My family was going back to England to visit my mother's grandmother, who was very ill. We went up to Liverpool and I met my great-aunt, who was just a force of nature. She was an elocution teacher and a huge enthusiast for theater and the classics. ...
When I stopped going to school, I got the strongest dose of perspective. When you're a kid, your friends, your school, your teachers, your family - that's your whole world, your whole existence. And then when I stopped going, I lost all my friends bu...
Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whos...
Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and p...
Working as a correspondent for 'Business Week,' I felt that I was simply informing people, not empowering them. I saw a parallel problem in the world of education. In too many educational settings, teachers simply 'inform' or 'instruct' learners, rat...
If you spend your life with academics, when you step outside, you realise there is this huge general readership that is almost impossible to reach with critical writing. It is a rare critical monograph that gets a general readership, and if you spend...
I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take...
I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or what...
I remind everyone: Whether you school them at home or send them to school, you as a parent have the responsibility to make sure they learn and behave. Teachers and principals may help, but parents are the ones who must accept responsibility.
An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did...
In the fourth grade, my history teacher gave us a project: Why was the auto industry located in Detroit, Michigan? I didn't know I was going to be an economist, but I knew I was going to do something that was involved in answering questions like that...
I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next ,a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participan...
Internet safety begins at home and that is why my legislation would require the Federal Trade Commission to design and publish a unique website to serve as a clearinghouse and resource for parents, teachers and children for information on the dangers...
My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she wo...
A lot of children, like I did, move away from words because of the fear - which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you'll get, detention, worrying about letting people down, your parents, teachers.
My education in the public schools of New York City between 1932 and 1944 was an excellent preparation for a life in science. Because of the Depression, these schools were able to attract a remarkably talented and dedicated collection of teachers who...
Mary and Jesus had this extraordinary relationship between them. What a teacher Mary is, really. It is the ultimate trusting; that she had to trust God, that she was so privileged to be the mother of the Savior, that she had to stand there as a mothe...
When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, 'I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.' I wouldn't have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a s...
And I found out, the other part of it is that I found out and in my desire to life successfully, that baseball fit very well into my life. It's been a great teacher, trainer, mentor and you'll see what I mean in the next few minutes that I have to sp...
I had a brilliant drama teacher while I was at Roland Park: Ann Mainolfi. But the school was mostly rich in academics. It wasn't like I was prepping myself for a life in acting. There, you prepped yourself to have a stable future. The school's piece ...
The religious neutrality in our schools is, I would argue, one of our strengths. Teachers cannot inhibit or deride religion. But this does not mean that we've taken God out of public schools. I'm reminded of the book of Esther in the Bible. God is no...
