James Tooley

The Beautiful Tree

1. IDEA 1

   The poor run their own schools

   Tooley, a professor of education, describes discovering many low-cost private schools serving poor families in the slums of Hyderabad. He argues that the poor were educating themselves without government or aid help.

2. IDEA 2

   Slums were full of schools

   Tooley describes finding hundreds of small private schools in poor neighbourhoods, charging very low fees. Officials and experts often ignored them. In his account, these schools had grown up without help, run by local people who saw a need.

3. IDEA 3

   Africa had them too

   Tooley describes similar schools in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. Parents paid small fees from tiny incomes. In his account, the same pattern appeared across a wide range of countries, which suggests the trend was not limited to one place.

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