Stuck in Class

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Autumn is not just the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as Keats wrote, but also the widening of the class divide. For it brings the start of school, an institution that, particularly in crowded global cities like London, efficiently sorts kids by socioeconomic class. A 2004 study of British schoolchildren by University of Bristol researchers found that the wider the choice of schools parents have, the more segregated pupils are by background. I've seen this firsthand, having just dispatched my youngest child, Nicola, to school.

With her went the freedom to lie in and to...

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