I was in school - I was a good learner; if I wanted to get something done, I could get it done. I was lazy, though. I was always, like, sort of an outcast. And when I got home, I was always doing music, but when I was doing music, no one was there to judge it, you know? It was just me in my bedroom. It gave me freedom and made me happy.
...Started by missionaries in 1841, Punahou Academy had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites...It hadn't been easy to get me in, my grandparents told her (my mother); there was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps' boss, who was an alumnus (my first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race).
For decades, the public school system failed too many children, so we passed the No Child Left Behind Act and demanded schools show results in return for money.
You wouldn't know that if you talked to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or some of the international activist organizations. Certainly you wouldn't know that if you were talking to some of the writers who criticize our drone policy. But I've actually told my staff it's probably good that they stay critical of this policy, even though I think right now we're doing the best that we can in a dangerous world with terrorists who would gladly blow up a school bus full of American kids if they could.
I live. I travel. I eat. I pray. These are the things I do. I'd rather be in my condition than be a man with four children in a four-bedroom house, working hard every day to pay for his house, taking his children to school.
I do not think that you can try and systematize education for the whole world. I would try experiments in small communities and in schools to see how they work out, instead of taking the children of an entire nation and trying to bring them up on the same system.
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
While one is young is the time to investigate, to experiment with everything. The school should help its young people to discover their vocations and responsibilities, and not merely cram their minds with facts and technical knowledge; it should be the soil in which they can grow without fear, happily and integrally.
When I first got into the first-year study after the Cultural Revolution, got into the same school with this group, I wasn't conscious of the so-called "Fifth Generation." I didn't like that kind of study condition because there's no real, true education there.
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.