Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the challenging environment of a 15th-century English boarding school, emphasizing both physical trials and intellectual rigor.
Pico Iyer describes the harsh yet formative experiences of boys in a 15th-century boarding school, highlighting the physical endurance required through activities like the steeplechase, as well as the intellectual challenges presented by studying dead languages. This duality of hardship and scholarly pursuit illustrates the toughening nature of education during that time, shaping character and resilience in young boys.
In practice
This quote is perfect for discussing the rigorous nature of traditional education in a history class.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition.
My dream is to see every girl educated, in every country.
Education is a beautiful, liberating thing, but I think that tying in education and status, and the need to do well at every cost, is toxic.
What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point.
I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.
Real education enhances the dignity of a human being and increases his or her self-respect. If only the real sense of education could be realized by each individual and carried forward in every field of human activity, the world will be so much a better place to live in.
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