When you go visiting countries you start reading the history of the place and you start getting into the culture and then you have to leave. In my experience all countries have hidden treasures.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.
High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.
I've always enjoyed traveling and having experience with different cultures and different people. But it's also a wonderful thing to be able to benefit and enable research not only in our country but around the world.
The right to a quality education is I believe the perfect path to bridge the gap between different cultures and to reconcile various civilizations. Without such a right the values of liberty justice and equality will have no meaning. Ignorance is by far the biggest danger and threat to humankind.
Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.
There is no 'need' for us to eat meat dairy or eggs. Indeed these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet.
The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.
In this country the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.
The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry agriculture energy and transportation - essential as they are make people sick and die.
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences.
Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.
In fact I believe that we need better sex education in our own culture here in America so that young folk learn about things like venereal disease before they encounter it.
My wife wanted my children to have some Chinese culture and education. She believes the children need to learn two languages and two cultures.
Education must be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.
The question is will we continue to fight what may be a rearguard action to defend universal literacy as a central goal of our education system or are we bold enough to see what's actually happening to our culture?