JJ Ross's quotes

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. Surely so
revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Play makes children nimble—neurobiologically, mentally, behaviorally—capable of adapting to a rapidly evolving world. That makes it just about the best preparation for life in the 21st century. Psychologists believe that play cajoles people toward their human potential because it preserves all the possibilities nervous systems tend to otherwise prune away...

There's only one graduation requirement and over 95 percent of students meet it. They have to write and present a thesis about how they're prepared to be an adult. It takes time to write, even more time to figure out

...Students have become lute-makers, auto technicians, musicians, equestrian-farmers, dedicated environmentalists. Some have started their own companies at 18. Others take retail or service jobs to get money for travel abroad...They do what they do not by default or by obligation but from a sense of understanding what they're doing and why...
(and) go on to lead deeply satisfying lives. Most are unusually resilient. Almost all feel that they are in control of their destiny.

The alumni study shows that a "spectacularly high number" pursue careers in the arts—music, art, dance, writing, acting. Math, business and education are popular routes, too.

...It may be...that the Sudbury-style schools work so well because they are small...But on a 10-acre estate in Massachusetts, 200 kids are having a hell of a time preparing for the future.

Two prominent Democrats lament the degradation of civil
discourse in graduation addresses:

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles,
told University of Southern California graduates it was "poisoning our
politics."

Mark Warner, former Virginia governor speaking at Wake
Forest University, criticized the "personal and partisan attacks" and
"complex issues reduced to easy-to-digest sound bites."

"No one — no one — in politics has a monopoly on virtue,
on patriotism,
or most importantly, on the truth," Mr. Warner said.
"And that goes for
everyone, from conservative to liberal."

" . . .realism is not the enemy of idealism, and taxpayers aren't being selfish when they place a heavy burden on those who would ask them to part with some of their money.

Advocates of public action need to meet
that test."

Famously opposed educators come together:

"Our macro-level differences do not interfere with our mutual respect for each other’s work.
That itself is something we hope our schools can help teach young people.

Our differences helped us consider ways to rethink our ideas and find places where those holding different views might compromise, and perhaps learn to live under one umbrella.

What we hope to model is the idea of democratic engagement, the notion that citizens need to think about and debate their beliefs and values with others who do not necessarily share all of them.

We want the issues connected to schooling to be a matter for discussion among all people who care.

We don’t have it in our power to solve the problems that confront American education—not those that take place within the schoolhouse, much less those that have a direct impact on children’s ability to learn, such as their unequal access to health care, housing, and myriad other life necessities.

But we hope that we have it in our power to provoke the thinking that must precede, accompany, and follow any attempt to reform—perhaps, even better, to transform—our schools."

People want to do the right thing.
What the right thing is, however,
depends on what you value.

Sometimes I want to scream.
I’d like to say, “From now on, hats can be left on in the building, and food is welcome in all classrooms. Now, can we just move on, for Pete’s sake?”
But I don’t. . .

We’re arguing about power. About consistency. About priorities. We’re trying to discuss the Big Issues, but we’re afraid to name them.
So we bicker about minutiae.

We fall into the safe arguments that no one will ever win but that will surely fill the time allotted, ensuring that we can return to our classrooms, departments, and homes. . .

If we’re actually going to talk about why kids need to eat in class, then we may have to break the silence surrounding the issues of poverty and inequity.

We don’t really want to
do that. We prefer to stay safely ensconced in our ignorance, putting mountains of energy into talking about nothing at all. . .

(So) kids stay hungry, continue to lack basic
supplies, and, most important, fail to get a sense of what it is to recognize and be able to use their power as citizens. They don’t learn how it feels to exercise power wisely because we refuse to show them.

They learn to pour their energies into petty battles rather than real civic engagement.

In this era of increasing political partisanship, isn’t it time for us to teach our students that looking deeply into the well of our own shortcomings is the way to solve them? How long will we maintain the charade of infallibility, our blameless collective personae?

The greatest gift we can give our students, and ourselves, is the acknowledgment that things aren’t OK — and won’t be OK, even if we build a school in which no one wears a hat indoors, everyone has a pencil, and neither Snickers bars nor apple cores can be found outside the cafeteria.

"Do we without protest, accept accelerating preschool and nursing home cultures, which warn ominously that
the earlier you institutionalize your child,
the earlier he will institutionalize you?"