I’ve got a very deep and abiding passion about education being far more than buildings and textbooks it’s what children bring into school with them.

Lamont’s remark argues against reducing “education” to its material infrastructure—school buildings, resources, and prescribed texts. Instead, it emphasizes the formative role of what pupils themselves carry into the classroom: prior knowledge, language, family circumstances, culture, motivation, trauma, aspirations, and social supports. The quote implies that educational outcomes depend as much on these lived realities—and how schools recognize and respond to them—as on formal curricula. It also gestures toward a more holistic, child-centered view of schooling in which relationships, wellbeing, and inclusion are central, and where policy should attend to inequality outside school as a determinant of what happens inside it.