Outside the ever-litigious United States, the field of education is relatively free from legal challenges to its daily routines.
In recent years, however, there has been a steady increase in the number of school-related lawsuits. While many have dealt with situations of cruelty and child abuse, there have also been a few cases relating to poor teaching.
One such case was successfully argued in the Australian city of Melbourne in August with potentially enormous ramifications for schools throughout the world.
Yvonne Meyer was awarded an undisclosed sum for the adjudged failure of Brighton Grammar School to rectify her son's literacy problems as promised.
Young Jake Meyer had no cognitive handicaps whatsoever. His problem was that he had managed to survive in reading until the end of the fifth grade by using guesswork and memorisation, instead of decoding words sound-by-sound.
Guesswork and memorisation? This is precisely how the vast majority of Hong Kong's children have been taught to read English. To his credit, Jake, 13, has since made a relatively successful transition to secondary school, thanks to months of intensive tutoring using the phonics method of explicit decoding.
Even so, it will take years of recreational and academic reading for Jake's vocabulary to catch up to the level of his peers - if it ever does.
