David Brooks
"If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads."
71 Quotes
"If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads."
"لقد أدرك علماء نفس النمو، بعد سنوات من البحث، حقيقة جوهرية: ليس على الآباء أن يكونوا علماء نفس بارعين لينجحوا في مهمتهم، ولا معلمين موهوبين للغاية. فمعظم الجهود التي يبذلها الآباء باستخدام البطاقات التعليمية والتدريبات الخاصة والدروس الخصوصية لصقل أبنائهم وتحويلهم إلى آلات إنجاز مثالية، لا تُحدث أي تأثير يُذكر. بل يكفي أن يكون الآباء "جيدين بما فيه الكفاية". عليهم أن يوفروا لأبنائهم إيقاعات حياة مستقرة ويمكن التنبؤ بها. يجب أن يكونوا قادرين على التناغم مع احتياجات أطفالهم، جامعِين بين الدفء والانضباط. عليهم أن يؤسسوا روابط عاطفية آمنة يمكن للأطفال الاعتماد عليها في مواجهة التوتر. ويجب أن يكونوا حاضرين لتقديم أمثلة حية لكيفية التعامل مع مشكلات العالم، ليتمكن أطفالهم من تطوير نماذج لاواعية في أذهانهم."
David Brooks
The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
"Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country's inability to govern itself."
"بينما يقارن الجميع التسرب النفطي بإعصار كاترينا، فإن المقارنة الأعمق قد تكمن في أزمة الرهائن الإيرانية. ففي أواخر سبعينيات القرن الماضي، غدت أزمة الرهائن رمزاً لعجز أمريكا عن اتخاذ قرار حاسم في مواجهة مشكلات مستفحلة. وعلى المنوال ذاته، قد يصبح تدفق النفط الخارج عن السيطرة تجسيداً مادياً لعجز البلاد عن إدارة شؤونها."
David Brooks
"I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it."
David Brooks
"vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding membership in a historic commitment."
David Brooks
"Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; "The night cometh."
David Brooks
"What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker’s cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz’s moral purpose (building an integrated self)."
David Brooks
"In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent."
David Brooks
"People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard."
David Brooks
"Apparently, we have become such a hyper-individualized culture that it is impossible to develop an argument based on how individual cases fit into the fabric of the common good."
David Brooks
"College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few."
David Brooks
"most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road."
David Brooks
"Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk."
David Brooks
"Freedom without structure is its own slavery."
David Brooks
"How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?"
David Brooks
"Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends."
David Brooks
"Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self."
David Brooks
"Ehimlite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it comes to the sort of growth Deresiewicz is talking about, everyone is on their own. An admissions officer might bias her criteria slightly away from the Résumé God and toward the quirky kid. A student may privately wrestle with taking a summer camp job instead of an emotionally vacuous but résumé-padding internship. But these struggles are informal, isolated and semi-articulate."
David Brooks
"(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self."
David Brooks
"wonderful people are made, not born – that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments."
David Brooks
"Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction."
David Brooks
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