When I started out doing comedy, I was still in college and was working day jobs. I taught preschool for a few years. And then I got more into freelance writing. So stand-up has always been my primary independent creative mode of expression. I've done it my whole adult and young adult life.
My nana was always a widow as long as I was alive; my grandfather died before I was born. All the women on my street - there were four houses in a row with all old women who lived alone who were widowed. They all had kids, but they were all widowed. My mom didn't put me in preschool; I didn't know that was a thing. I just hung out with these women all day.
Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.
I will do everything that I can to make sure that you have good jobs, with rising incomes, that your kids have good educations from preschool through college.
The social and educational value of preschool is undisputed.
The children were singing beer commercials. If they could learn from beer commercials why can't they learn 1,2, 3 and more.
She went on to found and develop Sesame Street for pre-school children.
I could do a thousand documentaries on poverty and poor people that would be watched by a handful of the convinced, but I was never really going to have an influence on my times -- (as I might if I develop Sesame Street).
Ensuring preschool education for all and investing more in public schools is essential if the U.S. is to avoid becoming a neo-feudal country where advantages and disadvantages are passed on from one generation to the next.
I love kids. All my best friends have kids, and I love, love, love kids.
If we can make sure that that young boys starting at the age of three or four already knows their colors and their letters and are getting good preschool, and by the time they get into school they've got a good teacher and are getting the support that they need and are able to keep up with their classwork, that is going to do more to reduce the incarceration rate at the same time, obviously, as it increases the college enrollment rate.
I think day care is terrific. Kids get to be around other kids, and they're playing, and they're teaching each other. When I was in college, my summer job was being a preschool teacher. I loved it, and after that experience, I said I can't wait to put my kid in day care because I could see how much they loved it.
President Obama's first term in office has been better for intentions than for actual changes in planning and policy. I do believe, and he has several things to this effect, that he would like to provide universal preschool or at least far more preschool for our children.
It is … interest of all, that every one, from birth, should be well educated.
I loved working on 'Thomas & Friends.' That's an iconic show, and that thing is, like, a billion-dollar property. But content-wise, yep, if you're not into steam trains and preschool storytelling, it can get a little wearing after years of it.
Early childhood offerings vary, but everywhere in Europe and in Canada, they're far more generous than in the United States. Ukrainian dads may not change enough diapers, but their government offers paid maternity leave; practically free preschool; and per-baby payments equivalent to eight months of an average salary.
I feel strongly that we have to have an education system that starts with preschool and goes through college. That's why I want more technical education in high schools and in community colleges, real apprenticeships to prepare young people for the jobs of the future.
There are resources to help and simple steps that parents, preschools, businesses, and communities can take to help our kids succeed, because we're all in this together, and that's what the Too Small to Fail Initiative is all about.
For eight years, I taught special-needs preschool for 18 months to 3-year-olds. It's what I was gonna do with my career for a while, and then I got a little burnt out.
Some parents expend great efforts to get their kids into the right nursery school or the right preschool, with the thought that that will set them on the path to success, to competitive success especially.
Twenty per cent of American children grow up in poverty, and that means they get inadequate nutrition, inadequate health care, and because we have a very local education system, they get inadequate access to education. With those as a starting base, you perpetuate inequality. That's why, here in New York, Mayor de Blasio has made a big deal of trying to focus on preschool education, because by five years old, there are already huge differences. We've finally begun to recognize it.