Fiona Hill

No, I don't think I want to be a vet.

So I cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education, but the whole sense was you had to apply your education.

It wasn't an education for education's sake.

It was an education to do something.

And when I was about 14 or 15, my local member of parliament came to the school.

And it was one of these, you know, pep talks for kids in these, you know, deprived areas.

He had been quite prominent in local education.

And now he was a member of parliament.

He himself had come from a really hardscrabble background and had risen up through education.

He'd even gone to Oxford and done

philosophy, politics, and economics.

And he basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really going to get ahead and go to elite institutions, look, you can get an education.

You don't have to be held back by your circumstances.

But if you do get an education, it's a privilege and you need to do something with it.

So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do?

Okay, an education is a qualification.

It's to do something.

Most people around me I knew didn't have careers.

I mean, my dad didn't really have a career.

He had jobs.