The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Schools play a crucial role in promoting social mobility and addressing past injustices through equitable education.
In this quote, Clint Smith emphasizes the profound impact that education systems have on social mobility in society. He argues that by recognizing historical injustices and enacting laws that address them, we can leverage schools to mitigate inequality and create a more equitable future for all students. The commitment to reform in the educational system is fundamental to achieving social change and fostering opportunities for everyone.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a community meeting about educational reform, this quote can highlight the importance of investing in schools.
More from Clint Smith
All quotes →In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.
One does not read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with hopes that it will grant him a career in engineering; he does so because poetry helps him see something in the world that he might not have seen before.
History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.
Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance.
Similar quotes
Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
The true end of education is not only to make the young learned, but to make them love learning; not only to make them industrious, but to make them love industry; not only to make them virtuous, but to make them love virtue; not only to make them just, but to make them hunger and thirst after justice.
Play is the work of childhood.
We need to understand that every time an elementary teacher captures the imagination of a child through the arts or music of language this nation gets a little stronger.
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else for us to learn, except possibly algebra.