By fully committing to our public education system and engaging holistically from cradle to career, we can guarantee that all of our children in Georgia, no matter their needs, have the kinds of teachers and neighbors in their lives that my mother had.
Interpretation
Investing in a holistic education system can ensure equitable opportunities for all children.
Stacey Abrams emphasizes the importance of a committed and comprehensive public education system that supports children from their earliest years through to their career paths. By fostering a nurturing environment with accessible resources and supportive mentors, we can provide every child, regardless of their circumstances, the essential guidance and support that can shape their futures positively, much like the support the speaker received as a child.
In practice
Discussing educational reforms at a community meeting.
I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.
I do not Google myself, I do not read comments, and I barely look myself in the eye when I look in the mirror.
My being a black woman is not a deficit. It is a strength. Because I could not be where I am had I not overcome so many other barriers. Which means you know I'm relentless, you know I'm persistent, and you know I'm smart.
The basis for sustainable progress is legal protections grounded in an awareness of how identity has been used to deny opportunity.
I like to solve problems. I know it is a skill set, but it's also an obligation. I grew up with parents who believe that you don't simply complain: you try to find solutions and fix what's in front of you.
Here in Georgia, we continue to grapple with our own vestiges of hate. The image carved into Stone Mountain, like Confederate monuments across this state, stand as constant reminders of racism, intolerance, and division.
We were taught to be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and efficient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask.
If it is right that schools should be maintained by the whole community for the well-being of the whole, it is right also that libraries should be so maintained.
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
Whatever the intellectual quality of the education given our children, it is vital that it include elements of love and compassion, for nothing guarantees that knowledge alone will be truly useful to human beings.
It's true that, in Iran, women have half of the rights men do. And yet 66 per cent of students are women.
Education is the basic tool for the development of consciousness and the reconstitution of society.
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