A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves
Tooley presents a convincing, almost proselytising case that, in building support, raising funds, and setting the stage for a utopian world where free, high-quality public education is available to all, the predominant thought in educational theory circles is wasting generations of talent and potential.
It is an argument that anyone in the field of education — especially those involved in policy decisions — should consider seriously, and soon.
The book progresses slowly, mirroring Tooley's own hesitance to believe that such schools exist. As he gains the confidence that they are common and widespread, he's hesitant to believe in their efficacy, because no one else does. Even in countries where free education is available, many poor parents pay to send their children to private school. The experts tell him it's because they don't know better.
But Tooley's group videotapes, in elegantly furnished public schools that have received large amounts of Western aid, teachers napping on their desks during class time. (The union is powerful, and corruption prevalent, so the most that can be done is to transfer them, explains one official.)
Tooley's abiding interesting in doing his part to help realise universal education drove him to teach mathematics in Zimbabwe for a few years after graduating college. Despite requesting rural posting, his relatively high level of education meant he was assigned to a school in urban Harare — a school many politicians’ children attended. After two years, he was finally able to wrangle an assignment in Zimbabwe's rural Eastern Highlands.
In 2000, working on his doctorate, Tooley was offered a commission by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation to study private schools in a dozen developing countries. Once again, however, Tooley would be stopped from accessing the poor. The private schools he was to study catered to children in the middle and upper classes. However, this, Tooley was told, was because there existed no private schools for the poor.
That's what makes his discovery of one, and then another, and then another, so exciting. And not just in Hyderabad, but in example after example, country after country, Tooley finds private schools catering to the poorest of the poor. Slum dwellers. Shantytown denizens.
Tooley studies these schools in his free time — why poor people pay for them, how they compare with public schools, how they're able to exist unbeknownst to international educational experts and even the regional education officers.
In The Beautiful Tree, James Tooley censures the widespread belief that education for all must be public, free, and government-administered by showcasing the success of private schools in the slums and villages of India, Nigeria and China
As revealed in The Beautiful Tree — A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves, James Tooley is a revolutionary by happenstance. Or perhaps by serendipity. Maybe that's not an uncommon origin for revolutionaries. But he also has an inquisitive nature and an open mind; without the former, his chance discovery in Hyderabad in 2000 never would have occurred; without the latter, it never would have turned from discovery to realisation.
