Education: How Progressive Can You Get?

For a small school (24 pupils), Britain's ultra-progressive, coed Horsley Hall in Eccleshall, Staffordshire, had had its share of the headlines. When a whipping-cane maker lectured at Horsley last fall, teen-age pupils grabbed him and flogged him with one of his own canes (TIME, Dec. 6). Later, Headmaster Robert Copping hit the news by announcing that he was founding a children's union to protect British kids everywhere from their reactionary elders. Last week, bearded Robert Copping was a headline again as a stream of shocked witnesses in the Eccleshall magistrates' court told just how progressive the Copping experiment in "do-as-you-like" education...