#inequality

There is, I am sensible, an age at which every individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Uneasy at your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered, as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of you contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those who may have the misfortune of succeeding you. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#age

A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated — and turned out to grass. ↗

— Pearl S. Buck

#education #empowerment #inequality #men #women

He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow." It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#education #inequality #social-issues #education

Bei den Hochgestellten gilt das Reden vom Essen als niedrig. Das kommt: sie haben schon gegessen. ↗

— Bertolt Brecht

#inequality #poor #rich #equality

As inequality has grown, as its negative consequences have become harder and harder to ignore, our response has been to put more and more weight on the educational system, to look to school reform as the means of closing the 'achievement gap' and of guaranteeing the increasingly illusory promise of equal opportunity. We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task. ↗

— Christopher L. Hayes

#inequality #education

The first commendment of hte post 1970s meritocracy can be sumed up as follows: "Thou shall provide equality of opportunity to all, regardless of race, gender, or sexual oritentation, but worry not about equality of outcomes." But what we've seen time and time again is that the two aren't so neatly separated. If you don't concern yourself at all with equality fo outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish. ↗

— Christopher L. Hayes

#inequality #meritocracy #social-solidarity #equality

blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books. ↗

— Cordelia Fine

#gender-equality #gender-inequality #gender-stereotypes #equality

Immodest creature, you do not want a woman who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless – one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to her." (Letter, 17 June 1837) ↗

— George Sand

#gender #imperfections #inequality #men #mysogyny

By God, if women had written stories, As clerks had within here oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress. ↗

— Geoffrey Chaucer

#dishonesty #evil #gender #inequality #men

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next. ↗

— Nicholas Kristof

#generations #inequality #inequity #opportunity #united-states