Shanley Caswell Quotes

I left home to go to college, and then I moved back home. I moved back for three years from 21 to 24.

I skipped kindergarten because I was reading at a pretty high level. That's a weird and cocky thing to say, but I was real sharp, and I knew that early on.

I'm actually graduating early. I got a lot of work done already. Being home schooled, I have had a lot of tutors help me.

Yeah, I left Idaho at 17. You know, I graduated high school a year early and just, you know, the typical story, packed up my car and moved out.

I was born and raised in California and benefited from California's excellent public schools, from kindergarten through medical school.

I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school.

At first, after my freshman year, it was kind of a joke, going into my sophomore year like, 'Hey, I wanna graduate in three years, two-and-a-half.' And we were just kind of playing with it, added some extra classes in, and then once I finished that following spring going into that next summer, it was just like, 'Hey, I can actually do it.'

What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master's in four years. It wasn't slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures.

Graduating from college and starting your life as an adult is a giant transition no matter what.

When I was in high school... I loved the outdoors, and I was introduced to wilderness camping. I was in a little prep school - a boarding school in southern California, in Ojai - and when I was in this school, they had a camping program, and there would be regular trips: hikes into the mountains, the Sierras, the Sespe River Valley, and different places.

I strongly believe the black culture spends too much time, energy and effort raising, praising, and teasing our black children about the dubious glories of professional sports.

Every child has a right to go to high school and end up with a third grade education.

Some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, were to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man.

California is maybe the richest place in the world. They're destroying the best public education system in the world.

But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight.

Because of my schooling, my fate would always be a little different from my friends.

I believe that education offers the fastest route to economic mobility. I grew up with a family of strong, accomplished, and educated women. I believe, as they say, that you can't be what you don't see, and since I saw a lot of smart women in my life, education being at the center, I just mimicked that behavior. There was never a question that I'd go to college. In fact, I was the last person in my family to get a master's degree, so that tells you I'm actually the underachiever!

You're not going to get to college - you're not even going to be qualified, even to go to a community college, if you don't address the basic problem of literacy in America. And there's no reason - no reason - for us to have that problem.

If you were very bright and you became head of a department, as I did, of the psychology department, you were encouraged to go on to graduate work. But as a women you didn't even think about discrimination.

All the kids that I grew up with, in an almost idyllic environment - I've got to tell you, it was so wonderful - they've gone on and they're doctors and Ph.D.'s and everybody has a four-year college degree. None of our parents, I think, had a four-year degree.

People who plan their life when they're 18 years old and say, "This is my life plan," would generally be surprised and maybe disappointed.

I dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.