What we were given, and what it cost someone

I left the valley in 1980 and spent the next forty years running other people's schools, which is a long way of saying I spent forty years comparing everything to one place. For most of that time I thought what we had been given was the beauty. The hill, the tamarind, the light at six. It is an easy thing to think, because it is the part you can photograph. I was wrong, and it took me until I was about sixty to work out why. What we were actually given was the assumption of good faith. Not a rule, not a policy. An assumption, held by every adult in the place, that if a child did something strange it was probably interesting rather than probably bad. I have tried to import that into eleven schools and it is the single hardest thing to install, because it cannot be written down, and it costs the adults an enormous amount. It cost them the comfort of certainty. It cost them the efficiency of just telling us. It cost them entire evenings that a stricter school would have got back. I did not know at fifteen that this was being spent on me. I want to say now, thirty years too late for most of them, that I know it now, and that I spent it as carefully as I could manage.