Michael Rosen

Author

1946-05-07

Quotes by Michael Rosen

• Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.

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• Academies can also flog off land and buildings, if the much weakened local authorities agree. Serious money can be made, management salaries are high, and hidden in all this is the long-term public subsidy in such sites.

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• Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through 'synthetic phonics' and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sounds tough and purposeful.

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• The invention of council housing originally offered the poor a way of knowing they were valuable. You had security of tenure.

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• I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

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• As I began to perform - songs, poems, sketches or conjuring tricks - I began to learn what children run with and what they dont. I discovered that, quite often, an element of surprise or absurdity might be the key to unlocking laughter.

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• Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often.

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• People always imagine that the whole of Victorian England was sitting around reading Alice in Wonderland - in fact only a tiny minority ever did.

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• In his 70s, when I was in my 40s, my father still read me the stories he wrote about his childhood. His intonation, his pronunciation of Yiddish, our cackling at his jokes live on.

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• I was the youngest, and there was my mother, my father and my brother. They each had their own way of turning anything, from washing up an eggcup to a chase across the North York Moors to catch up with a train, into a comic account.

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