“
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
“
While still a student, Napoleon had written on the last page of his geography book: "St. Helena. Small island." This may have been what we call a coincidence, but the thought must certainly have aroused terror in him in his last days.
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Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
“
Solitude takes time, and caregivers to children have no time. Our children demand attention and need care. They ask questions and parents must answer. The number of decisions that go into a week of parenting astonishes me. Women have known for centuries what I have just discovered: going to work every day is far easier than staying home raising children...thoughtful parenting requires time to think, and parents of young children do not have time to think...One middle-aged female writing student spoke to me of feeling she lacked the freedom to "play hooky in nature"; it is an act of leisure men indulge in while women stay at home, keeping domestic life in order. Men often can justify poking around in the woods as a part of their profession, or as part of an acceptably manly activity like hunting or fishing. Women, for generations circumscribed by conventional values, must purposefully create opportunities for solitude, for exploration of nature or ideas, for writing.
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Gary Paul Nabhan (The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (Concord Library))
“
Fighting isn’t all there is to the Art of War. The men who think that way, and are satisfied to have food to eat and a place to sleep, are mere vagabonds. A serious student is much more concerned with training his mind and disciplining his spirit than with developing martial skills. He has to learn about all sorts of things—geography, irrigation, the people’s feelings, their manners and customs, their relationship with the lord of their territory. He wants to know what goes on inside the castle, not just what goes on outside it. He wants, essentially, to go everywhere he can and learn everything he can.
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Eiji Yoshikawa (Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era)
“
Inland rain requires trees. Rain clouds on their own cannot travel more than 400km from the sea, so rain in the centre of a continent – the very rain that creates the central forest of the Amazon for example – requires continuous forest to the coast. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon comes from its trees. As every school geography student knows, water evaporates from the sea, then falls as rain on coastal forest. Those trees ‘breathe out’ water vapour, which creates new clouds that travel further inland in so-called ‘flying rivers’. Crucially, this is how water reaches the soy and corn plantations in central and western Brazil. Once you destroy the forest you get less rain. A 2019 study showed that the rainy season in the state of Mato Grosso had become a month shorter in a decade,41, 42 and many of the major soy farms in Brazil are now suffering from the very drought that they have caused.
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Chris van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can't Stop Eating Food That Isn't Food)
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Only twenty students chose to do geography in year 12,
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R.A. Spratt (Never Fear (Friday Barnes, #8))
“
A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.
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Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You)
“
WHEN ASKED “ What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness. Because it’s true. Latin, geography, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome: unless you know these things, you’ll be limited to doing the puzzles in People magazine, where the clues read “Movie title, Gone ____ the Wind” and “It holds up your pants.” It’s not such a terrible place to start, but the joy of accomplishment wears off fairly quickly.
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David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)
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Independence vs. interdependence is of course not an either/or matter. Every society—and every individual—is a blend of both. It turns out that it is remarkably easy to bring one or another orientation to the fore. Psychologists Wendi Gardner, Shira Gabriel, and Angela Lee “primed” American college students to think either independently or interdependently.
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Richard E. Nisbett (The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why)
“
Like the monks chanting their Pali mantras, learning by rote was the accepted method of education just as in English schools of the time. ‘In geography,’ Sokheang recalled, ‘we would have to learn the size of a country, the population, the agricultural produce, etcetera. And we would get called up to recite it to the rest of the class.’ The accuracy of this recitation was the measure of a successful student. ‘Knowledge,’ said Sokheang, ‘was the storage of facts.
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Nic Dunlop (The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge)
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For Scotland is made out of cities and the country and the sea, which means
It's so much more, as an imagined space, a geography of the mind,
Than its centres of population. Demographics are never enough
And the way in which this might best be imagined starts
In the work of Hugh MacDiarmid. And the poets and artists
Who followed from that. Not as disciples. As students. As witnesses
As thinking men and women, who understand the depths, complexities
Subtleties and strengths and the cosmic clock,
All the resources there, and all the risks required.
from 'Scotland's Voices
”
”
Alan Riach (Landmarks: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland)
“
It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed
culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally
truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has
become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far
more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two
decades as public elementary schools, public and private high
schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores
of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers,
monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the
demands” of this new technological workplace.
"We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? –
that those technological investments have coincided with a
decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading
comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the
phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade
inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding
of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an
increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal
experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore,
then let’s blame the teachers...
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Peter K. Fallon (Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance)
“
At the Lab School children planted gardens and grew crops not to become farmers but to learn about food, chemistry, and geography. These students, who came from fairly affluent families in Hyde Park, acquired considerable knowledge, but they were creatively and actively involved in their education and less dependent on textbooks and traditional instruction. Children could read a textbook to learn how to boil an egg, but experimenting on their own drew upon their interests and strengthened their powers of observation. Efficiency was sacrificed, but active engagement in learning, as in democracy, required time and patience.
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William J. Reese (America's Public Schools: From the Common School to "No Child Left Behind" (The American Moment))
“
Leonardo received an adequate education, learning basic Latin, mathematics, and geography. He was never a stellar student, instead finding his attentions on things other than what were found in classrooms. The
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Hourly History (Leonardo da Vinci: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Painters))
“
Miss Breckenridge: We want the child to build relationships with the things in nature, which would include the earth itself, plant and animal life, oceanography, and astronomy. So, all things that eventually fall under science, and the more physical parts of geography. Miss Mason: And, as educators, what do we generally do with that? We consider the matter carefully; we say the boy will make a jumble of it if he is taught more than one or two sciences. We ask our friends “what sciences will tell best in examinations?” and “which are most easily learned?” We discover which are the best text-books in the smallest compass. The most economical, so to speak. The student learns up the text, listens to lectures, makes diagrams, watches demonstrations. Behold! he has “learned a science,” and is able to produce facts and figures, for a time anyway, in connection with some one class of natural phenomena; but of tender intimacy with Nature herself he has acquired none. I will now sketch what seems to me a better way.
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Anne E. White (Revitalized: A new rendering of Charlotte Mason's School Education)
“
Inland rain requires trees. Rain clouds on their own cannot travel more than 400km from the sea, so rain in the centre of a continent – the very rain that creates the central forest of the Amazon for example – requires continuous forest to the coast. Around half the rain that falls on the Amazon comes from its trees. As every school geography student knows, water evaporates from the sea, then falls as rain on coastal forest. Those trees ‘breathe out’ water vapour, which creates new clouds that travel further inland in so-called ‘flying rivers’. Crucially, this is how water reaches the soy and corn plantations in central and western Brazil. Once you destroy the forest you get less rain. A 2019 study showed that the rainy season in the state of Mato Grosso had become a month shorter in a decade,41, 42 and many of the major soy farms in Brazil are now suffering from the very drought that they have caused. Diverting rivers is not going to be possible, because the river water comes from rain.43 Hotter temperatures and droughts mean the southeastern Amazon has become a source of carbon dioxide rather than a carbon sink, and by some estimates the Amazon now produces more carbon than it stores.44, 45 So, the single greatest threat to Brazilian agribusiness is ... Brazilian agribusiness.
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Chris van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can't Stop Eating Food That Isn't Food)
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Registrations for NRI of the Year Awards 2016 are OPEN!
Calling all students, cultural doyennes, businessmen, philanthropists and successful professionals! Your most-loved NRI of the Year Awards is back with its third season! These awards are all about you – to partake of, savour and conquer. So, allow us the privilege of honouring you for being the trailblazers in your chosen field – be it academics, art and culture, entrepreneurship, philanthropy or professionals.
There are four geographies viz. North America, UK, Middle-East & Asia Pacific and five awards in each category. Thus there are 20 spanking new awards to be at NRI of the Year Awards 2016!
So, if you are part of the constellation of Indian stars shining bright on foreign skies, these awards are yours to claim!
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”
NRI Of The Year
“
Mrs. Henderson, Riley’s fifth-grade teacher, surveyed her class appraisingly. “Capital city of Brazil? Johnny?” “Rio de Janeiro,” Johnny answered quickly. Riley nearly shook her head, but stopped at the last minute. It was an easy mistake to have made, and nobody liked a smarty-pants. “No,” Mrs. Henderson replied. “Anybody else?” The class was silent. Riley wondered if any of the other students could name another city in Brazil. “How about you, Riley?” Riley sighed quietly. She briefly considered pretending she didn’t know the answer, but her mother had told her more than once that pretending to be something that you weren’t was the same as lying, and it was a terrible kind of lying, because it was lying to yourself. “Brasilia,” Riley answered. “That’s right,” Mrs. Henderson smiled. “I’m glad someone in this class has been paying attention.” Riley hadn’t been paying attention. She hadn’t even realized the lesson had moved from the geography of Europe to that of South America. She’d read about Brazil in a travel magazine her parents subscribed to. She toyed with her pen as Mrs. Henderson moved on to another South American country. She wanted to start writing, and to do it the way her great-grandfather had. She could put a story down in her notebook. If it was long enough, she might even fill two of them. Maybe someday she would even be published. The thought of seeing her own book on the shelf in a bookstore was just about the best thing she could think of.
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M.J. Storm (Riley Flynn and the Runaway Fairy)
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The author's differing experience of school geography as a faculty member going from parking lot to parking lot and to locations centered around HER office and her experience of the more scattered life of a student speaks to a larger truth. As adults, we are used to following the same routine and look romantically on anything different.
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Rebekah Nathan (My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student)
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Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I had—its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn’t go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed. Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains. And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was! What a map I could draw for a tourist a micron high, a submicroscopic Wandervögel bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga’s belly button. If this image is in bad taste, God help me. Everybody is supposed to play games for mental health.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Mother Night)
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Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Geography lessons go virtual: Danish government creates Minecraft version of ENTIRE country to help teachers Entire country was recreated by government's mapping department Minecraft lesson plans for teachers also created in bid to make education more accessible By Mark Prigg Published: 22:06 GMT, 25 April 2014 | Updated: 23:01 GMT, 25 April 2014 The Danish government has recreated the entire country in the hit computer game Minecraft. The first country to be fully transplanted into the blocky Minecraft games, the government hopes it could help make lessons more fun for students. It has even produced a series of lesson plans for teachers to help them navigate the virtual version of their country. Scroll down for video Denmark's Ministry of the Environment has created a full-scale model of the country in Minecraft for players to explore. The downloadable model consists of 4,000 billion blocks and requires one terabyte of storage space.
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Anonymous
“
Incentivizing government service, though, would be altogether different. Why should we want young Americans to perform one or two years of government service? One reason is that a common experience would help break down some of the barriers that have arisen owing to geography, class, race, religion, education, language, and more. World War II did precisely this for millions of Americans. Today, however, there is simply too little common experience in this society and too much that reinforces differences and divisions. It is revealing that according to a recent poll, almost half of second-year college students report they wouldn’t choose to room with someone who supported a different presidential candidate than they did in 2020, while a majority say they wouldn’t go on a date with someone who voted differently and nearly two-thirds couldn’t envision marrying someone who supported a different candidate.
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Richard N. Haass (The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens)
“
She turned her efforts instead to a piece of needlepoint that she intended to present to one of her accusers. She was studying grammar, arithmetic, and geography as well, but it was for her decorative sewing—the symbol of refinement for women of leisure—that she had received the sharpest criticism from the mothers of her students. She resented spending her time on such frivolous work, but she poured into this needlepoint project all the energy she had previously given to pressing her suit with Nathaniel. She visited schools all over Boston to compare her piece with others, and at last felt satisfied that hers, a portrait of George Washington—whose death in 1799 had made him a popular subject for memorials in thread—was as well done as any she saw. She could return to teaching with full confidence in her abilities, if not in her clean reputation
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Megan Marshall (The Peabody Sisters)
“
Right now, images from 3055 show that Earth’s tectonic plates have shifted to the point in which all the continents are close to becoming just one continent! Pangaea is being recreated! If there is a time when the continents actually do come together, it might be harder to identify individual continents when they are all forged together in a single mass, so a person may attempt to redraw lines between the continents to help students continue to be able to identify them, which is beneficial to the community, because it supports the continuation of geographical education; people could distinguish continents, which is beneficial to analyzing each continent. However, suppose the person who made the lines believed that a certain religious group were terrorists. Suppose that person made the lines, because he/she wants to divide the continent the religious group is located in and the continent he/she lives in. That way, there could be a boundary between the continent where the religious group lives and the continent where the person lives. One may consider this to be religious intolerance, and hence believe it to be immoral, which exemplifies that a person’s intentions must also be considered in discussions about morality.
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Lucy Carter (The Reformation)
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Because the Arab states have not experienced a similar opening-up and have suffered from colonialism, they were not ready to turn the Arab uprisings into a real Arab Spring. Instead they soured into perpetual rioting and civil war. The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the ‘Green Revolution’, describing the young students of north Tehran as the ‘Youth of Iran’, thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography)
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In 1826, while Louis was still a student, both he and his friend Gabriel Gauthier became teaching assistants at the Institute. When Louis graduated in 1828, Dr. Pignier asked him to stay on as a full-time instructor of grammar, geography, and arithmetic.
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Russell Freedman (Out of Darkness: The Story of Louis Braille)
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If she was to plan this again – which by definition she wouldn't be – she would have taken geography into account more. In particular, she would have selected a virginity-removal partner who came from down the country, or better yet, abroad. That way, they would have their own student digs. Matt, like herself, came from Dublin and hence lived at home. This meant the only venue open to them had been his mother's car.
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Caimh McDonnell (The Day That Never Comes (Dublin Trilogy publication order, #2; Dublin Trilogy chronological order, #7))
“
Studies have shown that games outperform textbooks in helping students learn fact-based subjects such as geography, history, physics, and anatomy, while also improving visual coordination, cognitive speed, and manual dexterity.
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Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
“
Core subjects include English, reading, and language arts; world languages; arts; mathematics; economics; science; geography; history; and government and civics. Learning and innovation skills are those possessed by students who are prepared for the 21st century and include creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, and communication and collaboration. Information, media, and technology skills are needed to manage the abundance of information and also contribute to the building of it. These include information literacy; media literacy; and information, communications, and technology (ICT) literacy. Life and career skills are those abilities necessary to navigate complex life and work environments. These include flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity and accountability, and leadership and responsibility.
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Laura M. Greenstein (Assessing 21st Century Skills: A Guide to Evaluating Mastery and Authentic Learning)
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GEOGRAPHY TEACHER: What state would you find Lincoln in? STUDENT: A state of extreme boredom, if he was in this class.
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Ilana Weitzman (Jokelopedia: The Biggest, Best, Silliest, Dumbest Joke Book Ever!)
“
Every few years, a teacher from Monroe Colored High loaded a band of students onto the flat bed of a pickup truck and rattled across the Missouri Pacific Railway tracks. They passed the rich people’s porticos and pulled up to the back entrance of the white high school in town. The boys jumped out and began stacking the truck bed with the books the white school was throwing away. That is how Monroe Colored High School got its books. The boys loaded the truck with old geography and English texts, some without covers and with pages torn out and love notes scrawled in the margins, and headed back to their side of town. By the time he was old enough to understand where the books came from, Pershing was fast putting together the pieces of the world he lived in. He knew there was a dividing line, but it was hitting him in the face now. He was showing a talent for science and was getting to the point that he needed reference books to do his lesson. But it was against the law for colored people to go to the public library. “And the library at the Colored High School did not live up to its name,” he said years later. He was in the eighth grade when word filtered to his side of the tracks that Monroe was getting a new high school. It wouldn’t replace the old building that Monroe Colored High was in. It was for the white students, who already had a big school. It would be called Neville High. The colored people could see it going up when they ventured to the other side of the tracks. It rose up like a castle, four stories of brick and concrete with separate wings and a central tower, looking as if it belonged at Princeton or Yale. It opened in 1931 on twenty-two acres of land. The city fathers made a fuss over the state-of-the-art laboratories for physics and chemistry, the 2,200-seat balconied auditorium, the expanded library, and the fact it was costing $664,000 to build. As the new high school took shape across town, Pershing watched his father rise in the black of morning to milk the cows and walk the mile and a half to open his building the size of a grade school. His father, his mother, and the other teachers at Monroe Colored High School were working long hours with hand-me-down supplies for a fraction of the pay their white counterparts were getting. In Louisiana in the 1930s, white teachers and principals were making an average salary of $1,165 a year. Colored teachers and principals were making $499 a year, forty-three percent of what the white ones were.
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
“
philosopher Joubert was to regret the disappearance of the old schools: They were in fact small, elementary universities. In them, students received a very complete primary education.… There were chairs of philosophy and mathematics, subjects by which so much store is set; history, geography, and other branches of knowledge about which people talk played a role, not prominently and with fanfare, as they do today, but secretly and surreptitiously, so to speak. They were fused, insinuated, and conveyed with other subjects.… A little of everything was taught and … the chords of every disposition were sounded. Every mind was urged to know itself, and all talents to be developed. Taught rather slowly, with little ceremony and almost imperceptibly, students thought they knew little, and remained modest.… They left the old schools knowing they were ignorant and ignorant of what they knew. They departed eager to learn more, and full of love and respect for men they thought were learned.52
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Patrice Gueniffey (Bonaparte: 1769-1802)