Early Life and Education
Geoffrey Hewings was born in Wales into a family where successive generations had worked in the coal mines near Cwmbran. He grew up in post-war London, attending high school there and spending several weeks each summer with his grandparents in Wales. His passion for football (soccer) was such that he became the youngest qualified referee in England at the age of 16. He also spent vacation time in Scotland, working as a grouse beater (although often directing the birds away from the folks who were there to shoot them) and helping in the preservation of the endangered osprey. His parents and sisters emigrated to Canada in 1958, but he remained behind to in London to finish high school. Before going to university, he took a year off, working in a bookstore in Fleet Street and spending almost all that he earned attending symphony concerts and opera two to three times each week. After graduating from the University of Birmingham, he moved to Seattle to attend the University of Washington where he obtained his MA and PhD. While there, he also worked as an announcer and Seattle Symphony reviewer on KRAB-FM, a community-owned radio station. For the last three years in Seattle, he commuted from Bainbridge Island to the campus by ferry on an ancient Vespa motorcycle.
In 1968, Geoffrey taught summer school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he first met Adrianna; they were married in 1970 in England during an 18-month tenure at the University of Kent in Canterbury. In 1971, they emigrated to Canada where Geoffrey taught at the University of Toronto; in 1974, Adrianna and Geoffrey adopted her children, John, Matthew and Aaron and later that year moved to Urbana where he was appointed to the University of Illinois.
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Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Today we seek a moral basis for peace.... It cannot be a lasting peace if the fruit of it is oppression, or starvation, cruelty, or human life dominated by armed camps. It cannot be a sound peace if small nations must live in fear of powerful neighbors. It cannot be a moral peace if freedom from invasion is sold for tribute.”
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“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
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