On January 1, 2000, extraterrestrials arrive on Earth and offer the United States gold, safe nuclear power, and other technological advances in exchange for all of its Black citizens. They require a decision by January 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Gleason Golightly, a prominent Black conservative, participates in the cabinet's discussion of the proposed trade. Golightly, ordinarily an "Uncle Tom" on racial matters, is adamantly against the trade for moral reasons. The completely White cabinet discounts his moral objections because they believe the trade will fix the United States' practical environmental and economic problems.

That was the year of his "literacy breakthrough", he remembers, and when he went away to boarding school in Brisbane at the Lutheran St Peter's, he outshone most of his contemporaries in English. He continued to do so at Sydney University where he took his history and law degrees.

It was in this teacher's classroom that the seeds were sown for the high-stakes education revolution he has launched on Cape York, to erase a generation's dysfunction and lost opportunity.

It was there that Pearson came to understand that the "essence of the good teacher is above all the quality of their instruction", as he wrote last year. This led him eventually to the door of a 78-year-old professor at the University of Oregon last year.

Pearson remembers his old teacher used a boxed set of cards for the literacy exercises, which the children called ''SRA cards'' because they were published by the mysterious sounding Science Research Associates. Thirty-five years later he discovered the SRA and its cards had been part of a teaching method known as Direct Instruction, designed by Professor Siegfried Engelmann.

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