Three decades ago school teacher Dennis Littky took himself off to a cabin in
the forests of New Hampshire in the US north-east. There, he chopped wood and
pondered his great passion: the future of education.
As far as Littky was concerned, secondary education was in a state of
meltdown. High schools were outmoded sausage factories turning out generation
after generation of bored, disaffected students who failed to reach anything
like their true potential. The big question, of course, was what could be done
about it?
Littky had some ideas about this, and the more he pondered, the stranger his
ideas became.
When he emerged from the woods two years later, he became headmaster of a
run-down high school in a nearby town and set about putting his theories into
practice.
The school he'd taken over had a terrible academic record and a history of
disciplinary problems. Littky cut class sizes, abandoned the syllabus, threw
away textbooks and asked the students to write their set of rules. Parents and
the community were appalled, and banded together to try to get him fired.
Littky, however, hung on to his job - and a year later his critics were
confronted by some unforeseen results. The drop-out rate at his high school had
fallen from 10 per cent to 1 per cent.
The number of students applying for university had shot from 10 per cent to
55 per cent. Littky, universally known as "Doc", was voted School Principal of
the Year.
"A lesson for the 
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