There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.
Rita DoveRead
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Engaging with children and educators is crucial for understanding and promoting literature and poetry in schools.
Rita Dove emphasizes the importance of direct communication with children and teachers in the discourse on literature. Rather than theorizing about literature's essence, she advocates for ensuring poetry is integrated into educational curricula early in a child's development, fostering a deep appreciation for literary arts from a young age.
Themes
LiteraturePoetryEducationChildrenTeachersCurriculum
In practice
Example use cases
A teacher might use this quote during a professional development workshop about curriculum development.
More from Rita Dove
All quotes →Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.
Rita DoveRead
As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.
Rita DoveRead
If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.
Rita DoveRead
All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.
Rita DoveRead
Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.
Rita DoveRead
Similar quotes
When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead
The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue - questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.
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I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
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I am mentally preparing myself for the five-year-old mind. I want to come down to their physical limitations and up to their sense of wonder and awe.
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As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
Denis DiderotRead
And once we have given our community a good start,' I pointed out, ' the process will be cumulative. By maintaining a sound system of education you produce citizens of good character, and citizens of sound character, with the advantage of a good education, produce in turn children better than themselves and better able to produce still better children in their turn, as can be seen with animals.
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