Learning to Be Modern Pictures for James

By combining many photographs and scans of documents, Alan Macfarlane presents an account of his 'education' from his birth in Assam, India in 1941 through to leaving Oxford University in 1963. The theme is the transformation of a child through infancy, boarding schools and university, from the home to wider society. As an anthropologist and historian, the author and subject of this account is aware of how unusual the English system of education has been for many centuries. It is now influencing, through its own schools and universities and those of America, much of the world. This is part of a wider study of comparative education between China and the West. Alan Macfarlane was educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.