The childhood games ended for me when I was 14 and I finished school. I had to find a job, not an easy thing in those days.
Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.
I definitely have a family. I have a boyfriend who has kids, and we do normal things every day, like get up and go to school. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I wish I had taken Spanish instead of French in high school. I could eavesdrop on a lot more conversations on the subway if I knew Spanish.
When I was in elementary school, I watched 'Cinema Paradiso' 22 times and memorized the dialogue. In the movie, everyone had a place, even the bum who thought he owned the piazza. Eccentricities were celebrated, and no one was isolated.
We need to have a course in school that teaches about ecology and gastronomy. I could imagine that all children could eat at school for free and that the cafeteria would become part of the school's curriculum.
Earning a certificate or degree, or both, after high school opens the door to countless economic opportunities.
The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
As the older brother, I was expected to make sure no one messed with Eddie when he went to the park. He didn't have to deal with anyone saying, 'I'll get you after school.'
I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.
In my first few years of elementary school at the Edison School in Detroit, I did poorly. I remember worrying that I might fail the second grade and be held back.
I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
I had always been quiet and studious in school. I was the high school editor of the newspaper.
I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school... First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what.
Britain, today, educates 4.8 million primary school children in Britain. And we educate five million primary school children around the developing world, at a cost of 2.5 per cent of what we spend on British children.
Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.
School is now a place where punishment and discipline are prioritized over serving students and educating them. Any moment where a student falls outside scripted behavior becomes an opportunity for law enforcement to come in, criminalizing ordinary things people do every day.
The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
