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.
They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
To use books rightly, is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
We grow up thinking that the best answer is in someone else's brain. Much of our education is an elaborate game of 'guess what's in the teacher's head?' What the world really needs to know right now is what kind of dreams and ideas are in your head.
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.
I've learned that education, experience, and memories are three things that no one can take away from you.
Those 62 million girls who are not being educated around the world impact my life in Washington, D.C., in the United States of America. Because if we aren't empowering and providing the skills and the resources to half of our population, then we're not realizing our full potential as a society, as mankind.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.