But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.

False hope is worse than despair.

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.

What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later.

You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible.

I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.