Seven Essential Quotes

In 2017, I hope to read at least 52 books I will attempt to review and capture in seven essential quotes

An End to Inequality by Jonathan Kozol

Seven Essential Quotes Competent teachers do not need to make that choice. They know that children need to be prepared to go out and earn a living when they’re no longer children. The question that many of them ask, however, is whether students who are only six or eight or ten years old ought to be perceived as just so many economic units in a corporate society, and...

Flotsam by Erich Maria Remarque

“A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We’re living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What’s more, there are whole races who believe it!” Wanderers should have no...

A Little Life by Hana Yanagihara

JB wore a perpetual expression of mild disbelief while at his job, both that he should be working at all and that no one had yet thought to recognize his special genius. You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more...

The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future by Linda Darling-Hammond

Good teachers create little oases for themselves, while others who are less well prepared adopt approaches that are ineffective or even sometimes harmful. Some seek knowledge that is not readily available to them; others batten down the hatches and eventually become impermeable to better ideas. Schools are vulnerable to vendors selling educational snake oils when...

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

By failing to recognize that we now live with the severe, enduring effects of de jure segregation, we avoid confronting our constitutional obligation to reverse it. If I am right that we continue to have de jure segregation, then desegregation is not just a desirable policy; it is a constitutional as well as a moral obligation that we are required to fulfill. “Let...

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up. A formidable array of policy assaults and...