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ST; TABLE TALK: WITH FAREED ZAKARIA Political leadership for a new global order

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July 5, 2008
TABLE TALK: WITH FAREED ZAKARIA Political leadership for a new global order
How might Singapore deal with a world in which people are richer than ever before and many players are jostling for supremacy? The editor of Newsweek International, Dr Fareed Zakaria, proffers his thoughts
By Cheong Suk-Wai, Senior Writer
A SINGAPOREAN taxi driver's chance remark set Dr Fareed Zakaria thinking how best he might write about a world in which people are richer than ever before and many players are jostling for supremacy. Meeting The Straits Times in his London hotel suite earlier this week, the editor of Newsweek International recalled how the cabby pointed to the Republic's new ferris wheel, the Singapore Flyer. 'I looked at it and I said - I suppose in a somewhat patronising voice: 'How nice, you have a ferris wheel.' 'And he turns around and says: 'Sir, that's the largest ferris wheel in the world'.' A month later, he was being shown around the South China mall in Dongguan, when his host told him that the 9.6 million-sq ft complex was the world's largest. Dr Zakaria did not buy that at first. He thought The Mall of America in Minnesota still held that title. (Actually it is only the 18th largest these days). Dr Zakaria recalled: 'At that point I decided I had learnt my lesson. I began to realise these anecdotes I had been hearing about this country growing and that country growing were adding up to something quite significant.' So he decided his new book - his second after the best-selling The Future Of Freedom - would examine how the world's new thriving countries will change the character of international economics, politics and culture. Dr Zakaria's big, hawk-sharp eyes, which are very alert indeed, give the lie to his relaxed demeanour. His laptop pings away with news updates on a side table while we talk. Everything about him tells you he is his own man - from his powder purple polo T-shirt, an unusual colour choice, to his Indian-accented English, although he has been a naturalised American citizen for many years now. He was in London for the launch of his new weekly current affairs show on CNN. Called Global Public Square, it premiered on June 1, and the first episode saw him interviewing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Conservative Party leader David Cameron. The son of an Indian politician and a newspaper editor, Dr Zakaria is a Harvard political science alumnus. He had the ear of such luminaries as former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger from early in his career. But he really made his mark with his 2001 essay, Why They Hate Us, which he wrote just after the Sept 11 terror attacks on the US. His weekly column in Newsweek is now required reading for anyone interested in global affairs. The way forward THIRTY years ago, if anyone from Brazil, India or Mexico had predicted his country would soon be revving the world's economic engines, he would have been brushed off as a wishful thinker at best. But today, these countries are charging into the future after having embraced capitalism. As a result, three billion new players are competing for the world's ever-dwindling resources. Indeed, as Dr Zakaria points out in his new book, The Post-American World, the economies of 124 countries, including 30 African states, are now growing at the rate of at least 4 per cent a year. Compare that with the only 35 countries that enjoyed that sort of growth 30 years ago, he says, and what you have is 'the birth of a truly global order'. Singapore, he adds, is handling this brave new order very well. 'What Singapore has done very adroitly is to have moved up the value chain - to have said that 'okay, we can't compete with other countries in cheap labour, and so we're going to do value-added products, we're going to try services, we can compete (in) these areas, we're going to move to the next level'.' He applauds the Republic's 'very clever' forays into such areas as tourism, film-making and software design. And all this, on top of managing good relations with both the United States and China, he notes admiringly. But he adds that Singapore is the only rich country in the world without a fully functioning multi-party democracy. That will hobble its advance in the long run, he believes, because people 'want not only economic rights, but also freedom of association, freedom of speech and freedom of thought'. 'You may get lucky with a particular autocrat, but what happens after him?...If you could guarantee me in advance that you'll get Lee Kuan Yew, that's a whole different thing. But there's no way beforehand to know that you're going to get a leader like Lee Kuan Yew.' He adds wryly, wondering whether this would get into print: 'I think that the political system is rigged in favour of the People's Action Party (PAP). Some of it is formal...Some of it is informal. But all of it is largely unnecessary.' Singapore is already 'a very open society in many ways', he points out. 'I often say this to people because they have an image of Singapore which is essentially incorrect...It is a place where you would certainly feel as if you had many, many freedoms and liberties...It has been lucky in having very wise leadership.' But it has to widen its political outlook much more, he insists. 'Singapore's leaders have succeeded more than they realise. They created a modern society, and in creating that modern society, they must now also trust it more than they do.' He adds: 'That, in some ways, is the genius of democracy. It turns the relationship between governed and governors into a two-way street, and that will make for a much greater degree of sense of loyalty and pride in Singapore for the next generation.' He muses: 'It's funny: Whenever I meet senior Singapore government officials, I will sometimes mention this. And they'll go: 'Oh, no, no, it's not a real problem, don't worry.' And I'll say: 'You know, younger Singaporeans do feel frustrated.' And they'll say: 'Oh, I don't know if you are right about that.' 'And then, as I'm escorted out by one of the young aides to the senior government officials, they will tell me: 'By the way, Dr Zakaria, you are 100 per cent right. We are very frustrated'.' 'And these,' he notes, 'are people in the heart of the political structure.' Dr Zakaria is quite sure that if the PAP held what he calls 'open competitive elections', it would do 'quite well'. And as for Minister Mentor Lee's view that a non-PAP government would act irresponsibly by exhausting Singapore's coffers, Dr Zakaria says: 'You can produce checks and counter-checks. Nobody's talking about giving day-to-day control of Temasek (Holdings) and the Government Investment Corporation to Parliament. You can create institutions that are independent and therefore somewhat sheltered from day-to-day political control.' Tackling global crises AND political control, by the way, is what he feels the new global order needs in a big way. Great global growth brings with it great global worries. And therein lies the rub. The current lone superpower, the US, is not only being outstripped by new players on the economic front, it has also lost its intellectual and moral high ground since it invaded Iraq in 2003. On top of that, though food, fuel and weather woes have spilled over into the international arena, most countries are still thinking of how to solve these problems locally, when what is really needed is greater global consultation, cooperation and compromise. 'We have crises now. The question is whether we have the leadership.' China, he feels, is not ready to fill the vacuum America has left for two reasons. First, there is considerable scepticism about China, particularly in India, Japan and Indonesia. 'It's not as if the world is hungering for Chinese leadership.' Second, if China or any other Asian economic dragon wants to lead the world in the way the US has in the past 60 years, it would first need to present 'a compelling vision for other people to buy into and say, 'You know, we like the way Asians think about the world'.' 'It's not just about money,' Dr Zakaria insists. 'It's about setting an agenda, making people feel that there's a vision that you want to work towards.' For that reason alone, he thinks the US can still play a pivotal role. It can bring the world together to work out solutions to problems like energy and global warming. Asked which US presidential contender is better poised to lead in a post-American world, he plumps firmly for the Democrat, Senator Barack Obama. He finds Mr Obama's willingness to challenge settled wisdom in Washington - like his willingness to talk to US 'enemies' - 'refreshing'. 'And though he was criticised for it, he stuck to his guns,' notes Dr Zakaria. 'I think that was very impressive.' Mr Obama's rival, Senator John McCain, on the other hand, is 'a Cold Warrior', says Dr Zakaria, referring to the Republican's less than friendly references to Russia and China. 'That is just the wrong vision for the future.' Dr Zakaria himself is a long-term optimist about the post-American world. 'At the end of the day, the power of two to three billion people for the first time consuming, investing, producing, dreaming, inventing and problem-solving is very, very powerful,' he proclaims. suk@sph.com.sg

Home > Review > Others
July 5, 2008
Dr Zakaria on...
FIRM GROUND: PAP supporters pitching in during the 2006 election campaign. OPPOSITES?: US presidential candidates John McCain (left) and Barack Obama. -- PHOTO: THE BUSINESS TIMES PHOTO: AP   View more photos Economic and political rights: People want economic rights but they also want political rights. They want property rights but they also want freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought. You may get lucky with a particular autocrat, but what happens after him? The great problem with the idea that an autocracy is a good idea is that most people don't end up with Lee Kuan Yew. They end up with Mobuto or Marcos or Mugabe. If you could guarantee me in advance that you'll get Lee Kuan Yew, that's a whole different thing. But there's no way beforehand to know that you're going to get a leader like Lee Kuan Yew. I think that for societies that are not yet at an advanced industrial state, there are considerable questions as to whether introducing multi-party democracy right away produce stability. In places like Iraq we should have had a much greater emphasis on stability and order, rather than holding as we did four or five different elections. But in the long run, for a rich country, there are very few alternatives. Singapore is the only rich country in the world that does not have a fully functioning multi- party democracy. And Singapore is a very unusual case. First of all, it is a very open society. It is also a very small country that has been very lucky in having very wise leadership - and there's no way to guarantee that. One-party rule in Singapore The system needs more checks and balances. You need the prospect of losing power to produce a certain degree of discipline. The Singapore Government They've done a very good job, but younger Singaporeans do feel frustrated. They feel the society, the political system is too closed and it's too much of an insider's club. A sense of belonging What makes somebody a Singaporean in a world in which you are going to need people who have come two years, three years ago? How do you make them think of themselves as Singaporeans? Part of it has to be, I think, that they feel they are full participants in the destiny and political structures of the country. I can tell you that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong thinks a lot about this, because he and I have had several conversations about this. China Whenever you talk about the rise of Asia, you're really often talking about the rise of China. But the rise of China produces very complicated feelings in India and Japan. So there might actually be forces within Asia that can act and counteract these things. India I feel very frustrated watching India, because I think it has extraordinary potential. Indian society is so ready for globalisation (but) the Indian state is so scared and backward-looking and corrupt and caught up with its own phobias and ideologies from a different era. The 2008 US presidential race One of the advantages of this (long) process this time around is that the crazies are out of the race. There were a lot of candidates that had very disturbing views about the world, very confrontational, very nasty and would have taken America down a very dark road. And they were all thoroughly rejected by the American public. Mr Barack Obama He's a creature of the world as well as a creature of America...So this world is not a completely alien and slightly menacing thing to him, it's something that's part of him. Mr John McCain He remains a very old-fashioned figure. He has an almost Victorian view of the world.

Economist: Michelle Obama's America

Lexington

Michelle Obama's America

Jul 3rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Is Barack Obama's wife his rock or his bitter half?

Illustration by Kevin Kallaugher

THERE are two ways to be a political spouse. You can shun the limelight or you can grab it. Margaret Thatcher’s late husband, Denis, exemplified the former approach. He never upstaged his wife and though intelligent and rich, he was content to be viewed as a golfing, gin-swilling duffer. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Clintons. Hillary was Bill’s closest adviser when he was president, and he would have done the same for her, had she been elected. Neither approach is right or wrong, but both have predictable consequences. If you keep your mouth shut, you are unlikely to stir up controversy. If you speak up, you may help your spouse, but you risk hurting him or her, too.

John McCain’s wife, Cindy, gazes adoringly at him on the stump but says little. If she has to introduce him, she says she loves him and hopes you will vote for him. She may favour pink skirt-suits over golfing trousers, but in her reluctance to say anything that might conceivably hurt her spouse she is unmistakably a (Denis) Thatcherite. Hostile bloggers half-heartedly accuse her of being a Stepford wife or make snide cracks about the fortune she inherited and her past addiction to painkillers. But she seldom captures the headlines and seems to like it that way.

Michelle Obama falls somewhere between the two poles. Unlike Bill or Hillary, she has never hinted that she expects to be co-president. But unlike Mrs McCain, she criss-crosses the country making fiery speeches on her husband’s behalf. In many ways, she is a huge asset to his campaign. She is clever, driven, beautiful and articulate. Even when he is not there, she draws large, avid crowds. Yet she still finds time to be supermum. She bought two laptops so her husband can see and talk to his daughters when he is on the road. She teases him about his snoring and makes him take out the rubbish. He calls her “my rock”.

Like her husband, she exemplifies the American dream, having risen from humble roots to Princeton, Harvard and a $275,000-a-year job handling “community and external affairs” and “business diversity” for a hospital in Chicago. But her story is otherwise quite different from his. His background is more exotic and chaotic. His mother was white, his father was Kenyan, they broke up when he was two and the young Barack later lived in Hawaii and Indonesia. Michelle’s family, by contrast, was hard-up but intact. It was also all-black, all-American and rooted in the South Side of Chicago. Michelle grew up knowing useful people: she was chummy with Jesse Jackson’s daughter and even baby-sat his son when she was a teenager.

When Barack was starting out as a politician, his rivals dismissed him as inauthentically African-American or even “the white man in blackface”. Having Michelle at his side helped reassure sceptical blacks that he was really one of them. Even the precise shade of her skin colour may have helped him at the polls. Famous black men often pick light-skinned or white wives. Some black women resent this. That Michelle is quite dark may have endeared Barack to black female voters who might otherwise have voted for Hillary Clinton.

Now that the primaries are over, the issues have changed. Blacks are solidly for Mr Obama, but many swing voters are unsure. Some Republicans think his wife’s habit of speaking her mind could prove a problem. For example, in February, as her husband’s campaign was catching fire, she said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” Some Americans bristle at the implication that the only worthwhile thing any of them has done in the past quarter-century is to back Mr Obama.

Mrs Obama’s speeches rarely accentuate the positive. America, to her, is a “downright mean” country where families struggle to buy food, where mothers are terrified of being fired if they get pregnant and where “life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime”. But she was born in 1964, when Americans lived shorter, poorer lives and southern blacks couldn’t vote. Whereas her husband is magically skilled at not giving offence, Mrs Obama can be a blunt instrument. “Don’t go into corporate America,” she urges young people, denigrating what most Americans do for a living and biting the hand that pays for all the public programmes she favours. “Barack Obama will require you to work,” she says. “He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation…Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” Some people would rather decide for themselves how to live their lives.

The bitter bit

Conservative pundits have savaged her. One acerbic blogger calls her “Obama’s bitter half”. Others mock her occasional gripes about her personal finances and her solipsistic college thesis about the woes of black Princetonians. The National Review says she “embodies a peculiar mix of privilege and victimology, which is not where most Americans live. On the other hand, it does make her a terrific Oprah guest.”

Mr Obama says people should lay off his wife. Laura Bush agrees. And one has to sympathise with Mrs Obama. She was always a reluctant political wife. Her husband’s crazy hours and long absences impose a hefty burden on her and on their children. In dark moments, she fears for his physical safety. And all the while, both she and her husband are subjected to maliciously false gossip online.

But not all criticism is unfair. If Mr Obama is president, his wife will have the ear of the most powerful man on earth. So her political views matter. And if she expresses them forcefully in speech after speech, she can hardly cry foul when not everyone likes what she says. On June 30th she appeared on the front page of USA Today saying: “I don’t want to be a distraction.” For better or for worse, she is.

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NY Times: On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble

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July 5, 2008

Talking Business

On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble

By JOE NOCERA

Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google's day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company's plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent.

Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000.

At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company's plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company's T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google's top executives — to plead their case, and conducted surveys showing that most parents with children in Google day care would have to leave Google's facilities and find less expensive child care.

Do you think you know how this story ends? You're probably guessing that because it involves "do no evil" Google, Fortune magazine's "Best Company to Work For" the past two years, this is a heart-warming tale of a good company reversing a dumb decision.

If only. Although Google is rolling back its price increase slightly and is phasing in the higher price over five quarters, the outline of the original decision remains largely unchanged. At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of "Googlers" who felt entitled to perks like "bottled water and M&Ms," according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) On Monday, Google began the first phase of its new day care plan, letting go of the outside day care firm it had been using.

In recent months, Google has hit the first rough patch in its short, magical life as a public company. From November to April, Google's once high-flying stock dropped 44 percent, to $412 from $744. (It has since gained some of that back, closing on Thursday at $537.) It may be a stretch to equate the day care fiasco with the fall in Google's stock. But maybe not.

When a stock was rising as fast as Google's once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft.

"There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement," blogged Sergey Solyanik, who recently returned to Microsoft after a stint at Google. "There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid." Starting, it would appear, with day care.

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Google first began offering day care three and a half years ago, and perhaps it is only coincidence that this occurred not long after a woman named Susan Wojcicki returned to the company from maternity leave. Ms. Wojcicki is a figure of significant stature at Google; hers was the garage that Mr. Brin and Google's other founder, Larry Page, rented while starting up Google. Today she is the company's vice president for product measurement, though as I discovered in talking to unhappy Google parents this week, not many Googlers seem to know what her exact duties entail. Everybody, however, knows that she's Mr. Brin's sister-in-law.

From the start, Ms. Wojcicki has been a passionate advocate for Google's day care efforts, though there is some dispute about how much decision-making authority she has. Parents who know her point out that the company's day care approach is very much aligned with her views; for its part, a Google spokesman insists that "these decisions were not made by her; they were made by the executive management team."

Google's first facility, called the Kinderplex, was run by the Childrens' Creative Learning Centers, or C.C.L.C., which, according to its Web site, offers "learning in a play-based, developmentally appropriate environment that incorporates a variety of activities and multicultural aspects in a thematic style." That sounds perfect for Silicon Valley, doesn't it? One of C.C.L.C.'s longtime Silicon Valley clients, Electronic Arts, sent me an e-mail statement telling me how happy it has been with C.C.L.C.'s services.

According to Google, there were numerous complains about C.C.L.C., but the Google parents I spoke to disagree. They say that at the Kinderplex, teacher-child ratios were low, teachers were first-rate, the facility was clean and upbeat, and the food — organic, naturally — was terrific.

But at least one parent wasn't happy: Ms. Wojcicki. She is a proponent of a preschool philosophy called Reggio Emilia, the hot kiddie philosophy of the moment, which stresses even small children's ability to chart their own learning paths.

A year after the Kinderplex opened, Google opened its second day care center, called the Woods, which Google ran itself. The Woods was an expensive undertaking; in terms of the square footage per child, the aesthetics of its toys, and the college degrees of its teachers, it put the Kinderplex to shame. It also used the Reggio Emilia philosophy.

With the Woods open, Google decided to upgrade the Kinderplex to match the salaries and the teacher-student ratios of the Woods. Google now had 200 day care spots — and such wonderful day care at that! — and was promoting this new perk as a recruiting tool. The company was growing like crazy — its work force now numbers 19,000 — its young employees were starting to have babies, and well, you can just picture what happened next. The wait list ballooned insanely, finally reaching over 700 people. New employees who arrived at Google thinking they were getting in-house day care were stunned to discover that it could take up to two years to land a coveted spot.

Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle. Faced with this dilemma, Google decided that the way to solve the dual problems of a too-long wait list and a too-large subsidy was — are you sitting down for this? — to get rid of C.C.L.C. and make the Kinderplex more like the Woods! (Google says it was always planning to replace C.C.L.C.) Given that decision, the only possible way to reduce the subsidy was to raise prices through the roof.

If you are shaking your head at this point, that's because you lack the proper understanding of Google's culture. Having conquered the Internet, Google's executives tend to believe that they can do pretty much everything better than everybody else — even day care. When I spoke to Laszlo Bock, the company's vice president for "people operations" (a k a human relations), he told me that "what is really driving the cost is eliminating the two-year wait list while focusing on providing really high quality."

Google can't just have low teacher-child ratios — it has to have the lowest of anybody. Its teachers have to be the best. Its toys have to be the most advanced. If it costs a lot of money to provide the Greatest Day Care on Earth, well, that's life.

Plus, the high price of Google day care solves the waiting list problem. Indeed, getting the waiting list down was a huge priority for Google; the spokesman told me that forcing people to wait two years for day care was "inequitable." And maybe it is.

But parents who talked to me said that several times during the six-week-long day care brouhaha, Mr. Brin made comments indicating that he viewed the whole thing as a giant economics experiment. "This is a supply-and-demand issue," he told one group of parents — adding that Google needed to charge what the market would bear. (Through a Google spokesman, Mr. Brin denies making such a statement.) Given that Google has lots of pre-I.P.O. millionaires, it can clearly charge a lot.

Indeed, at one meeting, Ms. Wojcicki, a multimillionaire herself, told the parents that she planned to keep her own children in Google day care, despite the higher cost. "I've had firsthand experience with the great care provided by these centers and I want as many other parents as possible to have access to it," Ms. Wojcicki noted in an e-mail message.

Google has also started charging people several hundred dollars to stay on the waiting list; as a result the list has dropped to around 300 parents. By next fall, Google plans to open new facilities with another 300 places. See? No more waiting list.

Google, I should note, believes that it has handled the day care issue in a "Googly" way and object strongly to the criticism by the parents. The company points out that the prices are somewhat lower than originally planned, that it is expanding its day care operation, that its facilities will be state of the art and that it will be giving scholarships to parents who can't afford to keep their children in Google day care. (Although yet to release the details of the scholarship plan, the company says that employees will have to show proof of household income to qualify.)

But here's the real problem: providing day care isn't an economics experiment, nor should it be just another Google perk, alongside organic food and free M&Ms. Day care matters to people's lives in a way that few other perks do. There are many people in this country — including, I'll bet, many Googlers — who believe that employer-provided day care, at affordable prices, ought to be like health insurance, a benefit that every company provides as a matter of course. Yet as the technology blog Valleywag noted recently, Google doesn't even advertise day care as a benefit for its employees anymore. That's the real shame.

Google may be providing the greatest day care ever, but so what? It doesn't matter how good the day care is if only its wealthiest employees can afford to use it. If Google had really wanted to do something path-breaking about its day care crisis, it would have spent less time creating elitist day care centers and more time figuring out how to "scale" day care for everybody no matter what their salaries.

Instead, Google has shown that it thinks about day care the same way every other company does — as a luxury, not a benefit. Judging by what's transpired, that's what Google is fast becoming: just another company.

E-mail: nocera@nytimes.com

ST: Marriage - an unsettling experience

Home > Our Columnists > Column
June 29, 2008
Life Lines - Anthony Yeo Marriage - an unsettling experience
In this fortnightly column on life issues, veteran psychotherapist Anthony Yeo talks about the pros and cons of saying 'I do'
People believe that June is a good month for marriage. Somehow this is the month for weddings, and with the recent series of activities in conjunction with enhancing family life in Singapore, marriage is certainly in the air. Weddings are usually much celebrated events often attended by enthusiastic guests, including single or unattached adults. Along with the carnival spirit infused into the celebration are those well-meaning married guests who inevitably accost singles with the inevitable 'So, when is your turn?' query. Single adults know all too well what this means and often respond with polite responses such as 'You'll know when it comes' or 'I guess it's not time yet'. Somehow we tend to believe that marriage is for everyone and, all too often, unattached adults are singled out as targets for prospective coupling in marriage. There is also a commonly held notion that to get married is to 'settle down', in contrast to being unmarried suggesting that the latter is to be saddled with an 'unsettled' state of life. Somehow there is a prevailing idea that this 'unsettled' state is synonymous with being uncertain, fickle-minded, frustrated or incomplete. With all the earnest drive to promote marriage in Singapore, singles tend to be unsettled by the idea that fulfilment and happiness in life is to be experienced primarily in 'marital bliss'. This prevailing idea seems to defy my observation of the many couples who have sought help for marital conflict. Each time I encounter married people afflicted with marital woes, I am reminded of how marriage tends to be an unsettling experience. I have also been left with the unsettled feeling, wondering why so many had chosen to be married when they could have had a less stressful life if they had stayed single. Of course, the other unsettling feeling is the painful journey I traverse with those who have the courage to go their separate ways. As I ponder over this issue, I sometimes wish that marriage was not held in such high regard, with less focus on the romantic ideals of a peak experience that marriage seems to promise. Those who contemplate marriage would do well to confront the reality that marriage can be an unsettling experience rather than one where couples live happily ever after. The way I see it, marriage promises to be unsettling as couples need to be prepared for a lot of adjustment to living with someone quite unfamiliar to oneself, learning to adapt to each other's idiosyncrasies, growing together as partners in life and coping with all the demands that marriage and family life brings. It is also prudent to be aware that romance, if it is ever experienced, is not everlasting and may in fact fade months after the honeymoon is over. Conflicts are inevitable and there will be many issues to be negotiated, such as relationships with the in-laws, work-home relationships and friendships with those outside of marriage. The more I work with couples with marital conflict, the more I am concerned that marriage should not be entered into lightly. It is also fallacious to believe that life will be incomplete and unfulfilling if a person is not married. There is more to life than marriage and no one should be made to feel deprived of what life offers if the choice is to be single . GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED If you have any questions about marriage, write to suntimes@sph.com.sg, with 'Life Lines' in the subject line. Anthony Yeo, a consultant therapist at the Counselling And Care Centre, will answer selected questions. ... more

FT: The dangers of banality

Excerpt
The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

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The dangers of banality

By Harry Eyres

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil". Eichmann, responsible for the slaughter of millions of Jews, had the appearance and even the mentality of a petty bureaucrat or administrator, crunching numbers and logistics that could have concerned widgets but happened to involve the mass murder of human beings. The former employee of the Vacuum Oil Company was examined by a team of psychologists who pronounced him perfectly "normal" - "more normal at any rate than I am", as one of them said with black humour, "after having examined him".

When Arendt wrote, humanity was still reeling from the first total war in history, from the revelations of the Holocaust, the pitiful starvation of inmates at Belsen, the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Evil loomed large and dramatic on the face of the planet, and it was something of a shock to find its incarnation in such commonplace, trite human beings as Eichmann and the thousands of others who were simply "obeying orders".

Evil has not disappeared from the planet in the intervening years, but in most of Europe and in North America it has retreated from the limelight. If finding banality was surprising for Arendt, it is now what we expect and what everywhere surrounds us. We might feel grateful for small mercies and rejoice that today's politicians do not stage Wagnerian rallies and line the streets with 100ft-high banners. We find it reassuring to hear commonplaces uttered and we watch television programmes that are engineered precisely for that purpose (anyone caught saying anything difficult or original gets short shrift from Big Brother ).

But I am beginning to wonder whether Arendt's formulation might not be reversed, and whether we should not concern ourselves more with the evil of banality. One petty example is sports commentary. At this time of year I turn couch potato for an hour or two each afternoon to watch tennis or listen to the cricket (I used to watch that, too, until it was sold down the river to Sky). Cricket in particular has produced its fair share of poetic commentary, from the burred Hampshire lyricism of John Arlott to the bone-dry crispness of Richie Benaud. But poetry, whimsy and originality are every day less in evidence.

Tennis commentators (apart from the admirable Frew MacMillan and the ever-more elusive John McEnroe) seem to be chosen for locker room bonhomie rather than any gift for language or analysis. Commenting on the tattooed quotation from Dostoevsky that the maverick Serbian Janko Tipsaverich sports on one arm, the ever-trite Andrew Castle joked to the equally uninspired John Lloyd: "Oh, he's intelligent too - that wasn't what we used to read, was it Lloydy?" The idea, it seems, whether you are a player or a commentator, is to be "one of the lads".

Test Match Special , one of the truly great English eccentric creations, the one sports programme that comes into its own when play is suspended during breaks for rain, has been steadily losing its unique flavour, reminiscent of the genteel English surrealism of the Ealing comedies. "There's really nothing to say," opined the New Zealand commentator Jeremy Coney recently - not a sentiment that could ever have passed the lips of the great Brian Johnston.

The most popular purveyor of classical music in the UK is Classic FM, the radio station that treats classical music as if it was chocolate - and not even good chocolate, but the kind of milky, sugary nothingness that should have been banned long ago by the EU. The early evening offering on Classic FM is called Smooth Classics , as if the music of Beethoven and Schubert should slip down the gullet like baby food.

So the effect of banal commentary, and banal thinking in general, is to turn everything into undifferentiated pap. What is banal is what has already been chewed over, a thousand times, by someone else, or thousands of others. What is wrong with that? In the 1950s, the Gestalt therapists Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman explored the connection between physical eating and spiritual nourishment: as adults, it turns out, just as we need to engage in an active process of selecting our food, biting, chewing and digesting, so "we need to be able to 'bite off' and 'chew' experience so as to extract its healthy nourishment . . . to the extent that you have cluttered your personality with gulped-down morsels of this and that, you have impaired your ability to think and act on your own."

The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget.

harry.eyres@ft.com

FT: The ideology of teen pregnancy

The ideology of teen pregnancy

By Christopher Caldwell

Published: June 28 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 28 2008 03:00

Every year at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, three or four girls get pregnant. But not this year. This year 17 did. When Time magazine alleged that some of the girls had a "pregnancy pact", reporters and cameramen from around the world descended on the fishing port. Whether the pact was a teenage dare or a practical arrangement by the girls to give each other moral support has been hotly debated. No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. "Sweet!" one of them shouted in the school nurse's office. The school superintendent admitted: "They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant."

"Every child a wanted child" was the old slogan of the movement for birth control. But it is part of the folklore of feminism that no teenager ever wants a child. "Profoundly shocking," wrote the Gloucester Daily Times. "The idea of 15- and 16-year-old girls wanting to become pregnant, wanting to make such a life-altering choice so early in their lives - and others being 'disappointed', not relieved, when learning their pregnancy tests proved negative - is a notion that seems absolutely contrary to most of our psyches." This is untrue. Having babies at 16 is perfectly in line with our psyches, as a look at other cultures and our own history shows. What it is contrary to is our ideology. Pact or no, the Gloucester pregnancies are some kind of a rebellion.

Any talk-radio blowhard can find evidence that Gloucester High was either too lax or too stern. Massachusetts is the most sexually libertarian of the 50 United States - it was the first to allow gay marriage and gives wide latitude to cities and towns in the sex-counselling services they provide students. Yet Gloucester is a church-dominated Portuguese-, Italian- and Irish-American city. So its sex education is a mix of traditional and non-judgmental programmes. The school does not hand out condoms but has a crèche for teen mothers. Since Gloucester is a largely white city, commentators can give vent to all sorts of snorting stereotypes about pregnant teenagers, their parents and their culture, without fear of being called racist.

Like every debate over teen pregnancy, this one is a duel of dogmas. On one side is the view that chastity is a moral absolute. The chairman of the school board has suggested prosecuting the girls' boyfriends for statutory rape. On the other side is the view that, where birth control is available, girls forgo it only out of either ignorance or shame. This is the view of most news media and of Gloucester's mayor, who blamed her town's pregnancies on George W. Bush. His No Child Left Behind programme diverted to academics money that should have been spent on sex education, which is now taught only until age 15.

At the risk of sounding crude, though, the parts of sex education relevant to preventing teen pregnancy can be taught in five minutes. It may flatter our self-regard to believe that the modern, western pattern of child-bearing arises from superior knowledge and sophistication, but it does not. It arises from our priorities. The Gloucester pregnancies are not about information the girls don't have. They are about an argument the girls don't buy. It is a fool's errand to try to convince a girl that bearing a child is "sad" (a word used with appalling frequency in press accounts) or to argue that last year's hit movie Juno leads girls astray by glamorising pregnancy. (Apparently glamorising sex is all right, especially if it serves some transcendent purpose such as selling shampoo, but glamorising motherhood crosses the line.)

Having a baby is not sad. The reason not to have a baby in your teens is the risk that it will spoil something in your future - maybe your family life, your career or your economic prospects. In their landmark study of unmarried mothers, Promises I Can Keep , the US sociologists, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, noted that poor women need a "reason to wait" if they are to delay having children. It had better be a good reason. Time flies, after all. Whether or not a teenager's having a child is a misfortune, teenagers themselves may see it as a lesser misfortune than a 40-year-old's wishing for a child she cannot have.

The present ideology of family planning arose in a more fluid society than our own. It was constructed by college-educated baby-boom elites who, as they climbed from the middle into the upper-middle class, came to find pitiful the lives their mothers led as housewives. They chose careers over - or on top of - child-rearing and reaped substantial rewards. Whether those rewards are worth the risks of never having a child might be judged differently by the next generation.

As it gets harder to climb out of the class one was born in, the opportunity cost of being a young mother falls. Outside of the well-off, Ms Edin and Ms Kefalas note, the opportunity cost is already lower than it looks. Poor teen mothers "have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child". Given the increasing likelihood that a woman will raise her children alone, might not the teen years be a prudent time to become a single mother, while the financial and day-care resources of one's own parents are still available?

Baby-boom feminists did not replace a superstitious attitude towards teen sexuality with a rational one. They replaced one set of priorities with another. Their careerism prevented teen motherhood as reliably as did their mothers' moralism. The Gloucester girls appear equally unimpressed with both logics. If the old "pregnancy pact" that went by the name of marriage is no longer so readily available, they are not fools to look for a substitute.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: The machine that spun the world around

The machine that spun the world around

By Michael Skapinker

Published: June 24 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 24 2008 03:00

Publishers see world-changers everywhere. There is a book called Tea: The Drink That Changed the World . There is Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and that paean to Japanese motor manufacturing The Machine That Changed the World .

Tucked away under a counter in your kitchen, or gurgling in your utility room, is another machine. It has barely altered its appearance, function or performance in nearly half a century, which is perhaps why no one has thought to publish The Washing Machine - Which Really Did Change the World.

The washing machine transformed our workplaces and our families. It freed women from their most time-consuming household task, allowing them to get out and work.

Historians attribute female liberation to several causes. There was women's experience running second world war production lines, a memory that survived the 1950s return to domesticity. There was the contraceptive pill. There was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , with its account of the suburban wife, lying beside her husband after a day of household tasks, too afraid to ask: "Is this all?"

Without the fully automatic washing machine, which appeared in suburban homes around the time of Friedan's book, it might well have been all.

In their paper "Engines of Liberation" , Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu recount that, after the second world war, the US Rural Electrification Authority timed a farmer's wife doing the washing by hand and then with an electric washer.

She took four hours to wash 38 pounds of laundry by hand. Doing the same load with an electric machine took 41 minutes. And this was when the machines were more primitive than today. For example, she would have had to use a separate contraption to wring the clothes.

While the machines have changed, the essential process of washing has not. Since ancient times, people have poured water on their clothes and agitated them to get the dirt out. In their article, "An Introduction to the Historical Developments of Laundry" , Mark Stalmans and Walter Guhl recount how the ancients used to beat their wet clothes on riverside stones.

In Elizabethan England, washdays took place only every two to three months, but were dramatic occasions. The laundry was soaked in large wooden tubs. "All available women and girls hitched up their dresses and stamped and danced on the wet clothes," Stalmans and Guhl say.

In the 19th century, clothes were stirred with a stick. Manually operated wooden containers followed, allowing the clothes-washer to agitate the clothes inside. In the early 20th century, electric machines emerged. In 1937, Bendix of the US introduced the first machine with a wash, rinse and spin action to remove the water.

In the 1960s, washing, rinsing and spinning machines became the norm, turning laundry into something to be done between returning from work and feeding the family.

And that is where the cycle stopped. The industry boasts of progress since: special washes for wool, settings for half-loads, microprocessors (a dubious advance - at least mechanical processors could be repaired) and machines that sense laundry weight. But the method remained the same: pushing water through clothes or clothes through water.

Indeed, in one respect washing machines have remained the most conservative of businesses: there is no global product. Europeans have largely relied on front-loaders; Americans prefer to load their laundry from the top.

There is no doubt which is better. Consumer Reports, the US consumer organisation, has struggled to find top-loaders that wash as well as front-loaders. (Front-loaders' tumbling motion gives a better result.) This year, Consumer Reports trumpeted the news that it had found a top-loader to match front-loaders' cleaning quality. But top-loaders still used more energy and water.

Not that front-loaders are easy on water. Waterwise, a campaigning organisation, conservatively estimates that British households use 474m litres of water to wash their clothes every day.

Could we change our laundry habits? Researchers at Leeds University have come up with a way of washing clothes that uses only a cup of water. The dirt is absorbed by plastic chips that tumble with the clothes, which emerge almost dry. They can be briefly hung or ironed, eliminating the need for tumble dryers. Xeros, the university spin-out that is commercialising the technology, says the chips last for at least 100 washes.

The researchers expect almost waterless machines to be produced next year. Good luck to them. Washing machines may have revolutionised our lives, but the association of water with cleaning is as old as laundry itself.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Economist: Circumcision - Cutting the competition

Circumcision

Cutting the competition

Jun 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Mutilating male members may mar men’s mischievous matings

CIRCUMCISION and other forms of male-genital mutilation are commonplace in many societies around the world. The origin of these practices, however, puzzles anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. They wonder what benefit they could bring, especially given the obvious risks of infection and reduced fertility.

Explanations have ranged from the pragmatic (a ritual that marks the beginning of adulthood and bonds men together) to the Freudian (having something to do with the pain of the separation from the mother). However Christopher Wilson, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, has a different idea. In a recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior he suggests that male-genital mutilations are actually intended to prevent younger men from fathering children with older men’s wives.

Dr Wilson takes his cue from sperm-competition theory, which suggests that males of promiscuous primate species have evolved features that maximise their own sperm’s chances of fertilising an egg they might have to compete for. These features include large testicles which produce more sperm, and morphologically complex penises. Males of monogamous primate species, on the other hand, have smaller testicles and simpler penises. Human genitals are somewhere in between, perhaps reflecting the fact that people generally form pair bonds, but are susceptible to occasional bouts of promiscuity.

Some forms of genital mutilation have obvious effects on fertility. For instance, several African and Micronesian societies practice testicular ablation—the crushing or cutting off of one testicle. Some Australian aborigines engage in subincision, which exposes part of the urethra and thus causes sperm to leak out of the base of the penis. Circumcision does not have quite such clear-cut effects. But there are several ways it may affect fertility: most obviously, the lack of a foreskin could make insertion, ejaculation or both take longer. Perhaps long enough that an illicit quickie will not always reach fruition.

Older men are in a position to form alliances with younger men—passing on knowledge, lending them political support and giving them access to weapons. By insisting that the young undergo genital mutilation of some form as a quid pro quo, an older married man can seek to ensure that even if he is cuckolded, he will still be the father of his wives’ children. Of course, the older man has probably undergone genital mutilation too, and seen his own fertility reduced. But that, if anything, increases his incentive to make certain that the young bucks are similarly handicapped. And if all the older men in a society conclude this is a good thing, it will rapidly become a socially enforced norm.

To test this theory, Dr Wilson made several predictions. Among them, he suggested that mutilation is more likely to be practised in polygynous societies (since a man with several wives is more vulnerable to cuckoldry), and is especially likely in those polygynous societies where a man’s co-wives live in separate households from their husband. It should also take place in a public ceremony watched by other men, to avoid cheating or free-riding. And there should be a strong stigma against men who refuse it.

To test his predictions, Dr Wilson looked at a database of 186 pre-industrial societies. Some 48% of the highly polygynous ones practised a form of male-genital mutilation, and the number rose to 63% when co-wives kept separate households. By contrast, only 14% of monogamous societies practised mutilation. Moreover, and also as predicted, the mutilations were almost always carried out in public, often as part of a coming-of-age ceremony at puberty, with strong stigma attached to unmutilated men.

Dr Wilson’s paper does not definitely prove that sexual competition is at the root of male-genital mutilation. But it does provide a plausible explanation for a puzzling practice. It is not likely, however, to have much effect on attitudes toward circumcision. The men who enforce and undergo the rituals are no more aware of the underlying evolutionary motivations than of why their testicles are the size they are. Those who engage in the practice for religious reasons will surely continue to do so. Otherwise, most of the Western world has already largely abandoned routine neonatal circumcision, which is seen as an outdated and unfortunate medical fad.

The exceptions are America, where more than half of newborn boys are still circumcised, and Africa, where circumcision helps to stop the transmission of HIV, the AIDS-causing virus. There, infection really is a far greater threat to the number of children a man might have than the loss of his foreskin.

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: A Class Apart

A Class Apart

By Rob Blackhurs

Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00

Cover Story

Children in Britain are not legally obliged to go to school. And as parents' discontent with the state system grows and fees for private places rocket, more and more families are seeking a third way - home education

Photographs by Charlie Bibby

By Rob Blackhurst

It's 11 o'clock on tuesday morning. Throughout britain, school bells are ringing and corridors are pressed with shrieking teenagers on their way from geography to double science. Excuses are being formulated for late homework; gossip is being shared. But elsewhere, an alternative vision of contemporary British education can be seen. Across kitchen tables and on suburban sofas, in museums and parks, a growing tribe of home-schooled children is learning without whiteboards, timetables or uniforms.

At a rugby club in Bromley, London commuter-belt country, nine home-educating parents are giving their charges a day's "socialisation". Amid a wall of high-pitched noise, some kindergarten-age children are mixing paints and playing with glitter. Two 11-year-olds are idly flicking a table-football machine, and two boys - friends 30 seconds ago - are fighting over whose turn it is to play with a toy castle.

Alex, a pale, undersized seven-year-old with dyspraxia and autism, has upset Sam, 10, who has Asperger's syndrome - which means he too can find it hard to read social signals. "It's not fair. Go away, go away," shouts Sam. Sam's father runs over to rule, Solomon-like, on their contested claims. Just as the dispute is resolved, one girl breathlessly reports that she has seen another child climbing on the roof.

Elsewhere I speak to a self-possessed 10-year-old girl whose mother has taken her out of school because she felt she was too advanced for the work. She reels off reading lists of children's classics: "I'm reading the Just Williams. I'll read them all in two days. I finished The Hobbit. I'm now on book five of The Chronicles of Narnia." Though she's precocious, she speaks unselfconsciously. As we're approaching Easter, I ask her if she takes school holidays. "We don't really need to. We learn wherever we go. Say we went to the south of France - we'd learn stuff about France on holiday."

Home schooling has been on an upward trend in Britain over the past 10 years. Since there is no legal duty on parents to inform local education authorities that they are home schooling their children, the government has no idea how many children are in this position. Only if a child starts school and is then withdrawn is there an official record. But this misses out the thousands of children who never start school in the first place.

Mike Fortune-Wood, a pro-home-education researcher, estimates that about 50,000 children are presently being schooled at home - but says that number is growing fast: "The rise I got was 17 per cent annually. If you kept on at this rate, the figures start to get quite scary for schools by around 2020." Still, Britain is decades behind the US, where an estimated 1.2 million children are home educated, largely for religious reasons.

Unlike in Germany, where home schooling is banned (see opposite), there has never been a legal obligation for British parents to send their children to school. The only demand is that every child receives an "efficient full-time education suitable to his age, ability and aptitude... either by regular attendance at school or otherwise".

But within this definition parents have generous latitude. They don't have to follow the national curriculum, enter their children for exams, observe school hours, give formal lessons, or mark work. Local authority inspectors can ask annually for written information on how a child is being educated, but they have no right to meet the child or visit the home. Should a local authority decide a child is not receiving a "suitable" education it does have powers to send him or her back to school. In practice, though, courts rarely rule in the authority's favour.

Sam's mother, Ann Newstead, is a spokesperson for the Education Otherwise support group for the Kent area. She withdrew her son from school in July 2005 because he was being badly bullied: "The differences between him and his classmates got more obvious. At school he couldn't have a meltdown like that. You can't start shouting and screaming in class." Ann and her husband Roarke gave Sam's elder brother Josh, 12, a choice about whether to stay in school or leave. Initially he opted to stay: "He said, 'I've got friends at school, we're doing a really interesting project at the moment'. He carried on for one day. That night I went into his room. He was really tearful and said: 'I don't want to go back tomorrow'." Sam's younger brother, Will, six, is also educated at home.

Do the children have any regrets? "We live opposite school and they hear the kids playing. I think they miss that. But they don't remember that it's the every-single-day aspect of it that did their head in." Children on the verge of adolescence, however, can be stifled by a home education. "Because they're closer to us, letting them out of your sight can be a bit harder," says Newstead. "If [my son] was going on a school bus every day, he would be totally independent. Now he's not."

In the us, 75 per cent of home-schooling families are practising christians - and a third of that number cite religion as their main reason for choosing home education. In secular Britain, only 8 per cent home-educate for reasons of faith. But it's a contributory factor for many others who feel state schools have become too permissive.

Modupe has come to Britain from west Africa after completing a masters degree at an Ivy League university. She's teaching her son, Theo, at home, with a curriculum partly based on the teachings of the 19th-century home-education pioneer Charlotte Mason. Mason warned of the dangers of insulting children's intelligence by giving them "twaddle" to read, and Theo's reading list is furnished with such doughty classics as The Pilgrim's Progress and H.E. Marshall's Our Island Story (a volume of high Edwardian patriotism that has long since disappeared from British classrooms but is still taught in traditional African schools). "The modern stuff doesn't make you think," says Modupe. "It almost seems to be for entertainment. It's important for Theo to be aware of the history of this country."

Theo was attending a private school in the south of England. His teacher - who seemed to be unmarried - fell pregnant. As a Christian, Modupe felt awkward having to answer a child's questions about why an unmarried woman would be having a baby. There were worrying hints of racism at the school, too: Modupe's son was the only boy in class not invited to a classmate's birthday party for three years in a row.

She also felt she was fighting low expectations from some staff. One teacher said: "It's really good that you are keeping [your son] busy so he doesn't get into trouble." "He hadn't even spoken to my son," says Modupe, "but he was really negative towards him." A sociable boy, Theo was initially upset at being removed from school: "At first he complained that I had ruined his life. But the socialisation they get from school is not the kind of socialisation we want."

Ronald Meighan, a former professor of education at Nottingham University, has been part of the home-education movement from the days when it was a besieged minority. In 1977 he knew of only 20 home-schooling families in Britain. "Home education started as an alternative lifestyle for people living in smallholdings," he says. "People who believed in a better and more self-sufficient society also believed in a more self-sufficient form of education. At the first meetings of Education Otherwise, I was the only one wearing a suit. But the message got round to doctors and solicitors and teachers that this could work for us. The Sound of Music - which shows a home-education family in operation - gave it a shot in the arm."

Still, it was a risky lifestyle choice. Before the early 1980s, parents who home-educated their children stood a good chance of seeing them taken into care. In the 1960s and 1970s, a generation of home-education martyrs fought the government in the courts - greatly restricting the powers of local education authorities. Now, official attitudes vary. Some local authorities provide teaching materials online for home-educators and allow them to take extra books out of the library. Others, though, have inspectors who are still deeply sceptical about the value of home education.

Meighan is a proselytiser for "purposive conversation" - the belief that in-depth discussion is the most effective way to teach children. He believes formal schooling is actively harmful: it removes children from the comfortable home environment in which their natural curiosity thrives and they learn best.

According to a survey of 297 home-schooling families by Mike Fortune-Wood, 62 per cent never use a timetable, the same percentage never consult the national curriculum, and 50 per cent disagree with the statement that a child should be able to read by the age of eight. Fortune-Wood, who home-educated four children, says: "I know of children who've started to pick up books at nine or 10, and there are no indications that they do any worse than others. One of our children didn't read until he was nine or 10 - and he's just completed an MA in creative writing."

A week later i join a home schooling trip to an educational farm amid the lush countryside of the south downs. On a windswept hill, to the bleating of Pygmy goats, I meet Janice, a former policewoman turned homeopath who educates her 11-year-old son Jesse at home. Jesse is a gifted footballer - and for most of the trip he is a hurtling streak on the horizon. "I've never been to school but it doesn't sound very good," he tells me during a two-minute hiatus before tackling the adventure playground. "This boy at a school that I know had his head flushed down the toilet."

Janice home-educates because, "Like most boys, Jesse has an enormous amount of testosterone. And the school system does not really allow for that. Jesse does not absorb information if you go over 20 minutes. He needs to run around the garden and be manic for a minute and then come back." Jesse is following the "Unschooling" philosophy: "We're not following the national curriculum. His writing is coming along really well, but it is at his pace. He wouldn't be at the age level that the schools are at. He might be in a specialist reading class because we did not start reading with him until he was seven-and-a-half."

Jesse is a "practical learner" so he learns "experientially" - going on outings, visiting museums, taking photos and creating scrapbooks. He has daily morning sessions of maths and English and a weekly session with a private tutor. But it's Jesse's gentle self-assuredness that his mother sees as the main achievement of home schooling: "He's so confident. He gave a talk about football training to a group of parents. He spoke with such authority. When he's training he always involves the younger kids."

So why have the numbers of the home-educated grown so quickly over the past five years? In the UK, home-educating religious and ethnic minorities - Muslims, Romany travellers, Presbyterians, pagans - have grown in number, but they have not been the recruiting sergeant for home education they are in the US. Bigger factors have been the increasing number of children diagnosed with special needs, parents fleeing the British state sector's testing and targets, the ready availability of teaching materials on the internet and the doubling of private school fees in a decade.

But a survey of 34 local authorities showed that by far the most significant factor was bullying: 44 per cent of parents cite it as the reason they withdrew their children from school. In this less deferential age, parents are less willing to trust teachers - and when faced with a problem such as bullying, they sort it out themselves.

In spite of its somewhat anarchic origins, home-schooling is more than anything a product of consumer power. Take the Norton family. They live on a suburban close near Rochester, where Rob works from home for British Telecom and is a squadron quartermaster sergeant in the Territorial Army, while Karen works evening shifts at the local retail park. The couple deregistered their 11-year-old son, Andrew, from the school roll last Easter after an unhappy move from junior school to a comprehensive with 2,000 students. It was, says Rob, "educational factory farming". There was "lots of disruption, lots of behavioural problems. The place is just too big. We logged everything that happened over two terms on two sheets of A4. We are looking at assault, stealing and criminal damage."

Andrew, a serious-minded boy, gives a litany of complaints - from scrawls of "boffin" across his exercise book to a lesson in which one pupil hit another over the head with a chair. "We hated taking him to school," says Karen. "He didn't want to cry but you could see him welling up. I was concerned that I was going to see a child that wanted to start self-harming." The teachers "tried their hardest" to sort out the issues. But in the end, according to Rob, "they didn't get the support they needed. They've got the crest, they've got the uniform, they've got the procedures, but they haven't got the willingness at a higher level to deal with the problems."

After ruling out private school on the grounds of cost, they signed Andrew up to InterHigh - an internet-based school that runs virtual classes each weekday morning in real time. Teachers scattered across Britain speak to pupils at home via a Skype-type headset and microphone. Inside his bedroom - all Star Wars posters, Lego space stations and Airfix models of helicopters - Andrew shows me how he files his homework by e-mail and his teachers upload their class notes to a central database. There is no disruption - any pupil who misbehaves in cyberspace is logged out by the teacher.

For a few hours in the afternoon, Andrew does his homework on his own and bounces on a trampoline in the garden in lieu of PE lessons. Rob's meticulous accounting gives a taste of the new home-educating consumer: "We worked out that the cost in petrol of taking Andrew to school - up and down the gears - is about £1,000 a year. It costs £2,000 for the internet course. So we've knocked half the cost off already."

The Nortons are home educating not because of any sweeping alternative vision of education. Theirs is a pragmatic decision, based on a belief that state education is lagging behind expectations: "We as a family are so happy," says Karen. "Andrew has opened up his world a lot more."

The most common fear is that the home-educated miss out socially. American studies have yet to prove this: observations of home-schooled children at play show they have fewer problems with social interaction than state-educated children - and are involved in a wider variety of activities outside the home. It is true that home-educated children seem well-balanced and thoughtful. But isn't there a contradiction between an educational philosophy that stresses a child's independence and the fact that they remain much more cloistered and dependent on their parents?

Home education can produce the ultimate "helicopter parents" - constantly hovering over their children, protecting them from the failures that might be thought essential rites of passage. And oughtn't we be concerned that so many parents, particularly those under pressure with children with special needs, are finding state education so poor they take the drastic step - and make the financial sacrifice - of keeping their child at home?

More fundamentally, the growth of home education is a challenge to the age-old concept of universal education. It is bizarre that while the state insists on a detailed, legally enforced national curriculum for every pupil at school - whether at Eton College or an inner-city comprehensive - those schooled at home are able to opt out of these obligations entirely. The teachers' union Voice - which represents 34,000 educational professionals - is campaigning for greater inspection rights for local authorities.

As general secretary, Philip Parkin, says: "It is absolutely unbelievable that we don't know how many home-educated children there are and we don't know who is educating them. Society has got to get a grip on this."

Some names have been changed.

The Home School Refugee

Jonathan Skeet, who fled his adopted country of Germany for the Isle of Wight when he was ordered to send his children to school or have his bank account frozen, tells Serge Debrebant why a home education is best

I don't understand why Germany is opposed to home education. I only know the authorities would have taken our children away if we hadn't moved to Britain. I'm from Hampshire, but in 1989 I moved to Germany, where I met and married a German woman. We started a family in a town in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Although Germany is the only industrialised country in which home education is illegal, we got to know some parents who were promoting it. My wife and I liked the idea. Our first child, Rahel, was so eager to learn