The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public...
It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you kn...
Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.
Most of my friends from Columbia are going on to get advanced degrees. And why not? A Ph.D. is the new M.A., a master's is the new bachelor's, a B.A. is the new high school diploma, and a high school diploma is the new smiley-face sticker on your fir...
The cafeteria made him feel like an observer rather than a participant in the high school experience.
Pretty much everyone hates high school. It’s a measure of your humanity, I suspect. If you enjoyed high school, you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both.
Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.
In elementary school, we all say, 'If you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all.' In high school, we should say, 'If you don't have anything nice to say, shut your mouth.' So that's what I'm telling high schools all around t...
I had never dreamed about the NBA like some guys did. I was a non-scholarship player at an NAIA college. I played on the Boys and Girls Club team in my freshman and sophomore years of high school before I made the high school team. I was our backup c...
'Big Little Lies' is the story of a school trivia night that goes horrifically wrong, when one parent ends up dead, possibly murdered. I have never attended a school trivia night where a parent ended up dead. In fact, I've never been to a school triv...
My mother talked about the stories I used to spin as a child of three, before I started school. I would tell this story about what school I went to and what uniform I wore and who I talked to at lunchtime and what I ate, and my mother was like, 'This...
The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. And ...
I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told m...
A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexuality, and that breaks my heart, because they're going to have to - high school's hard enough to overcome. Middle school is hard enough to overcome when we get out of it. They say life is what you spend ...
My high school wasn't a big public school; it was tiny. There were 36 girls in my graduating class. We were a big group of girls that by the time senior year came along couldn't wait to get away from school fast enough but we loved each other. It's r...
When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls' school. I had three children and wait...
When I tell people I work to stop hazing in high schools I am almost always met with shocked expressions. 'High school? Really? I thought that was something that only arrogant frat guys do in college.' But it's true - as long as I have worked on prev...
It is not how old you are, but how you are old.
How young can you die of old age?
The best mirror is an old friend.
Everything that's old is new, and everything that's new is old.
