When you meet a head of state, and you say, 'What is your most precious natural resource?' they will not say children at first, and then when you say, 'children,' they will pretty quickly agree with you.
Interpretation
Children are often overlooked as valuable resources, yet they are essential for the future.
This quote emphasizes the importance of children as the most precious natural resource we have. Although leaders may initially not recognize this, it highlights that the future of society depends on nurturing and investing in the younger generations, as they hold the potential to shape tomorrow's world.
In practice
In a speech about education reform, one could say, 'As Nicholas Negroponte observed, when we consider our most precious natural resource, we must recognize the invaluable potential in our children.'
Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.
Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it.
I'm not good at selling laptops. I'm good at selling ideas.
Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.
I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.
I don't think that every child in America is going to necessarily aspire to, you know, a four-year degree from a liberal arts college or a certain kind of life. I think that people should learn to be excellent in the thing that they choose to do.
Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don't try to trip you up... they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do... if they've loved a story they love to know how it started.
Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.
School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.
I read in the newspapers they are going to have 30 minutes of intellectual stuff on television every Monday from 7:30 to 8. to educate America. They couldn't educate America if they started at 6:30.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.