Quotes from Michael Rosen

There's no one right way to teach poetry in schools.

Yes, it's possible to play computer games on your own and many do. But I also see children playing them in pairs and fours for hours on end and the air is full of talk and banter.

A visit to a bookshop will be a difficult one if you're looking for any picture book in print that is more than 50 years old.

I can't think of how many meetings I've sat through where people have explained that language has become less important because we now live in a visual age.

Books for children get into schools. Committed teachers use books like mine alongside films, non-fiction and fiction to help children investigate and understand the Holocaust, persecution and genocide.

The main problem with people not reading to their children is the lack of a bridge between schools and families, so that children don't see books and learning as a separate part of life.

My own view is that the arts are neither superior nor inferior to anything else that goes on in schools.

Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.

Living with a dog is one way to retain something of a child's spirit.

I understand that more and more children under the age of 10 go to bed without having something read to them or reading something themselves. Instead, there are more and more TVs in children's bedrooms and they are going to sleep watching TV.

The wave of feeling that can overcome an adult when he or she opens a book that was read to them by a loved parent or teacher can be quite stunning.

Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world.

When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it's about, how it works, how it's constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry's method, poetry's way of looking at things.

You pass a poem to the audience through the words as embodied literally by the rest of your human form. And the people listening and watching come back at you in an equally embodied way.

Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed - and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

If we are serious about enabling those who want to acquire what we have called standard English then first we should be honest about change and its lack of encoded rules. Then, together with them, we should look closely at how such people's speech and writing diverges from the kind of English that they would like to acquire.

My parents bookshelves were full of books that belonged to their lives in the Communist party.

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

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.

Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through 'synthetic phonics' and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sounds tough and purposeful.

The arts investigate the properties of the world by playing with materials - such as stone, paint, fabric, synthetic substances, the human body, the human voice and of course language.

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.