The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
Interpretation
The focus should be on preventing youth from turning to crime rather than solely punishing offenders.
W. E. B. Du Bois emphasizes that in communities plagued by crime, the real concern should not just be the punishment of those who commit crimes, but rather the prevention of young people from being influenced or trained to engage in criminal behavior. He suggests that by addressing the root causes and providing better guidance and opportunities for the youth, society can effectively reduce crime in the long run.
In practice
In a community meeting about youth programs, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of investing in preventive measures.
Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'
Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.
School houses do not teach themselves - piles of brick and mortar and machinery do not send out men. It is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
For most people, it is enough for the world to know that they aspire. The world does not ask what their aspirations are, trusting that those aspirations are for the best and greatest things. But with regard to the Negroes in America, there is a feeling that their aspirations in some way are not consistent with the great ideals.
For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.
Boosting education will be a direct counterbalance to Boko Haram's appeal. In particular we must educate more young girls, ensuring they will grow up to be empowered through learning to play their full part as citizens of Nigeria and pull themselves up and out of poverty.
When I am through learning, I am through.
The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.
I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.
My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.
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