Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

My parents are wonderful, practical, sensible people, and the expectation was that I would study something academic.

Whenever we've seen the kids in the most disadvantaged context truly excel, always it's been in classrooms and in whole schools where there is a clear vision of where the kids have the potential to be.

I could have been a Rhodes Scholar, except for my grades.

I'm from an Indian family of professionals, and my parents had to go through hardships themselves to send me to IIT-Mumbai.

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.

Every kid, every minority kid can be so successful if they focus on their education.

Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language.

You know, I never really paid attention to sports, which, coming from the mecca of football in Texas, is kind of odd. I played sports, but I was nerdy. Having a single mother, the pressure was on me to get good grades and a scholarship and go to college.

As far as I could tell, I was the first person anywhere in my family tree to go to university.

Children from a given family background, when put in schools of different social compositions, will achieve at quite different levels.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

Had Barack Obama been obliged to take his degree at the University of Akron, say, it is doubtful that his progress would have been remotely as stellar.

The results showed that Joe Mokoena and I had made history. For the first time in the history of education in South Africa, two African students had passed the JC with a First Class degree, regarded as a rare achievement for any student.

Education is not about thinning the herd. Education is about helping every student succeed.

I'm a child of academics.

I had two parents who were doctors, and my mom was valedictorian in multiple classes.

It's important that we challenge the culture of low expectations. You need to believe every child can do well.

My mum's always had big aspirations because I'm an academic. I always got good grades at school. GCSEs were just a breeze for me.

I passed the 11-plus and went up to the senior school, where my two older sisters had already gone. I was in the 'A' stream, but in the third year, they asked me to give up Latin; no one had ever got 7 per cent before.

My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that's what we did as kids.

My dad had to quit school when he was in third grade. My mom had to quit school. They didn't know what I needed, and I didn't know what I needed to keep wrestling and go to school, so that's why I had to go to community college.

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.

Both my parents are teachers, and while they were always cool with what I did, they never let me take my education lightly.

It's been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.