13 Quotes by Garret Keizer

We inculcate in our children the sensibilities of raccoons, a fascination with shiny objects and an appetite for garbage, and then carp about ‘the texting generation’ as if thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who couldn’t boil an egg are capable of creating a culture. They grow on what we feed them. It has never been otherwise. The only thing that changes is the food.

Teachers who complain ‘These kids have no work ethic’ couldn’t be farther off the mark. The problem is not that these kids lack a work ethic; the problem is that some of them see no connection between a work ethic and school. None of them would think, for example, to say to a customer at the MacDonald’s drive-up window, ‘Do you think I could get you those Chicken McNuggets some time tomorrow?’ Yet we give sanction to that sort of request when it comes to school assignments.

The bottom line here – and I use the phrase with an eye to the mind-set that promotes these ‘systems’ – is that I am increasingly devoting more time to the generation and recording of data and less time to the educational substance of what the data is supposed to measure. Think of it as a man who develops ever more elaborate schemes for counting his money, even as he forfeits more and more of his time for earning the money he counts.

I’d probably put those salt and pepper shakers away now, David, because we’re about to be visited by dribbling cannibal psychopath and we wouldn’t want to tease these fellows. Of course, if they’re very hungry, I do have this left arm that I don’t use all that much.