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The second extract above, from Professor Dobinson's Schooling 1963–1970, summarises all else in this article with the most ironical accuracy. For three centuries we have memorised the words of John Locke so faithfully that our entire educational system is the most efficient denial of them that could ever be constructed. The misgivings expressed by the Board of Education in 1937 were suppressed by the elaboration of a commercialised examination system that, by 1970, was driving more pupils out of schools than from those of any comparable country. Thus when the school‐leaving age was put up to 16 and pupils could no longer get free while still one or two years younger, large numbers of those forced by law to stay on sought their own forms of self‐expression. Most of these were to demonstrate their abilities to take action, normally of a kind calculated to draw attention to its perpetrators; our own studies of the attitudes of school leavers shows beyond all doubt that schools in which the initiatives of the individual pupils are overridden by the demands of the syllabus are those in which a significant number of pupils would wish to assert themselves by vandalising the premises or attacking the teachers. But these same studies also showed that when the pupils themselves were invited to join in classifying what might be going on in their lessons, they displayed the most intelligent motivation from which, had they been so inclined, even some experts in education might have learned. Again it would be interesting to involve a small number of comprehensive schools in all their variety, preferably in three or four local groups of five schools in each group, so that by action learning all associated with them — heads and staffs, parents and pupils — could study together their own and their colleagues' troubles and opportunities. There is no other way.