The Power of Their Ideas Quotes

“Art and music, for example, are not "academic" unless we sever their connection from performance—from doing. Then we can have what's now called academic art. But why is "doing" nonacademic? And why is art worthier of school time when it's academic than when it's not? And why is science at least four times more important than even academic art? I once figured out that there are more jobs in New York City for people with advanced musical or artistic skills than for those with advanced calculus. But, see! I've fallen into the trap of assuming school is vocational. Okay, which do more citizens get pleasure from? Which leads them into improved habits of citizenship? I'd be hard put to claim calculus the winner over art or music on any such measure of real-life utility.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“As my son explained to me one day when I was trying to convince him to ask his teacher to explain something to him, "Mom, you don't understand. The last person in the world I'd let know if I don't understand is my teacher." Too often schooling becomes a vast game in which teachers try to trick students into revealing their ignorance while students try to trick teachers into not noticing it. Getting a good grade, after all, is getting the teacher to think you know more than you do! Is it so different for teachers, whose only source of help and support is precisely the person who rates and rules them?”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“We learned that it takes months, even years, to see some ideas take shape. Above all, we recognized that caring for others is very hard to do if you don't see yourself as capable of being helpful to them. There is a terrible and seemingly pointless pain in powerless caring, and it erodes the capacity for affection. To hear a story and be faced with either ignoring it or being a martyr to everyone else's woes are the usual choices available. A school that is a community has other possibilities.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“The ways schools were organized (the homogeneous tracks, the division of students by age), their scale of virtues (where the worst sins involved talking out of turn or not standing properly in line, while generosity was barely noticed), the labels "academic" and "nonacademic" all offered glimpses into social history. Why, for example, was putting together a student newspaper nonacademic, whereas lessons in handwriting or filling in multiple-choice workbooks were academic?”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“Private schools aren't very inspiring when it comes to innovation (nor are private nursing homes, for that matter). In general they are as convention-bound as their public counterparts They mostly differ in an invidious way, much like their public school sisters. There's a hierarchy among them, based mostly on how choosy the institution can be about whom it accepts. The fact that the choosiest schools attract higher-status families and select only the most promising students ensures their success. They cannot serve as general models; their value and advantages depend on their scarcity. But if the marketplace is not a magical answer, neither, experience suggests, can we expect that forced change from the top down will work any better. What results from such bureaucratically mandated change is anger and sabotage on the part of the unwilling, unready parents and professionals as well as the manipulation of data by ambitious bureaucrats and timid administrators. The end result: a gradual return to the status quo.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“I am irritated by the fact that so many concerned policymakers who oppose choice because of its potential impact on equity are already exercising choice for their own children. They are generally among the millions of well-intentioned citizens who have chosen private schools, gotten their children into selective or specialized public schools, moved to more affluent communities where the schools are better, or taken whatever measures were needed to see that their children qualified for classes for the gifted. Despite their recognition that such choices are likely to have negative consequences, they cannot resist. Writ larger, however, such individual acts have already fatally damaged most of our neighborhood schools and made change of the sort advocated by policymakers in place of choice nearly impossible.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“The habits conducive to free inquiry don't just happen with age and maturity. They take root slowly. And uncertainties, multiple viewpoints, the use of independent judgment, and pleasure in imaginative play aren't luxuries to be grafted on to the mind-set of a mature scholar, suited only to the gifted few, or offered after school on a voluntary basis to the children of parents inclined this way. It's my contention that these are the required habits of a sound citizenry, habits that take time and patience.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“In the end, of course, the marketplace undermines the rationales for public funding. If we assume always the primacy of our private interests over our public ones we're not far away from claiming an absence of responsibility for the next generation by anyone but those directly interested—parents. Why should all citizens be expected to finance what is thus only a matter of individual private gain? Why should the childless? The old? But what then happens when parents alone must subsidize the full cost of education? As the public subsidy dwindles, naturally some will suffer far more than others.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“False history thrives because our memories play tricks on us. We forget, for example, that discipline, gangs, truancy, low standards, social promotion, and plenty of other issues plagued us in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Why Johnny Can't Read was a bestseller forty years ago. Laura Ingalls Wilder described unruly country boys who thought reading was unmanly a century ago. We've complained about student ignorance, the absence of academic rigor, and the low attainment of our teachers, and parental neglect generation after generation (and probably justly) without noticing that it's never been different. Once history is acknowledged the task may seem even bigger and together, but it will not lend itself to the easy placing of blame, as though we need only recycle the past.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“At the heart of the idea of progressive education is a still unaccepted notion: that giving both adolescents and their teachers greater responsibility for the development of their schools can't be by-passed. Without a radical departure from a more authoritarian model, one strips the key parties of the respect which lies at the heart of democratic practice and good schooling. As long as we see "these kids" as dangers to our civil peace and their teachers as time-servers or crazy martyrs, we are not likely to offer either group the respect they need to make schools work. Schools for thoughtfulness can't be built on top of thoughtlessness.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem

“When we talk with school officials and local politicians about restructuring large high schools, the first thing they worry about is what will happen to the basketball or baseball teams, the after-school program, and other sideshows; that the heart of the school, its capacity to educate, is missing, seems almost beside the point.”
― Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem