To focus on discipline is to ignore the real problem: We will never be able to get students (or anyone else) to be in good order if, day after day, we try to force them to do what they do not find satisfying.

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.

What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

Running a school where the students all succeed, even if some students have to help others to make the grade, is good preparation for democracy.

The answer lies in preventing these failures, not in looking for better ways to fix the people who are failing.