“THERE is no greater test of your principles than choosing a school for your child.” Had Nels Abbey opened his essay on the British and colonial education system — Boarding Schools: The system that rules Britain (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week) — with this statement, he might have spared many of his listeners the need for 25 minutes of animated whataboutery.

As David Kynaston and Francis Green declare at the opening of their astute survey of independent education, Engines of Privilege (Bloomsbury, 2019), we are all invested emotionally, and some financially, in the education question, and no serious debate can take place without acknowledging that fact. Mr Abbey is good enough to admit that he himself has recently picked up the brochure of an independent boarding school on behalf of his daughter.

What he also says, and with well-earned authority, is that he would never consider sending her to the kind of boarding school that still operates in some parts of the former British Empire, the kind of schools whose strategies for achieving academic excellence appear to be many decades behind those of British institutions. Mr Abbey’s investigation was at its best when it focused on that translation of colonial educational ambitions from the boarding schools of mid-20th century Britain to those of countries newly independent of Empire. There, as here, the line between discipline and violence was over-stepped with regularity.

Less convincing in the programme were the attempts to impugn the whole system because it has, in the past, been associated with the perpetuation of colonialism. Nor should we take as given the dual assertions, made here by the psychotherapist Nick Duffell, that boarding schools teach children to assume a veneer of invulnerability, and that to be vulnerable is a necessary characteristic in somebody who wishes to take on positions of responsibility in society. Not everyone who emerges from public school has the bravado of a Boris Johnson.

The trauma of childhood is something that W. H. Auden understood well; and, in the middle section of The Age of Anxiety (dramatised brilliantly by Robin Brooks for Radio 3’s Sunday night drama), his characters explore the original sin of childhood through a re-fashioning of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. If you think this sounds heavy, you’d be right. This is the densest 90 minutes of radio listening your reviewer has undertaken for quite some time; and the prefatory materials, presented in the form of a dialogue between Mr Brooks and Auden, warn us to expect a hard journey. It is radio which requires multiple visits, but, even at a first pass, one is able to appreciate the virtuosic verse, inspired by the alliterative poetry of the early Middle Ages; as well as the humour which arises when registers shift and pomposity is pricked.

Much radio now comes in 15-minute packages; such as Why Do We Do That? (Radio 4, Fridays), in which the anthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi gives us her disciplinary take on everyday behaviour. For instance, why do we shake hands? I won’t spoil it for you; suffice to say, it involves throwing people out of aeroplanes and monitoring their sweat.