At the chalkface: A new dawn for education

Like many trembling dotards in these dark and dismal times, I’ve been doing a bit of home-schooling – with my five-year-old granddaughter.

Like all granddaughters, she has the beauty of a Botticelli, the mind of Leonardo Da Vinci, and the dancing wit of Beryl the Peril.

It’s a breeze.

Out go targets, tests, exams and semi-colons.

In comes play, larks and some fierce thinking.

Everything that the modern school can’t – or won’t do.

We’ve returned to what my old hippy head called the “seamless web of knowledge”. It’s all connected.

So... we’ve been exploring Greek myths, dressing up like Medusa, jiving like Elvis, painting like Picasso, playing piano like Thelonius Monk, flying kites from high windows, reading the perfect Bing, skipping to nursery rhymes, gazing on daffodils, identifying birds chirping in the freshly unpolluted air, giggling ourselves silly at Laurel and Hardy, and pondering the philosophical implications of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – for starters.