3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo Animals are sentient, intelligent, perceptive, funny and entertaining. We owe them a duty of care as we do to children.
3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.
3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo It is the child’s understanding that teaches the adults the way of the future. They’re still doing it today with modern technology.
3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don’t try to trip you up… they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do… if they’ve loved a story they love to know how it started.
3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo Everyone is interested in war, in that people don’t want it to happen. I’m much more interested in peace than in war but it’s important to understand why we fight.
3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo A lot of children, like I did, move away from words because of the fear – which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you’ll get, detention, worrying about letting people down, your parents, teachers.
3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the ‘pity of war’ as Wilfred Owen called it.
3 December 2020 Michael Morpurgo Don’t worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.
