Just as important as our society as a whole are our small communities: our neighborhoods, workplaces and schools.

If black people use their resources properly, they can become as competitive as any group in society - take control of our neighborhoods, our businesses, our schools, including our teachers. The only thing keeping black people from doing it is this idiotic idea about integration, about being racially balanced.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

Schools ought to teach students to challenge secular ideologies masquerading as science in the classroom.

Many of the mainstream agricultural scientists, especially at the agricultural schools, but at all of our major universities, are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.

So many schools are getting rid of music programs and it's really sad because I know that when I started singing and stuff it was something that I always wanted to do and I never believed in myself to be able to do it.

It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice, let us resolve to choose wisely.

And I think that we in America need to understand that many schools need improvement, and particularly with respect to how they're serving minority children.

As Americans, we're not sure we share values. We're sometimes even afraid to use the word 'values.' We talk about teaching ethics in schools - people say, 'What ethics? Whose ethics? Maybe we can't.' And they confuse that with teaching of religion.

Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students, but exempt them from studying religion. Obama's school documents, though, wrongly list him as being Indonesian.

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

There is so much that is positive, wonderful even, about state schools. At a state school your kids will learn to live alongside and appreciate other kids from many diverse and different cultures.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

My friends wonder how I have the patience to engage with people on Twitter about topics such as diversity and why black British history should be taught in schools: surely it's exhausting? And they're right.

Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

The public schools in our neighborhood were so bad that the teachers in the school said you shouldn't send your kids here. My mother called around and found a school that was willing to give both me and my brother scholarship money. It's a classic story about black parents wanting more for their kids than they had for themselves.

I don't believe the most successful people are the ones who got the best grades, got into the best schools, or made the most money.

I was accepted to multiple fashion schools. But I had two kids when I was a teenager. My kids' mom already had two kids when she was still in high school. So I had to be in the streets early. Instead of going to fashion school, I took the street route.

When I was 12, I was living in Iowa, and I emailed so many wrestling schools, and one of them was actually in Boston. I joined it at 18 - the New England Pro Wrestling Academy. They were doing a fantasy camp. I was 17 about to turn 18. I told my mom, 'I'm 18 now. I just signed these papers by myself, and I'm going to do this.'

This is why we have a chief medical officer: to set a norm in society, make judgments on behalf of society, so that individual schools or individual parents don't have to decide.

I wish every international or national corporate would be given a rule to set up companies in rural areas, where they would have to provide hospitals, schools, low-cost housing and free medical care, training, and then employment - but not on agricultural land.

Hunger, inadequate medical care, poor housing, and inferior schools are enemies of the sense of wonder. It is easier and less expensive in the long run to prevent a loss of imagination by providing adequate nutrition, housing, medical care, and schooling than it is to try to restore that loss.