Question

summary on a school with a difference by Edward verrall Lucas

Answer 1

The narrator visits a boarding school where children live and study. Ms. Beam is the director of the school. The narrator is astonished to see the way children are sensitized to empathize with the differently able children. There each child has to spend a day as a blind, as a cripple, and as a deaf. They had to bandage their eyes when the blind day was observed. On the day they had to be a cripple, one of the legs was folded and tied.  This way they could understand the problems disabled people feel in their life and develop an attitude of sympathy and care. 
The children were taught simple spellings, basic calculations and writing. Rest was all taught by means of talks and discussion in the class. The narrator finds it a school with a difference where human attributes are more important than scores and cut-throat competition.

Answer 2

The school with a difference that the writer talks about is Miss Beam’s school. When he managed to visit the school finally, he had a talk about it with Miss Beam. The latter said that the way the school made a difference to its counterparts was that it did not focus on developing thoughtfulness in its students. Rather, the school wanted to instill humanity in the minds of the children.

She pointed out that the children who appeared to be differently abled like lame or blind as the writer saw were actually not so. They could actually walk or move about and see just like normal children. However, they pretended to be differently abled to understand the misfortune faced by such children. In the course of the term, each child had to play the role of four types of differently abled persons on different days.