Alissa Quart Quotes
'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.
Quart, Alissa. Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America. Ecco, 2018.
This quotation is an excellent of a particular anti-intellectual view of education that is held by a significant number of Americans. For them, the only societal purpose of education is to prepare students for jobs, not to improve the intellectual quality of life for the student and not to make him/her a better citizen by learning our history and developing critical thinking skills. They argue that education will enlighten students and make them better citizens and better developed people, independent of their vocational choices. They do not claim that schools should not prepare students for jobs, but that job preparation is not the major or only purpose of education.
Alissa Quart (born 1972) is an American nonfiction writer, critic, journalist, editor, and poet. Her nonfiction books are Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels (2013), Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (2007), Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (2003), and Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America (2018), the poetry book Monetized (2015) and the poetry book Thoughts and Prayers (2019).
