George Ignatieff - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Ignatieff was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, the youngest of five sons, to a distinguished Russian family. His mother was Princess Natalia Nikolayevna Meshcherskaya and his father was Count Paul Ignatieff, a close advisor to Tsar Nicholas II serving as his last Minister of Education. In 1918, the year after the Russian Revolution, Count Ignatieff was imprisoned, but his release was negotiated by sympathetic supporters. The family fled to France, and later moved to Canada. George Ignatieff was educated at St Paul's School, London, Lower Canada College (having first been rejected by Selwyn House School), and the University of Trinity College, University of Toronto, before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford.

Read more about this topic:  George Ignatieff

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!”
    David Elkind (20th century)

    John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    There are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters, which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land. Compare this earnest wisdom with that of Poor Richard.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)