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Gavin Edwards

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“Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.”

“Our discussion has been about education and not about schools, for schooling is only a means, and not always an absolute necessary one, toward education. Parents had the duty of educating their children long before there were any schools, and the duty would remain were all schools abolished. Even today, if the parents have the ability and the leisure to give adequate instruction to their children at home, they have no moral obligation to send them to school at all. (p. 436)”

“The state has not the right to monopolize education. Education is a legitimate form of private enterprise, subject indeed to a certain amount of government regulation, but there is notrhing in its nature that makes it a public or private monopoly. The reason is that the primary right to educate their children belongs to the parents. In understanding the work of education, the state is simply supplying the parents with facilities to fulfill their duty. If the parents have other facilities at their command, they have no obligation to use those the state provides. (p. 437)”

“Leading and improving! teaching and tutoring! bearing and forbearing! Pah! my husband is not to be my baby. I am not to set him his daily lesson and see that he learns it, and give him a sugar-plum if he is good, and a patient, pensive, pathetic lecture if he is bad. But it is like a tutor to talk of the "satisfaction of teaching." I suppose you think it the finest employment in the world. I don't. I reject it. Improving a husband! No. I shall insist upon my husband improving me, or else we part.”

“So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn’t touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder—the famed double helix.”