Minus Education Quotes

Its all about perception in life, For some One minus One = One & for some its Zero.That's the only difference.

Life is, in essence, a simple matter. Its only goal is the maximising of pleasure. Even our much-lauded curiosity, our inclination to explore the universe and human nature, is a mere manifestation of the desire to accentuate and protract this pleasure. So when our sums end up on the minus side, when life offers us more pain than pleasure, and there’s no longer any hope of things changing, we end it. We eat or drink ourselves to death, swim out to where the current is strong, smoke in bed, drive when drunk, put off seeing the doctor even though the lump on the throat is growing. Or quite simply hang ourselves in the barn. It’s banal when you realise for the first time that this is actually a completely practical alternative; indeed, it doesn’t even feel like the most important decision of your life. To build that house or get that education – these are bigger decisions than choosing to end your life sooner than it otherwise would have ended.

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6

The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.

Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on. Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include: the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number; the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI); the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions; the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated); the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability; the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries; and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.

Don’t even think about it,” she said. He grinned in spite of himself. “Come on, Ellie. You can’t make me not think about it.” “I’m not getting mixed up with someone like you. First of all, I’m all wrong for someone like you. Second, I’m clearing out the second I have my kids. Third…” She paused. “I don’t need a third. That’s good enough. Don’t ever do that again.” “I haven’t kissed a woman like that in quite a while,” he said. “That was nice. Are you angry?” he asked. “Did I taste angry?” He just smiled. “You tasted wonderful. You’re right—it’s not such a good idea. Well, I mean, it is a good idea. But I see the potential for disaster.” She pulled away and put a hand against her wild curls as if to smooth her hair into place. The hand trembled a bit; he’d never seen her rattled before. “You’re just going to get yourself in trouble with the Big Guy, and there’s no point in making your life tougher.” “Nah, God’s not opposed to kissing. I think employers taking advantage of employees, however, could put a big black mark on the minus side of my chart. But you liked it,” he said. “You did. And I liked it. It felt pretty consensual to me.” “I’m not the kind of woman a man like you gets interested in, and we both know that. Eventually that could hurt me. And if you really are a nice guy, hurting me will hurt you.” “Because of that dancing thing?” he asked. “That dancing thing, and I’m poor, undereducated, strapped with kids and very, very temporary.” “Wait now,” he said. “I’m not trying to make an argument for interest, because you might be right—it might be a mistake that could get out of control. But you’re smart, no matter how much or little formal education you have. And I don’t believe you see your kids as a liability, and you know I don’t—I like them. And you won’t always be poor, not with your ambition and positive attitude.” He smiled gently. “The dancing doesn’t matter a damn. I understand about that.” “I don’t want to be your bad girl. The one you take chances with for a little walk on the wild side. To break a few rules, have a little sinful fun.” “Ellie, there’s not a bad bone in your body. And we both know it.” “That isn’t really the point, Your Holiness…” “Okay, let’s be rational. I apologize, I won’t do it again, but really—it was just a kiss.” “Not the way you do it,” she said.

Dad lived in fear of time. He felt it stalking him. I could see it in the worried glances he gave the sun as it moved across the sky, in the anxious way he appraised every length of pipe or cut of steel. Dad saw every piece of scrap as the money it could be sold for, minus the time needed to sort, cut and deliver it.