19 Quotes by Lisa Delpit

We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs.

When one ‘we’ gets to determine standards for all ‘we’s’ then some ‘we’s’ are in trouble.

In other words, every human brain has the built-in capacity to become, over time, what we demand of it. No ability is fixed. Practice can even change the brain.

The purpose of education is to learn to die satiated with life.” That, I believe, is what we need to bring to our schools: experiences that are so full of the wonder of life, so full of connectedness, so embedded in the context of our communities, so brilliant in the insights that we develop and the analyses that we devise, that all of us, teachers and students alike, can learn to live lives that leave us truly satisfied.

A second reason African American students are not excelling is that we have all been affected by our society’s deeply ingrained bias of equating blackness with inferiority.

We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment – and that is not easy. It is painful as well, because it means turning yourself inside out, giving up your own sense of who you are, and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of another’s angry gaze.

The worldviews of many in our society exist in protected cocoons. These individuals have never had to make an adjustment from home life to public life, as their public lives and institutions they have encountered merely reflect a “reality” these individuals have been schooled in since birth.

I write these words because what we need to know at a very deep level is that African American children do not come into this world at a deficit. There is no “achievement gap” at birth – at.

Kati Haycock has calculated that three to four weeks of effective, full-day literacy instruction would allow the average student to gain an entire year of academic growth.