A book for today and tomorrow About 100 special schools have been closed in the UK since 1997. Another, Brighouse School in Westborough, is threatened with closure. An international consensus that children with special educational needs have the right to be educated in mainstream schools drives this policy. But what if it is not such a good idea? What if it is just a flawed and expensive social experiment that is good for some children but bad for others, fine in the libraries of the mind, but not in the classrooms of the real world? What if lawyers asserting human rights enjoy the fruits of Utopia whereas everyone else has just a partial glimpse of it? What if academia is leading its students down a blind alley? And maybe the system of goverment is wanting, too. What if mistakes and misconceptions here help to explain what is wrong elsewhere and also threaten other things that we treasure? And what if the rising generation is illequiped to meet the new challenges of the twenty first century? No-one should ignore these questions.