There is a huge gap between what students want for their future and what their schools are offering.
Interpretation
Students' aspirations often do not align with the education they receive.
This quote emphasizes the disconnect between students' ambitions for their future and the educational programs offered by schools. It suggests that the current educational system may not adequately prepare students for the realities of their desired paths, leading to a misalignment between student goals and available opportunities.
In practice
In a speech at a graduation ceremony, a speaker could use this quote to highlight the need for educational reform.
It's not that our high school system was not designed well, but that it was designed in 1906 when the country was just out of the industrial era. There hasn't been a substantial systemic change the way we do high school since then.
As a parent, you have to be good coach and bad coach, and I think in the college-application process, I didn't want to be bad coach. 'This is amazing! I'm so proud of you!' That's the role I wanted with my kids.
Regardless of zip code, talent and IQ are evenly distributed, so we need to make sure that opportunity is evenly distributed, too.
Teachers have told us across the country that what's severely outdated is the teacher at the front of the classroom as the font of knowledge, because as we know, access to knowledge and information is now ubiquitous. So instead, teachers want to help students learn how to think so that they can be lifelong learners.
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life.
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