"Consider this. Do all humans aim at happiness? Is happiness broadly similar for all humans? Must you read philosophy to be happy? Must you be morally good to be happy? To answer yes to these questions is to commit yourself to the ethics of Aristotle, and I hope this is what you will come to do." He looks up at them. "Who would answer yes?"

Inevitably, it is Maya who is the first to respond. "Would that mean that happiness is the same for one of us as it was for a twelfth-century monk?"

"Yes."

She starts in disbelief. "They were happy reading and praying, but no one here would be happy doing that."

"The easiest way to understand this would be to consider the terms we are using. 'Happiness' is the most common translation of the ancient Greek word 'eudaimonia'. Many now feel this is better translated as 'a flourishing life'. Aristotle believed that all humans shared a common nature, and we could describe, at least in outline, the flourishing life for all humans because in each case it would be fulfilling a range of natural capacities that we all have. He would have said that, although the monks may have believed they were leading a flourishing life, they would have been mistaken. Humans naturally appreciate pleasure, and the best life will include many of the pleasures that the monks refused. They therefore could not lead the best life."

Other hands are now raised, but Maya continues on the assumed right of follow-up questions. "Are you saying that you can't be happy if you don't read philosophy?"

Smiles all around. They sense that this is so improbable it's actually amusing that anyone should have made the claim at all. This in turn creates the opportunity for point- scoring against the philosophers. They have all studied Plato in their first year and find an arrogance in the idea of the ideal state as one ruled by philosophers, which they also detect in their teachers of the subject.

"At some stages Aristotle appears to go as far as suggesting that the best life is not simply one where you study philosophy but one where you focus purely on the most abstract areas such as the fundamentals of logic, mathematics, and physics. Even subjects such as ethics would no longer be a part of what one does. He suggests that the gods are pure conscious thought, and as the gods have the best possible existence and no practical concerns, the best possible existence must be one of pure thought for its own sake. He thinks abstract philosophy is like that."

"Does anyone believe that now?" Joe's first contribution of the year. He is looking down and drawing some sort of machine as he says it, pressing the pen down on the paper with excessive force. Aside from Maya, he is the only student of the five with mental health problems of which Tom is aware. The ever-present symptom is that he sits with his ankles clamped tight and moves his knees apart and together with metronomic regularity over the entire seventy minutes of every lesson. His concentration is so sporadic it is extraordinary that he has made his way this far through school, benefitting from only the short episodes of attention which punctuate the general, swirling storm of his mental energy. Tom takes this to be an indication of what Joe could have achieved if capable of focusing for more than a fraction of any class. This thought fights for supremacy over the extreme irritation Joe causes by constantly drifting into conversation with others around him, but Tom has never seriously considered having him withdrawn from the class.

In December of last year, there had been an inspection. The aging little Ofsted man with the shirt-splitting belly and the incongruous Paul Smith designer glasses was already sitting in the room when Tom entered two minutes late and saw him tick a box indicating the class had not started on time. Tom began by asking a series of questions based on the material covered in the previous session. Joe's hand shot up at the first question, and he answered using precisely the words Tom had used two days earlier. The same happened with the second question. Other students quickly understood that Joe had studied and memorised that entire lesson in preparation for a possible inspection. They also began to respond with unusual enthusiasm. The inspector commended the "positive learning environment" and awarded the lesson the second highest of the four possible grades. So Tom lets Joe sit there with his knees knocking and his bad drawing and his constant talking.

"No one who counts himself an Aristotelian today would accept this. There are differences of opinion over whether or not Aristotle himself really held this to be the case. Most believe that he was committed to the view that the best life for all of us would involve philosophy as a means of fulfilling the intellectual potential that all of us have. But he also stresses the value of developing the moral virtues, such as being charitable, and talks of the importance of friendship. It is better to think of the best life as one which involves developing a range of capacities, including our philosophical ones."

Tom now gives each of them an extract from Book I of Nicomachean Ethics accompanied by several questions, answers to which they must extract from Roger Crisp's new translation. This is not the one that the exam board specifies, but it is more readable than the Penguin version. This in turn makes it easier for Tom to sit down and daydream as the students try to decipher sentences which are longer than most paragraphs. It is many years since his expanding laziness overcame the professional obligation to circulate among the students, checking their progress and helping them. He now sits quietly as they get on with it and reflects on other matters. He calculates that, as he will provide the right answers at the end, it makes no sense to dilute their enthusiasm by correcting them as they go. Once he has gone through the text with them, he writes some notes on the whiteboard summarising key points. The board is still annoyingly stained down the right-hand side from where rainwater used to leak through the roof. The leak was fixed as part of a mass of decorating and repairs which preceded Ofsted's visit. Prior to that, on rainy days, he could use only the left side of the board because the constant drip of water would wash away anything written in its path.

After the lesson, Maya follows him to his office to pick up a list of secondary texts she has asked for, some of which he has read himself. Although she is in a second-year course, she is in her third year at the college. She arrived with eleven GCSEs, ten of them at A*, pretty much the best any British sixteen-year-old can do before progressing to two years of sixth form study, followed by university. She then took five AS courses in her first year instead of the usual four, picking up an A for each of them, as well as re-taking the eleventh GCSE to ensure the full set of perfect grades. In January of her second year, she re-sat an English lit paper in which she had scored only a B, despite getting an A overall. When the result came back as another B, she dropped out of the college and returned the following year. The email from Learning Support said she now had a better counsellor and better meds, but to monitor her carefully. Going on past experience, Tom judges it unlikely that she will suffer another breakdown if she fails to get the place at Cambridge which has been held over from the last...