Parenting & Family Quote by George Shearing

Shearing’s most pointed move here is how casually he drops a structural indictment into a plain autobiographical sentence. He’s not selling hardship, not angling for uplift. He’s laying out a childhood timetable the way a working musician might lay out a set list: ages, locations, the matter-of-fact logistics of training. That tone is the tell. The “I believe” isn’t uncertainty so much as a distancing device, a soft English hedge that lets him criticize the system without turning the memory into a speech.

The line about the “blind teacher” does quiet double duty. It signals a world where blind people taught blind children, a closed circuit of expertise and expectation. There’s dignity in it, but also a hint of confinement: the education isn’t integrated; it’s segregated and self-contained. Then comes the sharper edge: boarding school “was compulsory.” Not “I went,” but “I was in,” passive voice that mirrors how little agency a blind child was granted. The subtext is that the institution chose for him, and society treated separation as care.

Context matters: early-20th-century Britain had a paternalistic approach to disability, often equating protection with removal from ordinary life. Shearing would later become a globally mobile, modern jazz figure - someone defined by improvisation and freedom. That’s why the quote lands. It sketches the bureaucratic choreography he had to pass through before he could invent himself onstage, and it does it without sentimentality, letting the calmness expose how normalized compulsion once was.