In any small town sports are really important to the high school and I wasn't very good at sports.

Of course in our grade school in those days there were no organized sports at all. We just went out and ran around the school yard for recess.

It sounds like a cliche but it... you do sing about what you know about. And I grew up in a small town and I grew up in a place where your whole world revolved around friends family school and church and sports.

My parents couldn't handle my energy so they enrolled me in every sport the school was offering. I didn't resent it because I loved sports and picked them up easily.

Academe n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy n.: A modern school where football is taught.

And from a military school which taught me that to fit into society you can't just do anything you damn well please because it will suit you. And that it's much better to be with the winners than it is with the losers.

The conception that instead of this contemporary society is at or near a turning point is very prominent in the views of a school of social scientists who though they are still comparatively few are getting more and more of a hearing.

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

When I got out of acting school I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots ' and for society not me it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion and I was not.

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society particularly blacks it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime drugs the whole bit.

I want to help middle-school girls stay interested in math and be good at it and see it as friendly and accessible and not this scary thing. Everyone else in society tells them it's not for them. It's for nerdy white guys with pocket protectors.

Since my retirement I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.

I had a little insight into life that most kids probably didn't have. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a social worker. Through his eyes I saw the underside of society.

In junior high school I was an object of pure ridicule for my dress withdrawal and asocial manner. Dozens of times I saw individuals laugh and smile more in ten to fifteen minutes than I did in all my life up to then.

We must be willing to pay inspiring math and science teachers who have high paying alternatives in industry more to teach and reward students who take more challenging courses in high school.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.

Today over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math science technology and engineering yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.