I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
With the enactment of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, we have taken an important step toward achieving federal education policies that will allow students to learn and achieve at the highest possible level.
Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.
You can't have a sustainable US economy without a great education system. Teach students to do the job right. You don't have an innovative economy unless you have a great education.
Study after study affirms what I saw in the classroom every day as superintendent of Denver Public Schools: Nothing makes a bigger difference for student learning than great teaching.
As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.
During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.
I ran the high school newspaper and was in student government. I played sports my whole life but was never picked as captain.
Many of my students assume that government protection is the only thing ensuring decent wages for most American workers. But basic economics shows that competition between employers for workers can be very effective at preventing businesses from misb...
Queens is famous throughout the world for diversity and tolerance. But really it's what we have in common that makes our neighborhoods work, our students succeed, and our families able to care for children and grandparents as they can.
As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic.
Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science, it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.
Common Core, the initiative that claims to more accurately measure K-12 student knowledge in English and math, also encourages children to step up their 'critical thinking.'
Here, class attendance is expected and students are required to take notes, which they are tested on. What is missing, it seems to me, is the use of knowledge, the practical training.
I was a student at Peking University for close to a decade, while a so-called 'knowledge explosion' was rapidly expanding. I was searching for not just knowledge, but also to mold a temperament, to cultivate a scholarly outlook.
I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.
The student body was huge at UT and you had to mature pretty quick, very quick actually. I enjoyed it and it helped me a lot in my life in general - not only in the classroom but on the baseball field as well.
A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
When you're too robotic and scripted, the students tune you out. So I always tried to use different learning modalities - kinesthetic, auditory, visual, whatever might bring learning to life.
I tell students, 'If you are learning from YouTube I almost don't want to teach you because what you learn from YouTube it takes 10 times as long to unlearn.' They do an approximation of the centre of the note, an approximation of the interpretation,...
