A Quote by Rick Perlstein

The history of American higher education over the twentieth century is an extraordinary one, the story of the creation of a powerhouse set of institutions that are the envy of the civilized world. Once they were the province, both among the student and faculty bodies, of children of privilege, generally WASPs.

Rick Perlstein

Quote Topics

American Among Bodies Both Century Children Civilized Creation Education Envy Extraordinary Faculty Generally Higher Higher Education History Institutions Once Over Powerhouse Privilege Province Set Story Student The History Of Twentieth Twentieth Century Wasps Were World

Quote Author

Rick Perlstein
American - Historian
Born: 1969

In part, it's almost surely a failure of modern education, whether K through 12 or higher education, or really both. Barack Obama went to Ivy League institutions like Columbia, which are reputed to be among America's top colleges. And yet, this very recent product of those American institutions is not publicly articulating an appreciation of the American founding or the founders and their vision for America.

Paul Kengor

Until the Left took over American public education in the second half of the 20th century, it was generally excellent - look at the high level of eighth-grade exams from early in the 20th century and you will weep. The more money the Left has gotten for education - America now spends more per student than any country in the world - the worse the academic results. And the Left has removed God and dress codes from schools - with socially disastrous results.

Dennis Prager

Higher education is one of few areas where this country competes with the rest of the world and wins. The best of American higher education outstrips any in the world. Look where the rest of the world goes for higher education, for graduate degrees. They come here.

Donna Shalala

All I suggest is to make K-12 like higher education. Higher education in the United States is the best in the world because these institutions compete with each other for your tuition dollar. Let's just bring competition to public education.

Gary Johnson

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Don DeLillo

I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him agesof education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.

Frances Harper

In the current environment, attributing low student performance to teacher tenure is one of the great unproven causal links out there. The relationship just hasn't been examined very carefully, but we should all recognize that in higher education the strongest institutions generally have the most robust tenure systems, and in elementary and secondary, the states with the strongest teacher unions (and tenure systems) tend to have the highest student performance.

Nicholas Lemann

Contrary to what we learn from progressives in education and the media, the history of the Democratic Party well into the twentieth century is a virtually uninterrupted history of thievery, corruption, and bigotry.

Dinesh D'Souza

If we allow the celebrity rock-star model of leadership to triumph, we will see the decline of corporations and institutions of all types. The twentieth century was a century of greatness, but we face the very real prospect that the next century will see very few enduring great institutions.

James C. Collins

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

Drew Gilpin Faust

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

William James

The 21st century looks different. It's been very disruptive. It has created a lot of insecurity. We have to adjust to that, because the 21st century has real promise. Now, the higher-paying jobs of this new century are fantastic. The problem is, you have to have some level of higher education, maybe not a four-year degree, but some level of higher education, to get those jobs.

Marco Rubio

The social problem of the twentieth century is whether civilized nations can restore themselves to sanity after their nineteenth-century aberrations of individualism and capitalism.

Albion Woodbury Small

An institution of higher education is a partnership among students and alumni, faculty and administrators, donors and trustees, neighborhoods and more, to build a community - and a culture.

Ben Sasse

Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the First World War and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.