Quote

Indeed, the study of universities and the great men and women who have attended them leads me to think that the best of these schools are characterized not so much by what they teach and how they teach it but by the extent they provide opportunities and encouragement for students to teach themselves.

Universities can teach maturity. They can teach teenagers how to be adults, and that means to function outside a clique or a tribe.

Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone.

Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic-minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance.

Instead of educating students, these professors are trying to indoctrinate them.

Teach For America was built on the idea that our best hope of reaching 'One Day' is to have thousands of alumni use their diverse experiences and ideas to effect change from inside and outside the education system.

For one, thing, the media are dominated by the irreligious. So are universities.

Our experience at Teach For America has been that the more people understand educational inequity, the more they want to do something about it.

We're not trying to be the only route into teaching. We do put enormous energy into understanding what differentiates the most successful teachers.