Hans van Mourik Broekman was born 54 years ago in Syracuse, New York, of Dutch parents. He attended high school in the US, graduated in classics from St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, and began his career in education, first as a teacher and principal in a number of Catholic schools in America and then in Liverpool, where today he directs Liverpool College, one of the oldest institutes in the city. In 2015, he succeeded in converting the status of the college from an “independent school” to an “academy” financed with government funds. The result? It made it possible for everyone to obtain an excellent education, which in the UK is possible only for the children of the upper classes. This operation was described by Andrew Adonis, the Labour Party parliamentarian and minister under the both the Blair and Brown governments as “perhaps the greatest breach in the Berlin Wallthat separates the private and public sectors of instruction that we have seen in the last decades.”