Primary School Memories Quotes

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.16 The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.17 We based them on the wealth of scholarship that has redefined the field of American history since at least the 1960s, including Benjamin Quarles’s landmark book The Negro in the American Revolution, first published in 1961; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; and Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in The New York Times, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black

older learners are more efficient than younger learners. By using their metalinguistic knowledge, memory strategies, and problem-solving skills, they make the most of second or foreign language instruction. In educational settings, learners who begin learning a second language at primary school level do not always achieve greater proficiency in the long run than those who begin in adolescence. Furthermore, there are countless anecdotes about older learners (adolescents and adults) who achieve excellence in the second language.

with nothing and no one to her name. Maybe I’ll go for elocution lessons and learn to say ‘simply marvellous’ or ‘what-ho chaps.’ Carmel put on a silly posh accent and Sharif chucked. ‘Please don’t. I don’t ever want you to change, not one single thing. When I was at university, I worked very hard. My mother and father did the same, my father almost worked himself to death when he came here, but he wanted better for me, for my mother. He had corner shops, cliché, I know, but it was a business a young Pakistani immigrant could get a start in, and if you worked hard enough, you could expand it. People see me now, with Aashna House and all of it, but I’m from very humble people, hard-working people, who knew the value of a pound. Their blood is in my veins and yes, now I live in luxury, so does my mother, but it wasn’t always like this and I care very little for the trappings of wealth. I’m not a member of their clubs nor do I own a boat or a horse. I’m a simple man, with simple needs and desires. When Jamilla died, I never imagined I’d ever feel like that about anyone ever again. I knew her all my life, our parents were friends and she got it, you know? Her father and mine emigrated together, we grew up together. Weird as it might sound, she would have loved you. She had no time for that whole social climbing business either. She got that I didn’t want to be a doctor so I could make lots of money; I did it because I really wanted to make a difference to people’s lives. ‘I don’t fit in with those people, Tristan and Angelica and all of them, they just see the clinic and they calculate the money I must be making and decide to befriend me based on that. I normally refuse all those invitations, but I do want to be involved with the conference, there’s some cutting-edge stuff up for discussion there, particularly on the use of cannabis for medicinal purposes. Also, I forgot what a pain Angelica can be and I thought it might be nice for you to make some friends, but they’re not your type of people either. I’m sorry, I just want you to be happy here, I don’t want you to think you made a mistake.’ ‘Sharif, I have never been so bloody happy in my life. How can you be worried? I love it here, I love Aashna House, England, the patients, the staff, and I especially love the fact that I can feel closer to my mother here. You’ve saved my life.’ Chapter 7 Carmel’s pager buzzed; Marlena had paged her to come to reception. The head teacher from the local primary school wanted to see the events coordinator. For the first time since she got to Aashna, she felt tired. She wasn’t sleeping. Her mother was on her mind all the time, so many questions just swirling around her head. Sharif had taken her to Brighton, to where he and his mother had scattered Dolly’s ashes, and showed her the tree they had planted in her memory. ‘Dolly Mullane, mother and friend “Que sera sera”,’ was on the inscription. She asked Sharif to put ‘mother’ on it in case Carmel ever found her, which touched her, but left her with more questions to which nobody had answers. Who was her father? Was he still alive? Would he want to

Despite the empire’s problems, however, its former emperor had succeeded in making Byzantium a shining beacon of civilization. The architectural triumph of the Hagia Sophia had only been possible by sophisticated advances in mathematics, and it soon spawned a flourishing school dedicated to improving the field. In Byzantium, primary education was available for both genders, and thanks to the stability of Justinian’s rule, virtually every level of society was literate. Universities throughout the empire continued the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions that were by now over a millennium old, and the works of the great scientists of antiquity were compiled in both public and private libraries. The old western provinces under barbarian rule, by contrast, were quickly sinking into the brutish chaos of the Dark Ages, with recollections of advanced urban life a fading memory. Literacy declined precipitously as the struggle to scratch out an existence made education an unaffordable luxury, and it would have disappeared completely without the church. There, writing was still valued, and remote monasteries managed to keep learning dimly alive. But throughout the West, trade slowed to a crawl, cities shrank, and the grand public buildings fell into disrepair.

It seems blasphemous that my mother's death even existed in the same reality as those moments that subsequently came to define my youth; taking the long way home from Nixon's Corner so I could listen to Kid A twice, or poring over the lurid covers of horror paperbacks in a newly discovered corner of Foyle Street library. How is my mother's passing even part of the same universe that gave me the simple pleasures of ice cream after swimming lessons in William Street baths, or scenting the sun cream on girls' skin as they daubed polish on their outstretched, nonchalant nails. My life wasn't over from that point on. I'd laugh and cry and scream about borrowed jumpers, school fights, bomb scares, playing Zelda, teenage bands, primary-school crushes and yet more ice cream after yet more swimming lessons. I'd just be doing it without her. To some extent, I'd be doing it without a memory of her. The most dramatic moment of my life wasn't scored by wailing sirens, weeping angels or sad little ukuleles, nimbly plucked on lonely hillsides. Mammy's death was mostly signalled by tea, sandwiches, and an odd little boy in corduroy trousers, announcing it with a smile across his face.

All that he could fish out from the sea of memory were a few fragments, and the farther back he went, the fewer there were. Had he really been to high school? Had he really attended primary school? Had he really had a first love? Some of the fragments bore clear scratches, reminding him that those things had indeed taken place. The details were vivid, but the feelings had vanished without a trace. The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers. Memory was a river that had run dry long ago, leaving only scattered gravel in a lifeless riverbed.