Unless You Can Be In A Place

One Of The Great Failings Of Our Education System Is That We Tend To Focus On Those Who Are Succeeding In Exams, And There Are Plenty Of Them. But What We Should Also Be Looking At, And A Lot More Urgently, Is Those Who Fail.

Any Story That Gets Us Thinking, And Particularly Young People, Thinking Why? Whether It's As A Result Of Reading The Book, Or Coming Out Of The Theatre Or The Cinema, I Think We Should Just Simply Be Asking The Question 'why'? Why Did It Happen To Those People? Was It Necessary? And Anything That Gets Us Thinking Like That Is Really Important.

I Tell You, My Friends,’ He Said One Day. ‘i Tell You That I Am The Only Sane Man In The Regiment. It’s The Others That Are Mad, But They Don’t Know It. They Fight A War And They Don’t Know What For. Isn’t That Crazy? How Can One Man Kill Another And Not Really Know The Reason Why He Does It, Except That The Other Man Wears A Different Colour Uniform And Speaks A Different Language? And It’s Me They Call Mad!

Perhaps It Is Partly That We Need To Love Books Ourselves As Parents, Grandparents And Teachers In Order To Pass On That Passion For Stories To Our Children. It's Not About Testing And Reading Schemes, But About Loving Stories And Passing On That Passion To Our Children.

I Can Hate You More, But I'll Never Love You Less.