Educate Not Humiliate Quotes

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Gym should be illegal. It's humiliating.
Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)
Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. Cesar Chavez Address to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Nov. 9, 1984
César Chávez
Rather than swallowing our pride and simply asking what we do not know, we choose to fill in the blanks ourselves and later become humbled. Wisdom was often, in its youth, proven foolish, and ones humiliated were meant to become wise.
Criss Jami (Healology)
You cannot change someone using fear, degradation, humiliation, or by comparing them to others. It can only be done through love, with love, for love.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
What are the purposes of examinations anyhow? Are they to increase our educational attainment? Or are they instruments used to bring suffering and humiliation and deep hurt to a person who is trying so hard to succeed?
Virginia M. Axline (Dibs in Search of Self)
I can not remember telling my parents that I was studying classics, they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard-put to name one less useful in Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys of an executive bathroom. Now I would like to make it clear in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I can not criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor. And I quite agree with them, that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty, entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression, It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something by which to pride yourself, but poverty itself, is romanticized only by fools. But I feared at your age was not poverty, but failure... Now, I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted, and well educated, that you have never known heartbreak, hardship, or heartache. Talent and intelligence, never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates... ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure.
J.K. Rowling (Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination)
No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education. No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school boards in the world.
Pat Conroy (The Water is Wide)
The idea that girls are somehow responsible for 'provoking' harassment from boys is shamefully exacerbated by an epidemic of increasingly sexist school dress codes. Across the United States, stories have recently emerged about girls being hauled out of class, publicly humiliated, sent home, and even threatened with expulsion for such transgressions as wearing tops with 'spaghetti straps,' wearing leggings or (brace yourself) revealing their shoulders. The reasoning behind such dress codes, which almost always focus on the girls' clothing to a far greater extent than the boys', is often euphemistically described as the preservation of an effective 'learning environment.' Often schools go all out and explain that girls wearing certain clothing might 'distract' their male peers, or even their male teachers....in reality these messages privilege boys' apparent 'needs' over those of the girls, sending the insidious message that girls' bodies are dangerous and provoke harassment, and boys can't be expected to control their behavior, so girls are responsible for covering up....his education is being prioritized over hers.
Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism)
You feel humiliated, my young man, because thinking you understood so much so well, you suddenly find that many very apparent things were unknown to you. Thinking you were one of the Lords of the Galaxy; you suddenly find that you stand near to destruction. Naturally, you will resent the ivory tower in which you lived; the seclusion in which you were educated; the theories on which you were reared.
Isaac Asimov (Second Foundation (Foundation, #3))
I have no doubt that we will one day abolish the death penalty in America. It will come sooner if people like me who know the truth about executions do our work well and educate the public. It will come slowly if we do not. Because, finally, I know that it is not a question of malice or ill will or meanness of spirit that prompts our citizens to support executions. It is, quite simply, that people don't know the truth of what is going on. That is not by accident. The secrecy surrounding executions makes it possible for executions to continue. I am convinced that if executions were made public, the torture and violence would be unmasked, and we would be shamed into abolishing executions. We would be embarrassed at the brutalization of the crowds that would gather to watch a man or woman be killed. And we would be humiliated to know that visitors from other countries - Japan, Russia, Latina America, Europe - were watching us kill our own citizens - we, who take pride in being the flagship of democracy in the world. (p. 197)
Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account Of The Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate)
I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he said it—“Hey Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted, “Nigger, move to the next row.” I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.
Tara Westover (Educated)
One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child.
Ingmar Bergman
Consider now the primal scene of education in the modern elementary school. Let us assume that a teacher wishes to inform a class of some 20 pupils about the structure of atoms, and that she plans to base the day's instruction on an analogy with the solar system. She knows that the instruction will be effective only to the extent that all the students in the class already know about the solar system. A good teacher would probably try to find out. 'Now, class, how many of you know about the solar system?' Fifteen hands go up. Five stay down. What is a teacher to do in this typical circumstance in the contemporary American school? "If he or she pauses to explain the solar system, a class period is lost, and 15 of the 20 students are bored and deprived of knowledge for that day. If the teacher plunges ahead with atomic structure, the hapless five—they are most likely to be poor or minority students—are bored, humiliated and deprived, because they cannot comprehend the teacher's explanation.
E.D. Hirsch Jr.
Relief, fear, and humiliation. Her parents paid for a pricey prep school education in D.C. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown with a degree in political science. She breezed through law school and finished with honors. A dozen megafirms offered her jobs after a federal court clerkship. The first twenty-nine years of her life had seen overwhelming success and little failure. To be discharged in such a manner was crushing. To be escorted out of the building was degrading. This was not just a minor bump in a long, rewarding career.
John Grisham (Gray Mountain)
He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark. But God withheld the flood.
Tara Westover (Educated)
Appearing as a character in my brother’s books taught me something about myself. For most of my life, my history as an abused child with what I saw as a personality defect was shameful and embarrassing. Being a failure and a high school dropout was humiliating, no matter how well I subsequently did. I lied about my age, my education, and my upbringing for years because the truth was just too horrible to reveal. His book, and people’s remarkable acceptance of us as we are, changed all that. I was finally free.
John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's)
It's one of the greatest mistakes of cultivated people to take it as given that because they have sophisticated minds they also have sophisticated emotions. But what kind of soul feels sophisticated hatred or sophisticated grief, for, say, a murdered child? Is the broken heart of the educated and refined person different from that of the savage? Why not say that the enlightened and knowledgeable feel the pain of childbirth, or the kidney stone, in a different way to unpolished commoner or chav? Intelligence has many shades, but rage is the same color everywhere. Humiliation tastes the same to everyone.
Paul Hoffman (The Beating of His Wings (The Left Hand of God, #3))
The type of statements to avoid are indirect, open-ended suggestions, especially about feeling, and truisms or platitudes. Such statements induce a stuck feeling in clients with a compressed structure. They are inwardly trying to achieve the attitudes or actions suggested by the statements and simultaneously resisting and resenting them, while also feeling humiliated by the expectations implied in the statements and shameful of their resistance all at the same time. This reveals why the best intentioned therapist can end up with a client who makes little progress, seems bogged down, and makes the therapist feel ineffective.
Elliot Greene (The Psychology of the Body (Lww Massage Therapy & Bodywork Educational Series))
A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person or idea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit, indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as the emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive acts performed by violent cults. Most violent cults do not openly express their beliefs and practices, and they tend to live separately in noncommunal environments to avoid detection. Some victims of ritual abuse are children abused outside the home by nonfamily members, in public settings such as day care. Other victims are children and teenagers who are forced by their parents to witness and participate in violent rituals. Adult ritual abuse victims often include these grown children who were forced from childhood to be a member of the group. Other adult and teenage victims are people who unknowingly joined social groups or organizations that slowly manipulated and blackmailed them into becoming permanent members of the group. All cases of ritual abuse, no matter what the age of the victim, involve intense physical and emotional trauma. Violent cults may sacrifice humans and animals as part of religious rituals. They use torture to silence victims and other unwilling participants. Ritual abuse victims say they are degraded and humiliated and are often forced to torture, kill, and sexually violate other helpless victims. The purpose of the ritual abuse is usually indoctrination. The cults intend to destroy these victims' free will by undermining their sense of safety in the world and by forcing them to hurt others. In the last ten years, a number of people have been convicted on sexual abuse charges in cases where the abused children had reported elements of ritual child abuse. These children described being raped by groups of adults who wore costumes or masks and said they were forced to witness religious-type rituals in which animals and humans were tortured or killed. In one case, the defense introduced in court photographs of the children being abused by the defendants[.1] In another case, the police found tunnels etched with crosses and pentacles along with stone altars and candles in a cemetery where abuse had been reported. The defendants in this case pleaded guilty to charges of incest, cruelty, and indecent assault.[2] Ritual abuse allegations have been made in England, the United States, and Canada.[3] Many myths abound concerning the parents and children who report ritual abuse. Some people suggest that the tales of ritual abuse are "mass hysteria." They say the parents of these children who report ritual abuse are often overly zealous Christians on a "witch-hunt" to persecute satanists. These skeptics say the parents are fearful of satanism, and they use their knowledge of the Black Mass (a historically well-known, sexualized ritual in which animals and humans are sacrificed) to brainwash their children into saying they were abused by satanists.[4] In 1992 I conducted a study to separate fact from fiction in regard to the disclosures of children who report ritual abuse.[5] The study was conducted through Believe the Children, a national organization that provides support and educational sources for ritual abuse survivors and their families.
Margaret Smith (Ritual Abuse: What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Help)
To some of us the humiliation of failure seems to open a wide gulf between God and us. We imagine that God turns away from us in disgust. What I discovered was that failure could be a bridge across the chasm that pride had created.
James Martin (The 10 Best Books to Read for Easter: Selections to Inspire, Educate, & Provoke: Excerpts from new and classic titles by bestselling authors in the field, with an Introduction by James Martin, SJ.)
When you revive a connection or relationship that has humiliated you, you are disrespecting yourself. Forgiveness is one thing, but having limits is quite another. By selecting what you will and will not tolerate, you educate people how to treat you. Maintain your self-worth and don't be scared to say no when required.
Genereux Philip
I am saying this because I don’t think there can be anything more aggravating and intolerable than to be ruined by an accident which might or night not have happened, by a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances which might have passed away like a cloud. For a man of education nothing can be more humiliating. - The Gentle Spirit
Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared. Class is an altogether separate measure of one’s standing in a society, marked by level of education, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from socioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste. Through the years, wealth and class may have insulated some people born to the subordinate caste in America but not protected them from humiliating attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of their caste position.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Why is financial inequality a problem? There are two very different answers. One kind of harm is material: not being able to get a decent house, quality health care, a proper education, and a hopeful future for one’s children. But there is also a psychological reason why inequality proves so problematic: because poverty is intricately bound up with humiliation. The
The School of Life (The School of Life: An Emotional Education)
Politeness provides a way where you can back down with dignity. In nature there is only ever one reason you cede the high ground – you are acknowledging defeat. You are bowing before a superior power. But under the rules of politeness, you let the other person off not because you are a weakling, a coward or a failure, but because you value calm over chaos. Politeness makes it easier to apologise, because apologising isn’t just an act of pure submission. Politeness is founded on a major insight into human nature and a big positive thesis about what civilisation is and why we need it. It’s a view that was advanced particularly by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. Hobbes was acutely conscious that our normal, unrestrained instincts are far from being wholly nice. We may be quite inclined by nature to damage or destroy our rivals; to take advantage of those who are weaker than us; to grab more than our fair share of anything good if we can; to humiliate those who we feel are in some way alien; to revenge ourselves on anyone we feel has upset or disappointed us and to enforce our opinions and beliefs on others if we can. These are natural inclinations, Hobbes argues; therefore, we positively require a set of constraining conventions that artificially induce better ways of dealing with other people. Politeness is not mere decoration. It is directed at dealing with a major human problem: we need manners to restrain the beast inside.
The School of Life (Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury)
This day is a reminder to us all that there are man. Who have unconditioned love, who have time and respect for their women and children. Man who gives advice's, attention, guidance, help, wisdom and education to their women and children. A man who encourages, motivates and inspire their women and children. A man who sacrifices everything for their children and women, not a man who sacrifices their child and women for everything. A man who uses their strength to protect their family, not a man who uses their strength to hurt their family. Not a man who abuses, rape, molest, threaten, torture, or humiliate their children and family. To all those good man. Happy Fathers Day. May God bless you more. Don’t stop what you are doing and may other men learn from your ways.
D.J. Kyos
This is often taken to signal a basic nastiness in human nature, but the truth is more poignant. We are not so much crowing when we hear of failure as deeply reassured to know that we aren’t humiliatingly alone with the appalling difficulties of being alive. It is all too easy to suspect that we have been uniquely cursed in the extent of our troubles, of which we seldom find evidence in the lives around us.
The School of Life (The School of Life: An Emotional Education)
To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them, because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh. We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all! "Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Notes from Underground)
Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was a very good reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz - as she herself had felt two or three years ago - my soul chooseth strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe it ; I would not live always.
Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles)
Giuliani could never understand the price scholarship boys paid for their education: the inevitable alienation from your uncomprehending family, from roots, from your own first person, from the original “I” you once were. Angry, Felipe decided to say nothing more about Emilio Sandoz. Let Giuliani ask the man directly. But the Father General said, “So you memorize the rules and you try not to expose yourself to humiliation.” “Yes.” “And you are stiff and formal in direct proportion to how completely you feel out of your element.
Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow (The Sparrow, #1))
After generations of separations and decades of forgetfulness, the mention of the South brings back to our memories ancient years of pain and pleasure. At the turn of the twentieth century, many African Americans left the Southern towns, left the crushing prejudice and prohibition, and moved north to Chicago and New York City, west to Los Angeles and San Diego. They were drawn by the heady promise of better lives, of equality, fair play, and good old American four-star freedom. Their expectations were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment. The sense of fulfillment arose from the fact that there were chances to exchange the dull drudgery of sharecrop farming for protected work under unionized agreements. Sadly for the last thirty years, those jobs have been decreasing as industry became computerized and work was sent to foreign countries. The climate which the immigrants imagined as free of racial prejudice was found to be discriminatory in ways different from the Southern modes and possibly even more humiliating. A small percentage of highly skilled and fully educated blacks found and clung to rungs on the success ladder. Unskilled and undereducated black workers were spit out by the system like so many undigestible watermelon seeds. They began to find their lives minimalized, and their selves as persons trivialized. Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants.
Maya Angelou (Letter to My Daughter)
For what must be clear to us above all, both to our humiliation and our elevation, is that the whole comedy of art is certainly not performed for us, neither for our edification nor our education, just as we are far from truly being the creators of that world of art; conversely, however, we may very well assume we are already images and artistic projections for the true creator of art, and that our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art - for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified - although, of course, our awareness of our significance in this respect hardly differs from the awareness which painted soldiers have of the battle depicted on the same canvas.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)
The worst form of bondage is the bondage of dejection, which keeps men hopelessly chained in loss of faith in themselves. We have been repeatedly told, with some justification, that Asia lives in the past,—it is like a rich mausoleum which displays all its magnificence in trying to immortalize the dead. It was said of Asia that it could never move in the path of progress, its face was so inevitably turned backwards. We accepted this accusation, and came to believe it. In India, I know, a large section of our educated community, grown tired of feeling the humiliation of this charge against us, is trying all its resources of self-deception to turn it into a matter of boasting. But boasting is only a masked shame, it does not truly believe in itself.
Rabindranath Tagore (Nationalism)
Self-Love Self-love is the quality that determines how much we can be friends with ourselves and, day to day, remain on our own side. When we meet a stranger who has things we don’t, how quickly do we feel ourselves pitiful, and how long can we remain assured by the decency of what we have and are? When another person frustrates or humiliates us, can we let the insult go, able to perceive the senseless malice beneath the attack, or are we left brooding and devastated, implicitly identifying with the verdict of our enemies? How much can the disapproval or neglect of public opinion be offset by the memory of the steady attention of significant people in the past? In relationships, do we have enough self-love to leave an abusive union? Or are we so down on ourselves that we carry an implicit belief that harm is all we deserve? In a different vein, how good are we at apologizing to a lover for things that may be our fault? How rigidly self-righteous do we need to be? Can we dare to admit mistakes or does an admission of guilt or error bring us too close to our background sense of nullity? In the bedroom, how clean and natural or alternatively disgusting and unacceptable do our desires feel? Might they be a little odd, but not for that matter bad or dark, since they emanate from within us and we are not wretches? At work, do we have a reasonable, well-grounded sense of our worth and so feel able to ask for (and properly expect to get) the rewards we are due? Can we resist the need to please others indiscriminately? Are we sufficiently aware of our genuine contribution to be able to say no when we need to?
The School of Life (The School of Life: An Emotional Education)
January 1787 On the day we arrived at Condorcet’s residence, I admired a portrait in the hall, my fingers itching to reproduce it in a sketch. “Who is this darling little girl? A relation of yours?” Unexpectedly, the question made my new husband cringe. “In a way.” His reaction made my stomach knot. Was this a bastard daughter? Given our arrangement, it wasn’t my right to know, but my voice was sharp. “In what way?” He glanced at me warily. “My mother was a good woman. A loving mother . . . but she kept me in dresses almost until the age of eight. Years after other boys were breeched and began to attend school. That portrait is not a girl. It’s me. You can, perhaps, easily imagine the cruel laughter and mockery of other boys that I endured.” Sensing a lingering pain, I took the liberty of reaching for his hand. “We should be rid of this portrait if it humiliates you.” “No, it educates me,” he said, squeezing my fingers. “That’s a good thing. The experience taught me the
Kate Quinn (Ribbons of Scarlet)
Abortion is often seen as a bad thing for society, a sign of hedonism, materialism, and hyperindividualism. I argue that, on the contrary, access to legal abortion is a good thing for society and helping a woman obtain one is a good deed. Instead of shaming women for ending a pregnancy, we should acknowledge their realism and self-knowledge. We should accept that it's good for everyone if women only have the children they want and can raise them well. Society benefits when women can commit to education and work and dreams without having at the back of their mind a concern that maybe it's all provisional, because at any moment an accidental pregnancy could derail them for life. It's good for children to be wanted, and to come into this life when their parents are ready for them. It's good for people to be able to have sexual experiences and know that birth-control failure need not be the last word. It would not make us a better country if more girls and women were nudged and bullied and cajoled and humiliated and frightened into bearing children they are ill-equipped to raise, even if more men could somehow be lassoed into marrying or supporting them. It would simply mean more lost hope, more bad marriages and family misery, more poverty and struggle for women, their partners, and their kids. Don't we have way too much of all that already?
Katha Pollitt (Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights)
But it is difficult for a child to realise that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child believes that the school exists to educate and that the schoolmaster disciplines him either for his own good, or from a love of bullying. Sim and Bingo had chosen to befriend me, and their friendship included canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me and saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I believed in it. It was therefore clear that I owed them a vast debt of gratitude. But I was not grateful, as I very well knew. On the contrary, I hated both of them. I could not control my subjective feelings, and I could not conceal them from myself. But it is wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors? So I was taught, and so I believed. A child accepts the codes of behaviour that are presented to it, even when it breaks them. From the age of eight, or even earlier, the consciousness of sin was never far away from me. If I contrived to seem callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of shame and dismay. All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude—and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
George Orwell (A Collection Of Essays: (Authorized Orwell Edition): A Mariner Books Classic (Harvest Book))
While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill. The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery. Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth. It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market. Nor did this derivative bondage end when formal slavery gave way to the de-facto slavery of discrimination. To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them, because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors. It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
Oh, without the brigade one could still somehow manage to survive the camp! Without the brigade you are an individual, you yourself choose your own line of conduct. Without the brigade you can at least die proudly, but in the brigade the only way they allow you even to die is in humiliation, on your belly. From the chief, from the camp foreman, from the jailer, from the convoy guard, from all of them you can hide and catch a moment of rest; you can ease up a bit here on hauling, shirk a bit there on lifting. But from the driving belts, from your comrades in the brigade, there is neither a hiding place, nor salvation, nor mercy. You cannot not want to work. You cannot, conscious of being a political [prisoner], prefer death from hunger to work. No! Once you have been marched outside the compound, once you have been registered as going out to work, everything the brigade does today will be divided not by twenty-five but by twenty-six, and because of you the entire brigade's percentage of norm will fall from 123 to 119, which makes the difference between the ration allotted to record breakers and ordinary rations, and everyone will lose a millet cake and three and a half ounces of bread. And that is why your comrades keep watch on you better than any jailers! And the brigade leader's fist will punish you far more effectively than the whole People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Now that is what spontaneous initiative in re-education means! That is psychological enrichment of the personality by the collective!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV)
The third serious problem the culture of customer service as we know it creates is turning every profession into a customer service tool to generate profits. In doing so, we risk the loss of creativity, quality, and critical thinking in many walks of life. Nowhere is this risk clearer and more damaging than viewing students at different educational institutions as customers, and nowhere this trend has been happening more rapidly than at schools, colleges, and universities, especially at private institutions. There is severe damage done to creativity and critical thinking when all students want is an A, and in fact feel entitled to get it since they (or their parents) are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend elite schools. Many educators are under enormous pressure to give students grades they do not deserve in order to avoid receiving bad student evaluations (or to ensure getting good ones). This pressure is intensifying as academic jobs become increasingly contingent and precarious, where teaching staff are hired under short contracts only renewed based on so-called ‘performance,’ which is often measured by student evaluations and enrollment. When this happens, academic and intellectual compromises and corruption increase. Colleagues at elite American universities have been pressured to give students grades no lower than a B, with the explanation that this is what is ‘expected.’ Rampant grade inflation is unethical and unacceptable. Unfortunately, when graduate instructors resist professors’ instructions to fix grades by grading according to independent criteria of intellectual merit, they may be verbally chastised or worse, fired. This humiliation not only reinforces the norm of inflating grades, it also bolsters the power of the tenured professors who instruct their teaching assistants to do it.
Louis Yako
But if somebody does want a productive conversation and genuinely believes that being called “cracker” is the same as being called “nigger” and feels angry and invalidated by the insistence that both do not meet your definition of racism, they will say so. This is an educational opportunity. This is a great way to let that person know that you do hear them, and that your experiences do not erase theirs because even though their experience is valid, it is a different experience. A response I’ve used is, “What was said to you wasn’t okay, and should be addressed. But we are talking about two different things. Being called “cracker” hurts, may even be humiliating. But after those feelings fade, what measurable impact will it have on your life? On your ability to walk the streets safely? On your ability to get a job? How often has the word “cracker” been used to deny you services? What measurable impact has this word had on the lives of white Americans in general?” In all honesty, from my personal experience, you are still not likely to get very far in that conversation, not right away. But it gives people something to think about. These conversations, even if they seem fruitless at first, can plant a seed to greater understanding. If you want to further understanding of systemic racism even more among the people you interact with, you can try to link to the systemic effects of racism whenever you talk about racism. Instead of posting on Facebook: “This teacher shouted a racial slur at a Hispanic kid and should be fired!” you can say all that, and then add, “This behavior is linked to the increased suspension, expulsion, and detention of Hispanic youth in our schools and sets an example of behavior for the children witnessing this teacher’s racism that will influence the way these children are treated by their peers, and how they are treated as adults.” I do this often when
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
(p.112-114) This past, the Negro's past, of rope, fire torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for this women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible - this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering - enough is certainly as good as a feast - but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth - and indeed, no church - can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats - the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say "this country" because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying "Yes, sir" and "No, Ma'am" in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying "Yes, sir" and "No Ma'am", but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in anyway inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. ... I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence.
James Baldwin
Hyphen This word comes from two Greek words together meaning ‘under one’, which gets nobody anywhere and merely prompts the reflection that argument by etymology only serves the purpose of intimidating ignorant antagonists. On, then. This is one more case in which matters have not improved since Fowler’s day, since he wrote in 1926: The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education … The wrong use or wrong non-use of hyphens makes the words, if strictly interpreted, mean something different from what the writers intended. It is no adequate answer to such criticisms to say that actual misunderstanding is unlikely; to have to depend on one’s employer’s readiness to take the will for the deed is surely a humiliation that no decent craftsman should be willing to put up with. And so say all of us who may be reading this book. The references there to ‘printers’ needs updating to something like ‘editors’, meaning those who declare copy fit to print. Such people now often get it wrong by preserving in midcolumn a hyphen originally put at the end of a line to signal a word-break: inter-fere, say, is acceptable split between lines but not as part of a single line. This mistake is comparatively rare and seldom causes confusion; even so, time spent wondering whether an exactor may not be an ex-actor is time avoidably wasted. The hyphen is properly and necessarily used to join the halves of a two-word adjectival phrase, as in fair-haired children, last-ditch resistance, falling-down drunk, over-familiar reference. Breaches of this rule are rare and not troublesome. Hyphens are also required when a phrase of more than two words is used adjectivally, as in middle-of-the-road policy, too-good-to-be-true story, no-holds-barred contest. No hard-and-fast rule can be devised that lays down when a two-word phrase is to be hyphenated and when the two words are to be run into one, though there will be a rough consensus that, for example, book-plate and bookseller are each properly set out and that bookplate and book-seller might seem respectively new-fangled and fussy. A hyphen is not required when a normal adverb (i.e. one ending in -ly) plus an adjective or other modifier are used in an adjectival role, as in Jack’s equally detestable brother, a beautifully kept garden, her abnormally sensitive hearing. A hyphen is required, however, when the adverb lacks a final -ly, like well, ill, seldom, altogether or one of those words like tight and slow that double as adjectives. To avoid ambiguity here we must write a well-kept garden, an ill-considered objection, a tight-fisted policy. The commonest fault in the use of the hyphen, and the hardest to eradicate, is found when an adjectival phrase is used predicatively. So a gent may write of a hard-to-conquer mountain peak but not of a mountain peak that remains hard-to-conquer, an often-proposed solution but not of one that is often-proposed. For some reason this fault is especially common when numbers, including fractions, are concerned, and we read every other day of criminals being imprisoned for two-and-a-half years, a woman becoming a mother-of-three and even of some unfortunate being stabbed six-times. And the Tories have been in power for a decade-and-a-half. Finally, there seems no end to the list of common phrases that some berk will bung a superfluous hyphen into the middle of: artificial-leg, daily-help, false-teeth, taxi-firm, martial-law, rainy-day, airport-lounge, first-wicket, piano-concerto, lung-cancer, cavalry-regiment, overseas-service. I hope I need not add that of course one none the less writes of a false-teeth problem, a first-wicket stand, etc. The only guide is: omit the hyphen whenever possible, so avoid not only mechanically propelled vehicle users (a beauty from MEU) but also a man eating tiger. And no one is right and no-one is wrong.
Kingsley Amis (The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage)
There was this new minister who went to the cemetery sorry, cemetery and he got his PhD and his DD and he’s got assign to his first church. I’ll never forget this. When he got there the church was a little lively but he was dead and he told the people now that am your new pastor we gonna do things a little different around here. He said, no more shouting, we’re going to do things in order. And theres going to be a quietness. He said I want you to follow my lead. He said I’ve graduated from the seminary and I’ve been educated and we’re going to do things in order and we’re going to take away this noise. It took him about 6 months to get things all tone down, he thought. He never even bothered to write his sermons out because some of the people were still shouting. But after 6 months he had everything under control and everything was dead. Dead quite. I mean quite. And finally he worked on his message all week long, had it all type written out on 15 pages, double space. Had everything perfect and now he is going to demonstrate his educational powers. Ready to wax eloquent and have them know they have an educated preacher/minister. He got into his message that he was reading. And he got to page 5, there was an ooooooooooooold fashion deacon in the back and let out one of them big old weeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!!. that was like an atom bomb that struck. And he became frustrated and all 15 pages of notes fell on the ground and he lost his place. He was never been so humiliated in all of his life. He could not finish his sermon. The only thing he could do is stop and pray and put the benediction on. He became so aggravated at the brother at the back. He said I did not know what I said to make him shout but he said am going to visit him in the morning and am going to found out what I said. And whatever I said am going to cut it out of my mind and I’ll never say it again so he won’t shout. Monday morning he headed out and he went to this brother who was a farmer. He didn’t even bother to go to the house. He wanted to handle this man to man. The brother offered a cup of coffee but the pastor refused it. He said I came out here to talk man to man sir. Do you remember when I first came to the church I said we were going to do things differently. He said yes sir I do remember. You remember I said nobody was going to make some noice. He said yes sir I remember that. He said yesterday you embarrassed me. I only got half way through my sermon. He said I want you to be honest with me brother. What was it that I said that made you shout because whatever it is am not going to say it no more. The brother breathed and said let get one thing straight pastor, you’ve been here six months. aint nothing you ever said made me shout. Nothing at all. But when I get to thinking how deep I was in sin and Jesus brought me out and cleaned me and wrote my name the book of life. How so good He’s been to me. When I was thinking of what He done for me, I couldn’t help but shoouuuuuuuuuuuuuuut to His gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I don’t just shout in church, here with my mules thinking of Jesus, I feel another shouuuuuuuuuuuuut coming up.
RW SCHAMBACH
Who needs a love life when you've got the Life of the Mind?
Rebecca Schuman (Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For)
A YOUNG MAN’S LONG, AWKWARD, OCCASIONALLY TRAGIC, AND FREQUENTLY HUMILIATING EDUCATION IN AFFAIRS OF THE HEART, PART I: VALENTINE’S DAY It
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
No one has ever learned anything under conditions of humiliation. The moment you said anything humiliating, the lesson is over. They are not on your side and they are offended. As We know it from feedback forms, it has got to be 99% sweetness and light and honey and 1% criticism, then you've got a potential chance to educate.
Alain de Botton
The rigid stupidities of forced schooling, its linear logics, its bell curves, its buzzers and tests and multiple humiliations, its resort to magical spells, fills me with rage these days as an old man. Real education can only begin out of a foundation of self-awareness. Know the truth of yourself or you are nothing but a pathetic human resource. Your life will have missed it’s point.
John Taylor Gatto (Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling)
A rude person is humiliated even if he is educated.
The Philosopher Orod Bozorg
I say all this confidently now, but it wasn’t that long ago that I thought the answer to all our social and political problems was to elect the right people—good people with the right ideas and the courage to act on them. Before I went to work for the governor, I thought he was one of the right people. And he was. He did what he said he was going to do, he took his duties seriously, he behaved himself in public with charm and decorum, he did not fear criticism, and he had realistic views of what government could and couldn’t accomplish. He was everything a politician should be—a politician in the best sense of that word, if it has a best sense. After two or three weeks of working for him, though, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that I thought he should have been the same thoughtful political leader in private that he was in public; the difference between public persona and reality is a valuable and inevitable one. Rather, I found it unnerving to discover such a stark difference between the personality he presented to the public and the one to which he subjected his staff. I remarked on this difference many times to my wife during that first year. We often laughed about it, but I think we both knew it signified something terrible—not just about the governor but about the world, or at least about democratic cultures in which political leaders often function as celebrities and even heroes. What that something was came to me much later, when I glimpsed the depth of his self-absorption. Here was a man who shattered his ambitions and humiliated his family and friends by pursuing his own petty, myopic desires. And yet in his ruin he could not find more than the paltriest shred of genuine self-criticism. I believe he wanted to feel a deeper remorse, but he looked inside and it wasn’t there. All he found was more of himself.
Barton Swaim (The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics)
What drives him is the thirst for glory; the public good, as he understands it, is a means to that end. So when a great statesman accomplishes a laudable goal by sagacity and bravery, we’re right to give him the praise he craves. But when we’re surprised and disgusted because the man we lauded has humiliated himself and disgraced his office, we haven’t just misjudged a man—we’ve misjudged the nature of modern politics.
Barton Swaim (The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics)
Only one group, the intelligentsia, rose to challenge the dynasty. Educated people in all walks of life, especially those who had not been absorbed in officialdom, had no less reason than had the peasantry to be disappointed with the Tsar—the Emancipator. He had first aroused and then frustrated their craving for freedom as he had aroused and deceived the muzhiks’ hunger for land. Alexander had not, like his predecessor Nicholas I, chastised the intelligentsia with scorpions; but he was still punishing them with whips. His reforms in education and in the Press had been half-hearted and mean: the spiritual life of the nation remained under the tutelage of the police, the censorship, and the Holy Synod. By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion. Numerically
Isaac Deutscher (The Prophet: The Life of Leon Trotsky)
By offering the educated a semblance of freedom he made the denial of real freedom even more painful and humiliating. The intelligentsia sought to avenge their betrayed hopes; the Tsar strove to tame their restive spirit; and, so, semi-liberal reforms gave way to repression and repression bred rebellion.
Isaac Deutscher (The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921)
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to see that education can inspire us to become more capable parents, more engaged citizens, and more resourceful human beings. Knowledge has the power to widen our eyes, open our minds, and enable us to see past people’s gender or economic status. It can help us value pricelessness over price tag. It can help us recognize the shame in humiliating and the grace in humility. And it can help us to understand that there is no greater richness than love.” Maha Al Fahim Share
Maha Al Fahim
In circumstances such as this I have no sympathy for myself as a citizen. It is my government, my civil service. Mine and yours. It has shamed all of us by prevaricating, lying, causing suffering to fellow citizens. In this case, the word shame must be used. We and those suffering are the Crown. We are the source of Canada’s fiduciary responsibility. And we, through our government, are cheating and humiliating citizens who have already been humiliated by our governmental education system. Not surprisingly, the
John Ralston Saul (The Comeback: How Aboriginals Are Reclaiming Power And Influence)
But, by 1945, African expectations had been transformed, especially among the educated élite. No longer satisfied with reforming a system, they turned to demanding the overthrow of the whole deeply humiliating concept of colonial rule. Colonial authorities resisted as long as possible, but the colonial powers were exhausted after the Second World War, and a combination of popular protest and political party agitation brought most to the negotiating table in due course.
Kevin Shillington (History of Africa)
If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation. Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.
William James (The Moral Equivalent of War)
The blasphemy law, whether Islamic or not, adopted by the majority of law markers displays respect for one's religious beliefs within its moral, cultural, and religious routes that abandon and restrict others, whether in a majority or minority, not to perform hatred, humiliation, insult, and disregard, and hurting the feelings, abusing its belief and its school of thought. As a fact, the blasphemy law executes a warning as traffic lights to be careful with those who deliberately and knowingly behave to invite danger, which, indeed, mirrors an initial of self-suicide. It is also protective and educational, whereas opposing that means the license of freedom to abuse, insult, humiliate and create hatred whenever one wants and desires for its motives in the name of freedom of the press and speech. In this context and concept, if one criticizes the will of the majority is a ridiculous view of the point, which demonstrates and demands the minorities' authority on the law of the majority that holds safeguard prospects. As I realize that this law determines the peace, harmony, unity, and respect in multicultural societies; however, one should not practice that in the wrong and unjust way; it will be a personal-conduct to violate the law, which is not the definition of that law; it is a crime.
Ehsan Sehgal
A loss of adequate income and social stagnation causes more than financial distress. It severs, as the sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out in The Division of Labour in Society, the vital social bonds that give us meaning. A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of education and health care, and a loss of hope are crippling forms of humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger, and feelings of worthlessness. In short, when you are marginalized and rejected by society, life often has little meaning. There arises a yearning among the disempowered to become as omnipotent as the gods. The impossibility of omnipotence leads, as the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death, to its dark alternative—destroying like the gods. In Hitler and the Germans the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismissed the myth that Hitler—an uneducated mediocrity whose only strengths were oratory and an ability to exploit political opportunities—mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he wrote, voted for Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures”118 surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse, hopelessness, and violence. Voegelin defined stupidity as a “loss of reality.”119 This loss of reality meant a “stupid” person could not “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.”120 The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or a social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.
Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
The Chinese memory of national humiliation is really the key to understanding China’s foreign policy,” says scholar Zheng Wang, who believes that the strident voice of the young nationalists, magnified by the Internet, has become a factor in foreign policy decisions. “This government is finding itself the victim of its own patriotic education campaign. It has very limited choices. Backing down becomes weakness or even a new humiliation. The government is the guardian of China’s national face, so being tough and strong is the only choice.
Louisa Lim (The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited)
Although they both survived this campaign more or less unscathed, they suffered the humiliating experience of having to make self-criticism of their family background, their education abroad, and their outlook on life as reflected in Henry’s architectural designs and in their teaching methods.
Nien Cheng (Life and Death in Shanghai)
I was one to one with a big nurse. Afraid to move and ask, ‘Whose blood is it so cold?’ … drop by drop … inside my small body. But the blood from the looks of these opposite men was not cold. It was hot, even very hot, pumping into my head. One man, another, and one more, some older than others, some even with temples of grey hair. But what united them all was the interest in a ten-year-old girl.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 1: The Girl Felt a Woman) “We sat together, at the bottom of the trench, on the cold and dry ground. The sun slowly was going down, and the first signs of the cold September evening appeared. Tanya pulled out the matches and lit the cigarette butts, and we started to smoke; two small girls of seven and five. We thought that nobody was seeing us making the fumes. Suddenly, I saw Tanya’s sister go out to the balcony of their flat, looking around the yard. When she noticed the fumes from the trench, she screamed at the whole yard, ‘Tanya! Tanya! I see you. Come immediately home!’ ‘Why! Am I cold?’ shouted back Tanya, pressing the cigarette butt in the trench soil. ‘No! You want to eat!’ screamed her sister. They both imitated a joke about a caring mother. Tanya stood up, climbed out of the trench, and left. I remained sitting alone, and it was getting dark. I also wanted to go home, wash my hands and eat. When suddenly, I heard a soft man’s voice from the darkness, ‘Let me help you to get out of the trench, little girl.’” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 2: The Paedophile Play) “In the USSR, at schools, sometimes was carried a medical check-up for teenage girls from fourteen to seventeen years old, till the end of their school life. It was a very psychologically traumatic and humiliating experience because of the process itself, and because the results were reported to the school director, parents, and sometimes, even to the police. The girls were tested for virginity, but the boys were not.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 3: Long Ten Years) “At that time, execution was allowed in the USSR, also for women. The maximum that prisoners could get was fifteen years. After that, capital punishment was the last measure. Mainly, the execution took place in the prison corridor by shooting the back of the inmate when he or she was taken to go somewhere, or in the prison yard. Executions were usually done by policemen.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 4: Prison for Woman)
Angelika Regossi (Love in Communism: A Young Woman's Adult Story)
There is only one way for women to reach full human potential—by participating in the mainstream of society, by exercising their own voice in all the decisions shaping that society. For women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence. Breaking through the barriers that had kept them from the jobs and professions rewarded by society was the first step, but it wasn’t sufficient. It would be necessary to change the rules of the game to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home. The manner in which offices and hospitals are structured, along the rigid, separate, unequal, unbridgeable lines of secretary/executive, nurse/doctor, embodies and perpetuates the feminine mystique. But the economic part would never be complete unless a dollar value was somehow put on the work done by women in the home, at least in terms of social security, pensions, retirement pay. And housework and child rearing would have to be more equally shared by husband, wife, and society. Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn. When the young radical kids came into the movement, they said it was “boring” or “reformist” or “capitalist co-option” to place so much emphasis on jobs and education. But very few women can afford to ignore the elementary economic facts of life. Only economic independence can free a woman to marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless, intolerable, humiliating marriage, or to eat, dress, rest, and move if she plans not to marry. But the importance of work for women goes beyond economics. How else can women participate in the action and decisions of an advanced industrial society unless they have the training and opportunity and skills that come from participating in it?
Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique)
This is the start of a toxic mismatch between the child’s capabilities and the unrealistic expectations of an education system that is all too often underresourced, developmentally uninformed, and trauma-ignorant. Even if the child “progresses” to the next grade, they are still behind, and this sets them up to fail. Year after year, they fall further and further behind. Their delays in developing skills, together with their trauma-related symptoms, begin to attract mental health labels (see Figure 6). The hypervigilance from their sensitized stress response is labeled ADHD; their predictable efforts to self-regulate—by rocking, chewing gum, doodling, daydreaming, listening to music, tapping their pencil, etc.—are prohibited. They will be labeled, medicated, excluded, punished, perhaps expelled, and then, all too often, arrested. When they try to avoid the constant humiliation of school, they’re charged with truancy; when they try to flee and the school staff tries to stop them, a restraint incident results in charges of assault—against the child. This is the school-to-prison pipeline.
Bruce D. Perry (What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
Don’t call me that,” I said. “You don’t know what it means.” “Sure I do,” he said. “You’ve got black all over your face, like a nigger!” For the rest of the afternoon—for the rest of the summer—that was what he called me. I’d answered to it a thousand times before with indifference. Now, I was alive to it. I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place that word transported me. Every time he said it—“ Hey Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted at me to move to the next row. I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.
Tara Westover (Educated)
Yes, the father of American sex “education,” of “therapy,” and of a sexual liberation cult, shaped millions of marriages in his deformed image. Specializing in primitive, painful, pathologic, and ultimately pathetic sex acts that humiliated and assaulted everyone involved, Kinsey himself never lived in a healthy marriage. Whatever it was, it was never love—by any stretch of the word.
Judith Reisman (Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America)
The blasphemy law, whether Islamic or not, adopted by the majority of law markers display the respect for one's religious beliefs, within its moral, cultural, and religious-routes that abandon and restrict others, whether in a majority or minority, not to perform hatred, humiliation, insult, and disregard, and hurting the feelings, abusing its belief and its school of thought. As a fact, the blasphemy law executes a warning as traffic lights, to be careful for those who deliberately and knowingly behave to invite danger; which indeed, mirrors an initial of self-suicide. It is also protective and educational; whereas, opposing that means the license of freedom to abuse, insult, humiliate and create hatred, whenever one wants and desires for its motives on the name of freedom of press and speech. In this context and concept, if one criticises the will of the majority is a ridiculous view of point, which demonstrates and demands the minorities' authority on the law of majority that holds safeguard-prospects. As I realize that this law determines the peace, harmony, unity, and respect in multicultural societies; however, one should not practice that in the wrong and unjust way; it will be a personal-conduct to violate the law, which is not the definition of that law; it is a crime.
Ehsan Sehgal
These days man are known as trash. They are feared, not trusted. They are not respected and loved as human beings anymore, because of the recent things happening to women and children. But this day is a reminder to us all that there are man. Who have unconditioned love, who have time and respect for their women and children. Man who gives advice's, attention, guidance, help, wisdom and education to their women and children. A man who encourages, motivates and inspire their women and children. A man who sacrifices everything for their children and women, not a man who sacrifices their child and women for everything. A man who uses their strength to protect their family, not a man who uses their strength to hurt their family. Not a man who abuses, rape, molest, threaten, torture, or humiliate their children and family. To all those good man. Happy Fathers Day. May God bless you more. Don’t stop what you are doing and may other men learn from your ways. If your father did you wrong. If you grew up without a father or someone playing a father role in your life. It doesn’t mean you should take away the efforts of those who are trying to be good fathers to their family. It doesn’t mean you should undermine, and not acknowledge or respect what other fathers are doing out there for their children. All the sacrifices they are making. There are good fathers out there and to those Fathers Happy Fathers Day.
D.J. Kyos
You have a bad habit of quoting," said Anne. "As I never know the context or author, I find it humiliating." Denis apologized. "It's the fault of one's education. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and words—Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education." "You may regret your education," said Anne; "I'm ashamed of my lack of it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren't they magnificent?
Aldous Huxley (Crome Yellow)
On reaching their new dwelling places in Ottoman territory, the boys were “either persuaded or forced to be circumcised and made Muslim.” Nor were these merely symbolic or superficial acts: “The first thing they are made to learn is the Turks’ false religion, which they know so well as to put us to shame.”28 Having learned to submit, they were next subjected to a draconian training system not unlike the ancient Spartan agoge: “They make them drudge day and night, and they give them no bed to sleep on and very little food.” They were allowed to “speak to each other only when it is urgently necessary” and were made to “pray together without fail at four prescribed times every day.” As “for any little offense, they beat them cruelly with sticks, rarely hitting them less than a hundred times, and often as much as a thousand. After punishments the boys have to come to them and kiss their clothing and thank them for the cudgelings they have received. You can see, then,” concluded the Italian observer, “that moral degradation and humiliation are part of the training system.”29 Ironically, however—and as with other historically Muslim institutions that have been whitewashed¶—this abduction, forced conversion, and jihadi indoctrination of Christian children is portrayed by several leading academics “as the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.
Raymond Ibrahim (Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West)
frequently the inner voice is not very nice at all. It is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. It doesn’t represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities.
The School of Life (The School of Life: An Emotional Education)
Prisons themselves could actually start preventing violence, rather than stimulating it, if we took everyone out of them, demolished the buildings, and replaced them with a new and different kind of institution — namely, a locked, secure residential college, whose purpose and functions would be educational and therapeutic, not punitive. It would make sense to organize such a facility as a therapeutic community, with a full range of treatments for substance abuse and any other medical and mental health services needed to help the individual heal the damage that deformed his character and stunted his humanity. If it seems utopian to replace prison with schools, let me remind you that prisons already are schools and always have been — except that they are schools in crime and violence, in humiliation, degradation, brutalization and exploitation, not in peace and love and dignity. I am merely suggesting that we replace one already existing type of school with another. Such a program would enable those who have been violent to adopt non-violent means for developing the feelings of self-esteem and self-respect, for being respected by others, and of being able to take legitimate and realistic pride in their skills and knowledge and achievements, which all human beings need if they are to be able to find alternatives to violent behavior when their self-esteem is threatened. It would also enable them to become employable and self-sufficient, and to make a productive contribution to society when they return to the community. But before that can happen, we will have to renounce our own urge to engage in violence — that is, punishment — and decide that we want to engage in educational and therapeutic endeavors instead, so as to facilitate maturation, development, and healing.
James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
Whatever the subject matter, the core requirements for this tend to be the same, the first and foremost among them being that the ‘student’ should not be scared. We rarely learn very well when we have been humiliated or belittled, are insulted and threatened.
The School of Life (Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury)
I was struck by the importance of dignity as a historical force. “What was horrible about the communist rule,” Tatjana told us, “was that the man in front of you ordering you around was very stupid, and you had to listen to him.” Even amid jailings and torture, these smaller humiliations ground people down.
Samantha Power (The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir)
To the extent that we place a positive value on social stratification and hierarchies, whether actively or passively, then we signal to our children that status systems are a good thing, and they are likely then to reproduce their own versions. Working to dismantle all status hierarchies, however, does not at all require that we stop making distinctions between better or worse quality work, whether in the arts, the sciences, or any other field of endeavor. We have to recognize that the only basis on which we can live with each other without violence is one of mutual respect, a respect that is so deep and unconditional that it is not dependent on achievement or behavior, but is respect for human dignity, for the inviolability of the human soul and personality, and a determination not to subject anyone to any shame that is not an unavoidable consequence of the fact that we are all imperfect and therefore will all inevitably and appropriately suffer from the narcissistic wound of acknowledging our own imperfections. Finally, it is important to remember Malcolm X's insight that no one can give someone else self-esteem or self-respect; people can only acquire that for themselves, through their own achievements and way of life. But we can choose whether we make available the tools people need to acquire their own self-esteem, by deciding whether to do everything possible to guarantee true equality of opportunity, including equal access to education. Thus it is not enough to provide schools like Columbine High School only for the children of the affluent white upper-middle class. It is just as essential to provide schools of equal quality for every child everywhere, for failure to do so sends a message to all our children, both those in the ghetto and those in the Columbines of the world. This message is that creating status hierarchies that expose those at the bottom to soul-destroying, violence-provoking intensities of humiliation is acceptable human behavior.
James Gilligan (Preventing Violence (Prospects for Tomorrow))
The blasphemy law, whether Islamic or not, adopted by the majority of law markers display the respect for one's religious beliefs, within its moral, cultural and religious-routes that abandon and restrict others, whether in a majority or minority, not to perform hatred, humiliation, insult, and disregard and hurting the feelings, abusing its belief and its school of thought. As a fact, the blasphemy law executes a warning as traffic lights, to be careful, for those, who deliberately and knowingly behave to invite danger, which; indeed, mirrors an initial of self-suicide. It is also protective and educational; whereas, opposing that, means the license of freedom to abuse, insult, humiliate and create hatred, whenever, one wants and desires for its motives on the name of freedom of press and speech. In this context and concept, if one criticises the will of the majority, is a ridiculous view of point, which demonstrates and demands the minorities' authority on the law of majority that holds safeguard-prospects. As I realize that, this law determines the peace, harmony, unity, and respect in multicultural societies; however, one should not practice that in the wrong and unjust way; it will be a personal-conduct, to violate the law, which is not the definition of that law; it is a crime. By Ehsan Sehgal
Ehsan Sehgal
I put away my journal and lie in bed, reciting this narrative as if it is a poem I’ve decided to learn by heart. I’ve nearly committed it to memory when the recitation is interrupted. Images invade my mind—of me on my back, arms pressed above my head. Then I’m in the parking lot. I look down at my white stomach, then up at my brother. His expression is unforgettable: not anger or rage. There is no fury in it. Only pleasure, unperturbed. Then a part of me understands, even as I begin to argue against it, that my humiliation was the cause of that pleasure. It was not an accident or side effect. It was the objective.
Tara Westover (Educated)
Yet the structure we have built to protect and nurture these children actually does the opposite. Imagine an impoverished six-year-old boy who rarely gets a healthy meal and rarely has parental supervision. He finally goes to school and falls in love with the first person who has ever been there every day for him—his first-grade teacher. She loves and encourages and teaches him. She won’t let the kids bully one another, and she makes sure he gets a good breakfast, lunch, and an after-school snack. Only the weekends are scary. The sixyear-old has a daily routine that includes a committed relationship for the very first time. Life is good; hope is learned. Then the school year ends, and this wonderful teacher says, “Good-bye. You will have a great teacher in second grade.” So the seven-year-old survives the short summer and begins the process all over. But now he has a homeroom teacher, a math and science teacher, a language arts teacher, and a music teacher. Which one is he to fall in love with? Who will fall in love with him? Each of these teachers has dozens of students to care for an hour at a time. And so, at the end of second grade it’s a little less painful to part with his teachers because he never really got to know them. But at least he was physically safe and was fed every day. And so, by the end of third grade, he hardly notices his teacher because he has formed a strong attachment to the friends who move along from class to class with him. They share multiple hours together daily. Instead of taking his signals of proper behavior from a committed adult, since he has none at home or school, he models his life after the future football captain, just as the girls in his class likely emulate the future prom queen. This child from an impoverished culture was taught, in effect, that no adult cares enough to hang out and teach him for more than the 150 hours required to complete a credit. And as he got older, he also learned that the teachers were not quite as able to physically protect him as when he and his classmates were small, and it’s humiliating to have to eat the government-provided free lunch. Even our elementary
Leigh A. Bortins (The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education)
Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected: ‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.’ Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf? Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forces’ earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoples’ collective consciousness.
Louis Yako (Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile)
The blasphemy law, whether Islamic or not, adopted by the majority of law markers display the respect for one's religious beliefs, within its moral, cultural, and religious-routes that abandon and restrict others, whether in a majority or minority, not to perform hatred, humiliation, insult, and disregard, and hurting the feelings, abusing its belief and its school of thought. As a fact, the blasphemy law executes a warning as traffic lights, to be careful for those who deliberately and knowingly behave to invite danger which indeed, mirrors an initial of self-suicide. It is also protective and educational, whereas opposing that means the license of freedom to abuse, insult, humiliate, and create hatred, whenever one wants and desires for its motives in the name of freedom of press and speech. In this context and concept, if one criticizes the will of the majority is a ridiculous view of point, which demonstrates and demands the minorities' authority on the law of majority that holds safeguard-prospects. As I realize that this law determines the peace, harmony, unity, and respect in multicultural societies; however, one should not practice that in the wrong and unjust way; it will be personal conduct to violate the law, which is not the definition of that law; it is a crime.
Ehsan Sehgal
Don’t call me that,” I said. “You don’t know what it means.” “Sure I do,” he said. “You’ve got black all over your face, like a nigger!” For the rest of the afternoon—for the rest of the summer—that was what he called me. I’d answered to it a thousand times before with indifference. Now, I was alive to it. I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place that word transported me. Every time he said it—“Hey Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted at me to move to the next row. I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.
Tara Westover (Educated)
To lovers out there …. Overinflated egos are what keep many people single today. People think they are too rich, too beautiful, too sexy, too educated, too qualified, or too hot to be in a relationship or to be humble. They go around seeking validation from strangers by humiliating people who show interest in them.
De philosopher DJ Kyos
That humiliation led to a vow, the vow led to drilling his firstborn son, and the nightly drills resulted in a boy who could read at the Violet level, three years ahead of time
Richard Powers (Playground)