I didn't wake up and decide to become an activist. But you couldn't help notice the inequities, the injustices. It was all around you.
Yuri KochiyamaRead
I tell you, in this country, you don't get much of an education. Throughout high school, through junior college, which is all I went, I didn't know anything about the annihilation of all the Indian nations that were here.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the inadequacies of the education system in addressing important historical truths.
Yuri Kochiyama's quote reflects on the lack of comprehensive education regarding the history and experiences of Native American nations within the American education system. It emphasizes a significant gap in the curriculum that fails to acknowledge the atrocities and injustices faced by these communities, suggesting a need for a more inclusive and truthful educational narrative.
In practice
In a speech advocating for educational reform, this quote can illustrate the need for deeper historical awareness.
I didn't wake up and decide to become an activist. But you couldn't help notice the inequities, the injustices. It was all around you.
Don't become too narrow. Live fully. Meet all kinds of people. You'll learn something from everyone. Follow what you feel in your heart.
Life is not what you alone make it. Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all part of one another.
So, transform yourself first… Because you are young and have dreams and want to do something meaningful, that in itself, makes you our future and our hope. Keep expanding your horizon, decolonize your mind, and cross borders.
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.
Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
The benefits of prison education go beyond lowering recidivism rates and increasing post-release employment. It can also rekindle a sense of purpose and confidence.
We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.
To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.
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