Neil Kinnock Quotes

Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.

Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

Some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than others; and that those children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

The Scholastic Aptitude Tests do not predict success any better than the socio economic status of the parents.

We aspire to be equal opportunity, but all across the country where a student is born, their race, their class affect where they end up.

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

I used to believe, like many people who come from poor backgrounds, that it gave me an edge, but I think that's just something we have to tell ourselves to get by sometimes. I don't believe that anymore. Children of privilege can be just as talented and clever as anybody else.

Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins.

Every society naturally divides itself into classes. The author of nature has bestowed on some greater capacities than on others--birth, education, talents and wealth, create distinctions among men as visible and of as much influence as titles, stars and garters. In every society, men of this class will command a superior degree of respect--and if the government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the powers of it, it will, according to the natural course of things, be in their hands.

Better educated than wealthy

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

The people with high school degrees and the people who have college degrees are living in two different Americas.

Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords.

It is actually getting much harder for someone from an ordinary background to break through the ranks. In the period from 1964 to 1997, every single Prime Minister - from Harold Wilson to John Major - was the product of a state school.

We remain a country where a young person's chance of fulfilling their potential rests on the vagaries of where they were born and what their parents do, rather than their innate talent and ambition.

The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

Parikrma aims to give underprivileged children an equal chance at education so they can integrate with kids of private schools and, later, with the society. I want these children to hold high-end jobs at multinational companies and not work at the lower end of the spectrum.

Merit should count more than academic background.

Over time, my students have gotten richer and more educated.

As a senior at Princeton, I felt like the whole world was open to me. In our country, that's not a given. We aspire to be a place of equal opportunity, and yet where you're born determines your prospects.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us.

To me, there's so much talent in the world that's locked out for the wrong reasons, whether it's innovators at the highest end where we need to change the regulation systems, or whether it's the talented people who work here who the bureaucracy's holding back, or the amazing American people.