I can think of many amusing parallels. For example, "the Borough of ... announces: Miss Jones, the splendid principal of our gramm...ar school, has been offered the position of cook and housekeeper by the family next door, and so we feel obliged to dismiss her and make room for one of the young girls just graduated from training college. Miss Jones may not care to be a cook but since she has that privilege we don't think it right for her to continue to teach, valuable as her services are to the community." Or, "the Educational Committee of ... Borough has adopted a rule to employ no more men teachers who have vegetable gardens, and to notify those men now in its employ who possess vegetable gardens or are contemplating acquiring one that they will be dismissed. We are actuated by the following reasons: (1) The place of a man with a vegetable garden is at home working in his garden. (2) We feel, as a general rule, that a man with a vegetable garden will, to some extent, suffer in his efficiency as a teacher. We have no evidence of this; in fact the vegetable gardeners whom we are about to dismiss are among our best teachers, but nevertheless, we feel that as a general policy our rule is sound from an educational standpoint. (3) A man with a garden will not starve. Therefore, it is unfair to continue paying him a salary as a teacher while men who have no vegetable gardens are waiting for posts [ellipses in original].LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil... is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. A man who inv...ested wisely would be admired, but a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel like my sixteenth birthday and the time I graduated from high school, and the first time I flew solo all wrapped up in one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could t...o-day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...you don't have to be as good as white people, you have to be better or the best. When Negroes are average, they fail, unless th...ey are very, very lucky. Now, if you're average and white, honey, you can go far. Just look at Dan Quayle. If that boy was colored he'd be washing dishes somewhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real e...state?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which... comes to others through their eyes and their ears.... books have meant so much more in my education than in that of others ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse... of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »