William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

Again and again, universities have put a low priority on the very programs and initiatives that are needed most to increase productivity and competitiveness, improve the quality of government, and overcome the problems of illiteracy, miseducation, and unemployment.

For every challenge we face - unemployment, poverty, crime, income growth, income inequality, productivity, competitiveness - a great education is a major component of the solution.

I want to wage war against illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, unfair competition, communitarianism, delinquency.

The Time to Succeed Coalition brings together an unprecedented group of leaders from education and business, communities and academia to say that it is time to strike the shackles of an outdated school calendar from our disadvantaged schools.

Centuries have elapsed since schools were first established.... Because learning was viewed as the exclusive province of the samurai and his superiors, farmers, artisans, merchants and women have neglected it altogether.... There shall, in the future, be no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person .... Hereafter ... every man shall, of his own accord, subordinate all other matters to the education of his children.

The only way to beat poverty in America is to completely transform American public education

If we want to close the achievement gap, build a well-educated workforce and responsible citizenry, we must start with our youngest children.

In the economy today, everybody understands that we need a well educated workforce. This is 2016. When we talk about public education, it can no longer be K through 12th grade. I do believe that public colleges and universities should be tuition free.

Poverty can't be an excuse for bad teaching, but teaching can't be the only thing we do to combat poverty.

The notion about education has changed and that now it’s sort of much more aligned with, “Well, schools can’t combat poverty. We can’t possibly expect schools to do the work to overcome poverty.” I think that notion which has changed over the last few decades is part, not all, but part of what is maybe leading to people feeling less of a sense of possibility.

Let us become the first generation to decide to be the last that sees empty classrooms, lost childhoods and wasted potential

We wouldn't need any job training centers if our education was working in the first place.

I hope someday we can stamp out illiteracy in America. Of course you'll have to kill alot of my relatives to do it.

I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.

In Congress, I will fight for an education system that bridges the opportunity gap in order to help close the achievement gap, and prioritize models that sustain and enrich whole people and communities.

With sad, depressing predictability, the children of today's underclass become tomorrow's criminals and dropouts.

Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.

I do believe that everyone growing up faces differential opportunities. With me, it was books and travel and some good teachers.

Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.

The preachers are the greatest problem in the United States of America.

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

One of the things that even wealthy children need is an education, and I think the problems I saw really have nothing to do with economics. So I was unhappy with what my own children were getting even in the better schools, and then I was seeing so many children here recruited for failure.

Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system.

I'm seeing too many smart kind of socially awkward kids, a lot milder than I was, not getting employment because they're not learning job skills.

It's a big problem in South Africa up to this day: many people want to open factories, they want to invest, but then they discover that they don't have the skilled people to employ.