Quotations on Education, Equity, and Social Justice - famous education quotes

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• (1) Positive quotes about learning
• (2) Education quotes inspirational
• (3) Education quotes for students
• (4) Value of education quotes

The Equity Literacy Institute is an EdChange initiative.
http://www.equityliteracy.org
gorski@equityliteracy.org
@pgorski
Quotations on Education, Equity, and Social Justice
Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman
schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel. -Bella Abzug
The child becomes largely what it is taught; hence we must watch what we teach it, and how we live before it.
-Jane Addams
We are all creative, but by the time we are three of four years old, someone has knocked the creativity out of
us. Some people shut up the kids who start to tell stories. Kids dance in their cribs, but someone will insist they
sit still. By the time the creative people are ten or twelve, they want to be like everyone else. -Maya Angelou
I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el
espiritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world. -Gloria Anzald?a
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and
by the same token to save it from that ruin, which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and
the young, would be inevitable. An education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough
not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their
choice of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the
task of renewing a common world. -Hannah Arendt
I want American history taught. Unless I'm in that book, you're not in it either. History is not a procession of
illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
-James Baldwin
The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors. -Henry Becque
All generalizations are false, including this one. -Alexander Chase
The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things. -Gilbert Chesterton
The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but reveal to them their own. -
Benjamin Disraeli
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own
ignorance. -Will Durant
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Any attempt to disturb the deadly routine of instruction is looked upon as sabotage. And the notion that the
aims and functions of education should be determined in the local community by a close and continuous
discussion among students, faculty, administration, and citizens is so visionary that it is not even seriously
considered. -Charles Ferguson
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to
differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. -Anatole France
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Of course there's no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if She exists. -Antonia
Fraser
All children have preparedness, potential, curiosity and interest in constructing their learning, in engaging in
social interaction and in negotiating with everything the environment brings to them. -Lella Gandini
It is not who you attend school with, but who controls the school you attend. -Nikki Giovanni
A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more
than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form. -Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
By the time they reach second grade, every child in the country knows what an Indian is. They wear lots of
feathers, ride spotted ponies and shoot arrows. Indians who don't fit the type are invisible; they simply can't
be imagined by the majority of white children or adults. -Rayna Green
So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the
school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the
individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units
are not machines, but human beings. -Edith Hamilton
Wherever there are beginners and experts, old and young, there is some kind of learning going on, some kind
of teaching. We are all pupils and we are all teachers. -Gilbert Highet
There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform
consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures. -bell hooks
The single largest variable that predicts SAT scores is family income. If you want higher SAT scores, you need
to get your kids born into wealthier families. You know, it's great to tell kids to pull themselves up by their own
boot straps, but you better put boots on them first. -Paul Houston
Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can they
deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me. -Zora Neale Hurston
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. -Aldous Huxley
Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people
a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It
makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and broken promises. -Chief Joseph
Though people with disabilities have become more vocal in recent years, we still constitute a very small
minority. Yet the Beautiful People - the slender, fair and perfect ones - form a minority that may be even
smaller. -Debra Kent
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward
freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more
devoted to order than to justice. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I
mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do
not deal with the schools and their inequalities. -Jonathan Kozol
by Paul Gorski for EdChange and the Equity Literacy Institute. Revised November 26, 2017.
In the end, as any successful teacher will tell you, you can only teach the things that you are. If we practice
racism then it is racism we teach. -Max Lerner
Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed
them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? 'If you want us to change the
world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!' shouts the child. -Audre Lorde
Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have
what it takes.' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.' -Clare Boothe Luce
One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and
listen for yourself and think for yourself. -Malcolm X
The problem with our education system is not that parents do not have a choice. The problem is that inequities
continue to exist. -Patsy Mink
'Status quo.' Latin for the mess we're in. -Jeve Moorman
The function of freedom is to free somebody else. -Toni Morrison
Aye, fight! But not your neighbor. Fight rather all the things that cause you and your neighbor to fight. -Mikhail
Naimy
Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the Unites States. Ask any Indian. -Robert Orben
Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do
you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agreed, as you can all read the book? -Red Jacket
The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. -Bryan Stevenson
There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than
the other savages. -Mark Twain
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that homosexuality 'is a lifestyle I don't agree with.' This is a trope you hear
from the religious right a good deal, and it seems to have entered the conservative mainstream, rolling easily
off the tongue. But it is a very odd thing to say. No one (speaking rationally) says, 'I don't agree with the
Pacific Ocean' or 'I don't agree with the Grand Canyon.' Facts are not things you agree or disagree with. You
can agree or disagree with viewpoints, thoughts or ideas, but homosexuality is not a viewpoint or an idea. It is
a thing, an attribute, a nature, a fact. -Paul Varnell
People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
-Rebecca West
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people
how to begin to think. -Mary Wollstonecraft
Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire. -William Butler Yeats
by Paul Gorski for EdChange and the Equity Literacy Institute. Revised November 26, 2017.


What are some famous learning quotes? Quotes About Teachers and Teaching C. S. ... Henry Brooks Adams: "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The secret in education lies in respecting the student." William Arthur Ward: “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. ... Henry Brooks Adams: "Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops."

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