I was a union member in my youth as well and I went on strike, and I don't think it solved anything. It only made the situation worse for everyone involved.

I'm a decentralizer. I believe in trusting professionals.

Children themselves know they are being cheated. Ultimately we owe it to our children. They are in school for 190 days a year. Every moment they spend learning is precious. If a year goes by and they are not being stretched and excited, that blights their life.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

I was born in Norway, and when I was little I went to live in Detroit, Michigan. My father was a professor of philosophy at Wayne University, and my mother was also a teacher.

I was never an A student. I never really liked going to school like many of my friends. There were just too many students and too competitive. We were sort of forced into studying to go to college. It was like if we didn't go to college, society looked at us as failures. We didn't know what to do with the situation.

After I finished my degree in India in 1980, I came to the U.S. to get a master's, and I was teaching quantum physics to freshmen. As I got my bearings as to what goes on in labs, I understood that to teach, you have to learn.

Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.