Barack Obama Quotes

… adult education should be made available … so that our less privileged groups may be able to avail themselves of new openings which require more education than they possess.

I'm aware of the fact that a lot of talented people out there will never get this chance.

When you come from an under-privileged background, oftentimes, you feel a little overwhelmed by your education or your lack of.

I grew up in a very progressive family and with a great educational system, and I asked myself, 'Why doesn't everybody have these opportunities for a good education? So why not give back to these kids who didn't grow up with the same privileges I had?'

It is not easy for men to rise whose qualities are thwarted by poverty.

From exam grading to health education to professional training to democratic participation, paths towards self-realization and success in the world are often daunting and obscure: journeys only the privileged feel confident setting off along.

The Tories and the Lib Dems talk about social mobility, but, short of winning the lottery, the only way to guarantee young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to do better and to raise aspirations is through education.

Unless we make education a priority, an entire generation of Americans could miss out on the American dream.

We still have two public school systems in the United States: One for the haves and one for the have-nots.

Public education is the great equalizer of America.

Tomorrow everybody--or practically everybody--will have had the education of the upper class of yesterday.

Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in non-educated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible.

Those who start life with the fewest advantages need the smallest classes.

We know what works. What works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children.

That certain groups do much better in America than others—as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on – is difficult to talk about.

Surrounded by the evidence of their success, the wealthy come to believe that they are fundamentally better than other Americans and that working people deserve their declining fortunes. They trumpet meritocracy while ensuring that their children enjoy crushing advantages from birth. They have unprecedented access to politicians and use it to push policies that swell their wealth while defunding institutions, such as public education, that sustain opportunities for less-fortunate Americans.

One of society's thorniest problems is that children from poor families start school lagging badly behind their more affluent classmates in readiness.

Education is important. And the difference of the zip code you grow up in or the zip code you are born in and how you turn out really isn't fair to the kids of our world.

I've seen a lot of poverty - coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that.

Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we've got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.

I think the debate around nepotism is futile because I am an outsider and I know that there is no compensation of talent.

Millennials easily connect the dots between good education and good opportunities, and they also understand that it isn't just hard work that determines how well a child will be educated - it also depends on where they live and the resources their parents commit to their education.

There's not enough opportunity, and I feel like you can't control where you're born or where you're brought up.