Ajahn Chah

If you let go a little you will have a little happiness. If you let go completely you will be free.

I mean, look, teachers don’t do their job for the money, obviously, because we pay them ridiculously little amounts for what they put in. Most of them come out of their own pocket for materials and things to help the children and all that.

I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I – if I’m not interested in something, I don’t grasp it.

Perhaps because my father never got a college degree himself, he continued to view people who had one with a respect that bordered on awe. In most cases they didn’t deserve it. My father could run circles around most academics and he would have done very well in college, if he’d been able to go.

By making college unaffordable and student loans unbearable, we risk deterring our best and brightest from pursuing higher education and securing a good paying job.

For profit higher education is today a booming industry feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.

There is no education like adversity.

I never cut class. I loved getting A’s, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.

In the past, there has been a stigma surrounding community colleges, where they were seen as a less viable option because they are not four-year universities. I know differently and so do the millions of people across the country who have received an affordable, quality higher education at community college.

It is a truism that education is no longer a luxury. Education in this day and age is a necessity.

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

My first task is to help students reject 18 years of poor learning that teaches them that knowledge is a product rather than a process.

Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read, he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

As a kid I had a hard time reading in school. I was the kid who would go one period a day to the class for kids with learning disabilities.

Any man can learn anything he will, but no man can teach except to those who want to learn. Education is preeminently a matter of quality, not amount.