Cambridge Education Quotes

This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.

I couldn’t tell him that the reason I couldn’t return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life.

You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak.

Born in Hong Kong, raised in London, and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Kai’s mannerisms were a clear reflection of his upbringing.

You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

The conversation was slow, halting. Audrey asked me no questions about England or Cambridge. She had no frame of reference for my life, so we talked about hers

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits.

My friends in Cambridge has become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of belonging with them, that for many years, had been absent.... I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given....

The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day. [Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold.

Nowadays it seems you learn only what is reasonable and relevant. I went to Rome with a young friend, educated on the latest lines, and who had taken historical honours at Cambridge. The first morning the pats of butter came up stamped with the Twins. “ Good old Romulus and Remus,” said I. “ Good old who? ” said she. She had never heard of the Twins and was much bored when I told her the story; they had no place in “ con¬ stitutional history ”, and for her the old wolf of the Capitol howled in vain: “ Great God! I’d rather be ”!

The last thing you want to do is turn into a nerd like your father, nose always buried in a book, living like a tramp just to get one of those useless PhD thingies. And look where his posh Cambridge education got him—a flipping poet, for chrissakes!

Mr. Ansell was not merely a man of some education; he had what no education can bring — the power of detecting what is important. Like many fathers, he had spared no expense over his boy, — he had borrowed money to start him at a rapacious and fashionable private school; he had sent him to tutors; he had sent him to Cambridge. But he knew that all this was not the important thing. The important thing was freedom.

Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYI, or even that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.... The most powerful determination of who you are is inside you, he said, ‘Professor Steinberg says this Pygmalion.... She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.’ I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I’d never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot.

Detective Sergeant Jonathan Searle, a Cambridge-educated art historian who worked at Special Branch, the muscle behind British intelligence on national security and espionage.

Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful.

That’s your project,” he said. “You can do something no one has done: you can examine Mormonism not just as a religious movement, but as an intellectual one.” I began to reread the letters of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As a child I’d read those letters as an act of worship; now I read them with different eyes, not the eyes of a critic, but also not the eyes of a disciple. I examined polygamy, not as a doctrine but as a social policy. I measured it against its own aims, as well as against other movements and theories from the same period. It felt like a radical act. My friends in Cambridge had become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of belonging with them that, for many years, had been absent on Buck’s Peak. Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings.

That ridiculous place meaning: Cambridge, one of the top universities in the world. But the great Jacques Meunier hadn’t needed a college education, and look where he’d got himself. A self-made man.

This is a magical place,' I said. 'Everything shines here.' 'You must stop yourself from thinking like that,' Dr Kerry said, his voice raised. 'You are not fool's gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lights—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

My friends in Cambridge had become a kind of family, and I felt a sense of belonging with them that, for many years, had been absent on Buck's Peak. Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings. No natural sister should love a stranger more than a brother, I thought, and what sort of daughter prefers a teacher to her own father? But although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck's Peak. That feeling became a physical part of me, something I could taste on my tongue or smell on my own breath.

women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respe

I cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.

Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge. "Just what I need!" I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag: Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed his students − including me − had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the "Invocation to Light" in Book 9. So I said, "Wait here," and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag: Milton assumed I'd read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I'd been reared in Judaism I hadn't. So I said, "Wait here," and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays by Shakespeare, and Boswell's Johnson, but also the Second books of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it's in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed. So what with one thing and another and an average of three "Wait here's" a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q's five books of lectures.

Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers?—raised in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress, fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of “both ideas and ideals” as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and “show what we are made of.” Sometimes I wish I’d been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it. Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, What am I going to do? In the end I thought Nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, That settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work. We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and st back. A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake—the Art of Knowledge, in short—which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past. Though perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge became definitely commercial. They (and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise. The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the working classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a mediaeval baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact, THE bores of society. They were laughed at, despised—and paid. Which last was what they aimed at.

Quando os graduados [das] famosas escolas inglesas saíam com 18 ou 19 anos para Oxford ou Cambridge, possuíam uma segunda personalidade: normalizada, não sem atrativos, mas artificial - semelhante às árvores podadas dos jardins barrocos franceses. (...) O sistema educativo está mais do que testado e raramente falha. Exerce forças poderosas e terríveis, e o seu poder de sugestão é quase irresistível. Um ou outro poderá quebrar perante a sua força, mas a maioria sobrevive à sua dureza e torna-se mais ou menos solícito, mais ou menos completo, formado e marcado pelo sistema. Anos mais tarde olham em retrospectiva para os anos de escola como se tivessem sido os mais felizes da sua vida.

Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death, accounts of her life still set the pace for modern modes of living. Plunge (and this Introduction is intended to help you take the plunge) into Woolf ’s works – at any point – whether in her novels, her short stories, her essays, her polemical pamphlets, or her published letters, diaries, memoirs and journals – and you will be transported by her elegant, startling, buoyant sentences to a world where everything in modern life (cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, feminism, politics, war and so on) is explored and questioned and refashioned.

No natural sister should love a stranger more than a brother, I thought, and what sort of daughter prefers a teacher to her own father? But although I wished it were otherwise, I did not want to go home. I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak.

The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of London which Chaucer himself spoke. Indeed, by the end of the fourteenth century the educated language of London, bolstered by the economic power of London itself, was beginning to become the standard form of written language throughout the country, although the process was not to be completed for several centuries. The cultural, commercial, administrative and intellectual importance of the East Midlands (one of the two main universities, Cambridge, was also in this region), the agricultural richness of the region and the presence of major cities, Norwich and London, contributed much to the increasing standardisation of the dialect.

Parnell’s star had zenithed. The aloof man who spoke loudest by listening, the unemotional exterior which wept within at injustice, the shy man whose moral strength was powerfully evident, the Protestant who fought the Catholic cause, the Anglo-ascendancy landowner who led the landless, the Cambridge-educated genius who alone was able to rally and control an effective conglomeration of wild Irishmen. Charles Stewart Parnell, indeed, was the uncrowned king of Ireland.

that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that I can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.

The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that I can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.

All these data sets are known as “behavioral data,” and with this data, it is possible for data aggregators to build a picture of you that is incredibly precise and endlessly useful. Companies can then tailor their products to align with your daily activities. Politicians use your behavioral data to show you information so that their message will ring true to you, and at the right time: Think of those ads about education that just happen to play on the radio at the precise moment you’re dropping your kids off at school. You’re not paranoid. It’s all orchestrated.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.   “It was, in all,” writes McCullough, “a declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears.

Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. "There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought." And now? "Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths." How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for.

When he was twenty-three years old, he (George Fox) saw the inner light in a vision. For him it symbolized the spirit against the letter, silence against chatter, experience against dogma, and equality against all who build inequality on authority and power, be it of the state or religion. His mistrust of the official Anglican Church was immense. He spoke with disdain of the "towered houses" and was tormented by the ringing of church bells. He frequently interrupted preachers, standing in the church's doorway, a hat covering his head, and uttering threatening words toward the pulpit, causing great excitement in the gathered congregation. It often resulted in Fox being beaten up, banished, and, later on, jailed for years. What aroused his ire, above all, were the priests who, without ever having experienced or even looked for illumination, presented themselves as servants of God but, in truth, comprised a "society of cannibals." It is "not enough to have been educated in Oxford or Cambridge in order to become capable for and efficient in the service of Christ. To this day it is difficult for many Friends to speak of "Quaker theology." The Friends believe in Scripture - George Fox knew it by heart - but they also believe that the Spirit transcends Scripture and that the inner light is experienced by all human beings without human mediation. "The inner light," "the inward teacher" are names that the early Quakers gave to their experiences of the Spirit. They believe that everyone can meet the "Christ within," even though he has different names in different ages and places and is not tied to any form of religion. This light is open to everyone and, yet, it is not simply the natural light of reason. In a conversation that Fox had with Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, he vigorously resisted this rational interpretation. In every human being is "that of God," hidden, eclipsed, often forgotten. Linguistically a clumsy expression at best, "that of God in everyone" is the foundation of human dignity. In addition, it is the admonition to believe in it, to discover it in each and everyone and to respond to it. Fox said, "Walk joyfully on the earth and respond to that of God in every human being.

The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that I can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.” “You’re saying,” he said slowly, “that more women actually want to be in science.” She widened her eyes. “Of course we do. In science, in medicine, in business, in music, in math. Pick an area.

In May 2002, the principal of Franklin Elementary School in Santa Monica, California, sent a newsletter to parents informing them that children could no longer play tag during the lunch recess. As she explained, “The running part of this activity is healthy and encouraged; however, in this game there is a ‘victim’ or ‘it,’ which creates a self-esteem issue.”4 School districts in Texas, Maryland, New York, and Virginia “have banned, limited, or discouraged” dodgeball.5 “Any time you throw an object at somebody,” said an elementary school coach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “it creates an environment of retaliation and resentment.”6 Coaches who permit children to play dodgeball “should be fired immediately,” according to the physical education chairman at Central High School in Naperville, Illinois.7

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

David Brooks, “Our Founding Yuppie,” Weekly Standard, Oct. 23, 2000, 31. The word “meritocracy” is an argument-starter, and I have employed it sparingly in this book. It is often used loosely to denote a vision of social mobility based on merit and diligence, like Franklin’s. The word was coined by British social thinker Michael Young (later to become, somewhat ironically, Lord Young of Darlington) in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (New York: Viking Press) as a dismissive term to satirize a society that misguidedly created a new elite class based on the “narrow band of values” of IQ and educational credentials. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 106, used it more broadly to mean a “social order [that] follows the principle of careers open to talents.” The best description of the idea is in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a history of educational aptitude tests and their effect on American society. In Franklin’s time, Enlightenment thinkers (such as Jefferson in his proposals for creating the University of Virginia) advocated replacing the hereditary aristocracy with a “natural aristocracy,” whose members would be plucked from the masses at an early age based on “virtues and talents” and groomed for leadership. Franklin’s idea was more expansive. He believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed as best they could based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and talent. As we shall see, his proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania (in contrast to Jefferson’s for the University of Virginia) were aimed not at filtering a new elite but at encouraging and enriching all “aspiring” young men. Franklin was propounding a more egalitarian and democratic approach than Jefferson by proposing a system that would, as Rawls (p. 107) would later prescribe, assure that “resources for education are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens.” (Translation: He cared not simply about making society as a whole more productive, but also about making each individual more enriched.)

Cooking’s a more popular hobby than fencing.” “They don’t have a Great British Fence-Off,” muttered Dante. There was a thoughtful pause. “Oh, that sounds like such a good show,” Nicholas murmured. “I like your idea for a television show as well,” Seiji told Dante. “Why do you picture it being British specifically?” Dante’s mouth opened and closed. No sound came out. “Could be because of the European history of dueling?” Nicholas suggested, and looked to Seiji. “Like in the book you let me borrow. Did you know that if you killed someone in a duel back in the old days, you could run away to France, because in France, dueling was still a totally cool and legal way to kill someone you had beef with?” Seiji nodded, pointing at Nicholas for emphasis. “I did know that, but clearly not everybody does. You’re right; the show would be educational for many people. Perhaps they could hold fencing displays in old manor houses and castles and châteaux? And, of course, in colleges such as Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity, where the legacy of fencing students is so illustrious.” Breakfast conversation was so awesome now that Seiji had joined them! Nicholas bet nobody else had as much fun as they did. Dante had clearly given up on talking and was giving Bobby a silent, pleading look. Nicholas guessed Dante was shy. Seiji was pretty famous, so maybe Dante was overwhelmed.

Dr. Kerry said he'd been watching me. "You act like someone who is impersonating someone else. And it's as if you think your life depends on it." I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. "It has never occurred to you," he said, "that you might have as much right to be here as anyone." He waited for an explanation. "I would enjoy serving the dinner," I said, "more than eating it." Dr. Kerry smiled. "You should trust Professor Steinberg. If he says you're a scholar-'pure gold,' I heard him say-then you are." "This is a magical place," I said. "Everything shines here." "You must stop yourself from thinking like that," Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. "You are not fool's gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself-even gold appears dull in some lighting-but that is the illusion. And it always was." I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I'd never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot. I couldn't tell Dr. Kerry about that girl. I couldn't tell him that the reason I couldn't return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life. At BYU I could almost forget, allow what had been to blend into what was. But the contrast here was too great, the world before my eyes too fantastical. The memories were more real-more believable-than the stone spires. To myself I pretended there were other reasons I couldn't belong at Cambridge, reasons having to do with class and status: that it was because I was poor, had grown up poor. Because I could stand in the wind on the chapel roof and not tilt. That was the person who didn't belong in Cambridge: the roofer, not the whore. I can go to school, I had written in my journal that very afternoon. And I can buy new clothes. But I am still Tara Westover. I have done jobs no Cambridge student would do. Dress us any way you like, we are not the same. Clothes could not fix what was wrong with me. Something had rotted on the inside. Whether Dr. Kerry suspected any part of this, I'm not sure. But he understood that I had fixated on clothes as the symbol of why I didn't, and couldn't, belong. It was the last thing he said to me before he walked away, leaving me rooted, astonished, beside that grand chapel. "The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you," he said. "Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara." He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. "She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn't matter what dress she wore.

Where classical and medieval rhetorical pragmatism diverges from modern, I think, is in assigning a crucial role to a notion of common memory, accessed by an individual through education, which acts to “complete” uninformed individual experience.

The student with whom Hal shared a bedroom, Englishman John Abel Smith, bore educational credentials that Hal could only dimly conceive. John was the namesake of a renowned merchant banker and British Member of Parliament. He had attended Eton, one of the world’s most famous preparatory schools, before entering Cambridge, where he had “read” under the personal tutelage of English scholars. Hal began to understand the difference between his public-school education and the background of his roommates when he surveyed them relative to a reading list he came across. It was titled, “One Hundred Books Every Educated Person Ought to Have Read.” George Montgomery and Powell Cabot had read approximately seventy and eighty, respectively. John Abel Smith had read all but four. Hal had read (though not necessarily finished) six. Hal also felt his social inferiority. He had long known that his parents weren’t fashionable. His mother never had her hair done in a beauty parlor. His father owned only one pair of dress shoes at a time and frequently took long trips abroad with nothing but his briefcase and a single change of underwear, washing his clothes—including a “wash-and-wear” suit—in hotel sinks at night. That was part of the reason why Hal took an expensive tailored suit—a broad-shouldered pinstripe—and a new fedora hat to Boston. He knew that he needed to rise to a new level, fashion-wise. But he realized that his fashion statement had failed when Powell Cabot asked, late in October, to borrow his suit and hat. Hal’s swell of pride turned to chagrin when Powell explained his purpose—he had been invited to a Halloween costume party, and he wanted to go as a gangster.

They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and Atlanta before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes, but those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a new educational system upon the University: where, forsooth, shall we ground knowledge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge? The roots of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and from the dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of the University has been the broad foundation-stone on which is built the kindergarten's A B C.

All of these jobs required an education and therefore excluded women, who were not allowed into many universities. Although the University of London admitted women from 1877, it was nearly 70 years later in 1946 that the University of Cambridge did the same. In France, the Sorbonne admitted women in 1880 but two other Grandes Ecoles only started to accept women in the 1960s? It was only in the 1960s that Harvard University, Princeton University and New York University allowed women to be granted PhDs. Opportunities for women in the professions were therefore limited or non-existent. But there were jobs to be had in the unskilled work produced by Taylorism, with women replacing men in many countries in Europe and North America because they were cheaper to employ.

I was educated at Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That empirical procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts of my crescograph2 are evidence for the most skeptical that plants have a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals. - Jagadis Chandra Bose

Cambridge is outstripping Oxford when it comes to brains,” commented Charles. “Why is that?” “For years now, Oxford’s gone in for inverted snobbery. They turn down bright pupils from private schools in order to favour pupils from comprehensive ones. Big mistake. It’s not only the rich who pay for the children’s education, but often it’s caring parents who are prepared to take out a second mortgage to pay school fees, and caring parents produce bright children.

I couldn’t tell Dr. Kerry about that girl. I couldn’t tell him that the reason I couldn’t return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life.

New York Post, August 3, 2022 “ ‘Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans” by Rob Henderson One example of luxury belief is that all family structures are equal. This is not true. Evidence is clear that families with two married parents are the most beneficial for young children. And yet, affluent, educated people raised by two married parents are more likely than others to believe monogamy is outdated, marriage is a sham or that all families are the same. … Another luxury belief is that religion is irrational or harmful. Members of the upper class are most likely to be atheists or non-religious. But they have the resources and access to thrive without the unifying social edifice of religion. Places of worship are often essential for the social fabric of poor communities. Denigrating the importance of religion harms the poor. While affluent people often find meaning in their work, most Americans do not have the luxury of a “profession.” They have jobs. They clock in, they clock out. Without a family or community to care for, such a job can feel meaningless. Then there’s the luxury belief that individual decisions don’t matter much compared to random social forces, including luck. This belief is more common among many of my peers at Yale and Cambridge than the kids I grew up with in foster care or the women and men I served with in the military. The key message is that the outcomes of your life are beyond your control. This idea works to the benefit of the upper class and harms ordinary people. … White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around poor whites. Often members of the upper-class claim that racial disparities stem from inherent advantages held by whites. Yet Asian Americans are more educated, have higher earnings and live longer than whites. Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. … When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt. … In the future, expect the upper class to defame even more values — including ones they hold dear — in their quest to gain top-dog status.

New York Post, August 3, 2022 “ ‘Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans” by Rob Henderson One example of luxury belief is that all family structures are equal. This is not true. Evidence is clear that families with two married parents are the most beneficial for young children. And yet, affluent, educated people raised by two married parents are more likely than others to believe monogamy is outdated, marriage is a sham or that all families are the same. … This luxury belief contributed to the erosion of the family. Today, the marriage rates of affluent Americans are nearly the same as they were in the 1960s. But working-class people are far less likely to get married. Furthermore, out-of-wedlock birthrates are more than 10 times higher than they were in 1960, mostly among the poor and working class. Affluent people seldom have kids out of wedlock but are more likely than others to express the luxury belief that doing so is of no consequence. Another luxury belief is that religion is irrational or harmful. Members of the upper class are most likely to be atheists or non-religious. But they have the resources and access to thrive without the unifying social edifice of religion. Places of worship are often essential for the social fabric of poor communities. Denigrating the importance of religion harms the poor. While affluent people often find meaning in their work, most Americans do not have the luxury of a “profession.” They have jobs. They clock in, they clock out. Without a family or community to care for, such a job can feel meaningless. Then there’s the luxury belief that individual decisions don’t matter much compared to random social forces, including luck. This belief is more common among many of my peers at Yale and Cambridge than the kids I grew up with in foster care or the women and men I served with in the military. The key message is that the outcomes of your life are beyond your control. This idea works to the benefit of the upper class and harms ordinary people. … White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around poor whites. Often members of the upper-class claim that racial disparities stem from inherent advantages held by whites. Yet Asian Americans are more educated, have higher earnings and live longer than whites. Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. … When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt. …

The importance of forming such “habits of order” later became one of James’s great subjects as a psychologist. In 1892 he delivered a lecture to teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was eventually incorporated into his book Psychology: A Briefer Course. James argued that the “great thing” in education is to “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” “The more details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lights—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

My life in Cambridge was transformed—or rather, I was transformed into someone who believed she belonged in Cambridge. The shame I’d long felt about my family leaked out of me almost overnight. For the first time in my life I talked openly about where I’d come from. I admitted to my friends that I’d never been to school. I described Buck’s Peak, with its many junkyards, barns, corrals. I even told them about the root cellar full of supplies in the wheat field, and the gasoline buried near the old barn. I told them I’d been poor, I told them I’d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not the slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

You must stop yourself from thinking like that," Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. "You are not fool's gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself-even gold appears dull in some lighting-but that is the illusion. And it always was.

You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are.

Who knew we’d have to send you to Cambridge to get you in the kitchen where you belong?” he said.

It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lights—but that is the illusion. And it always was.

All right,’ he said. ’I solved the problem by taking a bed-sitting room near the British Museum. My father wanted me to study medicine, but it didn’t interest me enough to make a career of it. My mother on the other hand wanted me to go up to Cambridge and read English, which appealed to me slightly more. However, I decided not to take the path of formal education. It would have been too easy, that was my thinking. I should have been given a generous allowance and taken up my rightful place as a prospective member of the governing class. The idea repelled me.’ ‘But why?’ asked Lustgarten. They were still standing by the gate which was only partly open. ‘It’s difficult to explain. Everyone I know takes life for granted. Heidegger has a phrase which captures it entirely: the triviality of everydayness. It is as if they are forgetful of existence.’ Lustgarten was nodding his long head in great seriousness.

I began to recall my own experience when I was Mercutio’s age (late teens I decided, a year or two older than Romeo) as a pupil at a public school called Christ’s Hospital. This school is situated in the idyllic countryside of the Sussex Weald, just outside Horsham. I recalled the strange blend of raucousness and intellect amongst the cloisters, the fighting, the sport, and general sense of rebelliousness, of not wishing to seem conventional (this was the sixties); in the sixth form (we were called Grecians) the rarefied atmosphere, the assumption that of course we would go to Oxford or Cambridge; the adoption of an ascetic style, of Zen Buddhism, of baroque opera, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and Mahler; of Pound, Eliot and e. e. cummings. We perceived the world completely through art and culture. We were very young, very wise, and possessed of a kind of innocent cynicism. We wore yellow stockings, knee breeches, and an ankle length dark blue coat, with silver buttons. We had read Proust, we had read Evelyn Waugh, we knew what was what. There was a sense, fostered by us and by many teachers, that we were already up there with Lamb, Coleridge, and all the other great men who had been educated there. We certainly thought that we soared ‘above a common bound’. I suppose it is a process of constant mythologizing that is attempted at any public school. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a good example. Girls were objects of both romantic and purely sexual, fantasy; beautiful, distant, mysterious, unobtainable, and, quite simply, not there. The real vessel for emotional exchange, whether sexually expressed or not, were our own intense friendships with each other. The process of my perceptions of Mercutio intermingling with my emotional memory continued intermittently, up to and including rehearsals. I am now aware that that possibly I re-constructed my memory somewhat, mythologised it even, excising what was irrelevant, emphasising what was useful, to accord with how I was beginning to see the part, and what I wanted to express with it. What I was seeing in Mercutio was his grief and pain at impending separation from Romeo, so I suppose I sensitised myself to that period of my life when male bonding was at its strongest for me.

Don’t you remember my degree was given me this year because I am a Peer’s son?” asked Curly, reprovingly. “See what it is to be a Goth, without a classical education! You should have gone to Granta, De Vigne, you’d have been Stroke of the Cambridge Eight, not a doubt of it There’s muscle gone to waste! It’s very jolly, you see, being an Honourable, though I never knew it; one gets credit for brains whether one has them or not What an inestimable blessing to some of the pillars of the aristocracy, isn’t it? I suppose the House of Lords was instituted on that principle; and its members are no more required to know why they pass their bills, than we, their sons and heirs, are required to know why we pass our examinations, eh?

Though his public teaching lasted only three years, it has been scrutinized by scholars in every science—among them theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to name a few. Jesus’ influence has founded universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Now spanning the entire globe, Jesus’ followers have been inspired throughout the centuries to set up educational institutions to teach what he taught.

the aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values. Values are facts apprehended in their relation to each other, and to ourselves.

The wise man is he who knows the relative values of things.

Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Nehru jokingly called himself the ‘last Englishman to rule India’.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, is to convince several generations of teachers and teacher educators raised according to Direct Method principles that the L1 is not an obstacle to learning the L2, but an asset.

Young people need looking after,” she said. “Think of that beautiful boy Galois. People felt there was something secret in his character. They were right. The secret was mathematics. His father a suicide. His own death a horrible farce. Dawn in the fields. Caped and whiskered seconds. Sinister marksman poised to fire.” I need all my courage to die at twenty. “Then there was Abel, not much older, desperately poor, Abel in delirium, hemorrhaging. So often mathematical experience consists of time segments too massive to be contained in the usual frame. Lives overstated. Themes pursued to extreme points. Adventure, romance and tragedy.” I will fight for my life. “Look at Pascal, who rid himself of physical pain by dwelling on mathematics. He was just a bit older than you when he constructed his mystic hexagram. The loveliest aspect of the mystic hexagram is that it is mystic. That’s what’s so lovely about it. It’s able to become its own shadow.” Keep believing it. “The tricky thing about mathematical genius,” she said, “is that its sources are so often buried. Galois for one. Ramanujan for another. No indication anywhere in their backgrounds that these boys would one day display such natural powers. Figures jumping out of sequence. Or completely misplaced.” (...) “Numbers have supernatural harmonies, according to Hermite. They exist beyond human thought. Divine order through number. Number as absolute reality. Someone said of Hermite: ‘The most abstract entities are for him like living creatures.’ That’s what someone said.” “People invented numbers,” he said. “You don’t have numbers without people.” “Good, let’s argue.” “I don’t want to argue.” “Secret lives,” she said. “Dedekind listed as dead twelve years before the fact. Poncelet scratching calculations on the walls of his cell. Lobachevski mopping the floors of an old museum. Sophie Germain using a man’s name. Do I have the order right? Sometimes I get it mixed up or completely backwards. (...) “Tell me about your mathematical dreams.” “Never had one.” “Cardano did, born half dead, his inner life a neon web of treachery and magic. Gambler, astrologer, heretic, court physician. Schemed his way through the algebra wars.” “Can I see the baby?” “Ramanujan had algebraic dreams. Wrote down the results after getting out of bed. Vast intuitive powers but poor education. Taken to Cambridge like a jungle boy. Sonja Kowalewski wasn’t allowed to attend university lectures. We both know why. When her husband died she spent days and days without food, coming out of her room only after she’d restored herself by working on her mathematics. Tell me, was it Kronecker who thought mathematics similar to poetry? I know Hamilton and many others tried their hands at verse. Our superduper Sonja preferred the novel.

Russell and Moore (like James) were educated by Hegelians.

Papa decided that dear Isabelle was getting less – or it may have been more – out of her Cambridge education than he had expected.

I have been teaching in Cambridge for thirty years,” he said. “And this is one of the best essays I’ve read.

George Alfred Henty (1832–1902), who began his writing career in the 1860s. Henty – educated at Westminster and Caius, Cambridge, the son of a wealthy stockbroker – had been commissioned in the Purveyor’s Department of the army, and gone to the Crimea during the war. There he had drifted into journalism, sending back reports for the Morning Advertiser and the Morning Post before catching fever and being invalided home. He continued to work in the Purveyor’s Department until the mid-Sixties, when the life of the war correspondent and the writer of boys’ adventure stories seemed overwhelmingly more interesting and better paid. Four generations of British children grew up with Henry’s irresistible stories, beautifully produced, bound and edited, on their shelves. The Henty phenomenon – over seventy titles celebrating imperialistic derring-do – really belongs to the 1880s, but deserves a mention here not only because of his radical and political views, but because of the direction taken by his career as a writer. The Henty story, by the time he had got into his stride, followed the formula that a young English lad in his early teens, freed from the shackles of public school or home upbringing by the convenient accident of orphanhood, finds himself caught up in some thrilling historical episode. The temporal sweep is impressive, ranging from Beric at Agincourt to The Briton: a story of the Roman Invasion; but the huge majority are exercises in British imperialist myth-building: By Conduct and Courage, A Story of the Days of Nelson, By Pike and Dyke, By Sheer Pluck, A Tale of the Ashanti War, Condemned as a Nihilist, The Dash for Khartoum, For Name and Fame: or through the Afghan Passes, Jack Archer, A Tale of the Crimea, Through the Sikh War. A Tale of the Punjaub (sic); The Tiger of Mysore, With Buller in Natal, With Kitchener in the Soudan, and so on.

The first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859. In a reply to a letter from John Lubbock, thanking Darwin for an advance copy of his book, Darwin made a remarkable comment about William Paley's book Natural Theology, which had been published half a century before. Darwin wrote: "I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley's 'Natural Theology'. I could almost formerly have said it by heart." Years later in his Autobiography Darwin wrote of Paley that "The careful study of [his] works . . . was the only part of the academical course [in Cambridge] which . . . was of the least use to me in the education of my mind." Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind

The Pala period [between the eighth and the twelfth century CE], in particular, saw several monasteries emerge in what is now modern Bengal and Bihar, five of which—Vikramashila, Nalanda, Somapura Mahavihara, Odantapuri, and Jaggadala—were premier educational institutions which created a coordinated network amongst themselves under Indian rulers. Nalanda University, which enjoyed international renown when Oxford and Cambridge were not even gleams in their founders’ eyes, employed 2,000 teachers and housed 10,000 students in a remarkable campus that featured a library nine storeys tall. It is said that monks would hand-copy documents and books which would then become part of private collections of individual scholars. The university opened its doors to students from countries ranging from Korea, Japan, China, Tibet, and Indonesia in the east to Persia and Turkey in the west, studying subjects which included the fine arts, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, politics and the art of war.

Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. Westover, Tara. Educated (p. 242). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

One of the first translators of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Garnett (1861–1948) was born in Brighton, England, educated in Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge, and tutored in Russian by the exiled Feliks Volkhovsky.

Cognitive issues Unfortunately, surrogates frequently do not understand the clinical status of the patients whom they represent. Some studies have shown that less than half of surrogates, regardless of educational level, had adequate knowledge of what was going on and what would happen to the patient. Sometimes, the surrogate lacks capacity to make the relevant decisions. But even when the surrogate has capacity, there are three key iatrogenic causes of surrogate misunderstanding. First, providers often fail to explain clearly the patient's condition and prognosis with clear, jargon-free language. Second, providers may place undue pressure on the surrogate and fail to allow sufficient time to process information. Third, different specialists often supply the surrogate with uncoordinated, even conflicting, information.