And the final image of his death, slumped across a schoolroom desk, reinforces Mann's point about the precariousness of civilised values.
Upstairs, in a schoolroom where desks are painted green (the color reported in the local paper when the new district school opened), they can write on slates, play old-fashioned games and meet Miss Williams, the teacher.
Appalled that 4m children did not even have desks, let alone schoolrooms, he invented a "lapdesk" that sits on the child's lap and provides a stable surface.
The superchip will place vast amounts of information at our fingertips, huge computer power on every desk in the office, schoolroom, home, factory and laboratory.
While staying in the villages, we gave the children their first soccer balls, painted their school, made desks to fill the empty schoolrooms, and tended to orphaned infants who had no one to hold them.
"Kids have to find schoolrooms on location, I have to provide chairs, desks --." And then?
In one scene, jihadis lurk outside a schoolroom, while a class of girls sit at their desks; in another, gunmen bristle on the horizon as holidaymakers sunbathe on a beach.
There are school desks set up as though for a schoolroom tea, with spam, hot dogs, cookies, and grain, just like I remember from my childhood, and women who all look like the vice-principal.
Anyway, for Ben Roy's title card we had a shot where he poured out the contents of a schoolroom garbage can onto a student sitting at a desk.
In the schoolroom, the schoolmaster was conspicuously absent, and some of the desks' interactive touch screens were out of order.
