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.
I said to myself, Malala, you must be brave. You must not be afraid of anyone. You are only trying to get an education. You are not committing a crime.
Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.
I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.
What's wrong with our children? Adults telling children to be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children to not be violent while marketing and glorifying violence... I believe that adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.
To implant fear in the minds of children is a crime. If parents try to rule the child by fear, then fear rules the child.
The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.
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