Here’s an interesting and very telling story from the Guardian newspaper, UK:

Guardian newspaper – School Design

The gist is that civil servants and politicians, sitting in their ivory towers will dictate to schools and local schools’ management boards about how schools are to be built. This includes what features they will/ won’t have etc. In India, ironically, so far, this has been a much healthier state of affairs. Government sets down (and occasionally enforces) minimum standards about such things as square footage space per student, rooms available and numbers of toilets etc. of course, there’s still a further irony that whilst these rules are imposed on private schools there are vast areas of the country where the government’s own schools in the public sector don’t comply with the rules.

Reading this news story I was troubled by the underlying message that government wasn’t interested in views based upon the…