Garret Keizer > Quotes

“I try to remember what I have too often forgotten to my peril: as far as teaching goes, when all you are is right, what you really are is in trouble.”
― Garret Keizer, Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher

“As we're told that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, and as the PowerPoint throws up aphoristic bromides by the corporate heroes of the digitally driven 'global economy' -- the implication being that 'great companies' know what they're doing, while most schools don't -- and as we're goaded mercilessly to the conclusion that everything we are, know, and do is bound for the dustbin of history, I want to ask what kind of schooling Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. Wasn't it at bottom the very sort of book-based, content-driven education that we declare obsolete in the name of their achievements?”
― Garret Keizer, Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher

“Everyone believes in sin, the people who charge their peers with political incorrectness and the people who regard political correctness as the bogey of a little mind. What everyone does not believe in, as nearly as I can tell, is forgiveness.”
― Garret Keizer, Help: The Original Human Dilemma – A Wise Exploration of the Paradox of Assistance in Everyday Relationships

“We inculcate in our children the sensibilities of raccoons, a fascination with shiny objects and an appetite for garbage, and then carp about 'the texting generation' as if thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who couldn't boil an egg are capable of creating a culture. They grow on what we feed them. It has never been otherwise. The only thing that changes is the food.”
― Garret Keizer, Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher

“So beer is our bread?”
― Garret Keizer, God of Beer

“Teachers who complain 'These kids have no work ethic' couldn't be farther off the mark. The problem is not that these kids lack a work ethic; the problem is that some of them see no connection between a work ethic and school. None of them would think, for example, to say to a customer at the MacDonald's drive-up window, 'Do you think I could get you those Chicken McNuggets some time tomorrow?' Yet we give sanction to that sort of request when it comes to school assignments.”
― Garret Keizer, Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher

“If God came to India, he'd have to come as bread. If God came to Willoughby union he'd have to came as what?”
― Garret Keizer, God of Beer

“My master gives me bread and beer and every good thing.”
― Garret Keizer, God of Beer

“The bottom line here -- and I use the phrase with an eye to the mind-set that promotes these 'systems' -- is that I am increasingly devoting more time to the generation and recording of data and less time to the educational substance of what the data is supposed to measure. Think of it as a man who develops ever more elaborate schemes for counting his money, even as he forfeits more and more of his time for earning the money he counts.”
― Garret Keizer, Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher

“Our advertising and even our arts convey the idea that we [Americans] as a society are brash, irreverent, and free of all constraint, when the best available evidence would suggest that we are in fact tame, spayed, and easily brought to heel. ”
― Garret Keizer

“Going to school is like going to prison...you have about two weeks to establish your credibility, failing which you're either a punk or as good as dead. Depending on the school, some students can manage ot avoid those stark alternatives, but even at the best school, no teacher does.”
― Garret Keizer, Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher

“If you can sustain the insight that people are doing the best they can--if you can maintain some faith that this is an insight--you're solid. If not, maybe you should pack it in.”
― Garret Keizer, Help: The Original Human Dilemma – A Wise Exploration of the Paradox of Assistance in Everyday Relationships

“I'd probably put those salt and pepper shakers away now, David, because we're about to be visited by dribbling cannibal psychopath and we wouldn't want to tease these fellows. Of course, if they're very hungry, I do have this left arm that I don't use all that much. ”
― Garret Keizer, God of Beer

“People in the city are poor because they are oppressed, discriminated against and alienated; people in the country are poor because they're too stupid to realize they ought to be living in the city.”
― Garret Keizer, No Place But Here Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence: Melville & Hawthorne, James & Wharton, Porter & Welty, Bishop & Lowell

“Killt him a b'ar when he was only three.”
― Garret Keizer, God of Beer