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Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality QUOTES

Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality QUOTES

1 " Since they are in fact academically gifted, it is fine to tell them that. Trying to hide their academic ability from them would be futile anyway. But they must also be told explicitly, forcefully, and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift that they have done nothing to deserve. They are not superior human beings, but very, very lucky ones. They should feel humbled by their good luck. "

― Charles Murray , Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality

2 " It is said that there comes a point in every mathematics student's education when he hears himself saying to the teacher, "I think I understand"-- and that's the point at which he has hit a wall. Making sure that all gifted students hit their own personal walls is crucial for developing the empathy with the rest of the world. When they see their less lucky peers struggle academically, they need to be able to say "I know how it feels,"-- and be telling the truth. "

― Charles Murray , Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality

3 " No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life... the responsibility of working there was too great... to be entrusted to people who weren't painfully aware of how badly things can go wrong. "

― Charles Murray , Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality

4 " We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people. Most students at today's colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don't want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn't make sense for them. "

― Charles Murray , Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality

5 " The first basis for this statement is that I know you have reached the second chapter of a nonfiction book on a public policy issue, which means you are probably well above average in academic ability—not because getting to the second chapter of this book requires that you be especially bright, but because people with below-average academic ability hardly ever choose to read books like this. "

― Charles Murray , Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality

6 " [The humanities] invite—they compel—us to confront the truth about ourselves and help us to inhabit with greater understanding the disjointed condition of longing and defeat that defines the human condition. Achilles’ reflections on honor and memory and the fleeting beauty of youth; Shakespeare’s defense of love against the powers of “sluttish time” Kant’s struggle to put our knowledge of certain things on an unchallengeable foundation so as to place the knowledge of others forever beyond reach; Caravaggio’s painting of the sacrifice of Isaac, which depicts a confusion of loves that defeats all understanding; and so on endlessly through the armory of humanistic works: the subject is always the same. The subject is always man, whose nature it is to yearn to be more than he is. "

― Charles Murray , Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality