Lisa D. Delpit > Quotes

“We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs.”
― Lisa Delpit

“As a result of this “racism smog,” many of our children have internalized all of the negative stereotypes inherent in our society’s views of black people. A student teacher at Southern University told me that she didn’t know what to say when an African American eighth-grade boy came up to her and said, “They made us the slaves because we were dumb, right, Ms. Summers?” Working with a middle schooler on her math, a tutor was admonished, “Why you trying to teach me to multiply, Ms. L.? Black people don’t multiply; black people just add and subtract. White people multiply.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“A second reason African American students are not excelling is that we have all been affected by our society’s deeply ingrained bias of equating blackness with inferiority.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment - and that is not easy. It is painful as well, because it means turning yourself inside out, giving up your own sense of who you are, and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of another’s angry gaze.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“there are different attitudes in different cultural groups about which characteristics make for a good teacher. Thus, it is impossible to create a model for the good teacher without taking issues of culture and community context into account.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“The purpose of education is to learn to die satiated with life.” That, I believe, is what we need to bring to our schools: experiences that are so full of the wonder of life, so full of connectedness, so embedded in the context of our communities, so brilliant in the insights that we develop and the analyses that we devise, that all of us, teachers and students alike, can learn to live lives that leave us truly satisfied.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“If the curriculum we use to teach our children does not connect in positive ways to the culture young people bring to school, it is doomed to failure.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“There is no achievement gap at birth.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“The worldviews of many in our society exist in protected cocoons. These individuals have never had to make an adjustment from home life to public life, as their public lives and institutions they have encountered merely reflect a “reality” these individuals have been schooled in since birth.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“To provide schooling for everyone’s children that reflects liberal, middle-class values and aspirations is to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to ensure that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“Otherwise, as one New Orleans community activist told me, we are providing low-income schools with tourists rather than teachers.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“It is vitally important that non-minority educators realize that there is another voice, another reality; that many of the teachers whom they seek to reach have been able to conquer the educational system because they received the kind of instruction that their white progressive colleagues are denouncing.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“Currently, “minority” students represent a majority in all but two of our twenty-five largest cities, and by some estimates, the turn of the century will find up to 40 percent nonwhite children in American classrooms. At the same time, the teaching force is becoming more homogeneously white. African-American, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American teachers now comprise only 10 percent of the teaching force, and that percentage is shrinking rapidly.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“Assessment is a lot trickier than we think, especially if the children we are assessing are not from the same culture as the test makers.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“When students doubt their own competence, they typically respond with two behaviors: they either hide (hoods over faces, heads on desks) and try to become invisible, or they act out to prevent a scenario unfolding in which they will not be able to perform and will once again be proved "less than." Teachers frequently misinterpret both of these behaviors, usually inferring that the student is unmotivated, uninterested, or behavior disordered.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Too often in schools, we either ask teachers to be lone rangers in trying to create better instruction, or we give them prescribed "teacher-proof" lessons that may or may not be appropriate for their students.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Kati Haycock has calculated that three to four weeks of effective, full-day literacy instruction would allow the average student to gain an entire year of academic growth.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Why do we punish our children with our inability to teach them?”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“In other words, every human brain has the built-in capacity to become, over time, what we demand of it. No ability is fixed. Practice can even change the brain.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“No matter what the standards dictate, there is plenty of room for teachers working together to refine mandated instruction so that it is more appropriate for their students.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Because middle-class home culture is so taken for granted, so "transparent," it often exists outside of conscious awareness for those who are members of that culture, especially in schools. It is assumed to be what "everyone knows," just the background of normal life—knowledge that does not need to be taught. Consequently, when this knowledge is not exhibited by children or adults, there is a sense that something is wrong, perhaps a lack of basic intelligence.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Successful teachers of children marginalized either by income-level or ethnicity—or both—have long understood that their charges not only need strong instruction in skills, but they need to know that it is skills, and not intelligence, that they lack.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“I write these words because what we need to know at a very deep level is that African American children do not come into this world at a deficit. There is no “achievement gap” at birth—at”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“success in institutions - schools, workplaces, and so on - is predicated upon acquisition of the culture of those who are in power.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom

“She then adds that if we live in America, we are racism-breathers, and it doesn’t matter what color we are. We don’t try to be, we aren’t usually conscious of the racism we’ve breathed. We just go about our regular lives. We are so unconscious of these realities that we seldom see how even our language is embedded with racist overtones”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Many researchers have identified successful teachers of African American students as "warm demanders." James Vasquez used the term to identify teachers whom students of color said did not lower their standards and were willing to help them. Warm demanders expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them to reach their potential in a disciplined and structured environment.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Goethe said, ‘Look at a man the way that he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“After all the students were seated, the teacher picked up the broom and began to lecture them. Why didn’t any of them pick the broom up? Did they think it belonged on the floor? Who were they waiting for to tell them what was right? The message of the lesson was contained in her repeated words, “You cannot afford not to think! You cannot wait for others to tell you what you know is right! You have to think! No one will think for you, and if they do, they mean you no good!” This teacher understood that students who are members of a group stigmatized and oppressed by the larger society have to learn to think”
― Lisa D. Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“Another student told me that she couldn't shake the feeling that no one really knew who she was or cared about what she really wanted. She felt she was seen either as a member of a group who was there to "save the college" by increasing diversity, or she was there to be a part of the college's missionary-like efforts to "save black people.”
― Lisa Delpit, "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children

“This lesson was only one of many I received on learning to be a part of the world rather than trying to dominate it - on learning to see rather than merely to look, to feel rather than touch, to hear rather than listen: to learn, in short, about the world by being still and opening myself to experiencing it. If I realize that I am an organic part of all that is, and learn to adopt a receptive, connected stance, then I need not take an active, dominant role to understand; the universe will, in essence, include me in understanding. This realization has proved invaluable as I, an educational researcher, pursue learning about the world.”
― Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Updated Edition