Geoffrey Canada
Geoffrey Canada
Geoffrey Canadais an American educator, social activist and author. Since 1990, Canada has been president of the Harlem Children's Zone in Harlem, New York, an organization that states its goal is to increase high school and college graduation rates among students in Harlem. Canada serves as the chairman of Children's Defense Fund's board of directors. He was a member of the board of directors of The After-School Corporation, a nonprofit organization that aims to expand educational opportunities for all students...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
Date of Birth13 January 1952
CityBronx, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?
I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.
The rates of soda consumption in our poorest communities cannot be explained by individual consumer preferences alone, but rather are linked to broader issues of access and affordability of healthy foods in low-income neighborhoods, and to the marketing efforts of soda companies themselves.
When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching. It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters,
Middle-class families know education begins at birth.
Monsters work seven days a week and don't take vacations.
One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility,'
There is an educational cliff we are walking over right this very second.
Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally.
Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize - and sometimes you have to cauterize - the ones who really are against change. They're the kind of person who, if you tell them it's raining outside, they'll fight you tooth and nail.
When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my mother about it. And she was like, 'No, no, no. There's no Superman.' And I started crying. I really thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming.
When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching... It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters.
Video games offer violent messages, and even the sports video games include taunting and teasing.
At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.