J. C. Watts Quotes

As a young man, I saw families prosper without reading because there were always sufficient opportunities for willing workers who could follow simple instructions. This is no longer the case. Children who don't read are, in the main, destined for lesser lives. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to change this.

Even the best parents have to spend so much time making ends meet that they cannot help their kids with homework or afford the extra tutoring that wealthier students enjoy. To address these unjust disparities, we need an early education revolution.

The Indian youth needs to be empowered, and it can be done through good education and vocational training.

I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally, by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they're already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities.

It isn't the rich people's fault that poor people are poor. Poor people who get an education and work hard in this country will stop being poor. That should be the goal for all poor people everywhere.

People don't say, 'I just had a kid and I hope it turns out to be a factory worker.'

It was a shock to visit a Job Corps camp and see adults who had been through some years of our public education system stare at a blackboard where a teacher was writing CAT or helping them write their own names. In another room men were learning to tell time.

Illiteracy must be banished from the land.

The prevailing view was that girls were outside of school because of the resistance of families to their education. But when I visited a local village, what everyone told me - the chiefs, the parents, the children - was that girls weren't in school because it was the boys that had a better chance of getting paid work in the future.

A lot of my own relatives didn't get to go to school because we were mountain people. You have to get out and work and help feed the family. My own dad couldn't read and write. And my dad was very proud of me.

The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in any of the other advanced industrial countries.

I don't want anybody to be confused that the issue of police and community is one part of a broader set of issues. Our children need to be properly educated. They need to be trained so that they can get jobs and be functional.

About the state of black America, I've been working on that for many, many years. And [Donald Trump] said certain things in his early days about wanting to do something about it. We have a lot of violence in our neighborhoods now. We need education. And we need jobs. Is what I'm trying to say.

Illiterates have to dictate.

The longer our graduation lines are today, the shorter our unemployment lines will be tomorrow.

About 800 million people in India are below the age of 35 years. Their aspirations, energy, enterprise and skills will be the force for India's economic transformation.

Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I am the person I want to be. I got to teach and had some of the greatest times in my life learning that I had some teaching skills and doing some incredible things teaching 200 hours of computers a year to fifth graders, making them experts at certain things.

Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today's culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.

During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing. […] That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.

If you are low income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than getting a 4-year degree.

If you sell to the rich, you will become poor. If you sell to the poor, you can become rich. It is easier to get one peso from a million poor people than to get one million from one rich person.

If we want to invest in the prosperity of our nation, we must invest in the education of our children so that their talents may be fully employed.

I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.