[...] Really he was a solitary thinker, not interested in most of his colleagues. The vision he had for the school – with children as thinkers and artists at its core – went needless to say against the grain of public policy on education. It went against the way the world worked. And unlike Zachary, Alex had no conviction that progress was possible, or that you could build any institution into a power for good. There was a contradiction, Christine thought, between his passionate scepticism and his commitment to the children’s education. He didn’t believe that anything could get better, and was often despairing – yet he dedicated himself to building and nourishing their imaginations, as if hope depended on it. She also sometimes thought, when she was angry with him, that when they left his class he forgot them.