Geoffrey Canada Quotes
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People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better.
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One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.'
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Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.
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My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer.
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When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching... It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters.
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I believe that for lots of churches and religious institutions, their main focus on the development of faith among parishioners needs to spread to the community.
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Teachers need to be paid like professionals.
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Young people will tell you, if you're not prepared to write the most violent, the most misogynistic, the most horrible kinds of rhymes and scenarios, you are not going to get air play.
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Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally.
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Many schools today are sacrificing social studies, the arts and physical education so children can cover basic subjects like math, English and science.
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The system decides you can't run schools in the summer.
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Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.
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If you are a lousy teacher, you should be fired.
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My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff.
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Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize - and sometimes you have to cauterize - the ones who really are against change. They're the kind of person who, if you tell them it's raining outside, they'll fight you tooth and nail.
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At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.
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Lots of boys pick strong messages about who they are and who they want to be from the media.
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We've gotta guarantee all of our kids an education.
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When I began working in not-for-profits, it was taking a vow of poverty, which eliminated huge numbers of folks.
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You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.
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How is it we could have a system where schools could remain lousy for 50 years and yet you do exactly the same thing this year that they did 50 years ago when it didn't work then, and no one feels any pressure to change?
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In two-parent households, women have increasingly entered the workplace, and in single-parent households, there is even more of a need for the adults to work. That means parents do not fully control their own schedule and have to scramble to find high-quality after-school options.
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It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.
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When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my mother about it. And she was like, 'No, no, no. There's no Superman.' And I started crying. I really thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming.