Melinda Gates Quotes

I left school with basically nothing, I was a special needs kid. I did feel as though my school had let me down.

Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

What began to weigh heavily upon me was that at the same time I was struggling to get my scholars and their families to believe in themselves, I was part of an educational system that despite its best intentions, only reinforced their failures.

You've got close to educational meltdown here [in Chicago].

When people lose faith in a system as they have in the public school system, they no longer want to support it.

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.

I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students.

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.

The public school system doesn't get everybody. Every generation has its rebels.

When I was superintendent of Denver Public Schools, I saw the potential of some of our best and brightest students cut short, punished for the actions of others - kids who had grown up and done well in our school system, and kids who know no other home but America. This is unacceptable.

As long as there are people in education making excuses for failure, cursing future generations with a culture of low expectations, denying children access to the best that has been thought and written, because Nemo and the Mister Men are more relevant, the battle needs to be joined.

We have 200,000 kids a year who drop out of the French school system and have no hope. They become a drag on society.

Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education.

I've always been interested in the idea of people who fell through the cracks.

Our government has totally failed our African American friends, our Hispanic friends and the people of our country. Period. The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities. For those hurting the most who have been failed and failed by their politician —– year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers. Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it's safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats. And I ask you this, I ask you this —– crime, all of the problems —– to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I'll straighten it out. I'll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?

The U. S. is suffering greatly by the defects of the educational system .... we are producing an underclass.

The teachers are being screwed, blued, and tattooed by the system and the government doesn’t seem to care.

…it has fallen to you to do a dirty job which your predecessors ought to have done before you.

In Latin America, no country is prouder of its legally obligatory admission-free school system than Argentina. Yet only one Argentinian of five thousand born into the lower half of the population gets as far as the university.

Some folks work their hands off up to the elbows to give their young-uns education, and all they do is send their young-uns to Hell.

Evils of the gravest kind are likely to result from the so-called public schools.

The abolition of the separate school system in the south raises serious practical problems.... We face the abolition of the public school system. Boldness is essential but wisdom is indispensable.

… schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.