no. 473

"* In the chit-chat of the checkup, as I lay back in the chair with the suction tube in my mouth, he asked: “What are you majoring in at college?” When I replied that I was majoring in philosophy, he said: “What are you going to do with that?” 
“Think,” I replied."

By David Silbersweig, in The Washington Post, December 24, 2015

no. 414

"I find it interesting that while destroying the NEA seems to be one foundations of education “reform”, no one has suggesting destroying the AMA for healthcare reform."

Jake the snake commenting at Balloon Juice.

no. 249

"Be of service. You are taking your degree into a society dominated by concentrated poverty and a vulnerable middle class, a society where it is harder to pay for education, harder to find a job, harder to buy a house and harder to hold onto those things even if you manage to get them. You are entering adulthood during a period of mass incarceration and near constant war. There is a lot for you to do. Service is the rent you pay for the space you take up on the earth, and as a relatively privileged American you take up a lot of space. We are the most consuming, polluting, wasteful nation on earth. So your rent is steep. Pay it with service."

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry’s advice to Class of 2013

via

no. 247

from John Allison's Bad Machinery

no. 235

"When students cheat on exams it's because our School System values grades more than Students value learning."

Neil deGrasse Tyson

via

no. 229

"The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance, but to overcome it."

Lawrence Krauss

no. 199

"Blaming teachers for education is like blaming policemen for crime."

me

no. 195

"No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them."

Assata Shakur

no. 189

"I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativism is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it."

Kurt Vonnegut

via Gerry Canavan, the source of much goodness.

no. 180

"I know some classes at the school had to read A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye AND The Great Gatsby.

There’s your problem, America. It’s not video games or the Internet that is making your white kids grow up into amoral, self-important whiners who expect to get away with everything. It’s making them read books about jaded assholes and then telling them it’s great literature.

And hell, some schools throw in Ayn Rand’s garbage on top of it! No wonder Youtube comments look like they do. It’s fucking evil.

At the same time, I was reading Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau and Gulliver’s Travels. And what did those books teach me? That white people who think they’re smarter and better than everyone else usually wind up trapped in a hell of their own making, and while they can eventually cut their way out of it, it will probably drive them insane, or at least otherwise ruin their lives. I think that’s a far better lesson."

The Virgin Prince

no. 170

via

no. 169

via

no. 134

"I don’t have an issue with what you do in the church but I’m going to be up in your face if you’re going to knock on my science classroom and tell me I got to teach what you’re teaching in your Sunday school. That’s when we’re going to fight… There’s no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher ‘that might not necessarily be true.’ That’s never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There’s been this coexistence forever, so to have religious communities knocking down the science door, there’s something wrong there."

Neil deGrasse Tyson - Distinguished astrophysicist, prominent skeptic and host of the PBS show NOVA scienceNow on religion and education

(via)