BOOK REVIEW

THE BEAUTIFUL TREE

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 Book & Reviewers details

Book Title : The Beautiful Tree

Author : James Tooley

Reviewers : Lalitha devi P

Prabanjami K
Harish NA
Rahul D

No. Of. Pages : 366 pages No. Of. Chapters : 12 chapters

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 Review Outcomes

• At the end of the review, you will come to know that how world's poorest people are
educating themselves.

• Also, you will learn about the history of private education.

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 Index
S. No Topics Slide No.
1 Author introduction 5
2 Discovery in India 6-7
3 That Was No Discovery After All 8
4 A Puff of Logic, Nigeria 9
5 The logically impossible 10
6 A Kenyan Conundrum- and it’s Solution 11
7 Poor ignoramuses 12-13
8 An inspector Calls 14
9 Old Monk, and Young Nuns on Motorbikes 15
10 The Men Who Uprooted the Beautiful Tree 16-18
11 The Madras Method 19
12 Educating Amaretch 20
13 Conclusion 21

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 Author introduction

NAME : James Tooley

BORN : July 1959

BORN PLACE : Southampton,England

RESEARCH INTEREST : Private education, developing countries

higher education.

OCCUPATION : Professor of educational entrepreneurship,

Educator, Author, Vice-chancellor.

NOTABLE AWARDS : National free Enterprise award.

FAMOUS BOOKS : The Beautiful Tree,The Really Good Schools

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 Discovery in India

• The author’s real job was mathematics teacher in Africa. His main
objective was to help the poor people.

• During his interview with the minister of education at the Zimbabwe

high commission in London. He asked to assigned him to rural
school.

• Then he posted to the Queen Elizabeth high school because of his

mathematics degree. Then he changed the administrative error in
that school.

• Two years later, In Easterns Island, he lived and worked in a

small school.

• He defended Robert Mugabe regime because it was

engaged in bringing education.

• This was the journey that changed the author's life.

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 Discovery in India

• He returned to England to complete his doctorate and later

become a professor of education.

• One day he arrived Hyderabad to evaluate brand new private

college.

• On that day it was a republic day, so he had a free time.

• He researched private schools like Royal grammer school,

peace high school, St. Mariya high school, etc,.

• While researching he found small school, parents funded

schools and set to discover if they would achieve universal
education.

• In that the childrens, parents and teachers who taught him

that the poor are not waiting for education.

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 That was No Discovery at all
• Tooley return to world bank of Delhi, and told his colleagues of the
amazing findings.

• Many refused to believe that low budget private schools still

existed.

• Because in their view these schools where "Ripping off the poor"
and were "run by unscrupulous business people who didn't care for
any things other than profits".

• Tooley responded to such skepticis and cynicism by redoubling his

efforts to learn about such schools.

• He observed definitely private education was not an answer for the

problem of providing education for all.

• So Tooley searched for similar schools in the Nigeria, Ghana and

China.
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 A Puff of logic, Nigeria

• In Nigeria Tooley met Dennis Okoro recently retired chief inspector

of schools for the negerian federal government.

• Initially Okoro professed ingnorance that low cost private schools

existed; then he denied the possibility of the existence.

• Private schools are in Nigeria provided free education

approximately one out of every five students.

• This happening right now, which helping the poor without any
government assistance or oversight.

• He concluded that “ The poor by definition cannot afford to pay

fees for private schools. So, if this was a fee- charging private
schools, it couldn’t for the poors.

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 The Logically Impossible

• Television anchor Peter Jennings asked former U.S. president Bill Clinton on ABC’s
Primetime which one living person he would most like to meet

• Author asked him about the quality of the public schools in Gansu, and he replied that there
are excellent public schools in every country town like Lin is, the base for the DFID project.

• State schools were less expensive now, in any case ( although they weren’t free), so that
major reason was gone.

• All schools were subsequently telephoned, if possible by the supervisors, to check whether
the researchers had in fact conducted the survey and observation.

• The private schools for the poor exist in rural China.

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 The Kenyan Conundrum- and It’s Solution

• The BBC filmed him a public school, Olympic, on the outskirts of

Kibera, reportedly the largest slum in Africa.

• It is estimated that about 60 percent of the population live in

“unplanned informal settlements,” slums like Kibera.

• Our researchers found that average salaries were three to five

times higher in the private schools.

• After all this, the introduction of free primary education in Kenya

didn’t seem like such a success story.

• Author now in a position to answer the Conundrum, which was as

Pauline Rose had put it, “If children were previously out of school.

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 Poor ignoromuses

• When the BBC film crew came with Author to Nigeria to make a documentary of the private
schools for the poor in Makoko, He interviewed Mrs. Mary, the chief educational administrator
for Mainland.

• Certainly, the conditions of the schools Author visited on his journey sometimes looked
miserable. Buildings looked rough, and schools were usually poorly equipped; the teachers, it
was true, were largely untrained.

• What was the actual quality of the private schools for the poor? Could the human spirit rise
above these meager surroundings and still provide something of educational value ?

• Certainly, when he visited public schools on the edge of Makoko with the BBC crew we got a
sense of that abandonment.

• Public schools are letting down the poor, first, because of their teachers. The most serious
problem, said the development experts, is teacher absenteeism.

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 Poor Ignoromuses

According to the survey government teachers are very less compared to the
privates recogonized and private unrecognized unaided schools.

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 An Inspector Calls

• The winding dirt road from Bortianor, the fishing village home of Supreme Academy in Ga, Ghana,
meets the main Accra-Cape Coast highway at what locals call the “roadblock”.

• It’s the same in Nigeria, traveling on the Lagos to Ibadan highway, where hulks of burnt-out trucks
and cars lie by the road or are strewn across the median strip at disturbingly frequent intervals

• This kind of low-level corruption among government officials is all-pervasive in the countries where I
was traveling.

• Their writings were clear enough. One of the reports from Save the Children stressed that “before
private sector involvement should be contemplated as a possible policy option.

• Dr. Rose, too, was concerned with how private schools for the poor could be regulated.

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 Old Monk, and Young Nuns on Motorbikes

• January 26, 2004, Republic Day, India: Exactly four years to the day
since he first came to Hyderabad, took an autorickshaw to the
Charminar.

• They carried letters from the secretary of education, Dr. I. V. Subba Rao,
to persuade any reluctant government principals and a letter from him for
the private schools.

• Days were spent distributing them in individual bags for the children, the
right number for each school

• On Republic Day and the day after, 45 researchers were trained. Many
were graduate students at the local universities.

• Altogether, his teams tested 24,000 children. We started in India and

moved on to Nigeria, then Ghana, then back to India, then on to rural
China.

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 The Men who Uprooted the Beautiful Tree

• Author didn’t read only the report of development experts, he also read the Dalrymple’s report
who was a white Mughals.

• In early 19 th century Sir Thomas Munro who was the governor of the Madras presidency, asked
his district collectors to report the data of schools and colleges before British interne.

• The accumulated evidence showed that any claim of indigenous schooling worth speaking
before the British intervened is completely wrong.

• Teachers do not earn more than six to seven rupees per month.

• There are no buildings for schools. They are located in the religious worship, or village recreation
places, or in the open air with a small she’d of grass and leaves.

• Munro’s reforms failed with major five reasons.

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 The Men who uprooted the Beautiful Tree

Schools in the open air Low quality buildings

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 The Men who Uprooted the Beautiful Tree

“ I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more
illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British
administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were,
began to root them out, They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left
the root like that, and the Beautiful tree perished.”

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 Madras method

• Teachers had no knowledge of their duties and no very great love

for them.

• Dr. Bell saw that little children writing with their fingers on sand.
They taught themselves rather than the Masters.

• He got one of the older boys who knew his alphabet to teach one
of the classes that the master had pronounced impossible to teach

• This boy managed well. This class which had been before worse,
was now better taught than anyother school.

• The Madras method were adopted around Europe, West India,

Colombia.

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 Educating Amaretch

• William Easterly begins and ends his latest book, The white
Man’s Burden, with the heart rending story of 10 year old
Amaretch.

• Nearly one in five of all students in the slums of Hyderabad

receive free or subsidized tuition based on need.

• Philonthropic funding had been provided to build proper

latrines, refurbishing classrooms or building new one, buying
land, buying a school bus or desks.

• If India can, why can’t West can implement the methods find
in the schools of India.

• Wednesday March 29, 2006,. Author fly back to England.

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 Conclusion

• On Monday, 27 th March, 2006, It was the Eclipse. The author was in the fishing village of
Bortianor.

• By seeing the Eclipse James tooley says that the Sun is like public education and Moon is like
a private education.

• The power of educational self help is strong and you won’t need special glasses to observe it’s
effect.

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Any questions ?

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Thank you

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