I’ve always liked Emma Thompson. She’s a bit of a toff (Cambridge and all that) but she also is one very good actor, and also it seems to me, an actor with a brain. Yesterday she confirmed my brain judgement.
She was on The One Show (BBC ONE) and while I caught only the first few minutes, it was enough. The subject of A Level results came up and I think nice Emma said she had a daughter anxiously awaiting her fate. She then added that the whole system was horrible and Victorian, and in a couple of generations people would look back and wonder why we organized education in this perverse way.
Couldn’t agree more. Having spent a lifetime in education (no, Virginia, I didn’t keep failing – I worked in the sector), I often found myself supervising examinations. As I walked the rows between desks, it felt like being a chain-gang supervisor, watching the prisoners try to break the mental rocks that’d been set up for them. Spending years drumming things into youngsters’ heads and then judging their worth as workers and human beings by their ability to spill it all out inside a two-hour period made as much sense as training a circus pony to jump through hoops.
Emma Thompson didn’t say what she thought should replace this Gradgrind system, or not when I was watching anyway; so let me make a few suggestions for a future generation that might be able to go into the world, and think and act logically when they got there.
- Handwriting: cut back massively on teaching it. We have machines that write so much better than our pen on page efforts. I discovered the other day that I have a system on my phone whereby I can speak the words and my smart phone will write them down for me.
- Times tables: stop teaching them. About forty years ago calculators entered our world. They do calculations far, far more accurately than us. Why bark when you have a dog?
- Semantics: teach to all children from the earliest years. Start with words like ‘house’ and ‘room’, and move on to words like war and peace, love and hate, stupidity and intelligence. If people can’t understand that while similar, the definition of dog is not the same as the definition of cat, and no matter how much you love your dog he’s still not a cat, all hope for rational discussion is lost.
- Logic: teach it to children from the earliest years. Help them to see that while roosters crow as the sun rises, they don’t make the sun rise. Teach them that while all human beings are mortal and all mice are mortal, that doesn’t mean all human beings are really mice.
- Shouting, name-calling and rational discussion: teach the difference to all children from their earliest years. There are children (and some adults) who are convinced that if they shout loudly enough and call those who differ from them enough names, that should settle the matter. It will if you live in Trumpland, but we don’t want to live in Trumpland, do we?
There are a lot of other things that deserve inclusion in a curriculum for the future, but those five would do to start with. It’d help lead our children to an adulthood where logic would help them live lives where they realized that because they really really don’t like little Johnny, it doesn’t follow that he’s bound to be wrong when he opens his mouth to speak. Despite rumours to the contrary, there is a difference between the message and the messenger.
Meanwhile, good luck to all who are finding out their A Level fate this morning. It’s a system that stinks but we just have to keep hoping that the mental midgets won’t always run the show.
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