My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
Looking back at my high school years, I'm struck by how slowly history can move.
I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV.
The hardest part was when I was in high school not having a job and always being broke. I had to get to auditions without a car. I either took the bus or walked.
I had a '56 Ford, and my first car was a '49 Chevy. I converted it to a stick and used to race with the other high school kids down along the river.
It wasn't a secret that I was gay. I'd come out to my parents during my junior year of high school, on the day that I also wrecked the family car.
I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.
These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.
In high school, I worked eight hours a day just so I could get into the college of my dreams and say that I got in - and I never went.
When I was in high school, the genders were so separate from each other. If you weren't 'dating' somebody, you couldn't just be friends with somebody.
For the 95 per cent whose only means of schooling is the district or the city school, we must provide what we are not now providing, an education that will better fit them for the struggle of life.
I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.
Dr. Margaret Oda, a true trailblazer in education, served as Honolulu school district superintendent and was the driving force behind the middle-school concept and the first chairwoman of the Japanese American National Museum.
I don't feel I'm qualified to be a coach outside the high school level. I think I would need to do more education to really be a good coach.
If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.
But it is equally necessary to consider the implications for a society if there are fewer and fewer young people making music because we are economising on music schools or musical education in schools.
You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.
In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and its a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education.
I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation's schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it's unfortunate.
The great thing is that I'm getting my revenge on everybody who treated me badly in high school. The bad thing is I had to go back to high school to do it.
I kind of did this thing in high school, a spoof of 'Sweeney Todd' called 'Shirley Todd,' and I had a great time doing that.
