Go to a job interview and tell and employer that you can recite the 17 times table; they don't care. Why are we still teaching it?

There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.

You can force students to learn, to a certain extent, but students aren't happy and employers aren't happy.

Too many pupils at schools in the U.K. want to have careers as footballers or TV hosts, or models, because that's what they're constantly exposed to as the heroes of our time.

Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they're learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.