If they're out of high school, and they can go directly to the NBA and get drafted and get millions of dollars, I'm for it 100 percent. Just let's not devalue education. Let's just not devalue it.
Healthy children are more likely to attend school and are better able to learn. Healthy workers are more productive. More productive economies mean greater stability in developing countries and improved security in the West.
Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.
Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
When I was young, my family used to go and stay in hotels on the south coast in places like Devon. I loved those holidays because they were with my brothers, who were away at school; I really looked forward to them.
I didn't do plays at school, because I didn't have the confidence. At 14, I was at boarding school in Devon and I suffered from dyslexia quite badly, but they had a very good department there which specialised in it.
Finding great training, I think, is number one. I did a lot of research and found really great teachers, and it just takes - I took a year off from school and did independent studies so that I could devote all of my time to it. But I think that training is the key, definitely, and it's not a sport.
When I was younger, I used to play mind games in which I'd try to finish tasks in minutes. My favorite was when I would shower, lay out my school clothes, then devour my dinner - in 15 minutes flat.
I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.
My acting career began when I walked into a drama school class run by Anna Scher in Islington. Anna discovered a lot of people: Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke, Gary and Martin Kemp, and Dexter Fletcher were among my contemporaries.
My doctor said, 'If you can weigh what you weighed in high school, you'll essentially be healthy and not have Type 2 diabetes.' Well, I'm gonna have Type 2 diabetes, because there is no way I can weigh as much as I did in high school.
Whenever you say you're a physicist, there's a certain fraction of people who immediately go, 'Oh, I hated physics in high school.' That's because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams.
The contribution of West African languages to Ebonics is absolutely infinitesimal. What it actually is is a very interesting hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that slaves in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects that we often learn about in school.
If I'm going to be honest with you, when I trained at school, I feel like I was training to be a chameleon. I want to be that versatile actor who can do anything - that's why you learn fifty different dialects, you do Shakespeare, you do commedia, you do it all so that if any job comes your way, you should be able to do it.
When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
I wanted to sail when I was in grammar school and well remember memorizing the names of the sails from the Merriam-Webster's ponderous dictionary in the library. Now I am actually at sea - as a passenger, of course, but at sea nevertheless - and bound for Ecuador.
My favorite afternoon snack as a child in San Diego was a still-steaming flour tortilla purchased at the taqueria down the street from my school, and I've yearned for them ever since I moved away.
My favorite musical? I don't. It changes all the time. I'm just a diehard, I'm totally old school, like I'll sit and watch, if they are re-doing Oklahoma in New York, I will be the first one there.
The people I passed every morning as I walked up the school's steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was my teacher, who couldn't have been more different from them. She was one of the most loving people I had ever known.
