Something only you can do

Dessins abstraits [sic], 50/100, black pen on white card, 2” x 2”, by T R Koubois. Date unknown

Not funny ha ha

Peer behind the curtain and it’s funny how school can seem such a massive waste of time: busy work for everyone.

Obviously no one thinks about it in those terms, but then that is the problem with busy work: it looks like the very thing it isn’t. Perhaps it is our schools that are the poor proxy for learning. In that case then perhaps ironic would be a better word.

Ironic

Imagine buildings in towns and villages and cities up and down the country filled with young people sent there to learn who can barely remember a thing that happens inside them, and couldn’t care less anyway. My youngest has got wise to me and my clumsy questioning so when asked on his return from school each day, simply cuts to the chase and tells me, ‘well, there were no big moments, dad.’ If that is how he really feels then scandalous would be a better word.

Scandalous

The dictionary might only support this leap if we were minded to do something about it: causing general public outrage, disgracefully bad - “a scandalous waste of taxpayers money”. But the fact that we are often disinclined to take to the streets to make our feelings known shouldn’t prevent us from at least considering the term here. We must face fully and squarely the fact of a failure rate in the state sector of over 40% each year for 16 year olds. I mean, who would actually propose that as a plan? And who would accept it as a best and final offer?

Us, obviously.

So with a state system that does so many of our young people dirty, maybe we should be leafing through the c’s…

Songs of hope and protest

And I’m going to stop there. I think this is the inflection point. Nothing more can be gained from taking it down this road. What we need now are songs of hope as well as protest. We need to write these stories and make them rhyme; we need to set them to rousing music and sing them together. And we must dream together as well; conjure up a new imaginary, one built on shared purpose, mutualism and communal knowledge: a Carolean education imaginary for a new era.

Something only you can do

So instead of propping up a crumbling paradigm that assumes the primacy of defunct methodologies and stricken models; a desert world of standardised national data sets, cynically manipulated bell curves, false equivalence, fake news and gaslighting, we should be looking for the young person in all this and doing everything we can to help them find the something that only they can do.

They will thank us for that.