One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
Nicholas KristofRead
You educate a boy, and he'll have fewer children, but it's a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family.
Interpretation
Educating girls has a profound impact on family size and societal outcomes compared to educating boys.
This quote highlights the importance of educating girls, emphasizing that their education leads to a significant reduction in family size compared to that of boys. This reflects the broader societal implications of female education, suggesting that it empowers women to make informed choices about reproduction and family planning, ultimately resulting in better health and economic outcomes for themselves and their communities.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of investing in girls' education.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility.
Worrying about bills, food, or other problems leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.
Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it's an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.
Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.
The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.
Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.
In order to learn, one must change one's mind.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.
The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.
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