Primary School Quotes

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In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!
Woody Allen
I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper adult. I had been very grown-up in primary school. But as I continued through secondary school, I in fact became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.
Hiromi Kawakami (The Briefcase)
schools for love do not exist. everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. however this love often eludes us.
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
Thomas A. Edison
I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!
George Carlin
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.
John Taylor Gatto (A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling)
There can be tremendous loneliness in the crossover to a soul-centered life. Walking through uncharted territory often means walking alone. This is particularly true in the transition stages before we find a conscious soulpod. It can be like primary school all over again—who will be my first real friends?
Jeff Brown (Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation)
We teach brilliance bias to children from an early age. A recent US study found that when girls start primary school at the age of five, they are as likely as five-year-old boys to think women could be 'really really smart'. But by the time they turn six, something changes. They start doubting their gender. So much so, in fact, that they start limiting themselves: if a game is presented to them as intended for 'children who are really, really smart', five-year-old girls are as likely to want to play it as boys - but six-year-old girls are suddenly uninterested. Schools are teaching little girls that brilliance doesn't belong to them. No wonder that by the time they're filling out university evaluation forms, students are primed to see their female teachers as less qualified.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
Do it together. Remember in primary school we learned that a verb is a 'doing' word? Well, a father is as much a verb as a mother.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice... I want a louding voice.
Abi Daré (The Girl with the Louding Voice)
In primary school, sports day was the one day of the year when the less academically gifted students could triumph...As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe
Gail Honeyman
Its called a playground, but its nearer to a battlefield. It can be brutal
Keith Richards (Life)
this meant he had reached the end of the track that he had blindly followed from the first year of primary school to graduation.
Paolo Giordano (The Solitude of Prime Numbers)
From the primary school till he leaves the university a young man does nothing but acquire books by heart without his judgment or personal initiative being ever called into play.
Gustave Le Bon (Psychologie Des Foules)
I know it’s a big struggle—around the world there are fifty-seven million children who are not in primary school, thirty-two million of them girls.
Malala Yousafzai (I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban)
Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science;
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.
Darin Strauss (Half a Life)
education is our basic right. Not just in the West; Islam too has given us this right. Islam says every girl and every boy should go to school. In the Quran it is written, God wants us to have knowledge. He wants us to know why the sky is blue and about oceans and stars. I know it’s a big struggle—around the world there are fifty-seven million children who are not in primary school, thirty-two million of them girls.
Malala Yousafzai (I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban)
People who live at subsistence level want first things to be put first. They are not particularly interested in freedom of religion, freedom of the press, free enterprise as we understand it, or the secret ballot. Their needs are more basic: land, tools, fertilizers, something better than rags for their children, houses to replace their shacks, freedom from police oppression, medical attention, primary schools.
Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung On Guerrilla Warfare)
Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice.
Abi Daré (The Girl with the Louding Voice)
In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away.
Derrick Jensen (Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution)
Sport is a mystery to me. In primary school, sports day was the one day of the year when the less academically gifted students could triumph, winning prizes for jumping fastest in a sack, or running from Point A to Point B more quickly than their classmates. How they loved to wear those badges on their blazers the next day! As if a silver in the egg-and-spoon race was some sort of compensation for not understanding how to use an apostrophe.
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
Nana Oosaki, about Shin: I wonder if he's really eighteen. He looks sixteen. I'm sure he lied about his age... Nana Komatsu: See! You were complaining but you still read the application! Shin: The studio's free! Great! <3 Nana Komatsu, thinking: So cute! Nana Oosaki: I hope he's not in primary school...children today are advanced.
Ai Yazawa
Becoming a footballer is only the first half of the silent prayer a kid offers up to the sky or confides to his teacher in a primary school essay. The second part is the name of the team he wants to play for.
Andrea Pirlo
Just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn't mean that they are all about to slit their masters' necks. Of course they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses — and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. you see, the murdered in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him — and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet after writing a sentimental letter to his mother or primary school teacher, or is chased, beaten, buggered, and garroted by the brother of the woman he has done in. So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary. It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants.
Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
When girls start primary school and the boys hit us and pull our hair during breaks and we go to an adult and ask for help, the adults say: The boys are only doing that because they like you!! That’s how you teach boys that they have rights over us. Then we get bigger and then they rape us but we’re just stupid little whores because we don’t take it as a COMPLIMENT? They beat us and kill us but it’s only because they like us. Why don’t we understand that?
Fredrik Backman (The Winners (Beartown, #3))
Starting from the primary schools, there must be compulsory ‘Cosmos’ classes throughout the education period. If a man thinks about and understands the universe, he will have wider horizons; he will be much less conceited and much more realistic.
Mehmet Murat ildan
The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.” —John Abramson, M.D., Harvard Medical School I wrote this book to help Americans
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother.
Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women)
Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.
Richard B. Gunderman
were young. They went to the same nursery and progressed through the same primary school, middle school and high school. Eddie’s parents had wanted him to go to a
David Jester (The Clinic)
He turned to me and gestured to the girl. “Joe, this is Caoimhe Young. You were probably too young to remember her in primary school, but her little sister is friends with Shannon.
Chloe Walsh (Saving 6 (Boys of Tommen, #3))
When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which puts experience first.
John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling)
Tell us more, Darcy, about how European you are. Tell us about the way the Croatian sun roasts your shoulders, tell us about your love of canned fish and the girl you’d kiss for practice at your German primary school.
Jenny Fran Davis (Dykette)
It is necessary for the oppressors to approach the people in order, via subjugation, to keep them passive. This approximation, however, does not involve being with the people, or require true communication. It is accomplished by the oppressors' depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo: for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a "free society"; the myth that all persons are free to work where they wish, that if they don't like their boss they can leave him and look for another job; the myth that this order respects human rights and is therefore worthy of esteem; the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur--worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory; the myth of the universal right of education, when of all the Brazilian children who enter primary schools only a tiny fraction ever reach the university; the myth of the equality of all individuals, when the question: "Do you know who you're talking to?" is still current among us; the myth of the heroism of the oppressor classes as defenders of "Western Christian civilization" against "materialist barbarism"; the myth of the charity and generosity of the elites, when what they really do as a class is to foster selective "good deeds" (subsequently elaborated into the myth of "disinterested aid," which on the international level was severely criticized by Pope John XXIII); the myth that the dominant elites, "recognizing their duties," promote the advancement of the people, so that the people, in a gesture of gratitude, should accept the words of the elites and be conformed to them; the myth of private property as fundamental to personal human development (so long as oppressors are the only true human beings); the myth of the industriousness of the oppressors and the laziness and dishonesty of the oppressed as well as the myth of the natural inferiority of the latter and the superiority of the former.
Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
With astonishing consistency, the people of Kültepe and Duttepe all saw the same figures in their dreams at regular intervals: Boys: the female primary-school teacher Girls: Atatürk Men: the Holy Prophet Muhammad Women: a tall, anonymous Western film star Old men: an angel drinking milk Old women: a young postman bringing good news
Orhan Pamuk (A Strangeness in My Mind)
Liberal studies means..." said Mrs Chatterway, who prided herself on being an advocate of progressive education, in which role she had made a substantial contribution to the illiteracy rate in several previously good primary schools.
Tom Sharpe (Wilt)
lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault. So, the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly and unbearably overwhelming. And don’t get me started on the smell of it. Body sprays competed with hair sprays, which competed with the always over-deployed deodorants that still somehow managed to lose the war against the toxic bouquet of teenage body odour. Thank god I was a smoker; I might’ve perished otherwise. The other hurdle high school threw up at me was homework. I am not morally opposed to extracurricular curricula; I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on the things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end. On top of that, the closer I got to being an adult and the further away from being a baby, the more chores I was expected to get done at home. These extra burdens, as reasonable as they were, led to my brain shutting down more and more, and, without my brain, learning became impossible.
Hannah Gadsby (Ten Steps to Nanette)
She spent much of her childhood and adolescence planning elaborate scheme to remove herself from family conflict: staying completely silent, keeping her face and body expressionless and immobile, wordlessly leaving the room and making her way to her bedroom, closing the door quietly behind her. Locking herself in the toilet. Leaving the house for an indefinite number of hours and sitting in the school car park by herself. None of these strategies had ever proven successful. In fact her tactics only seemed to increase the possibility that she would be punished as the primary instigator.
Sally Rooney (Normal People)
Many of us vote under the assumption that if only the right man/woman/party/ideology could get seated in the White House, the Court House, or the School House then the Kingdom of God would come. That is an illusion. We do not look for the church to assist in or endorse the building of a made-in-America utopia which is only a Babylon with red, white, and blue curtains. We look for a city whose builder and maker is God. To him, and only him, we must pledge our primary allegiance.
Ronnie McBrayer (The Jesus Tribe: Following Christ in the Land of the Empire)
Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women—sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two.
Monique W. Morris (Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools)
Certain tools are destructive no matter who owns them, whether it be the Mafia, stockholders, a foreign company, the state, or even a workers' commune. Networks of multilane highways, long. range, wide-band-width transmitters, strip mines, or compulsory school systems are such tools. Destructive tools must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence, exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of conviviality, which is the primary treasure in many so-called "underdeveloped" areas.
Ivan Illich
Tocqueville concluded that “the strength of free peoples resides in the local community. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science: they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it.”26 He stressed that it was the nearness and immediacy of the township that made its citizens more likely to care and take an active interest not only in their own fates but in the shared fates of their fellow citizens. By contrast, he noted a striking lack of attentiveness to more distant political centers of power, including both state and an even more distant federal government, where only a few ambitious men might govern but which otherwise was of little concern to the active citizens within the township. Tocqueville would have regarded a citizenry that was oblivious to local self-governance, but which instead directed all its attention and energy to the machinations of a distant national power, not as the culmination of democracy but as its betrayal.
Patrick J. Deneen (Why Liberalism Failed)
Here was a space with dreams beyond self and ideals that truthfully felt no different from what we’d learned in primary school—be kind, collaborate, take care of the Earth, share—concepts that don’t jibe well with our capitalist system, the ones they push us to forget.
Elliot Page (Pageboy: A Memoir)
Still, Emma and I somehow struck up the type of friendship that lasts through primary school and high-school cliques, and our fathers are both doctors, although my dad is a GP and Dr Frank is a gynecologist (or, as Emma's two older brothers prefer to call him, a 'box mechanic'). In many ways, I think Emma and I balance each other out - at least, I hope we do. She forces me to be less cynical and bitter. And I'm on hand to remind her that, as long as she has two eyebrows rather than one, she has nothing to worry about. I text her back: 'Call me when you can plait them.' - Cat
Rebecca Sparrow (Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight)
Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of modern scientific achievements or even by the standards of England in the late eighteenth century. However, it must be borne in mind that to be held back at one stage means that it is impossible to go on to a further stage. When a person is forced to leave school after only two years of primary school education, it is no reflection on him that he is academically and intellectually less developed than someone who had the opportunity to be schooled right through to university level. What Africa experienced in the early centuries of trade was precisely a loss of development opportunity, and this is of greatest importance.
Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa)
In fact, second lieutenants were primary-school teachers. Sure, teachers with guns, but a platoon commander was, nonetheless, the guy who sorted out the working day for 30 men under his command, taught their lessons, helped them with their homework, sorted out their petty squabbles and put plasters on their knees when they fell over in the playground.
Patrick Hennessey (The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time And Fighting Wars)
The primary thing we need to learn is not just maths or spelling, but how to be good: we need to learn about courage, self-control, reasonableness, independence and calm.
The School of Life (Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today (The School of Life Library))
Samantha: Listen, you need to get your head around the demographics of this place. So first of all you’ve got your blue collars—tradies, we call them. We’ve got a lot of tradies in Pirriwee. Like my Stu. Salt of the earth. Or salt of the sea, because they all surf, of course. Most of the tradies grew up here and never left. Then you’ve got your alternative types. Your dippy hippies. And in the last ten years or so, all these wealthy execs and banker wankers have moved in and built massive McMansions up on the cliffs. But! There’s only one primary school for all our kids! So at school events you’ve got a plumber, a banker and a crystal healer standing around trying to make conversation. It’s hilarious. No wonder we had a riot.
Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies)
the Ann Arbor, Michigan, School Board, near where I live, had a debate as to whether the primary mission of their schools was imparting knowledge or raising self-esteem. Self-esteem won.
Will Storr (Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us)
we have equal legal rights to spend real time with our families, where there really is equal pay, where the pressures of the long-hours culture are removed, where pay in the caring professions was made so rewarding that it did not invariably fall to women to look after the elderly, the disabled or children in nurseries, nor that teaching in primary schools was a female role.
Helena Kennedy (Eve Was Shamed: How British Justice is Failing Women)
The fact that our society honestly believes that poor women don’t have the right to start families, because they may require public assistance, obscures the variety of ways that middle-class families do receive public assistance. White families have been the primary beneficiaries of both public and corporate welfare in the form of redlining policies that drove down property values in Black neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods undesirable for businesses, families, and schools. They have been beneficiaries of favorable bank-loan terms to help them purchase safe, affordable, quality housing. They are the beneficiaries of marital and housing tax breaks and the disproportionate beneficiaries of the dwindling number of quality public schools that we have left.
Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower)
a lot of noises all at once, even if they are exclusively pleasant sounds, will always feel like an assault. So, the relentless cacophony of high school was constantly and unbearably overwhelming. And don’t get me started on the smell of it. Body sprays competed with hair sprays, which competed with the always over-deployed deodorants that still somehow managed to lose the war against the toxic bouquet of teenage body odour. Thank god I was a smoker; I might’ve perished otherwise. The other hurdle high school threw up at me was homework. I am not morally opposed to extracurricular curricula; I just didn’t have time for it. As in primary school, I needed my evenings to catch up on the things my brain had been unable to take on board during the day, not to mention recover from the sheer exhaustion of trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens for hours on end. On top of that, the closer I got to being an adult and the further away from being a baby, the more chores I was expected to get done at home. These extra burdens, as reasonable as they were, led to my brain shutting down more and more, and, without my brain, learning became impossible.
Hannah Gadsby (Ten Steps to Nanette)
A Southern Poverty Law Center survey of high school seniors and social studies teachers in 2017 found students struggling on even basic questions about the enslavement of blacks in the United States. Only 8 percent of high school seniors could identify slavery as the primary reason the South seceded from the Union. Nearly half of the students said it was to protest taxes on imported goods.
Jennifer L. Eberhardt (Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do)
It is inevitable that a loss of faith in media would contribute to a loss of faith in the content itself. Where writing began as divine communication and literacy was the privilege of a very few, writing—and the media to promote and publish that writing—is now accessible to everyone, even to the functionally illiterate. This means that the quality of available information has been degraded considerably along with the structural weaknesses of primary and secondary school education. It is now difficult to determine between what is investigative journalism, for instance, and what is baseless conspiracy theorizing. As no demands are made on the writers of media content, the demands have correspondingly increased on the readers of that content to practice a form of what Fundamentalist Christians call “discernment,” to greater and lesser degrees of success.
Peter Levenda (The Tantric Alchemist: Thomas Vaughan and the Indian Tantric Tradition)
best places to hide but also because he changed his spots frequently. However, those days were gradually falling behind, especially now that he was in his last days of primary school. By the end of the summer, he would start middle school, so he had to take advantage of what little childhood he had left. He went around the house into the backyard and found the kitchen door hung wide open. Too easy, he told himself. Besides, he risked
Miguel Estrada (Madhouse)
India is a land where contradictions will continue to abound, because there are many Indias that are being transformed, with different levels of intensity, by different forces of globalization. Each of these Indias is responding to them in different ways. Consider these coexisting examples of progress and status quo: India is a nuclear-capable state that still cannot build roads that will survive their first monsoon. It has eradicated smallpox through the length and breadth of the country, but cannot stop female foeticide and infanticide. It is a country that managed to bring about what it called the ‘green revolution’, which heralded food grain self-sufficiency for a nation that relied on external food aid and yet, it easily has the most archaic land and agricultural laws in the world, with no sign of anyone wanting to reform them any time soon. It has hundreds of millions of people who subsist on less that a dollar a day, but who vote astutely and punish political parties ruthlessly. It has an independent judiciary that once set aside even Indira Gandhi’s election to parliament and yet, many members of parliament have criminal records and still contest and win elections from prison. India is a significant exporter of intellectual capital to the rest of the world—that capital being spawned in a handful of world class institutions of engineering, science and management. Yet it is a country with primary schools of pathetic quality and where retaining children in school is a challenge. India truly is an equal opportunity employer of women leaders in politics, but it took over fifty years to recognize that domestic violence is a crime and almost as long to get tough with bride burning. It is the IT powerhouse of the world, the harbinger of the offshore services revolution that is changing the business paradigms of the developed world. But regrettably, it is also the place where there is a yawning digital divide.
Rama Bijapurkar (We are like that only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India)
That evening, Hope wrote a letter to her MP, Jack Crow. She found no difficulty at all in composing it, but quite a bit in writing it. She hadn't hand-written an entire page since primary school. In the end she found an app on her glasses that sampled her handwriting and turned it into a font that looked like her handwriting would if it had been regular, and printed it off. There was even an app for the printer that indented the paper a little, and an ink that looked like ballpoint ink.
Ken MacLeod (Intrusion)
waited, I read that morning’s out-of-date newspaper. Paul the Porter sometimes leaves them for me on my bedside cabinet. I like the local newspapers best—where the rest of the world doesn’t exist, and all that matters is the local primary school’s new nature garden and an old woman who knitted a quilt for charity. Children are turning one year older, teenagers are graduating, and grandparents are being laid to rest. Everything is small and manageable and everybody waits their turn to die. When I’d finished
Marianne Cronin (The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot)
adherents of the Big Five school of personality psychology (which argues that human personality can be boiled down to five primary traits) define introversion not in terms of a rich inner life but as a lack of qualities such as assertiveness and sociability.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
The blocks of the Healthy Eating Pyramid include: • vegetable oils such as olive and canola oil as the primary sources of fat • an abundance of vegetables and fruits, not including potatoes or corn • whole-grain foods at most meals • healthy sources of protein such as beans, nuts, seeds, fish, poultry, and eggs • a daily calcium supplement or dairy foods one to two times a day • a daily multivitamin • for those who choose to drink, alcohol in moderation • red meat, white bread, potatoes, soda, and sweets only occasionally if at all.
Walter C. Willett (Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating)
If we are serious about climbing to higher ground, we will be found in church every Sunday—attending all of our meetings, partaking of the sacrament, participating in Sunday School, and contributing to the spirit found in Relief Society, Primary, and priesthood meetings.
Robert L. Millet
Bryk and Schneider also found that relational trust—between teachers and administrators, teachers and teachers, and teachers and parents—has the power to offset external factors that are normally thought to be the primary determinants of a school’s capacity to serve students well: “Improvements in academic productivity were less likely in schools with high levels of poverty, racial isolation, and student mobility, but [the researchers] say that a strong correlation between [relational] trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for such factors.” 9
Parker J. Palmer (The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life)
For a translator, the supreme authority should be the author's personal style. But most translators obey another authority: that of the conventional version of “good French” (or good German, good English, et cetera), namely, the French (the German, et cetera) we learn in school. The translator considers himself the ambassador from that authority to the foreign author. That is the error: every author of some value transgresses against “good style,” and in that transgression lies the originality (and hence the raison d'être) of his art. The translator's primary effort should be to understand that transgression. This is not difficult when it is obvious, as for example with Rabelais, or Joyce, or Celine. But there are authors whose transgression against “good style” is subtle, barely visible, hidden, discreet; as such, it is not easy to grasp. In such a case, it is all the more important to do so.
Milan Kundera (Testaments Betrayed)
We have a wonderful Church organization, but the one place where we may have greater influence than any other is in the homes in which we reside. We have our Sabbath Schools, our Mutual Improvement Associations, our Relief Societies, our Primaries, our Church schools and seminaries. All these institutions are intended to develop the best that is in mankind, but we as parents of children in this Church have no right to place the responsibility upon these organizations to establish faith in the hearts of these children that God has placed in our homes. It is your duty and mine to teach the children that come to our homes.
George Albert Smith
You just want her to be like you,' Dain argues. 'A cold-blooded killer. Soon you'll be telling her that it's all right, you get used to the killing.' I inhale a sharp breath. Xaden nails him with a glare. 'The blood in my veins is as warm as yours, Aetos, and if it's my job you want next year, then you'd better start understanding that you never get used to killing, but you do understand that it's necessary.' He turns back to me, his dark gaze boring into mine. 'This isn't primary school. This is war- and you heard me say it once before, but the ugly truth those not on the front lines choose to forget is there are always body bags in war.
Rebecca Yarros (Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1))
We began before words, and we will end beyond them. It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words said and not meant. Words said ‘and’ meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead words. If only words were a kind of fluid that collects in the ears, if only they turned into the visible chemical equivalent of their true value, an acid, or something curative – then we might be more careful. Words do collect in us anyway. They collect in the blood, in the soul, and either transform or poison people’s lives. Bitter or thoughtless words poured into the ears of the young have blighted many lives in advance. We all know people whose unhappy lives twist on a set of words uttered to them on a certain unforgotten day at school, in childhood, or at university. We seem to think that words aren’t things. A bump on the head may pass away, but a cutting remark grows with the mind. But then it is possible that we know all too well the awesome power of words – which is why we use them with such deadly and accurate cruelty. We are all wounded inside one way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest distance between two people. Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions. When things fall into words they usually descend. Words have an earthly gravity. But the best things in us are those that escape the gravity of our deaths. Art wants to pass into life, to lift it; art wants to enchant, to transform, to make life more meaningful or bearable in its own small and mysterious way. The greatest art was probably born from a profound and terrible silence – a silence out of which the greatest enigmas of our life cry: Why are we here? What is the point of it all? How can we know peace and live in joy? Why be born in order to die? Why this difficult one-way journey between the two mysteries? Out of the wonder and agony of being come these cries and questions and the endless stream of words with which to order human life and quieten the human heart in the midst of our living and our distress. The ages have been inundated with vast oceans of words. We have been virtually drowned in them. Words pour at us from every angle and corner. They have not brought understanding, or peace, or healing, or a sense of self-mastery, nor has the ocean of words given us the feeling that, at least in terms of tranquility, the human spirit is getting better. At best our cry for meaning, for serenity, is answered by a greater silence, the silence that makes us seek higher reconciliation. I think we need more of the wordless in our lives. We need more stillness, more of a sense of wonder, a feeling for the mystery of life. We need more love, more silence, more deep listening, more deep giving.
Ben Okri (Birds of Heaven)
A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.
Joel Mokyr (The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy)
Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers, and started some ladies’ publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual behavior and the victimization of prostitutes. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agitators, speakers.
Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
... schools in many industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designed to produce innovative thinkers or questioners -- their primary purpose was to produce workers. The author Seth Godin writes, "Our grandfathers and great grandfathers built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked." To create good workers, educations systems put a premium on compliancy and rote memorization of basic knowledge -- excellent qualities in an industrial worker. (Or, as the cartoonist and Simpsons creator Matt Groening puts it, "it seems the main rule that traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education.") And not so good for questioning: To the extent a school is like a factory, students who inquire about "the way things are" could be seen as insubordinate. It raises, at least in my mind, a question that may seem extreme: If schools were build on a factory model, were they actually designed to squelch questions?
Warren Berger
A primary purpose of school - and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well - is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time. This lesson is crucial to individual economic success ("I love art," my students would say, "but I've got to make a living"), to the perpetuation of our economic system (What if all those who hated their jobs quit?), and it is crucial, as should be clear now, to the rationale that causes all mass atrocities.
Derrick Jensen (A Language Older Than Words)
At primary school when people tried to find friends, I tried to find space that my imagination could fill with whatever it wanted, nearly always butterflies because to me they were perfection, like real-life fairies with prettier wings. At break time I turned myself into them, not just one butterfly but hundreds of them, my arms a kaleidoscope of colors as I danced across the wet grass while my class played tag, chasing around each other around the blacktop. I didn't understand it, like wasn't it too crowded I asked them all the time in my head. Don't you worry cherub, the lunch monitor said when she caught me watching the other children in confusion. You're Pluto. Happiest away from the heat of the action. She smiled a wrinkly smile. Nothing wrong with that.
Annabel Pitcher (Silence is Goldfish)
Jina langu ni Enock Maregesi na ningependa kukwambia kisa kidogo kuhusiana na bibi yangu, Martha Maregesi. Mwanamke huyu alikuwa mke mwenye upendo usiokuwa na masharti yoyote. Alikuwa mama na bibi aliyefundisha familia yake umuhimu wa kujitolea na umuhimu wa uvumilivu. Ijapokuwa hakupendelea sana kujizungumzia mwenyewe, ningependa kukusimulia kisa kidogo kuhusiana na hadithi ya maisha ya mwanamke huyu wa ajabu katika maisha yangu. Bibi yangu alizaliwa katika Kitongoji cha Butimba, Kijiji cha Kome, Kata ya Bwasi, Tarafa ya Nyanja (Majita), Wilaya ya Musoma Vijijini, Mkoa wa Mara, katika familia ya watoto kumi, mwaka 1930. Alisoma katika Shule ya Msingi ya Kome ambako alipata elimu ya awali na msingi na pia elimu ya kiroho kwani shule yao ilikuwa ya madhehebu ya Kisabato. Aliolewa na Bwana Maregesi Musyangi Sabi mwaka 1946, na kufanikiwa kupata watoto watatu; wa kiume wakiwa wawili na wa kike mmoja. Matatizo hasa ya bibi yalianza mwaka 2005, alipougua kiharusi akiwa nyumbani kwake huko Musoma. Hata hivyo alitibiwa hapo Musoma na Dar es Salaam akapona na kuwa mwenye afya ya kawaida. Lakini tarehe 19/10/2014 alipatwa tena na kiharusi na kulazwa tena katika Hospitali ya Mkoa ya Musoma, ila akajisikia nafuu na kuruhusiwa kurudi nyumbani – lakini kwa maagizo ya daktari ya kuendelea na dawa akiwa nje ya hospitali. Tarehe 29/10/2014 alirudi tena Hospitali ya Mkoa ya Musoma kwa tiba zaidi, lakini tarehe 4/11/2014 saa 7:55 usiku akafariki dunia; akiwa amezungukwa na familia yake. Dunia ina watu wachache sana wenye matumaini na misimamo ya kutegemea mazuri, na wachache zaidi ambao wako tayari kugawa matumaini na misimamo hiyo kwa watu wengine. Nitajisikia furaha siku zote kwamba miongoni mwa watu hao wachache, hata bibi yangu alikuwemo. Msalaba uliwekwa wakfu na Mwenyezi Mungu baada ya mwili wa Yesu Kristo kuning’inizwa juu yake. Kwa kuwa bibi yangu ametanguliwa na msalaba, msalaba utamwongoza mahali pa kwenda.
Enock Maregesi
The headmaster used to expound the meaning of school life in his sermons.15 Sherborne was not, he explained, entirely devoted to ‘opening the mind’, although ‘historically … this was the primary meaning of school.’ Indeed, said the headmaster, there was ‘constantly a danger of forgetting the original object of school.’ For the English public school had been consciously developed into what he called ‘a nation in miniature’. With a savage realism, it dispensed with the lip service paid to such ideas as free speech, equal justice and parliamentary democracy, and concentrated upon the fact of precedence and power. As the headmaster put it: In form-room and hall and dormitory, on the field and on parade, in your relations with us masters and in the scale of seniority among yourselves, you have become familiar with the ideas of authority and obedience, of cooperation and loyalty, of putting the house and the school above your personal desires … The great theme of the ‘scale of seniority’ was the balance of privilege and duty, itself reflecting the more worthy side of the British Empire. But this was a theme to which ‘opening the mind’ came as at best an irrelevance.
Andrew Hodges (Alan Turing: The Enigma)
We become better conversationalists when we employ two primary objectives. Number one: Take the risk. It is up to us to take the risk of starting a conversation with a stranger. We cannot hope that others will approach us; instead, even if we are shy, it is up to us to make the first move. We all fear rejection at some level. Just remind yourself that there are more dire consequences in life than a rejection by someone at a networking event, singles function, back-to-school night, or association meeting. Number two: Assume the burden. It is up to each and every one of us to assume the burden of conversation. It is our responsibility to come up with topics to discuss; it is up to us to remember people’s names and to introduce them to others; it is up to us to relieve the awkward moments or fill the pregnant pause.
Debra Fine (The Fine Art of Small Talk: How to Start a Conversation, Keep It Going, Build Networking Skills -- and Leave a Positive Impression!)
I’d stand at the front of the classroom, teaching my primary-school charges basic facts about language, life, the world, and I’d find that at the same time I was teaching myself these basic facts all over again—filtered through the eyes and minds of these children. Done the right way, this was a refreshing experience. Profound, even. I got along well with my pupils, their mothers, and my fellow teachers. Still
Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)
What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice? An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance. The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series))
The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free – were given schools and the right to vote – what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.
W.E.B. Du Bois (Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880)
Given our socialization into dependency, women are also poor risk takers. (...) We avoid new situations, job changes, moves to different parts of the country. Women are afraid that if they should make a mistake, or do "the wrong thing", they'll be punished. Women are less confident than men in their ability to make judgments, and in relationships will often hand over the decision-making duties to their mates, a situation which only ensures that they will become less confident in their powers of judgment as time goes by. Most shockingly of all, women are less likely than men to fulfill their intellectual potential. (...) In fact, as women proceed into adulthood, they get lower and lower scores on "total intelligence", owing to the fact that they tend to use their intelligence less and less the longer they're away from school. Other studies show that the intellect's ability to function may actually be impaired by dependent personality traits. (...) Confidence and self-esteem are primary issues in women's difficulties with achievement. Lack of confidence leads us into the dark waters of envy. (...) envy must be recognized, seen, and fully comprehended; it can too easily be used as a cover-up for something that is far mroe crucial to women's independence - our own inner feelings of incompetence. These must be dealt with - directly - if we are ever to achieve confidence and strength.
Colette Dowling (The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence)
Love is not coercion, and the state is only an agent of coercion. It has no other function and can work no other way. Its job is to be the last resort in society: the coercion of criminals through punishment. Its nature and its funding are coercion. Any solution it offers will inescapably be coercive. When we make it the primary agent of healing, we fundamentally alter the nature of society. We ought to have a society in which the power of love drives us to break down all social, class, and political barriers, and to effect healing through private means, private associations, private institutions, counselors, networks, schools, hospitals, charities, businesses, etc. It ought to be driven by giving. Love is giving; selfishness is taking. When we make the state the mover, we make the primary solution one of taking rather than giving. This inverts God's designed order for all human relations, including race relations and racial healing.
Joel McDurmon (The Problem of Slavery in Christian America)
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the dust cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke. Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country. Willie signed them on all right, and as a result got quite a few votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commissioner and, later, Lieutenant Governor in Willie's last term. I used to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask the Boss, "What do you keep that lunk-head for?" Sometimes he would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, "Hell, somebody's got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike." But once he said: "I keep him because he reminds me of something." "What?" "Something I don't ever want to forget," he said. "What's that?" "That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don't aim to forget that." So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.
Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men)
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
This divide is characterized by the demonization and privatization of public services, including schools, the military, prisons, and even policing; by the growing use of prison as our primary resolution for social contradictions; by the degradation and even debasement of the public sphere and all those who would seek to democratically occupy it; by an almost complete abandonment of the welfare state; by a nearly religious reverence for marketized solutions to public problems; by the growth of a consumer culture that repeatedly emphasizes the satisfaction of the self over the needs of the community; by the corruption of democracy by money and by monied interests, what Henry Giroux refers to as “totalitarianism with elections”;88 by the mockery of a judicial process already tipped in favor of the powerful; by the militarization of the police; by the acceptance of massive global inequality; by the erasure of those unconnected to the Internet-driven modern economy; by the loss of faith in the very notion of community; and by the shrinking presence of the radical voices, values, and vision necessary to resist this dark neoliberal moment.89
Marc Lamont Hill (Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond)
Such a principled disregard of ad hominem evidence is a characteristically modern prejudice of professional philosophers. For most Greek and Roman thinkers from Plato to Augustine, theorizing was but one mode of living life philosophically. To Socrates and the countless classical philosophers who tried to follow in his footsteps, the primary point was not to ratify a certain set of propositions (even when the ability to define terms and analyze arguments was a constitutive component of a school's teaching), but rather to explore 'the kind of person, the sort of self' that one could elaborate as a result of taking the quest for wisdom seriously.
James Miller
The idea that students don't know how to write clearly and precisely is as old as school itself, probably, but lately it seems as if students no longer know how to read either. It is true on my campus and from I can gather, on many other college campuses. The students understand words, sentences -- they are not illiterate -- but they don't seem to grasp the reasons for reading. They seem baffled when asked to take two thoughts, connect them, and form something new. They read James Baldwin or Henry David Thoreau and their primary reaction seems to be, "Okay, now I've ready that. I'm done." As if the only goal in reading was to have looked at every word.
Dinty W. Moore (Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals)
He stood a moment or two at the door after his wife had gone, drinking in reassurance from that glorious vision of solid sense that spread itself before his eyes: the endless house-roofs; the high glass vaults of the public baths and gymnasiums; the pinnacled schools where Citizenship was taught each morning; the spider-like cranes and scaffoldings that rose here and there; and even the few pricking spires did not disconcert him. There it stretched away into the grey haze of London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel that there was no God but man, no priest but the politician, no prophet but the schoolmaster. Then he went back once more to
Robert Hugh Benson (Lord of the World)
She reflected on the way things like juices were these days tasting exactly the way they were supposed to. No variation in gradations of sweet and tart, not like in the olden days, the olden days being those years when she was in primary and secondary school in Nigeria. Here and now, no matter the season, the time of year, the place you bought it, many things always tasted the same. The power of science. Sometimes she thought how one day even love might become like a science. Everyone saying exactly the same right words. Everyone reacting the same exact ways. Love feeling and tasting and looking exactly the way some scientists in some laboratory determined that it should. Perhaps a development like that would solve many romantic disputes, maybe even bring down divorce rates to a cool zero percent.
Chinelo Okparanta
they want their children to believe in God, to go to church, and to do what is right, but the primary focus of their parental energy is on producing children who are mannerly, do well at school, and succeed in sports and music. So they try to control all of the behaviors that will get in the way of these goals. Because of this they do not focus on the heart and what rules the heart. And because they fail to think about the heart, they miss those wonderful moments of grace where God is revealing the heart of the child so that his parents can be God’s tools of rescue, leading our children to insight, confession, and repentance. They are left with trying to get their children to do what is right without addressing the heart, failing to understand that if they could do that, Jesus wouldn’t have had to invade earth on his mission of rescue.
Paul David Tripp (Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family)
For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education. That's why, despite being soemthing of a liberatarian, he repeatedly proposed that the state pay for universal primary education as well as fund education at later stages. He was met with opposition from many quarters, mostly those wary of big government or highter taxes. Yet interestingly, one of this most ardent supporters was an old friend and political opponent, the conservative John Adams. "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it," Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people.
Fareed Zakaria (In Defense of a Liberal Education)
Springs and summers full of song and revolution. The Popular Front, demonstrations and confrontations, time that takes you away from yourself and your poetry, so that you could see them as if from cosmic space, a way of looking that changes everything into stars, our Earth, you and me, Estonia and Eritrea, blue anemones and the Pacific Ocean. Even the belief that you will write more poems. Something that was breathing into you, as May wind blows into a house bringing smells of mown grass and dogs' barks, - this something has dissipated, become invisible like stars in daylight. For quite a time I haven't permitted myself to hope it would come back. I know I am not free, I am nothing without this breathing, inspiration, wind that comes through the window. Let God be free, whether he exist or no. And then, it comes once again. At dusk in the countryside when I go to an outhouse, a little white moth flies out of the door. That's it, now. And the dusk around me begins little by little to breathe in words and syllables. * In the morning, I was presented to President Mitterrand, in the evening, I was weeding nettles from under the currant bushes. A lot happened inbetween, the ride from Tallinn to Tartu and to our country home through the spring that we had waited for so long, and that came, as always, unexpectedly, changing serious greyish Estonia at once into a primary school child's drawing in pale green, into a play-landscape where mayflies, mayors and cars are all somewhat tiny and ridiculous... In the evening I saw the full moon rising above the alder grove. Two bats circled over the courtyard. The President's hand was soft and warm. As were his eyes, where fatigue was, in a curious way, mingled with force, and depth with banality. He had bottomless night eyes with something mysterious in them like the paths of moles underground or the places where bats hibernate and sleep.
Jaan Kaplinski
Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.
Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools
Nelson A. Denis (War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony)
Plants have long been, and still are, humanity’s primary medicines. They possess certain attributes that pharmaceuticals never will: 1) their chemistry is highly complex, too complex for resistance to occur — instead of a silver bullet (a single chemical), plants often contain hundreds to thousands of compounds; 2) plants have developed sophisticated responses to bacterial invasion over millions of years — the complex compounds within plants work in complex synergy with each other and are designed to deactivate and destroy invading pathogens through multiple mechanisms, many of which I discuss in this book; 3) plants are free; that is, for those who learn how to identify them where they grow, harvest them, and make medicine from them (even if you buy or grow them yourself, they are remarkably inexpensive); 4) anyone can use them for healing — it doesn’t take 14 years of schooling to learn how to use plants for your healing; 5) they are very safe — in spite of the unending hysteria in the media, properly used herbal medicines cause very few side effects of any sort in the people who use them, especially when compared to the millions who are harmed every year by pharmaceuticals (adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association); and 6) they are ecologically sound. Plant medicines are a naturally renewable resource, and they don’t cause the severe kinds of environmental pollution that pharmaceuticals do — one of the factors that leads to resistance in microorganisms and severe diseases in people.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria)
Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
There were years when I went to the movies almost every day, sometimes even twice a day, and they were the years between 1936 and the war, around the time of my adolescence. Those were years in which cinema was my world. It’s been said many times before that cinema is a form of escape, it’s a stock phrase intended to be a condemnation, and cinema certainly served that purpose for me back then. It satisfied a need for disorientation, for shifting my attention to another place, and I believe it’s a need that corresponds to a primary function of integration in the world, an essential phase in any kind of development. Of course there are other more substantial and personal ways of creating a different space for yourself: cinema was the easiest method and it was within reach, but it was also the one that instantly carried me farthest away. I went to the cinema in the afternoon, secretly fleeing from home, or using study with a classmate as an excuse, because my parents left me very little freedom during the months when school was in session. The urge to hide inside the cinema as soon as it opened at two in the afternoon was the proof of true passion. Attending the first screening had a number of advantages: the half-empty theater, it was like I had it all to myself, would allow me to stretch out in the middle of the third row with my legs on the back of the seat in front of me; the hope of returning home without anyone finding out about my escape, in order to receive permission to go out once again later on (and maybe see another film); a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming. And in addition to these explanations that were unmentionable for various reasons, there was another more serious one: entering right when it opened guaranteed the rare privilege of seeing the movie from the beginning and not from a random moment toward the middle or the end, because that was what usually happened when I got to the cinema later in the afternoon or toward the evening.
Italo Calvino (Making a Film)
Just for a moment, imagine that you live in a magnificent ethereal world of indescribable beauty—a world consisting of subtle energies, where every thought you create instantly molds and shapes the immediate environment around you. Imagine a perfect world where your thoughts instantly create any reality you choose. Whatever your heart desires is suddenly made manifest before you. It is a glorious land overflowing with living light, a land where death, disease, and limitations are nonexistent. Imagine yourself in an ideal world where everyone is free to explore and develop their creative pursuits and experience their unlimited potential. Does this sound like heaven? Just think what an immature or undisciplined being could and would do in this ideal thought-responsive world. Picture the chaos and destruction that a single primitive mind could create. One undisciplined mind would wreak complete havoc, destroying the perfection of the subtle environments and the privacy of all the inhabitants. Now for a moment imagine what kind of educational environment would be the perfect training ground for this undisciplined mind. What kind of school would you create to educate this primitive state of consciousness? What kind of lessons would effectively train this disruptive mind to coexist in the thought-responsive heavenly dimensions? Welcome to the slowed-down molecular training ground of consciousness. Welcome to the dense training ground of matter, where focused thoughts are required in order to create and prosper. Welcome to the ideal environment where the young and undisciplined mind can learn by trial and error without contaminating the pure realm of spirit. Welcome to your life. This is one of the primary spiritual lessons we are here to learn. The unaware remain in the dense outer dimensions of the universe until they learn to exercise complete responsibility for their thoughts and actions. They then must learn to escape from the dense gravity field consisting of matter, form, and emotion. Eventually they recognize and break free from the illusions of form and to consciously pursue and experience their spiritual essence.
William Buhlman (The Secret of the Soul)
We danced to John Michael Montgomery’s “I Swear.” We cut the seven-tiered cake, electing not to take the smear-it-on-our-faces route. We visited and laughed and toasted. We held hands and mingled. But after a while, I began to notice that I hadn’t seen any of the tuxedo-clad groomsmen--particularly Marlboro Man’s friends from college--for quite some time. “What happened to all the guys?” I asked. “Oh,” he said. “They’re down in the men’s locker room.” “Oh, really?” I asked. “Are they smoking cigars or something?” “Well…” He hesitated, grinning. “They’re watching a football game.” I laughed. “What game are they watching?” It had to be a good one. “It’s…ASU is playing Nebraska,” he answered. ASU? His alma mater? Playing Nebraska? Defending national champions? How had I missed this? Marlboro Man hadn’t said a word. He was such a rabid college football fan, I couldn’t believe such a monumental game hadn’t been cause to reschedule the wedding date. Aside from ranching, football had always been Marlboro Man’s primary interest in life. He’d played in high school and part of college. He watched every televised ASU game religiously--for the nontelevised games, he relied on live reporting from Tony, his best friend, who attended every game in person. “I didn’t even know they were playing!” I said. I don’t know why I shouldn’t have known. It was September, after all. But it just hadn’t crossed my mind. I’d been a little on the busy side, I guess, getting ready to change my entire life and all. “How come you’re not down there watching it?” I asked. “I didn’t want to leave you,” he said. “You might get hit on.” He chuckled his sweet, sexy chuckle. I laughed. I could just see it--a drunk old guest scooting down the bar, eyeing my poufy white dress and spouting off pickup lines: You live around here? I sure like what you’re wearing… So…you married? Marlboro Man wasn’t in any immediate danger. Of that I was absolutely certain. “Go watch the game!” I insisted, motioning downstairs. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t need to.” He wanted to watch the game so badly I could see it in the air. “No, seriously!” I said. “I need to go hang with the girls anyway. Go. Now.” I turned my back and walked away, refusing even to look back. I wanted to make it easy on him. I wouldn’t see him for over an hour. Poor Marlboro Man. Unsure of the protocol for grooms watching college football during their wedding receptions, he’d darted in and out of the locker room for the entire first half. The agony he must have felt. The deep, sustained agony. I was so glad he’d finally joined the guys.
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together. Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do. In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other. So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships? I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their single friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves. When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems. I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart. Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond? When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers. In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.
Corin