Laura Lippman Quotes

We have a large underclass in Britain, and a fairly low standard of education. Our best universities are extremely good, but a very significant proportion of the British population that comes out of compulsory schooling with very low standards of education.

When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.

If my child were in a school where he was not learning, I would not wait for a gathering of social scientists to tell me whether it was okay for me to send him to another school.

The knowledge gap on civics remains wide between students who attend inner-city schools and their peers in middle-class schools

Providing great schooling is the single most important thing we can do to help any child from a disadvantaged background succeed. It's also the single most important thing we can do to boost the long-term productivity of our economy.

I was the youngest girl among my siblings, a simple village girl, who perhaps was luckier than other siblings as I have the chance to go to school.

I was a pretty unsavvy applicant, and I am grateful that the dean of admissions at Princeton chose to take a chance on a girl from an average public high school in southern Virginia.

Kids from New York usually don't stay in New York anymore: they go to prep schools and all sorts of stuff nowadays. I'm just happy to be one of the guys in our league from New York, to represent.

My family was extremely progressive. My parents had a love marriage, but they separated when I was two years old. I moved to Delhi with my mom, who got involved with the family business.

Although I had a private education at secondary level, I went to a local primary school where I mixed with kids of all backgrounds.

No child's dream should be limited by the quality, or lack thereof, of the education they receive.

I spent 35 years growing up in the U.S., and it had its ups and downs.

After my parents' divorce in the early seventies, I grew up with my mother, who wasn't super educated herself. But there were a lot of kids from the subcontinent in the neighbourhood, many of whom were academic achievers. So my sister and I grew up around them, and both of us did well in school.

I was born in Boston, but I moved to Cleveland when I was three.

I was born in Chicago. I moved to Detroit until I was six and moved to Oakland at that point. And then we had a couple years in Stockton and Pasadena. And by the time I was 13, I was back in Oakland.

The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through - like I did - because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.

Before moving to Delhi at the age of 17, I had only travelled to Patna or Varanasi outside Belwa.

And certainly having gone to Oxford, and seen some of the other students there, I wouldn't say the ones at my school were less capable. They could've been there.

In 1992, when I was 16, I moved to the United States to start working on my Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey.

I always felt that I was, you know, smart. I just didn't have a lot of the resources that everybody else had... It was tough for me to catch up.

As a working-class girl, receiving free school dinners, I studied art history. Having never had the chance to visit art galleries, I devoured the knowledge, and it has served me well as a practising artist.

Like my father, I used to believe that hard work and mastery of a standardized exam was the fairest way for students like me to compete with those who had far more resources.

When students get into a great university, it's a huge aspirational lift for their village. These students become beacons of hope.

I was born in Cambridgeshire and moved to Scotland when I was seven.

A university education is a privilege, but we should be proud that in Britain it is also a right, no matter what your income or class or ethnic background.