“The best single social test of a nation’s regard for the future is the way it treats its children.”
Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University, in a recent talk to the Young President’s Organization in Phoenix, Ariz.
"... Thousands of young South Carolinians are entering the work force each year woefully unprepared for the jobs of the future. ... We have failed to anticipate the need to retrain workers who have lost their jobs in shifting industries and we have not taken the necessary steps to reorient our vocational, technical, and secondary educational systems. ... In the industrial age, education played a relatively minor role. An ignorant work force worked well. Today, in this shift to knowledge intensity, basic skills and technical education take on critical strategic importance.”
South Carolina’s Lt. Governor Mike Daniel, speaking to the Council of Engineering Societies in Columbia, S.C.
“Parents overestimate the ‘dangers’ of books. If children read a four-letter word, it doesn’t mean they’re going to wind up shooting heroin in the alley.”
Stephen N. Tchudi, professor of English at Michigan State University and vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English, citing fear of censorship as the reason that educators avoid selecting “nontraditional literature” for use in the classroom.
“If you’re not taught at home, if you’re not taught at church, and you’re not taught at school, where do you learn? Out behind the barn, if you’re lucky.”
Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox, speaking about sex education at a conference on child abuse in Austin, Tex.