OF THE
TIMES
"Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison."In The Silver Chair, book 6 of CS Lewis's magnificent The Chronicles of Narnia, the first pages describe a "mixed" school, meaning for boys and girls, that was...
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it. These people had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked. And unfortunately what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others. All sort of things, horrid things, went on...[and] the people who did them were not expelled or punished. The Head said they were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked to them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became rather a favorite than otherwise."The school is called Experiment House and it's a drab, dull place where, even though it gives the appearance of "everyone doing what they liked," it's really a place where everyone must fit in and those who don't are singled out and persecuted.
Comment: The dams may be in need of repair but it's likely that, as we're seeing all over the world, the sheer amount of rain was a significant factor behind their collapse: