My granddaughter, Sylvie, is two-years-old. Like all granddaughters, she has the beauty of a Botticelli, the brains of the Einstein, the grace of Margot Fonteyn, the humour of Buster Keaton, the expression of Jackson Pollock, and the mischief of Beryl the Peril.
She knows The Grand Old Duke Of York backwards, can tap dance forwards, can do dragon impressions and has a PhD in Larking About. What more could you want? Her mother feels that, all things considered, she is a genius.
Well, this is all very well, but the end is nigh. Why? She must soon go to school. She must soon enlist in our ever-crumbling educational system for about 13 years or 1,500 hours – or even longer. Poor Sylvie.
She must soon be stuffed choc-full of National Curriculum. No more larks. Nursery school is just tolerable, but primary school is all levels and targets and SATs. She must become a measured outcome. Poor Sylvie.
Then it’s the secondary school, either a cold, grim, glass exam factory or a failing ruin for the unfortunate and crazed. There doesn’t seem to be any other kind. Poor Sylvie. She could well go barmy. Many do. Her mother, my daughter is desperate and considers home-schooling. I’m not a fan.
Surely Sylvie must acquire the necessary social and life-skills – like lying, deceit, cheating and being generally unpleasant. She must get used to the killing fields of the playground. And don’t home-schooled children get bullied and beaten up for being too nice, shy, precious, fragile, hippy, or looking like Woodcraft Folk?
My daughter dismisses my Hobbesian vision. The alternative’s even worse. “School was good when you were teaching. Now it’s a nightmare.”
I share her fears. “Maybe I just want out of it.” More and more parents do. They’re in good company – Plato, Rousseau, Einstein, Illich, Molesworth or the Bash Street Kids weren’t keen. Nor was Mark Twain who famously “never let my schooling interfere with my education”. They wanted out.
Mind you, all this might happen anyway. There may not be a place for Sylvie. Last week our nurseries were threatened by “a death by a thousand cuts”. One in 10 face closure. These cuts will be added to the carnage already visited on SureStart, primary and secondary schools, and their dazed teachers.
Meanwhile, Sylvie could care less and is very busy dancing with her polar bear, Sidney, to the Rolling Stones – not part of any foreseeable syllabus.
I comfort myself with Einstein: “Education is what remains when we have forgotten everything that has been learned in school.”
We can only hope.
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.