#stem

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water. ↗

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

#science #systems #science

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#metaphor #science #sea-lion #snail #systems-analyst

One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#science #science

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#logic

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor. ↗

— John Taylor Gatto

#public-education #education

There is no client as scary as an innocent man." J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962. ↗

— Michael Connelly

#clients #criminal-law #fear #guilt #innocence

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished. It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#criminal-justice-system #cycle-of-violence #desperation #greed #homelessness

In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve. ↗

— Stefan Collini

#education-system #humanities #education

We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things that are not seen are eternal. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#epistemology #philosophical #philosophical

America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. ↗

— Walter Cronkite

#care #caring #health #health care #health care system