Death of a Nightingale

A book for today and tomorrow
About 100 special schools have
been closed in the UK since
1997. Another, Brighouse School
in Westborough, is threatened
with closure. An international
consensus that children with
special educational needs have the
right to be educated in mainstream
schools drives this policy.
But what if it is not such a good
idea? What if it is just a flawed and
expensive social experiment that is
good for some children but bad for
others, fine in the libraries of the
mind, but not in the classrooms of
the real world?
What if lawyers asserting human
rights enjoy the fruits of Utopia
whereas everyone else has just a
partial glimpse of it? What if academia
is leading its students down a blind
alley? And maybe the system of
goverment is wanting, too.
What if mistakes and misconceptions
here help to explain what is
wrong elsewhere and also threaten
other things that we treasure?
And what if the rising generation is illequiped
to meet the new challenges
of the twenty first century?
No-one should ignore these questions.