Wynton Marsalis Quotes

Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted - private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training - edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.

The gap in education in this country, the unfairness of the schools, is one of the great unfairness in this society.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few

Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way.

The fundamental error of Europe has been to confine the light of knowledge to the wealthy and great, while the humble and the depressed have been as sedulously excluded from its participation as the wretched criminal, immured in a dungeon, is from the light of Heaven.

Private schools are gaming the system. There is way too much state money going in, and people who go to private schools seem to be given a head start for all of the top jobs and that's something that needs to be dealt with as well.

Many girls do not go to school because of poverty.

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

I grew up in a very progressive family and with a great educational system, and I asked myself, 'Why doesn't everybody have these opportunities for a good education? So why not give back to these kids who didn't grow up with the same privileges I had?'

The purposeful restriction of knowledge has been at the heart of untold misery and hardship in this world. Serfs were kept illiterate so as to not jeopardize the feudal system. Slaves were kept in the dark on a variety of subjects so as to not provide them the possibility of escape.

Anything that's of any use, famous people get hold of it and take it for themselves and it gets a bad rap.

When you go somewhere like Kenya and you see how the children don't have pencils and pens, and all of these things are considered luxuries, and what a privilege they see education as and how hungry they are to learn, I wanted to give my brother and sister long lectures. That definitely stayed with me.

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.

I hate uneducated people having power …

You come from a country which industrialized early and which succeeded in incorporating the great majority of its citizens into the middle classes. It is no social distinction in the U.S. to have graduated from the second year of college. Indeed, most Americans now do. Anybody in this the United States who did not finish high school is considered underprivileged. In Latin America the situation is quite different: 75% of all people drop out of school before they reach the sixth grade. Thus, people who have finished high school are members of a tiny minority. Then, a minority of that minority goes on for university training. It is only among these people that you will find your educational equals… a middle class in the United States is the majority. In Mexico, it is a tiny elite.

… egotists, exploiters and aristocrats

Whenever there are enclosing walls, there are abuses behind them.

Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent.

Allow the rich (no matter under what pretext, whether of philanthropy, or patriotism, or interest) to prescribe the education of the poor, and they prescribe their condition and relative importance.

The few are always crying up the advantages of costly colleges, national acadimys and grammar schools, in order to make places for men to live without work .... But [they] are always opposed to cheep schools and woman schools, the only or princaple means by which learning is spred among the Many.

Democracy requires breeding. These illiterate peasants certainly know less about running a country than I do.

I believe one half of the world is born for the convenience of the other half

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.