I sat in on an English lesson at the Gamal Abdel Nasser Secondary School. The Scottish instructor—one of three Britons employed in the Yemeni school system—was drilling the class in the difference between the “present simple” and the “present continuous”. There were twenty very thin, very eager boys aged between about fourteen and twenty-two. They were part of that tiny educated leaven in a country which has an illiteracy rate of ninety percent, and they had tense, ambitious faces. They had been trained to compete continually against each other, so that the lesson turned into a kind of noisy greyhound race. The moment that the instructor was half-way through a question, his voice was drowned by shouts of “Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!” and I lost sight of him behind the thicket of urgently raised hands. If a student began to stumble over an answer, the others fought to grab the question for themselves, bellowing for the teacher’s attention. I once taught for a term at a comprehensive school in England: had the children in my class ever shown a small fraction of the enthusiasm displayed by these Yemeni students, I might have stayed in the job a great deal longer. They were ravenous for the good marks and certificates which would take them out of their villages and tenements, and they behaved as if every minute spent in the classroom could make or break them.