Yesterday, the Bethnal Green Academy.   Today, St. Paul’s School on the green fields of Barnes beside the Thames.   I had been asked to be the Apposer, who is required to listen to four expositions on recondite subjects in public and then comment on them.   Not an easy task as the subjects included quantum computers, the extent to which T.S. Eliot was a truly modernist poet, the building of robots in synthetic biology, and the theory of a just war.   It’s impossible not to compare the discrepancies in opportunity between the state and the private system, except to note that St. Paul’s was, at least in its origins, the product of a highly egalitarian desire for free education of poor scholars from ‘all nacions and countries indifferently’.