This letter in the Daily Telegraph today provides good anecdotal support:

Sir - How to rescue Africa from Mr Blair's and Mr Brown's good intentions? James Bartholomew (Opinion, June 30) [this posting] cited Professor James Tooley's research to indicate how spending $7 billion a year of someone's money to give every African child free state education would shatter the standards of education already in place.

I can cite my own experience of simultaneously serving as a governor of a large comprehensive in Mr Blair's native ground of Islington while repeatedly visiting the remote Bakonzo people of the Ruwenzoru mountains in Uganda's far west. There, where virtually every child goes to one mission-founded school or another, paying tiny fees, the standards of literacy, grammar, maths, handwriting, general knowledge and, of course, scriptural history, were (and are) markedly higher than at the struggling Islington comprehensive, age for age, right through from 12 to 16.

Tom Stacey, London W8

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education • Foreign aid

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