When I went to my local grammar school, Lurgan College, girls were not encouraged to study science. My parents hit the roof and, along with other parents, demanded a curriculum change.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the importance of advocating for equal educational opportunities in science for all students, regardless of gender.
In this quote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discusses her experience at Lurgan College, where girls were discouraged from studying science. She highlights how her parents, along with other concerned parents, actively sought to change this unjust curriculum, emphasizing the crucial role of advocacy in challenging gender biases in education and ensuring equal access to opportunities for young girls in the field of science.
In practice
During a school assembly to inspire young girls in STEM, this quote can emphasize the need for educational reform.
There's some evidence that if you're recruiting, you tend to recruit a mini-me. Then you have a very comfortable group round a table. You all think alike. You agree. People are arguing that the banking crisis was because too many of the relevant bodies were thinkalikes, and that if they'd had more diversity, maybe it wouldn't have happened.
The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.
A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.
If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
Arguably, my student status and perhaps my gender were also my downfall with respect to the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Professor Antony Hewish and Professor Martin Ryle. At the time, science was still perceived as being carried out by distinguished men.
My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn't expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing - which is interesting but uncomfortable.
In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.
I decided to teach because I think that any person who studies philosophy has to be involved actively.
What do we older folks live for if not for the care of the young, to teach and train them?
To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.
Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.
I loved school, maybe too much, really. I was summa cum laude in high school. I was driven that way.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.