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|  | | I Could Be Anyone
Alternatively contemplative and raucous, I Could Be Anyone takes us into the writer's experiences of growing up in a rigidly academic town and his involvement with seminal radical artists of the decade including Pink Floyd's creator, Syd Barrett. Scurfield describes and accentuates the feelings of isolation and disenfranchisement caused by the rigid conformity of major institutions. Walking home in his neighbourhood as a child past houses owned by the crème of academic society, Scurfield recalls the "inaccessibility and unfriendliness" of these castles of the literati; behind closed doors there lay a complex cycle of "academic one-upmanship"; an exclusive club which glorified those who could and subtly ostracised those who could not. From someone who has spent much of their life in the outside lane, we get taken behind the mask for an inside look at yoga, acting, dyslexia and education in the psychological sense.
span style="font-size: larger">span style="font-family: Times New Roman">Born into a bohemian family of outstanding scholars and great engineers, whose legacy shines on in the halls and corridors of Cambridge University, only to enter the ignorance and brutality of the state school system in the fifties,to be shamed and spat out as one of life's failures. Stumbling into the heaven and hell of the sixties crash pad: London, The Arts Lab, Anti University, LSD and Paris. Running from the past, always just a beat ahead of the fall. Constantly on the cusp of the extraordinary ch | |  | | Indictment: Education and Flowering
If anyone had told me when I was at secondary school that I would be inspired to write an essay based on a letter challenging the moral code of education in the developed world, sent out by a bunch of peasant boys from the backwoods of Tuscany, I'd have looked at them in total disbelief. I'd certainly have recognised the stark reality of what they were saying, but the truth is, such were my academic failings, I doubt I'd have bothered to cast an eye over the pages, let alone read the words. The ebb and flow of circumstance meant I had to wait until 2009 to be given the letter, nearly fifty years after my schooling, to realise the significance.
p style="text-align: justify">span style="font-size: larger">span style="font-family: Times New Roman">From the teachings of a radical priest, in post war Italy, to the sobering insights of some latter day educators, this book takes a confrontational and enlightening look at how the lessons of yesterday's schooling inform the arena of education, in the broadest sense of the word, today. This isn't a theory, nor is it journalistic jingo, or quasi league tables put together by a political think tank. Here is an insider's understanding of the tyranny of a deeply fragmented school system. It is |
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