“Unless we solve our problems in science and mathematics, both this state and the nation can forget about high technology.”
B. Frank Brown, chairman of the Florida Governor’s Commission on Secondary Schools, speaking in Orlando, Fla., to a statewide coalition on the quality of education.
"[The] educational professoriate is on sounder ground if it asserts that, indeed, teachers should not take sides on matters of personal or religious values, but that the civic values of a democratic polity are the historic business of the schools in preparing for citizenship--not simply the knowledge of government and civics as taught in history and social studies, but careful, scholarly, and deliberate study of the ideas and values that pervade a democratic polity.”
R. Freeman Butts, visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, speaking at a joint meeting of the Society of Professors of Education, the John Dewey Society, and the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education in Detroit.
“It always seemed he was being bused to a school that was worse than the one he left.”
Minnie Liddell, whose 11-year lawsuit on behalf of her son, Creighton, recently resulted in an unprecedented agreement between St. Louis and neighboring suburbs to voluntarily swap students. In a newspaper interview.
“We need to pay greater attention to programs that will make possible a higher retention rate than our schools now realize. Many students who ‘drop out’ of our educational programs--for whatever reasons--come back to haunt us as welfare recipients, as prison inmates, as permanently unemployed.”
Phillip E. Runkel, Michigan’s state superintendent of public instruction, discussing the current state of Michigan’s public-education system.
“Too many of our teachers have not been liberated from late-19th-century ideas which simply do not square with what we know today about good writing instruction. ... They emphasize superficial, mechanical correctness instead of the substance of what students write. This approach forces students into trying to use language that isn’t their real language, and into writing assignments that have no real bearing on what they do in their lives. If, on the other hand, you teach students how to discover and then work with subjects that interest them, get them to put their thoughts down on paper, and react first to what they say, a wonderful thing happens. They start to get interested in what’s going on in class. ... Mechanics can be worked on later.”
Donald Stewart, chairman of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, speaking on the techniques employed by teachers of writing.
