Michael Rosen Quotes

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Michael Rosen

Profession : Author

Birth : May 7, 1946

A society based on a market economy which decided that people should only be allowed to take up senior positions in business, administration and the professions purely on merit would have to abolish the main mechanisms for taking up the top positions in society: inherited wealth, tax havens and private education.

Michael Rosen

I think grammar teaching should start with real examples of language in use: journalism, fiction, songs, ads, instructions, headlines, transcripts of conversations and so on.

Michael Rosen

In the mid-1970s I worked at Vauxhall Manor school, a girls comprehensive in south London.

Michael Rosen

The sentimentalist in me loves it when the important things we say and do can be tied to buildings and landscape.

Michael Rosen

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.

Michael Rosen

One of the many falsities of fiction that we accept quite happily is the non-ageing of characters as they appear across series and sequels.

Michael Rosen

If you want to discover how to make children laugh - and I truly believe all adults should, because children need laughter - the best place to start is with your own childhood.

Michael Rosen

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.

Michael Rosen

Any encounter, any situation in which there was a confrontation between us as children and our own parents, or teachers, when we did something daft, can arouse amazement and delight in our children. Theres something wonderful about knowing that our own parents were fallible.

Michael Rosen

A Christmas Carol' is one of a few literary works that can be cited as a common cultural reference point, so its a text people imagine theyve read without having done so.

Michael Rosen

If you find yourself caring about old stories and regret the ways in which they slip out of reach of young audiences, you may well conjure up the means to put these tales into young peoples imaginations.

Michael Rosen

When territories were settled or invaded by force, the colonisers frequently used names of European monarchs, leaders and the military as part of their settlement. The number of Victorias all over the world are one testimony to that.

Michael Rosen

When it comes to the UK, our problem is that weve never decolonised.

Michael Rosen

The world is becoming increasingly changeable and unpredictable, so why should education make the knowledge being passed on so finite and certain; why divide all of it into measurable units?

Michael Rosen

There should be room in education for schooling to be more responsive to events, more focused on varying interpretations and more able to create artistic and technological responses to the world as it changes.

Michael Rosen

Its social: in doing the arts we find out what we need from each other. But its also about survival - surviving as individuals, as groups, but also as the human race.

Michael Rosen

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.

Michael Rosen

One of the reasons we invented continuous prose was to lay out an argument, piling points on top of each other, weighing one view against another, even to invite the reader to look back at something earlier or later in a book.

Michael Rosen

The way we speak is very different from the way we write - especially from the way we write continuous prose.

Michael Rosen