I almost completely agree with Alice Bachini, about this:
The father of a persistent truant has said he would rather go to prison than force his bullied child to attend school.Gary Standford is facing prosecution by his local education authority over 15-year-old Darren's failure to attend Tunbridge Wells High School in Kent. But he claims that forcing his son to go to the school would be the equivalent of child abuse, as he is being hounded by a gang of bullies.
"Putting him into a new school or college would solve everything but putting me in to prison – well all that would mean is there will be no one to look after my child," he said. Mr Standford, who lives in Tunbridge Wells, is due in court soon unless the matter can be resolved.
Alice says that, on the face of it, this is unbelievable, which is the only bit in her posting about this that I don't fully agree with.
But:
A spokesman for Kent County Council said taking parents to court was always a last resort. "The education welfare officers have been in contact with the family over a number of months and bullying has not been mentioned as a factor before. No-one wants this to happen but it seems to have been the only way."
In other words, if Kent County Council are to be believed, Dad could have just made it up to excuse his dereliction of duty.
Personally, I don't think that a child not attending a school should require an explanation, any more than me walking out of HMV Oxford Street the other day without having bought any classical CDs – which, this time really unbelievably, did actually happen – requires me to explain myself to HMV. (Or to put it another way: in education as with most other things - such as transport - number 37.)
Nevertheless, the rules being the rules they now are, Dad has accused Kent Council of wanting to abuse children, and Kent Council are calling him a liar.
Or, the Telegraph has made it up, which should not be discounted, as anyone who has ever had direct dealings with a newspaper-reported event will almost certainly know.
Sounds like there'll be more to hear of this story. The Council certainly seem to have raised the stakes.
One of the great education miracles in the world is happening in India. From the New York Times:
MANUA, India – In this democracy of more than one billion people, an educational revolution is under way, its telltale signs the small children everywhere in uniforms and ties. From slums to villages, the march to private education, once reserved for the elite, is on.On the four-mile stretch of road between this village in Bihar State, in the north, and the district capital, Hajipur, there are 17 private schools (called here "public" schools).
They range from the Moonlight Public School where, for 40 rupees a month, less than a dollar, 200 children learn in one long room that looks like an educational sweatshop, to the DAV School, which sits backed up to a banana grove and charges up to 150 rupees a month, or more than $3. Eleven months after opening, it already has 600 students from 27 villages.
There are at least 100 more private schools in Hajipur, a city of 300,000; hundreds more in Patna, the state capital; and tens of thousands more across India.
The schools, founded by former teachers, landowners, entrepreneurs and others, and often of uneven quality, have capitalized on parental dismay over the even poorer quality of government schools. Parents say private education, particularly when English is the language of instruction, is their children's only hope for upward mobility.
Such hopes reflect a larger social change in India: a new certainty among many poor parents that if they provide the right education, neither caste nor class will be a barrier to their children's rise.
The writer of the story, Amy Waldman, seems torn between various different axioms, two in particular: whatever poor people in India do must be okay; and: private education bad. How to square that circle?
What's driving this private sector surge is in general, the ghastliness of Indian government schools, and in particular the refusal of government schools to teach in English, which is giving the private schools their sales hook. We teach in English!
Two further paragraphs caught my eye:
If anything should be free, it is primary education," said Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. No developed country, whether France or Japan, had educated itself using private schools, he noted.
Apart from the small matter of Britain, the first developed country of them all, which was deep into its development by the time state education got seriously dug in. The implication, that development somehow depends on state provided primary education is just plain wrong.
And second, immediately after that, comes this:
A recent census in the slums of Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, found that of 1,000 schools identified, two-thirds were private, according to James Tooley, a professor at the University of Newcastle in England who oversaw the research.
Ah yes, that man Tooley again.
Finally, I note that in India they are calling private schools "public" schools. Ha!
I've been reading the autobiography of Yehudi Menuhin, and I promised yesterday that I'd be reporting on how violinist Louis Persinger taught Menuhin. But this came first. Hephzibah and Yaltah are Menuhin's sisters.
I went to school for precisely one day, at the age of five, by which time I could read quite well and write and calculate a little. Tremendous discussions preceded the experiment, whose brevity suggests that my parents thankfully accepted the first token of its unwisdom to return to their basic convictions. My one morning was not unhappy but bewildered. Very quietly I sat in the class, the teacher stood at the front and said incomprehensible things for. a long time, and my attention eventually wandered to the window, through which I could see a tree. The tree was the only detail I remembered clearly enough to report at home that afternoon, and that was the end of my schooling. Some time afterwards Hephzibah attended this same school for a whole five days, at the end of which the superintendent asked for a private interview with my parents to tell them their daughter was backward; whereupon Hephzibah too was whisked home and within the year fluently read and wrote. After two failures, a third experiment for Yaltah was never even thought of.So we were educated at home. What did we lose thereby? Most obviously we lost acquaintance with other children. By the time I was ten I was used to adults taking me seriously but was only on tentative speaking terms with boys and girls of my own age. The academic gains and losses of the system are harder to weigh. If we didn't take mathematics beyond the beginnings of algebra and geometry, nor even study physics or chemistry, nor learn Latin and Greek, I believe that the languages and literature we did concentrate on were taken beyond the levels offered by most schools. I was thirteen and my sisters nine and seven when a holiday at Ospedaletti was celebrated by daily readings from The Divine Comedy in the original.
They all turned out okay. Mind you, their parents were remarkable people.
I've been reading the autobiography of the late Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Journey. He was not only was he a great musician and a most intriguing human being, but he also wrote beautifully, it would seem.
The education of someone like the young Menuhin was bound to be interesting, and so it proved.
The first thing to be said is that almost from the word go, Menuhin himself was determined to become a violinist. He wasn't pushed into it, still less forced into it, by ambitious parents, although once he had embarked on his course his father and mother ("Aba" and "Imma") backed him to the hilt. No, what happened was that Menuhin saw and heard a violinist in a circus, by the name of Carichiarto. And he saw and heard the "concert master" (that's what they call the leader over there) of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a man named Louis Persinger.
The finger I pointed at Louis Persinger could base its choice on four years that had given me what as many years of college rarely give the graduate: a sense of vocation. …
And like the teacher he himself was later to become, Menuhin immediately starts to speculate and generalise:
… Is this particular sense native to childhood itself? I wonder. Have the fortunate simply rescued from an otherwise lost age of innocence the conviction of unlimited possibility, the instinct for real worth, which make it easier for children to identify with great soloists or simple souls with able middlemen? Certainly, looking at children from an adult perspective, I have long believe that the grown-up world consistently underrates the young, finding marvels in ambition and achievement where none exists. …
Older children have no "vocation" not because they never had one, but because they lose touch with it, is what I suppose that to mean.
… At the age of four I was far too young to know that the violin would exact a price commensurate with the grace conferred – the grace of flying, of occupying an absolute vantage point, of enjoying such dominion over nerve, bone and muscle as could render the body an ecstatic absentee. But I did know, instinctively, that to play was to be.Quite simply I wanted to be Persinger, …
Whatever the vocations of others, Menuhin himself was firmly set on his course. Louis Persinger was asked if he would take the young Menuhin as a pupil, but he declined, so instead Menuhin was entrusted to the instructive attentions of …
… the local Svengali, Sigmund Anker, who, with the techniques of a drill-seargeant, transformed boys and girls into virtuosi by the batch.
There then follows a fascinating description of what Menuhin learned, not from Anker exactly, but as a result of the way Anker taught, combined as it was with Menuhin's determination to make sense of it all.
Anker's business in life was to groom the young to brilliant performance of Sarasate and Tchaikovsky, and as far as I can gather from dim memories of those distant days, he had neither capacity nor ambition for anything more subtle. He knew nothing of style, the classics, chamber music; more fundamentally, he knew nothing of the process of violin playing, or if he did, lacked the skill to pass his knowledge on. Not that he was alone in his darkness, for violin teaching was altogether a hit-and-miss activity then, as indeed it still too largely is. Anker's method was to set up a target – correct intonation, full round tone, or whatever – and whip his pupils towards it by unexplained command. The result was that one taught or failed to teach oneself, as one had earlier learned to walk and talk mainly by self-instruction; but violin playing being more complex than such inbuilt human skills, an illumination beyond what one's own nerves and muscles could supply would have been gratefully received.At the outset merely holding the violin, at arm's length, very tightly, lest it fall (or recoil), seemed problem enough; where did one find a second pair of arms to play it? I was invited to fly; I answered by hanging on for dear life. Where the left hand, in the 'golden mean' position, should form spirals round the neck of the instrument (as the right hand does around the bow), mine pinioned it between thumb and the base of my first finger. Where the digits should arch softly over the fingerboard, each muscularly independent of the others, mine – all but the smallest, which drooped behind – cleaved to one another like three parade ponies, moving en masse from one positional rung to another up the chromatic ladder as if they found safety in numbers. Where the violin should lie on the collarbone, secured there by the head's natural but delicate weight, I clamped it tight. Where the right hand (and by extension the wrist, elbow, arm, scapula) and the bow function rather as the wheel and axis of a gyroscope, the former rotating in order to keep the latter on a true course, I sawed a straight line and, on every downstroke, swerved or 'turned the corner' (to make matters worse, the bow was too long for me). At crucial points where sound should have vibrated freely, it was hopelessly grounded. These abominations were so many symptoms of my ignorance of the violin's nature, an ignorance which clearly was not going to be corrected by the explanations of a third party, but only by personal exploration. The gyres, the pendular swings, the waves required by an instrument that itself forms one continuous curve, I had to teach myself, and could do so the more easily perhaps for inhabiting my own absolute space, for lacking the linear perspective that relates people to one another, for feeling in circles.
After six months I had made remarkably little progress. Mr Anker would bode the worst, having expected the best, Imma would report his diminishing hopes, Aba would fall silent, and I felt like a terminal case bandied by future pallbearers. …
But then, the miracle …
… Then, for no reason I could explain, the violin began to lose its foreignness, my grip relaxed, my body discovered the freedom to forget itself, and I could enjoy what I was doing. I was at last launched. At this distance what I recall most clearly is my conquest of vibrato. To teach vibrato, Anker would shout, 'Vibrate! Vibrate!' with never a clue given as to how to do it. Indeed I would have obeyed him if I could. I longed to achieve vibrato, for what use was a violin to a little boy of Russian-Jewish background who could not bring a note to throbbing life? As with my struggle to roll an r, the problem was not to imagine the sound so much as to produce it; but vibrato proved a more elusive skill. I had already left Anker's tutelage and was perhaps six or seven years old when, lo and behold, one bright day my muscles had solved the puzzle. By such strokes of illumination, the solution proving so mysterious as the problem and leaving one almost as blind as before, most violinists learned their craft.
For Anker's combination of extreme dirigisme and extreme laissez-faire, Menuhin, perhaps without intending to, communicates gratitude. Was it so terrible to be told, as a budding violinist, that what mattered was "intonation!", or "tone!", or "vibrate!", or whatever was the word of the day, in unadorned commands? Would it have really improved matters if Anker had supervised the details of Menuhin's learning process, instead of merely announcing the required destination with one mysterious bellowed order? Would it really have made Menuhin a better musician if a man like Anker had been poking about in Menuhin's young mind when that mind was at its most responsive but yet also most vulnerable? Surely the best person to contrive the demanded outcomes was Menuhin himself. At any rate, that is what seems to have happened, although Menuhin adds parenthetically:
(The quest to perfect vibrato was to last for many years yet. Even when I was regularly performing in public as a boy, my vibrato was never very fast, and it wasn't until, as an adult, I undertook to unpick the mechanics of the operation and put them together again that I really began to satisfy myself.)
Once he had mastered the technical foundations of his chosen instrument – of his vocation, that is to say – Menuhin was again presented to Louis Persinger, and this time Louis Persinger said yes.
It's a fascinating story, which traditionalists and progressives would no doubt both regard as proof positive of their own wisdom and of the folly of their adversaries, that is, if such people as "traditionalists" and "progressives" actually exist, which I choose to doubt. To read descriptions of the Progressive/Traditional divide in educational theory is, I am increasingly coming to believe, to learn about two straw men locked in mythical battle, but in a battle that has decidedly little to do with real teaching. The reality of teaching, and of learning, is that traditional methods and discovery methods interact with extraordinary subtlety.
Anker told Menuhin what he wanted, but he left Menuhin himself to work out how to contrive it. To switch metaphors, Anker constructed a wooden frame, but left the plant Menuhin to grow upon it, telling him nothing. That Menuhin had to do for himself.
Meanwhile, I, the market choice in education freak, also regard it as a story about how right I am. For I regard the market choice mechanism – with parents deciding whatever they must and children deciding (as Menuhin decided in the first place to be a violinist) whatever they can, and, crucially, teachers only joining in if they agree to do so – as the framework within which Menuhin, Anker, Aba, Imma and Persinger, could all make their distinctive educational contributions to the glorious educational outcome (Menuhin himself).
Consider. Menuhin goes to a circus (prog choice) and to a classical concert (trad choice) and decides for himself (prog choice) to be a violinist. His parents ask Persinger (choice), but Persinger says no (choice again). The parents make do with Anker instead, who agrees (choice). Anker yells commands like a Prussian drill-seargeant (the distilled essence of "straw man" trad), yet Menuhin must himself discover (prog) how to get the results demanded, and does so discover. Anker having served his purpose, he is dismissed (choice again). Persinger notes the improvement and now says yes (more choice). It all worked out splendidly, I say.
That's more than enough for now. In due course, I hope to be telling you about Persinger's teaching methods. And when I get to the end of the book, I will also be learning about Menuhin's own teaching methods.
I don't know how much attention this story will get in the USA, but it certainly got mine:
Fourteen-year-old Lauren Lee recently got some great news in a progress report sent home from Sherwood High School in Montgomery County. The freshman got an "A" in a tough honors-level geometry course.Not bad, thought Lauren's mother, Lauren Asbury, especially considering that her daughter never attended the school.
"She doesn't go to Sherwood," explained Mrs. Asbury. "She goes to Good Counsel High School."
Lauren, who lives in Olney, has never attended Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring, but that hasn't stopped teachers she's never met from giving her high marks.
Two of the four teachers at Sherwood whose classes Lauren never attended gave her A's anyway, according to the Sept. 26 progress report school officials recently mailed home.
The mother is worried that truant officers will come calling. But what this story is really about is how increasingly, the people judging how well teachers are doing these days are themselves. School "reform" often now means London, or in this case maybe Washington, or perhaps the state capital, sending you a form which can be summarised as asking: How well are you doing? Answer: I'm doing great! Smiles all round. But what if, as here, and as in a lot of other places, the answer is a lie?
This is why I have a category called "Sovietisation", because this was how the economy of the old USSR also used to do so well. That too was an "I'm doing great!" set-up, until suddenly it very obviously wasn't.
I've always thought that that One Child policy in China was a bomb waiting to explode. All this only child objects of parental worship, and at the end of it, a fight to the death to get a girl friend. (Their potential girl friends tended to die in infancy.) How's that going to play out?
John Clare has an article in today's Telegraph about education in China which fills in some of the details. He's been there and seen a little of it, and is achingly envious of the eerily good behaviour of the Chinese children.
Deep calls to deep. The ancient Chinese authoritarian foundations upon which communism was first built, and back to which it is crumbling, reach out across teh continents to the Telegraph educational agony uncle.
Two things struck me. One was that state education, though compulsory from six to 15, is only partially subsidised: parents and sponsors commonly meet about 35 per cent of the cost. In the case of WenHui Middle School, the government provided the land and the buildings, but the school pays for everything else.Second, I was in Beijing when Tony Blair's monthly press conference was broadcast live on CNN. His first words were: "The main issues for our society are disrespect and anti-social behaviour. The community has to be re-built around deeply rooted values."
Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from the People's Republic of China?
One thing the Chinese are apparently all learning about us, though, is: our language. That also will surely have interesting consequences.
This from today's Guardian:
Master spy Sir Richard Dearlove will become the master of Cambridge University's Pembroke College following his retirement next summer as chief of MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service.
No no no. They never retire. He's just shifted to the recruiting department.
The college said that Sir Richard will take up his new role in October next year. Pembroke is the third oldest college in Cambridge, founded in 1347 by the Countess of Pembroke, Marie de St Pol, who gave the nucleus of its present site and an endowment.
Countess of Pembroke, eh? Before she married the Count, she was Miss Moneypenny.
Incoming.
Hi Brian,I thought I'd email to say thank you for the good write up that you gave to the Australian Museum fish site in your "Educate yourself about fish" entry.
I regularly put up images and factsheets on all sorts of strange fishes that your users might be interested in. Today for example I've added a factsheet on another deepsea fish, the bizarre Fangtooth. As it's name implies it has an impressive set of teeth!
www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/acornuta.htm
Cheers,
Mark
Cheers.
I can't claim to have had a very busy day, but I have had what was by my standards a slightly nerve-racking day. This was because I have just been on the radio, talking about something I am not confident about because it is such a complicated subject, namely the government's plans to introduce, slowly but surely, a national compulsory Identity Card scheme. I didn't know how long this little performance would take, or how well, badly or dreadfully I would do, so I spent the day fretting. Now it's done. It lasted only a tiny few minutes, so I had no time to dig myself into a very deep hole or be humiliated by some pro ID card fanatic. Nevertheless, the end result of my worryings and wafflings is that is now nearly eleven in the evening and I still owe the universe a posting on my Education Blog.
Allow me then to inflict a ramble upon you, in the form of a further reflection on just what a superb method of self-education blogging is. Anything more profound would almost certainly take me past midnight, and there have been too many take-a-look-at-this just-goes-to-show-don't-it postings of late. They don't take long, but nor do they add much. A day that includes one or two of these is fine. A day with just one of these and nothing else is not one I'm very proud of.
So, off we go.
During the year or two before I got started as a blogger, I felt that I was ceasing to make much in the way of intellectual progress. To be blunt about it, I had stopped learning. I'll spare you the details, but I've written about this experience here.
Blogging has changed all that. The comments on this blog are not numerous, but they make an impact on me, especially if they are critical, and whether I reply or not. Only today, I received a quite long email complaining about something I had put here a month or so ago, and I emailed back with an acknowledgement of error, together with a partial defence of other things I'd said. As most of us know, error and learning are things which are intimately related to each other. Through the simple discipline of having to bend my mind to matters educational at least once every day, I have learned an enormous amount about matters educational, and am confident that I will learn lots more as the years roll by.
I am not vain enough to imagine that more than a tiny handful of decidedly eccentric people ever trawl their way through the archives here, but it will not surprise you to learn that one of these eccentric people is me. Mostly I am relieved by the experience, for I usually agree with myself. But more to the point, I learn things. To be exact, I have things reinforced for me. Just reading something is one thing. Having to stir it up inside one's head and organise one's thoughts and write them down is an order of magnitude more educational. Reading it back a month later piles on yet more education.
Learning doesn't just mean piling up facts. It means organising them into coherent patterns, spotting their interconnections, and also spotting contradictions and confusions, and reformulating the original truths in such a way that they remain true, but do less to contradict other truths which are also true.
Of all the blogs I write for, the one which has done most to bring all this home to me in recent weeks has been this one, for which I have been writing about the Rugby World Cup. This experience has given me an entirely new respect for what real sports correspondents must endure and for what they achieve. Simply, I have learned far, far more about the game of rugby by writing about it than I would ever have learned about rugby merely by watching it. Writing about it meant making judgements, and then not being able to deny to myself (never mind to anyone else) that this was what I had put. One week Ireland, or whoever, looked great. The next week they were being mangled. One day England's backs looked all-powerful. Days later they were leaden footed cloggers. What was happening? Blogged questions are far harder to forget about than unblogged questions. I arrived at answers, and blogged them too. Commenters commented. (See especially this posting, and the comments on it.)
I think the rugby thing has been particularly striking because I've never really tried to think systematically about rugby before, to the point of actually writing stuff down, ever before in my life. Over the years I've written about politics, about education, about culture, about transport, about civil liberties (including ID cards) before, so the extra push given to my thinking on these matters by blogging about them has been less dramatic. But I'd never before written about rugby.
Well, I'll spare you the details, because if you are not a rugby fan, you won't care. My point here is, if you want to really learn about something, blog about it.
I know what you're thinking. Why do you need a blog to write about something? Well, of course you don't. But if you are as disorganised as me, and as big a show-off as me, blogging will basically make sure that you do it systematically and regularly and that you will later read what you have earlier written. It will organise your notes for you and supply you with a search engine to find what you put about some particular thing after a gap of three months, or a year.
It may not look very systematic to you, but blogging is the most systematic and sustained studying I've ever done in my entire life.
And although it definitely wouldn't suit everybody, I can't help thinking that there are lots of other failing or failed students who could turn their entire studying life around by following the same path. Like I say: if you want to learn about it, blog about it.
Email from Tim Haas:
If you didn't catch it, you might find this past week's "Moral Maze" on Radio 4 of interest: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/moralmaze/moralmaze.shtmlThe putative topic was whether Diane Abbott was a hypocrite, but it really turned out to be a fairly good examination of the agenda of the egalitarian education movement and whether public school parents (the term "independent schools" is making some inroads over there, I see) are buying better education or just privilege. It seems like the British left really can't let go of class rhetoric.
Thanks. I'm not very clever at making these sound file thingies work, and wasn't able to get this one going. Plus, it rather looks as if this particular link won't last, for educational purposes, as you can only access the latest programme. Still, useful to a few, I hope.
More news of the spread of home schooling in New York. I quote at length because New York Times stuff soon hides behind a payment wall. If you want to read the whole thing, as we bloggers say, read it now.
Newcomers to home schooling resist easy classification as part of the religious right or freewheeling left, who dominated the movement for decades, according to those who study the practice.They come to home schooling fed up with the shortcomings of public education and the cost of private schools. Add to that the new nationwide standards – uniform curriculum and more testing – which some educators say penalize children with special needs, whether they are gifted, learning disabled or merely eccentric.
"It's a profound irony that the standards movement wound up alienating more parents and fueling the growth of home schooling," said Mitchell L. Stevens, an educational psychologist at New York University and author of "Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement" (Princeton University Press, 2001).
"The presumption of home schooling is that children's distinctive needs come before the managerial needs of the schools," he said. "And, it's easier to do than it was 10 years ago, because the ideologues were so successful in making it legal and creating curriculum tools and organizational support."
In addition to dissatisfaction with schools, Mr. Stevens and others say, social trends have fed interest in home schooling. More women are abandoning careers to stay home with their children. And many families yearn for a less frantic schedule and more time together.
"This may be a rebellion of middle-class parents in this culture," Mr. Stevens said. "We have never figured out how to solve the contradiction between work and parenting for contemporary mothers. And a highly scheduled life puts a squeeze on childhood."
The link was added by me, and I do recommend that if you want to know more about home schooling in the USA and haven't already read this book, you follow that link. Sample quote from the Introduction:
… Theirs is a post-1960s America, a nation now sensitized profoundly to the fact that state officials and school bureaucrats can abuse their powers, a nation that has grown rather more accustomed than it used to be to groups that do things unconventionally, to people who live their ideals. Many of today's homeschool sages became adults in the 1960s and 1970s. Many participated in the cultural innovation and experimentation of those decades. Even years later, they think of themselves as their own people, a bit outside the mainstream. Notably, I found this sentiment to be as pervasive among conservative Protestants as among other home schoolers. These are people who have self-consciously done their own thing, or the right thing, regardless of what the neighbors or the in-laws might think.
The everlasting search for a meaningful life turns another corner in the road.
From John Clare's most recent Telegraph readers' questions answered column:
Why can't schools be left to choose their own pupils? What need is there for busy-body local education authorities, admissions forums and appeals panels to intervene?According to Philip Hunter, who glories in the title of "chief schools adjudicator", the answer is as follows: "Where a school can choose children, it will, left to its own devices, inexorably drift towards choosing posh children. Teachers would rather deal with nice children who have done their homework, and parents would prefer to send their children to schools that cater for children with similar backgrounds. The result is high-performing schools in posh areas and less well-performing schools in deprived areas." If nothing else, you have to admire the brutal clarity of the argument. The notion that schools can be improved so that all are equally attractive is "pie in the sky for the present", Mr Hunter adds.
I reckon he's right about the "pie in the sky" bit, and not just "for the present" either.
His solution? Parents must learn to accept that the bureaucrat who dispatches their child to a poor-performing, unpopular school knows best.
Mr Hunter is the Fixed Quantity of Education Fallacy personified. Yes, posh schools would get posher, if all were allowed to choose. But can he not see that the unposh schools would face pressures on them to get posher too? Especially if people were allowed to take a crack at setting up posh schools for the unposh, so to speak. Mr Hunter seems to think that posh kids have a fixed quantity of educational virtue attached to them, which shines out on its surroundings, uplifting all in their vicinity, and the only question is: who gets to bask in the light? And the unposh kids will automatically be illuminated, no matter what the other influences of their immediate surroundings. But what if the unposh kids extinguish the lights in their midst rather than passively allowing themselves to be illuminated?
What, in other words, if his rearrangements reduce the total amount of illumination? What if the arrangements he forbids would greatly increase it?
