A New Start

FT: In a class of their own

In a class of their own

By Catherine Moye

Published: July 5 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 5 2008 03:00

Like Oxford's spires, British fee-paying schools evoke notions of educational perfection. For many affluent non-Britons, names such as Eton and Harrow share a pedigree with buildings such as Buckingham Palace and St Paul's cathedral: traditional British institutions that cannot be outsourced to China.

Thus many overseas parents move to the UK, be it as non-domiciled aliens or relocators, as buyers or renters, full or part-time. Their search for British schooling for their children helps fuel demand for housing in prime areas, especially in London.

"Business, tax and education are the main reasons that overseas nationals come to live in London," says Richard Sharples of buying agency Property Vision. "The perception is that the British [education] system is the finest in the world and most people think it's a good idea for their children to learn English. There's also an element of prestige in having your child go to Harrow or wherever."

That might be the case but securing your child a place at Britain's most venerable scholastic institutions can be like obtaining a seat at King Arthur's round table - especially for an overseas national. Pressure on places is tough and growing and only a lucky few are admitted.

"We get hundreds of overseas enquiries. I would say that number has more than doubled in the past three years," says Kirsty Shanahan, communications manager of Harrow school, where fees are approximately £26,500 a year. "The bulk of the increase is from the emerging economies of India, Russia and China."

Yet only about 10 per cent of Harrow's pupils are from outside the UK, according to Shanahan. "That's been fairly consistent throughout. It's not set in stone but we do keep one eye on the quota, otherwise it's not good for the school as a whole."

Historically the overseas clientele were wealthy parents from Asia, the Middle East and commonwealth African countries. They sent their children to British public schools that they had almost invariably attended themselves before going on to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. (In Britain, in one of those quirks apparently designed to fox foreigners, independently run, fee-charging schools are termed "public" because historically pupils were gathered in public to be taught rather than privately at home by a tutor).

"To a certain extent it's snob value and the fact that children are worked much harder in the English public school system than, say, the American system," says buying agent Robert Bailey, many of whose clients want second homes for education-related reasons. "That is, the American system is more sports-led and a lot less arduous academically. We are very results-orientated."

The attraction of a British boarding school is also perhaps an unconscious backlash against the globalised era of You Tube, the IPod and the other relentless technology assailing children. The public school boarding house is seen as a bastion of discipline and offers the original and unsurpassable version of social websites such as Facebook and Bebo: the old school tie network. Not that all parents are up to speed with the protocol. "I am constantly being asked if I can try and pull a few strings and, you know, offer a school a sizeable 'donation'," says Bailey.

Education consultant Martin Humphrys says he has never been so inundated with requests for schools and has witnessed a marked increase in interest from emerging countries, especially Russia and China.

"The demand for places is very high at the moment," says Humphrys. "We've been in that situation for about the past nine years." But if overseas parents' dreams for their children are somehow bound up with the public school system, Humphrys reckons that 99 per cent of his job is about managing their expectations.

"Places are at a premium in the key schools such as Eton and the entrance exams are incredibly tough for children whose first language isn't English," he explains. "And there are certain schools that, if parents haven't registered their child by the age of 10 and a half they're not going to get them in at 13."

Even if the star names are oversubscribed, Humphrys is firm in his conviction that British public schools offer the best education in the world. "London especially has excellent schools, from nurseries right through to senior schools," he says. "People come here because you will not find schools bettered anywhere."

Although there are no specific statistics on how many overseas nationals relocate to the UK to buy second homes, many parents will want somewhere in the capital for family get-togethers, especially during boarding school holidays. To that extent their housing needs are more prêt-a-porter than couture.

"These buyers are looking for easy maintenance, lock-up-and-leave apartments that are secure, with 24-hour porterage," says Camilla Dell of buying agents Black Brick Property Solutions. "They want them in safe areas such as St John's Wood or Knightsbridge for when the children reach 16 or 17 and stay there by themselves, and that are good for public transport."

But matching the right child to the right school often means looking outside London. "The most important thing is that the school is a genuine boarding school and not dominated by flexi or weekly boarders with just a trickle of overseas children left at the weekends," says Catherine Stoker, director of education and guardianship services at educational consultancy Gabbitas. To that end, schools such as Marlborough and Haileybury in Herfordshire and Uppingham in Rutland are popular choices.

Berkshire schools close to Heathrow airport are also popular choices for overseas parents with children returning home at the end of each term - notably Bradfield College, Wellington College, and St George's at Ascot. And different nationalities have their own reasons for being often drawn to particular parts of the UK.

"In Tokyo they tend to live in apartments the size of postage stamps and so they love going to boarding schools set in large historical buildings," says Stoker. "We just took a Japanese girl to see Gordonstoun [in Scotland] and she loved it."

That blue-chip schools attract great wealth and prestige to the nation is music to the ears of Tony Little, head master of Eton College. "Ours is very much a British school and we are already over-subscribed from our British market. We don't actually have figures for nationality but the figure that springs to mind is about 100 boys [from overseas] out of 1,300," he says.

"UK independent schools have the strongest track record of any sector anywhere," he explains. "When you speak to people in, say, Russia or China, what they admire most is our great tradition of liberal education."

By this Little means that it is holistic and centred upon the person. "The Chinese, for example, are very conscious of the fact that they are strong in theoretical 'Confucian-style' education but the British system has the X-factor of building students' confidence and practical abilities in the wider world."

London also has highly regarded international schools serving the needs of foreign families, especially those relocating for short periods. Notable examples include the French Lycée in Kensington, Marymount in Kingston upon Thames, Woodside Park in Frien Barnet and Egham International in Surrey, all of which operate the International Baccalaureate system.

Those of us who live in the St John's Wood district of north London can be in no doubt as to the knock-on effect that a prestigious school can have on an area. The American School, which has existed in various incarnations since 1969, is one of the principal drivers in the local economy. Its presence is felt in everything from the cost of quality housing to the lengths of the queues at Starbucks.

Americans are the dominant group relocating to London. "[They] represent a large percentage of our sales and lettings," says James Simpson of estate agency Knight Frank's St. John's Wood office. "Most Americans rent but we also get investors looking to buy to rent to American families. Principally they want detached five-bedroom Victorian homes in side streets."

Greek-born Alicia Cornelius and her husband, Alex, a banker, divide their time between New York, Athens and London, where their 14-year old daughter is at boarding school. "We have a two-bedroom flat in a new-build block overlooking the river that just takes care of itself," says Cornelius.

Her own upbringing as much as her regard for the British school system came into play when deciding upon her daughter's education. "My parents were diplomats, so I went to at least a dozen schools around the world," she says. "I meet a lot of people today who went through the same and want nothing more than to settle their children in one place throughout their schooling."

Naomi Heaton of property investors London Central Portfolio, finds that mapping out your child's educational needs is not so different to mapping out an investment plan. "In both cases you are looking at around an eight-year cycle," she observes. "Your child is likely to be here at school or college for eight years and we see that time as the normal doubling of the London (market) cycle. In my experience, buying for the children is just a good rationale for something that people were going to do anyway."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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.

==

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

Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward

Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along. Gwendolyn Brooks

 

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 that we decided to give her lessons. Our reluctance to send our kids to school grew when we saw how well it worked.

In 2002, our troubles started. We received a letter telling us to register Rahel at the local school. We wrote back to say we preferred to home-educate her. Although I had heard some German home-schooling families had lost custody of their children, I wanted to be open about it. I was hoping to reach a compromise.

At first, the authorities didn't react, but this changed two years later, when our son Immanuel had to be registered at school. This time we received a flurry of letters. The local school inspector called us to her office, and at the end of the conversation, she warned me: "Mr Skeet, you don't know what's coming to you."

A few weeks later, my bank account was frozen. The state had fined us more than *6,000, and half of the money was removed from my bank account. Bailiffs turned up at our apartment trying to get the other half. My wife told me later that Rahel had been terrified - and tried to defend our piano [from being taken]. But the bailiffs just wanted our car keys.

I was working at a home for the elderly at the time and was just about to give out lunch when I looked out the window and saw men walking around my car. Then they had it towed away. We had to pay the other half of the fine to get it back.

We kept up the fight, but we set a one-year time limit. After that, we were worried it would start to damage the family. Soon, we were being threatened with other fines. The school minister for North Rhine-Westphalia wrote to us to tell us that she supported the local authorities.

In summer 2006 - four years after the first letter from the authorities - we visited my parents in Hampshire and also went to the Isle of Wight, where about 80 home-schooling families live. It was a swift decision. Within three months I had quit my job and given notice on our flat.

In our last weeks in Germany, the child welfare office invited us in to talk. We knew it was their first step towards taking our children away. But it didn't bother us any more. We were off to the Isle of Wight.

17% - The estimated annual increase in children who are home-schooled in the UK (presently 50,000)

Source: Mike Fortune-Wood

10% - The proportion of home-educating families in the UK who use textbooks on a frequent basis

source: mike fortune-wood

1.1 million - The lowest estimate of the number of children being home-schooled in the US. (Seventeen US presidents were educated at home.)

source: fraser institute

42% - The proportion of home-educating families in the UK that earn less than the national average wage. Despite perceptions that learning at home is a middle class phenomenon, 17 per cent of families live on incomes of under £10,000 per year

source: mike fortune-wood

Some famous names who were schooled at home...

John Stuart Mill, Patrick Moore, William Blake, Yehudi Menuhin, Bertrand Russell, Her Majesty the Queen...

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Insead offers a fresh model for student loans

Insead offers a fresh model for student loans

By Della Bradshaw

Published: June 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 2 2008 03:00

When Cameron Stevens began his MBA at Insead in 2005, he thought the problems he had faced when getting a loan for the year-long programme were probably unique. But on his arrival in Fontainebleau, France, he realised that was far from the case.

Insead prides itself on selecting students such as Mr Stevens who have an international background. But because Mr Stevens, a South African, had worked in Malaysia for several years before starting his MBA programme, he was not eligible for South African loans as he had no credit record there. Similarly, because he was not Malaysian, he could not apply for local loans.

When Mr Stevens realised the extent of the issue - research shows that 60 per cent of MBA students at top European business schools experience similar problems - he got together with two of his peers, fellow South African Ryan Steele and Miha Zerko, from Slovenia, to look into the issue.

As a project for an entrepreneurship course at Insead, they assessed the commercial viability of starting a new style of loan scheme, then they entered a five-year strategy for the project in the school's business plan competition.

On graduation, they set up Prodigy, a London-based company offering student loans, initially to those enrolled at Insead, but in the future to students at other top business schools.

Their loans differ in two fundamental ways from the traditional loan products offered by banks.

First, the company assess-es risk differently. Most banks calculate risk on the basis of past salary, but Prodigy has developed modelling tools that can incorporate potential future earnings based on profiles of past students.

"We can be a little bit more intelligent about this [assessment]," says Mr Steele, who previously work-ed at a leading South African bank. He points out that business schools have collected reams of data over the past decades linking career choices and salary.

Second, the scheme is funded by Insead alumni. These include the likes of André Hoffmann, vicechairman of pharmaceutical company Roche, and Michael Butt, chairman of Axis Capital. Investors get a return on investment that is higher than they would earn by leaving their money in the bank, and the Prodigy directors make their money through a fee to students.

Mr Stevens points out that the scheme enables Insead alumni, who may be too busy to contribute to Insead in other ways, to help programme students.

The pilot scheme was launched in 2007 and this year Prodigy has already set up loans for Insead students from at least 15 countries, ranging from the US and the UK, to Ghana and Chile.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

NY Times: Busy Students Get a New Required Course: Lunch

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/nyregion/24lunch.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all


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Busy Students Get a New Required Course: Lunch

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

At Briarcliff High School in Westchester County, many students eat in class. Others, citing heavy workloads, don’t eat at all.

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By WINNIE HU

Published: May 24, 2008

BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. — High school students in this well-to-do Westchester suburb pile on four, five, even six Advanced Placement classes to keep up with their friends. They track their grade-point averages to multiple decimal places and have longer résumés than their parents.

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Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

“I would never put lunch before work,” says Elaine Rigney, a junior at Briarcliff. She intends to work through the new period.

But nearly half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break. They will extend each school day and cut the number of minutes each class meets over the year. Briarcliff currently does not require students to have a lunch period.

In a school where SAT scores are the talk in the hallways and more than half the seniors are accepted to their first-choice college, Briarcliff’s principal, Jim Kaishian, said mandatory lunch is intended to reduce stress on teenagers so caught up in the achievement frenzy they barely have time to eat or sleep.

This year, 12 percent of Briarcliff’s 665 students have no free periods, while an additional 30 percent have classes the entire time the cafeteria is open.

“We see kids rushing to eat; we hear about stress levels going up,” Mr. Kaishian said. “We’ve watched as some kids implode and bend under the weight of having to go period after period without a break.”

Briarcliff is one of several high-performing campuses that is confronting the lunchless, alongside other stress-reduction measures like starting school later or limiting the number of A.P. courses each student can take.

At Horace Mann, a prestigious private school in Riverdale, the Governing Council passed a resolution in March saying: “All students, regardless of whether they want a lunch period, should have time to eat lunch outside of class.” In Chappaqua, Horace Greeley High is rolling out a new schedule this fall that lengthens classes, with a 30-minute free block in the middle of the day so that “students will have more time to eat in a less stressful way,” according to the superintendent, David Fleishman.

Across the country, Woodside Priory School, a Benedictine school south of San Francisco, not only added a mandatory lunch in 2005, but also a 30-minute snack break at 10:45 a.m. In nearby Palo Alto, the all-girl Castilleja School, which already required lunch, started setting out milk and fresh fruit all day and serving afternoon snacks of granola bars and trail mix. And in the Chicago suburbs, New Trier Township High School also considered mandatory lunch but dropped the idea after students protested that it would limit their chances to take electives like music, art and drama.

Here in Briarcliff Manor, the bright, spacious cafeteria often feels deserted. Those who do stop in for Boar’s Head deli sandwiches, yogurt parfaits, sushi or shrimp dumplings often sneak the meals into the library, where the media specialist, Tamara Hervey, said she is constantly picking up wrappers, napkins, soda cans and straws. Others take notes in class between bites of turkey and bologna sandwiches, chips, crackers and baby carrots; 15 of the 19 students in Ms. Carnahan’s 10:45 a.m. A.P. European History were eating the other day while reviewing for a test.

“I base my lunch on what’s going on in class that day, so if I have a test in European History, I’ll eat in Health or English,” said Elliot Tusk, 16, a sophomore who wolfed down Milano cookies. “The Health teacher is sympathetic, but you’re only allowed to eat healthy food in her class. If you have Gatorade or M&Ms, she’ll take it away from you,” he said.

Madeline Levine, a psychologist and author of “The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids” (HarperCollins, 2006), co-founded a project at Stanford University this spring, “Challenge Success,” that is working with a network of 50 public and private schools to reduce student stress and focus on developmental needs.

“Kids who are not eating, or eating under stressful circumstances are not cultivating healthy eating habits,” she said in an interview this week. “We want to send the message that a big part of growing up is how to manage yourself and not just getting good grades.”

Bob Sweeney, president of a counselors’ association in the Hudson Valley, said that many guidance departments are now advising students to strike a balance between a rigorous course load and a healthy lifestyle. At Mamaroneck High School, where Mr. Sweeney works, the whole school takes lunch from 11:06 to 11:58 a.m., when no classes meet.

“It’s the time of day when everything stops,” he said. “They really need that time to decompress and step off the treadmill.”

In anticipation of the new lunch policy, Briarcliff has spent more than $8,000 to expand the cafeteria seating area, ordering 14 additional tables and 140 chairs. It will also be adding a second cashier and deli worker, and revising the menu to include smoothies, more salads and ethnic foods.

To fit in two 20-minute lunch periods, the school has extended each day by 10 minutes, and moved to a rotating schedule of nine classes (only eight of the nine will meet each day). The overall instruction time in each subject will be an average of 7,100 minutes, rather than 7,200, per year.

While many parents support the enforced lunch policy, students complained that it could result in confusing schedules, longer lines in the cafeteria, less time for after-school clubs, and more homework because classes will meet fewer times.

Students will not be required to stay in the cafeteria, but neither will they be able to fill the time with a class. Elaine Rigney, 17, a junior who reads textbooks in the cafeteria sandwich line, said that she had already arranged with teachers to use their classroom computers during lunch next year.

“I would never put lunch before work,” said Elaine, who has a free block for lunch in her schedule this spring, but shuns the cafeteria to study in the library, and snacks in class on yogurt, cut-up red peppers and Wheat Thins.

With three honors and three Advanced Placement classes, Elaine said that her father, a corporate lawyer, lectures her that she will have an ulcer by age 20. But “everywhere you go, you hear college this and college that,” she said. “Now in junior year, with all the standardized tests and college visits, all I can think about is how things are going to affect my college application.”

Elliot Tusk, who eats most days in A.P. European History, said that even if it is unhealthy not to break for lunch, students should be allowed to make their own choices. He takes nine classes, fences every day after school and plays violin in a county orchestra, and said he sometimes skips both breakfast (to get 15 minutes extra sleep) and lunch (if he has multiple tests).

Though he loves food enough to write a restaurant column, “Eating with Elliot,” for the school newspaper, he said he sees weekday lunch as nothing more than a chance to refuel.

“You can’t eat for pleasure in school because you have to take notes in class,” Elliot said. “You can’t learn about the Holy Roman Empire and enjoy sweet peppers and chicken cutlets. It’s two separate parts of my brain.”

NYTimes: Hope in the Unseen

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/opinion/25friedman.html?th&emc=th

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May 25, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Hope in the Unseen

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Every once in a while as a journalist you see a scene that grips you and will not let go, a scene that is at once so uplifting and so cruel it’s difficult to even convey in words. I saw such a scene last weekend at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in Baltimore. It was actually a lottery, but no ordinary lottery. The winners didn’t win cash, but a ticket to a better life. The losers left with their hopes and lottery tickets crumpled.

The event was a lottery to choose the first 80 students who will attend a new public boarding school — the SEED School of Maryland — based in Baltimore. I went along because my wife is on the SEED Foundation board. The foundation opened its first school 10 years ago in Washington, D.C., as the nation’s first college-prep, public, urban boarding school. Baltimore is its second campus. The vast majority of students are African-American, drawn from the most disadvantaged and violent school districts.

SEED Maryland was admitting boys and girls beginning in sixth grade. They will live in a dormitory — insulated from the turmoil of their neighborhoods. In Washington, nearly all SEED graduates have gone on to four-year colleges, including Princeton and Georgetown.

Because its schools are financed by both private and public funds, SEED can offer this once-in-a-lifetime, small-class-size, prep-school education for free, but it can’t cherry-pick its students. It has to be open to anyone who applies. The problem is that too many people apply, so it has to choose them by public lottery. SEED Maryland got more than 300 applications for 80 places.

The families all crowded into the Notre Dame auditorium, clutching their lottery numbers like rosaries. On stage, there were two of those cages they use in church-sponsored bingo games. Each ping-pong ball bore the lottery number of a student applicant. One by one, a lottery volunteer would crank the bingo cage, a ping-pong ball would roll out, the number would be read and someone in the audience would shriek with joy, while everyone else slumped just a little bit lower. One fewer place left ...

It was impossible to watch all those balls tumbling around inside the cage and not see them as the people in that room tumbling around inside, waiting to see who would be the lucky one to slide out and be blessed. No wonder a portrait of hope and anxiety was on every face.

“I am so hopeful about the school and just so overwhelmingly anxious about what happens to the students who don’t get in,” said Dawn Lewis, the head of the SEED Maryland school. “During the six or seven months of recruiting, we heard all the stories of all the problems these kids are confronting in their schools, and each time [parents] would tell us, ‘This kind of school is the answer — the thing this child needs to be successful.’ When we were completing the applications, we received so many letters from guidance counselors and teachers and principals and even pastors saying, ‘Please, just exempt this kid from the lottery — because without this, there is no chance for this kid, there may not be another opportunity.’ ”

If you think that parents from the worst inner-city neighborhoods don’t aspire for something better for their kids, a lottery like this will dispel that illusion real fast.

Ms. Lewis said she’s seen people on crack walking their kids to school. “We had parents who came into our office who were clearly strung out,” she added. “They could not read or write, but they got themselves there and said, ‘I need help on this application’ for their son or daughter. Families do want the best for their children. If they have a chance, they don’t want their kids to inherit their problems. ... These aspirations are so underserved.”

Ms. Lewis said that she and her colleagues would meet with parents begging to get their kids in, help them fill out the applications and then, after the parents left, go into their offices, shut the door and cry.

Tony Cherry’s son Noah, an 11-year-old from Baltimore County, was one of the lucky ones whose number got pulled. “His teacher said if he got picked they’re going to have a party for him,” said Mr. Cherry. “This is a good opportunity. It’s going to give him a chance. ... Wish they could take all of them.”

Not everyone selected was in attendance, said Carol Beck, SEED’s director of new schools development. So, on Monday SEED notified those who had won. “We called one school counselor the next day and told her that so-and-so was chosen,” said Ms. Beck, “and she said: ‘Thank you. You have just saved this child’s life.’ ”

There are so many good reasons to finish our nation-building in Iraq and resume our nation-building in America, but none more than this: There’s something wrong when so much of an American child’s future is riding on the bounce of a ping-pong ball.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

FT: Penguins offer safer surfing for junior web users

Penguins offer safer surfing for junior web users

By Maija Palmer

Published: May 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 12 2008 03:00

The founders of Club Penguin - Lane Merrifield, Lance Priebe and Dave Krysko - are possibly some of the nicest guys in the internet business. They give millions of dollars a year to children's charities and are fierce advocates of family values.

Mr Merrifield looks more like a kindly primary school teacher than an executive, the kind of man you might trust to look after your children. This is what parents are, in effect ,doing as they let their children join Club Penguin, the virtual online world for six- to 14-year-olds.

What started out as a sideline project in the sleepy holiday town of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, is rapidly growing into a global phenomenon.

Club Penguin has 20m users and analysts estimate up to 10 per cent of them have persuaded parents to pay about £4 a month for souped-up access to the site. Stephen Prentice, senior analyst at Gartner, notes: "Kids' virtual worlds are the success story. If you exclude online games, around nine out of 10 virtual world users are probably under 12."

Club Penguin became so successful that last July it was bought by Disney for $700m (£350m). It is now building an international presence with Disney's backing, beginning with the opening of a UK office earlier this month. It is also hiring a marketing executive for the first time since it was founded in October 2005.

There is some irony in the fact that the Club Penguin founders now find themselves owned by a big US company. All three originally moved to Kelowna to escape the corporate rat race. And, they had started the site in order to create an advertisement-free zone for children that also offered entertainment.

The site's popularity - it made a profit within four months - showed the founders they had found a gap in the market.

Safety features were a big selling point from the outset. Mr Merrifield's wife is a clinical psychologist specialising in childhood and helped shape the site; his sister and mother, both teachers, also offered advice.

Virtual Worlds Management, which tracks networking sites and virtual worlds, estimates that there are more than 100 youth-focused virtual worlds either live or in development, with 52 of them aimed at children under seven. Disney alone is understood to be developing up to 10 virtual worlds aimed at children.

The fact that many of these sites are associated with commercial brands such as Barbie, Beanie Babies and Bratz worries parents concerned about their children being exposed to too much advertising online.

Safety is also a problem. A recent survey by Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, found that nearly half of all British children have a profile on a social networking site, including a quarter of all eight- to 11-year-olds with online access. These children are theoretically too young for Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, which have minimum age limits of 13 or 14. However, many find ways round the age restrictions. Given that last summer MySpace alone detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, parents concerns are real.

Their search for safer online alternatives - sites that are more closely monitored and where children cannot reveal personal information - plays to Club Penguin's strengths. It employs more than 100 moderators who monitor the site for unsafe behaviour. They are trained to spot bullying, or attempts to share contact details.

Pictures cannot be posted on the site. Instead, children are represented by a colourful penguin. Filtering software prevents phone numbers being published.

Club Penguin's culture of niceness is key to its success. But how well it can continue to walk the fine line between wholesomeness and commercial pressures is unclear. Mr Merrifield says that Disney has been very hands-off with the company and lets it do things its own way.

Mr Merrifield admits the company could create soft toys based on its virtual penguin characters but he pledges this would only be done with careful consideration. "It will be very purposeful. It will be based on what the audience want," he says.

The question is: which audience is he talking about? Eight-year-olds do not mind commercialism - they love toyshops. It is parents who resent it, and Club Penguin will have a tricky balancing act to please both sets of customers.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT REPORT - BUSINESS EDUCATION 2008: Back to school for lessons on leadership

"If you catch them four or five years [after receiving their MBAs] they will tell you they wish they'd paid more attention to their organisational behaviour professors, because it turns out those are the skills they now need most in the job," he says.

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FT REPORT - BUSINESS EDUCATION 2008: Back to school for lessons on leadership

By Andrew Baxter
Published: May 12, 2008

Seventeen years after receiving his MBA, Todd Loudenslager was back at school last month. The senior risk officer at US Bancorp's consumer bank, now 51, was taking part in the Kellogg School of Management's Post-MBA programme.

The programme claims to be unique - a three-week course, just for MBAs, that enables participants to catch up on business trends and management thinking in the decade or more since they received their qualification, and brush up their leadership skills.

"My boss had said there was a need to get me into some kind of advanced education, something at a higher and broader level than bankers' school," says Mr Loudenslager.

The Kellogg programme is not the only way MBAs can refresh their knowledge with short courses. In the UK, Ashridge Business School runs a three-day MBA Refresher weekend, while Harvard Business School in the US has its three-day Breakthrough Insights programme, open to the school's MBA and executive education alumni. It also has a week-long programme aimed mainly at women MBAs returning to the workplace, called "A New Path".

Then there are any number of executive education courses with content that appeals to middle-ranking or senior executives who may have long since given up trying to get into the suit - or dress - they bought for their MBA award ceremony.

The leadership programmes at Henley Management College are popular with MBAs, as is the three-week, Advanced Management Programme. At Cranfield School of Management, short courses that attract MBAs include the Business Leaders Programme (five plus seven days) and the five-day Director as Strategic Leader course.

At ESCP-EAP European School of Management, the Milestone executive education programmes are particularly attractive to MBAs wishing to move up to the next level of leadership, says Davide Sola, the school's UK director. An example is the school's three-day Advanced Leadership Workshop.

The need to catch up on new academic research and business trends is one obvious reason for MBAs to feel the urge to get back into the classroom. Sometimes participants on advanced management programmes may even get a head start on others when it comes to exposure to new thinking.

The business adviser Ram Charan, for example, has long been a teacher in programmes at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Recently, says Kip Kelly, Fuqua's director of executive education, Mr Charan has been teaching from his new book on innovation* even before it hit bookshops.

Refreshing leadership skills that may not have seemed so important to MBAs aged, typically, 28 or 29, is another reason to come back to school. Everyone would have taken some kind of leadership class in their MBA, says Brenda Ellington Booth, Kellogg's academic director for executive programmes, but for younger participants this would have been "interesting but not that relevant. Now you have more experience, you may be in a different industry, you have more direct and indirect reports, so we have a leadership week [the final week of the Kellogg programme]."

Narayan Pant, Insead's dean of executive education, says a lot of MBAs come back to the school's leadership programmes for this very reason. "If you catch them four or five years [after receiving their MBAs] they will tell you they wish they'd paid more attention to their organisational behaviour professors, because it turns out those are the skills they now need most in the job," he says.

Stephen Burnett, Kellogg's associate dean and director of executive education programmes, says many courses attract MBAs but are not designed on the assumption that participants have the qualification.

"This means that you always have to revisit a few basics to ensure that everybody is up to speed," says Prof Burnett. "With our post-MBA programme, we don't have to do that, because we know what you had and can build on that."

The $23,000 course is intensive and Mr Loudenslager says it "often felt like a firehose". But he says the time - 10 hours of classes a day from Monday to Friday and half a day on the first Saturday - was used wisely.

Away from the short courses of executive education, there is the Post-MBA Diploma in Advanced Management offered by Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix runs a Post-MBA Masters in Global Management. There is more on these courses in an extended version of this article at: www.ft.com/businesseducation

*The Game Changer - How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan. Crown Business

FT: Rebooting the Indian green revolution

Rebooting the Indian green revolution

By Amy Yee in New Delhi

Published: May 2 2008 03:00 | Last updated: May 2 2008 03:00

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.

Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers.

Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms. Farmers can also sell wheat and other crops to ITC.

The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.

ITC has rolled out 6,400 e-choupals across India since 2000. The initiative has gained new relevance as New Delhi urgently tries to tackle threats to food security, the growing gap between rich and poor and stagnant agricultural growth that has added to soaring food prices,

India "needs another green revolution", the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) recently urged. "Growth and productivity in agriculture are slowing, and the green revolution has bypassed millions."

India has the most to gain from improvements in agriculture because it is home to nearly two-thirds of Asia's poor, most of whom rely on farming, Unescap said.

Middle-class Indians are eating more and better food. Yet its population of 1.1bn is growing at about 1.4 per cent and food grain production increased just 0.9 per cent last year, according to ministry of agriculture statistics.

Agricultural growth has steadily decelerated because of years of under-investment as attention has focused on high-growth manufacturing and service industries.

But big strides can be made with relatively simple measures. In Kurthia, which is 40 km from the bustling holy city of Varanasi, the e-choupal consists of a computer in a modest house rigged with a small satellite dish. Farmers pose questions that are e-mailed to ITC -agricultural scientists and experts at agricultural -institutes.

Yogesh Bhrigulanshi, a farmer and the ITC local manager in nearby Bisuari village, says rice yields have risen 70 per cent, to 3,900kg per acre, since the arrival of the e-choupal. "We used to use fertiliser without any knowledge," says Mr Bhrigulanshi. "We used to use pesticides for any disease on plants. Now we know which pesticide to use and if it needs to be used."

ITC plans to invest $1bn on e-choupals in the period to 2015 to connect farmers to information, products and services. The hope is that as rural incomes rise, farmers will buy more products and services, ranging from seeds and fertilisers to insurance and healthcare.

Rural standards of living have improved. Mr Bhrigulanshi bought his second mobile phone last month and two years ago purchased a television. His 11-year-old son, wearing a white uniform and striped blue tie, goes to an English school that costs Rs25,000 ($625) per year. That compares to the $7 annual cost of his previous government school.

There is still a long way to go. Farmers say there has been little improvement in roads, electricity and water over the years. Government agricultural subsidies for fertiliser, pesticide and equipment do not reach them. Subsidies should be provided through private parties, Mr Singh suggests.

They remain sceptical of the Indian government's recent promises to invest heavily in agriculture and waive $15bn (€9.7bn, £7.6bn) worth of loans to farmers. Writing off bad loans means "defaulters benefit. Those who have paid do not have any benefit," opines Mr Bhrigulanshi.

"Government always talks about farmers when elections come," adds Mr Singh. "But practically, we are not seeing anything."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008