In Pakistan, the right to go to school is not a given. In the more rural areas, a girl is born, married off as early as 9 years old, and basically lives life under the control of men.
Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
Once you have done with school, you realise that it is just a smaller version of life, and really I have felt that I should have been an adult since I was aged about five.
I have always lived an ordinary life, and always will. It's who and what has to do with my job that makes it 'unordinary.' I cook, go to the supermarket, pick my children up at school.
I got out of school in 2000, and I always wanted to be on 'This American Life,' since I first started telling stories. And that, I mean, that show is a little bit of a fortress. It's really hard to get stuff on that show.
I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
When I was 11, I realised that I did not have to live the life my mother had: school, marriage, children, apartment, summer house.
I'm strong and opinionated. Those qualities brought me a lot of problems since I was a little girl in school, saying 'I don't agree' and fighting with the children. It's part of my curiosity for life.
My whole life as a grammar-school boy, getting to Cambridge University and working on the 'London Sunday Times' has been very aspirational.
Sport was an integral part of school life. The most influential teachers were not necessarily the PE teachers, but the teachers who helped me in sport because they had an understanding of what you were going through.
I have the life of Riley. I take my kids to school, do a bit of work in the afternoon, pick my kids up, microwave a meal, hang out with my kids, and work for a couple of hours.
Yes, being educated is definitely an advantage. But having said that, I've met so many people in life who haven't done very well at school but who are still really bright.
I was learning things in school rather than learning how to teach myself, which is what you have to do in life, so I just abandoned it and did ceramics for a year and a half.
My father was in Congress when I was born. He was mayor my whole life from when I was in grade school - first grade - to when I went away to college.
The characters are that vague TV high school age, but they'll be in high school as long as we need them to be.
I was president of the schools in junior high and high school, got a scholarship to New York University, played a little basketball, and was a celebrity.
By the time I was in high school, Roe v. Wade had passed, so that was also happening; girls were getting pregnant and getting abortions - and that happened in my school too.
Republicans get a lot of money from big business, but they are not tied to the union dollar. As a result they have been aggressive advocates of school reform, charter schools and vouchers for private schools.
A Christian high school is just like any other high school in the sense of the politics and all of these levels of who's cool and what to wear.
I went to Catholic high school for half a year and religion wasn't the cool thing to talk about even at a catholic high school. It never came up.
