Inside American Education Quotes

“The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“If you have no right to disapprove, then your approval means nothing. It may indeed be distressing to someone to have you express your opinion that his lifestyle is disgusting and his art, music or writing is crude, shallow, or repugnant, but unless you are free to reach such conclusions, any praise you bestow is hollow and suspect.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“To be sensitive, as ideologically defined, requires that one not merely accept but “affirm” other people’s way of life or even “celebrate” diversity in general. Like other demands for “sensitivity,” this demand offers no reason—unless fear of being disapproved, denounced, or harassed is a reason.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“When it is proclaimed that one must become more “sensitive” to various ethnic, linguistic, sexual, or lifestyle groups, neither a reason nor a definition usually accompanies this opaque imperative.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Like mismatched minority students, mismatched minority faculty have sought refuge in non-intellectual pursuits, such as community activities and campus political activism, in denunciations of standards they do not meet, and in complaints about the moral shortcomings of colleagues, or of American society in general. Given the stark alternatives of (1) losing one’s self-respect by accepting the prevailing academic standards and values, and (2) protecting one’s self-respect by repudiating those standards and values, it can hardly be surprising that many have chosen the latter. Clearly,”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“The U.S. Air Force Academy likewise sought racial “diversity” through double standards. A 1982 memorandum on Air Force Academy stationery, with the notation “for your eyes only,” listed different cut-off scores to use when identifying possible candidates for the Academy from different racial ethnic groups. Composite SAT scores as low as 520 were acceptable for blacks, though Hispanics and American Indians had to do somewhat better, and Asian Americans had to meet the general standards. For athletes “lower cut-offs” were permissible.52 Given that composite SAT scores begin at 400 (out of a possible 1600) a requirement of 520 is really a requirement to earn only 120 points out of a possible 1200 points earned.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Moreover, even at elite colleges, the personnel attracted to college admissions are seldom themselves part of the intellectual elite. Yet their job is to select students unlike themselves, to be taught by professors unlike themselves, for careers unlike theirs. It can hardly be surprising that admissions personnel are drawn toward non-intellectual criteria and toward ideas not unlike the notion of judging “the whole person,” as found among educators at the pre-college level. Over the years, all sorts of criteria from popular psychology and sociological speculation have assumed increasing weight visa-vis such standard intellectual criteria as academic records and test scores. The”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Top colleges turn out extraordinary graduates because they take in extraordinary freshmen. That tells very little about what happened in the intervening four years, except that it did not ruin these individuals completely. It tells even less about what would have happened if these same extraordinary people had been educated elsewhere. Whether a given individual will do better, either educationally or financially, by going to a bigname college is very doubtful. Hard”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Other countries whose educational systems achieve more than ours often do so in part by attempting less. While school children in Japan are learning science, mathematics, and a foreign language, American school children are sitting around in circles, unburdening their psyches and “expressing themselves” on scientific, economic and military issues for which they lack even the rudiments of competence. Worse than what they are not learning is what they are learning—presumptuous superficiality, taught by practitioners of it. The”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable—except that they are doing it with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children. There”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“If you have no right to disapprove, then your approval means nothing. It may indeed be distressing to someone to have you express your opinion that his lifestyle is disgusting and his art, music or writing is crude, shallow, or repugnant, but unless you are free to reach such conclusions, any praise you bestow is hollow and suspect. To say that A has a right to B’s approval is to say that B has no right to his own opinion. What is even more absurd, the “sensitivity” argument is not even consistent, because everything changes drastically according to who is A and who is B. Those in the chosen groups may repudiate any aspect of the prevailing culture, without being considered insensitive, but no one from the prevailing culture may repudiate any aspect of other cultures. The”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“The virtually unanimous support of bilingualism among Hispanic activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen”—in contrast to Hispanic parents—is understandable only in terms of the self-interest of those activists, “leaders” and “spokesmen,” who benefit from the preservation of a separate ethnic enclave, preferably alienated from the larger society.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels. Some zealots have not hesitated to use the traditional brain-washing technique of emotional trauma in the classroom to soften up children for their message. Gruesome and graphic movies on nuclear war, for example, have reduced some school children to tears—after which the teacher makes a pitch for whatever movement claims to reduce such dangers. Another technique is the ambush shock: A seventh-grade teacher in Manhattan, for example, innocently asked her students to discuss their future plans—after which she said: “Haven’t any of you realized that in this world with nuclear weapons no one in this class will be alive in the year 2000?”75 These”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Because this report considered “commitment to multicultural social studies education” to be crucial, it called for “extensive staff development” which would “address attitudes”—i.e., indoctrination—and which would extend even to the schools’ clerical staffs and bus drivers.7 In short, the call for cultural “diversity” is a call for ideological conformity.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“There is no a priori reason to believe such claims, especially in the face of multiple evidences of declining educational quality during the period when multiculturalism and other non-academic preoccupations have taken up more and more of the curriculum.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“At Columbia Teachers College, 120th Street is said to be “the widest street in the world” because it separates that institution from the rest of Columbia University.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“the supply of customers and the supply of labor are almost totally under the control of the education establishment. Compulsory attendance laws guarantee a captive audience, except for about 13 percent of American youngsters who attend private schools,5 and official requirements of education courses for permanent tenure keep out the unwanted competition of potential teachers from outside the existing establishment.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“the selling of curriculum materials of a more general nature is a substantial business in itself. A captive audience of more than 40 million school children is attractive to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. The susceptibility of educators to such fasionable “innovations” is what opens the floodgates to permit the intrusion of such programs into the public schools. This susceptibility is only partly spontaneous.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Drug prevention and sex education might seem to be very different activities, and a program for gifted and talented students still more different from both of these. But that is true only where these programs are legitimately confined to what they claim to be. Far too often, however, these words are mere flags of convenience under which schools set sail on an uncharted sea of social experimentation”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Among the early warnings was one in an article appearing in the New York Times Magazine of December 13, 1970, by a black professor named Thomas Sowell: When the failures of many programs become too great to disguise, or to hide under euphemisms and apologetics, the conclusion that will be drawn in many quarters will not be that these were half-baked schemes, but that black people just don’t have it.37 Such conclusions are now part of the “new racism” spreading across college campuses from coast to coast. PATTERNS”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“It would be impossible to understand the persistence and vehemence of these arguments against test scores without understanding the political purpose they serve. Arguments that test scores under-estimate the subsequent academic performance of minority students (1) serve to justify preferential admissions of minority students and (2) permit denial that these are in fact preferential policies, by enabling the claim to be made that different admissions standards merely adjust for the “unfairness” of the tests. In reality, the tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“The availability of federal grants and loans to help students meet rising tuition costs virtually ensures that those costs will rise. A college which kept tuition affordable could forfeit millions of dollars annually in federal money available to cover costs over and above what students can afford, according to a financial aid formula. Arguments”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that selfesteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something earned, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“The ideological component of multiculturalism can be summarized as a cultural relativism which finds the prominence of Western civilization in the world or in the schools intolerable. Behind this attitude is often a seething hostility to the West, barely concealed even in public statements designed to attract wider political support for the multicultural agenda.”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“Attitude-changing curriculum programs can be assessed in a number of ways, including (1) how effective they are in the specific area in which they claim to be effective (drug prevention, for example), (2) the academic and emotional costs they entail, and (3) their wider social consequences. Remarkably”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“When a reporter who spent months in a Los Angeles high school asked graduating seniors what they had learned, he received this reply from a boy described as “the smartest student in the class”: I learned that in the Vietnam War, North and South Korea fought against each other, and then there was a truce at the 38th parallel, and that Eisenhower had something to do with it. The reporter asked: Would it bother you to know that the things you learned were wrong? The answer was: Not really. Because what we really learned from Miss Silver was that we were worth listening to, that we could express ourselves and that an adult would listen, even if we were wrong. That’s why Miss Silver will always be our favorite teacher. She made us feel like we mattered, like we were important. The teacher herself saw her role in very similar terms: I want to be real in class and be a human being…. And I want my students to know that they can be themselves and I’ll still listen to them. I want every one of them to have a chance to express himself or herself. Those are my priorities.18 Neither”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“benighted”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“heath”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education

“In other words, it is the amount of money that colleges and universities can get—from tuition, endowment income, donations, etc.—which determines how much their spending or costs will go up, not the other way around, as they represent it to the public. To say that costs are going up is no more than to say that the additional intake is being spent, rather than hoarded. When”
― Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education