Eloise

“I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”
― Mark Twain

“Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival; the physically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men in general are physically stronger. (There are of course many exceptions.) Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“Why had their parents not explained this to them? Probably because they didn’t understand it themselves. Besides, if I had a nickel for every time I wanted to smack a kid’s parents for not teaching them even the most basic things … well … I’d have enough nickels to put in a sock and smack those parents with it.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions