Educators From England

"This of course has always been the method of empirical science, which has been suspicious of deductive argumentation unchecked by reference to experiment; but in a more general sense, and outside the practice of science itself, scientists have sometimes been the greatest offenders in adhering to dogmatic ideas against all the evidence, especially when they have tended to limit 'experience' to laboratory experiment."

"These three assumptions between them constitute a picture of science and the world somewhat as follows : there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in prepositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately."

"I am not a composer, I’m a clerk."

"Eating a fish from a river used to be a birth right, but those days are long gone. Now it’s our duty to put them back."

"Fear has a useful function: it concentrates the mind. And the appropriate reaction is to work to understand the thing that is causing the fear whether it’s a large fish or anything else. This way both parties are more likely to survive the encounter unscathed."

"The thing about rivers, is if you work with them, if you give them a little bit of help, it’s surprising how much they respond. And I think that is cause for hope. If we can just change our attitudes just a little bit, from being out-and-out exploitative to just sort of drawing back a little bit, and just giving them a little bit of thought and help… they do have this incredible regenerative power."

"We live in the information age where in theory everybody knows anything. You ask somebody where your fish comes from, they don’t know. You go, “Is that because you can’t tell me or because the system is designed to obscure that fact?” Which unfortunately is the case a lot of the time."

"You do get these similar stories everywhere. And I think part of that is because the underwater world is so unknown. The human mind doesn’t like a vacuum. We will populate that vacuum with the contents of our own head, and often that’s scary stuff. It’s a blank canvas. Often what happens is that real creatures get mixed up. They’ll get our own baggage mixed up with their reality, and part of my job is to sort that out."

"There is real wisdom there about respecting the environment that more enlightened people, supposedly, have forgotten all about."

"The term is understood objectively rather than subjectively. Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged or approved, in the societies to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities."

"Poverty can be defined objectively and applied consistently only in terms of the concept of relative deprivation."

"If the salt was dear and scarce, sugar was unknown except to the very rich. The poor man had little to sweeten his lot. The bees gave him honey; and long after the time I am dealing with, people left not only their hives to their children by will, but actually bequeathed a summer flight of bees to their friends; while the hive was claimed by one, the next swarm would become the property of another."

"The ordinary life of the monastery began at six o'clock in the morning, and when the small bell, called the skilla, rang, all rose, washed themselves at the latrines, put on their daily habit, and then presented themselves at the matin Mass."

"The old men remember the roadsides, the wastes, and commons, and village greens, and patches of no man's land, which have gone from them for ever. The donkey munched the thistles or rolled in the dust, the cow, half starved perhaps in winter, yet gained a certain sort of sustenance and picked up its livelihood under the hedge or on the green. The geese hissed at strangers intruding upon this or that patch of verdure, and brought in a few shillings, if their owner were lucky with them, at Michaelmas time."

"Even in our country villages we are losing our Individuals. The world is getting quite too much for us—withering us, in fact."

"It seems to me that before a man has any right to pose as a reformer he must do two things: first, he must learn the truth of things as they are, and look facts in the face; and secondly, he must learn how things were, and how they have come to be as they are."

"Mr. Montagu was fourteen when Dr. Johnson, whom he knew, died; he was the intimate associate of Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth; he watched by Mary Wollstonecraft's deathbed; Sir James Mackintosh helped to steady those liberal principles which were growing somewhat wild under Godwin's influence; his home was the haunt not only of Londoners like Charles Lamb, but of young men from the country before they grew famous, if only they had promise in them, like Edward Irving and Carlyle."

"George Eliot's Salon on Sundays was a stately reception, in which her talk was always well worth hearing: she raised conversation on whatever subject she touched to a higher level. Miss Anna Swanwick is the only other person I know with the same immediate power of raising the conversation with apparent continuity and without seeming to force it."

"The old Cambridge, which some of us knew in our youth, with its solemn ecclesiasticism, its quaint archaisms, its fantastic anomallies, its fascinating picturesqueness, its dear old barbaric unintelligible odds and ends that met us at every turn in street and chapel and hall—that old Cambridge is as dead as the Egypt of the Pharaohs."

"Literature has had little to say of the labourer; and this, not that his class is lacking in interest, in poetry, in romance, but simply because those sections of society to which writers belong know nothing about him."

"I read Tennyson for myself, learning by heart the greater part of the original volumes and thinking, as I still think, that for subtle workmanship no one had at all approached the same perfection since Milton. I did not then recognise how little thought is contained in that pomp and melody of verse, still less how very little of what thought there is, is the poet's own. For instance, a very large number of people are apparently unaware that Tennyson's idyll "Dora" is simply a story in Miss Mitford's Our Village broken up into blank verse with poetic touches added, and in later life his "Idylls of the King" are whole chapters of Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion treated in the same way."

"With perhaps the exception of Dr. Johnson and Lord Tennyson, it is difficult to name any men who, writing really good works, lived by those works and by the pensions conferred upon them on account of those works. With those exceptions, I can think of no one whose books have lived and are likely to live, who have not either had an independent fortune or a profession quite apart from literature, by which they gained at least a modest living."

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

"I am pretty confident in saying that the physiological stress levels (as measured by cortisol) of bosses are lower than their employees—in other words, the bosses are not as stressed as the employees they manage, this is shown not just by my study, but loads of other studies that show exactly the same results. Stress levels increase (not decrease) as we go from the top of the occupational ladder to the bottom."

"Workers in lower status jobs tend to have more stressful working conditions—they have lower pay, poorer pension arrangements, less control over their work, and report more unsupportive colleagues and manager."

"It is because of identity politics – we are, sadly, becoming more tribal. The expectation seems to be that a writer from each tribe must tell the story of that tribe. I’m Turkish but also many other things. For me, imagination is a desire to transcend boundaries. When we write, we can be multiple."

"Many women are asking: why do some women choose to cover their heads? We have to understand this and other questions. This is one of the biggest challenges for feminism today. What is worrying is that when women are divided into categories it is the status quo – the patriarchy – that benefits.…"

"I learned to pay attention to the readers and not to the madness…Because to be a writer in Turkey is a bit like being kissed on one cheek and slapped on the other."

"I have met lots of women who have grown up in Turkey who cannot bring themselves to swear in Turkish. But in English they use the F-word all the time. Writing is like that for me."

"I try to root the language of my poetry in kindness, forgiveness, compassion and curiosity, that is the way I want to live, but of course that’s not to say anger and resentment and envy and other difficult emotions don’t make a noise in my work…"

"Poetry has always been at the margins, and I think that because of its sidelining, this has been a part of its appeal…"

"Spoken Word poetry is an art form that fits me well because it enables me to bring all the layers of who I am into one space — A reader, writer, and performer…"

"I can say poetry has certainly sharpened my senses and keeps me open to wonder about alternative realities, to be overly curious rather than overly ideological, it can be read as just a reminder that we have more senses than we have the words for, so perhaps we ought to revel in that if we are to truly live our lives in the light?"

"The Earth can be any shape you want it any shape at all Dark and cold or bright and warm long or thin or small If love is all you're missing look into your heart: Is anybody home? There are stones buried in your soul In time you'll come to understand this flat old Earth is in your gentle hands"

"Some people sing love songs Everybody's got one This isn't my love song It's more like my love-gone-wrong song She came to breakfast And stayed a week But the lie detectors Broke down each time she tried to speak Broke down when she said: "You came close Close but no cigar You didn't miss by far You know you came this close Close but no cigar." I remember, I remember, I remember The promise in your eyes As black as the night I drove you to the airport And I remember, I remember, I remember The wide Brazilian sky that swallowed you Then I hit thirty Guess I can't complain But I must have been lonely The night I bumped into Lorraine She came for coffee And stayed all night But the lie detectors Broke down every time I tried to smile Broke down like the story of my life And each dream I missed by half a mile Broke down when I told her: "You came close Close but no cigar You didn't miss by far You know you came this close Close but no cigar.""

"I scare myself just thinking about you I scare myself when I'm without you I scare myself, the moment that you're gone I scare myself when I let my thoughts run But it's oh so very different when we're together And I'm so, so, so much calmer, I feel better 'Cause the stars already crossed our paths forever And the sooner that we realize it, the better And then I'll be with you and I won't scare myself And I'll know what to do and I won't scare myself And my thoughts will run and I won't scare myself And I'll think of you and I won't scare myself"

"Ha! It's poetry in motion. She turned her tender eyes to me, As deep as any ocean, As sweet as any harmony. Mm, but she blinded me with science (She blinded me with science!) And failed me in biology, yeah."

"I wanted him to use all his experience and intuition and empathy with people who'd grown up around him in Sheffield and put that into the movie, and I would be [...] the alien force, who was the voice of what science can do, and I would kind of foist these horrible indignities and horrors on these people, and he would try and get them to behave the way they would. So there was an innate conflict in that. We had many shouting matches, really passionate things, totally necessary for doing this."

"I thought I would like to show that these kids can do something which is in fact very skillful - not the old tale about them being cobblers and joiners, but something that means they have to get books out of the library. And it’s a technical skill; they’ve actually got to read about it before they can do something like training a hawk. My brother trained a kestrel in these fields at the back, and I wanted to show that kids can do this kind of thing. They can do all kinds of things if only they’re given opportunities."

"The trouble in school is that you can do so little to help kids because you come up against this dead end of the educational system. I think a comprehensive system is the only answer for these kids, if it is carried through properly. But education reflects the system, rather than changes it. People say it’s an instrument of social change; well, if it is, it’s a bloody slow one. I think education reflects the class system, and the system has to change before education can."

"I'd never heard of Ernest Hemingway, but when I read his stories I realised there was something special about this simple style, but I couldn’t understand how he got the effect. I realised there was something underneath it, and that's how the whole thing started to unfold for me."

"Our intention in making Threads was to step aside from the politics and – I hope convincingly – show the actual effects on either side should our best endeavours to prevent nuclear war fail."

"I think it was the first novel I'd actually read in my own time, and of my own volition. I'd actually sat down and read a book, and I was 21. Ridiculous. I can't remember reading anything before."

"I think that the book has survived as a set text because teachers like using it. It has a lot of possibilities from a teaching point of view. Most kinds of children seem to identify with the story. Northanger Abbey it is not! It should really be out of date now after all these years. But sadly, it's not. There are still a lot of kids like Billy around. Ken Loach's film Kes is a sympathetic retelling of the book. It adds value to it. Ken is a wonderful director for any writer to work with. I was very lucky that Tony Garnett the producer and Ken discovered my little book."

"He did hate doing it. It was alien to his nature. He reluctantly let himself be drawn into this thing, thinking what he would have done would have been a very passionate politicised scream of emotion, and what he was being pushed into was this box he didn't feel at all comfortable in."

"I think that I painted an accurate picture of what life was like for someone like Billy forty years ago. Looking back, maybe I was not as sympathetic as I could have been to some of the adult characters."

"How often are 'dreams realised' in real life? I write about real people and show a section of their life. Without the Hollywood endings which rarely happen outside Hollywood. My memory is failing me these days and I cannot remember the exact details, but Walt Disney offered to make Kes. On the condition that the hawk recovered. Should we have sold out? I know which way would always be right for me."

"I remember years ago when [w:The Price of Coal|The Price of Coal]] was on television one evening [in either 1977 or 1978]. When I got on the bus in Chapeltown the next day it was full of miners coming off shift. I walked down the aisle and they just looked and said nothing. I'm scared to death until one man appointed himself spokesman and said ‘that were alreight, Barry’. I felt like an icon then, I can tell you!"

"He hated coming on the set and despised me because I wore white shoes."

"[B]y the end of the nineteenth century... ...a rapid change had set in. Men were no longer convinced that the writers of Scripture knew more about a future life than they did themselves. Historical criticism began to suggest that writers who were far from infallible in their descriptions of the past were not wholly to be trusted in their prognostications of the future.""