David Brooks Quotes

Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in non-educated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.

The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men.

The traditional story of economists has been to say education explains what the returns are to school. I say, 'Okay, that's fine, but what explains the education? How much is just a matter of my giving you a poor kid versus a rich kid?'

I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates.

Better educated than wealthy

Some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than others; and that those children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

By the 1980s divorce declined among the more educated portions of the populace, while rates among the less educated continued to rise… the more educated and more well-to-do were more likely to wed. Given the family role as an incubator of human capital, such trends have had important spillover effects on inequality.

That certain groups do much better in America than others—as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on – is difficult to talk about.

Let me ask you: Should only children of the wealthy have access to quality early education? Should only children of the wealthy have access to a college degree? The answer - the only answer - is: no.

America is the best half-educated country in the world.

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.

I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

The public education system works for children of families like mine but it does not work for the children of families who I represent …

Visible minorities lead in education but trail in income.

There are lots of great educationalists out there who really care about social mobility.

We aspire to be equal opportunity, but all across the country where a student is born, their race, their class affect where they end up.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

Class still matters in Britain today.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

We have a large underclass in Britain, and a fairly low standard of education. Our best universities are extremely good, but a very significant proportion of the British population that comes out of compulsory schooling with very low standards of education.

France has the least social mobility of any developed country. The social elevator no longer works. It's broken.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.