Torn between a butcher and a doctor

Ideas for a square painting, oil on paper, 3.5” x 3.5”, April 2021, by T R Koubois

Don’t worry, I’m a butcher!

A phrase you’ll never hope to hear.

In a bad way, you’ll want to be assured that the right profession is pushing its way through to you.

Or, like the terminally wounded Tommy watching in morphine-horror as the medical orderly carefully attaches their medals on the bedstead, maybe it’s that they just know something you don’t.

Torn in our own febrile minds between a doctor and a butcher, maybe it’s the butcher we need. The best cuts will fetch a good price, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

Deckchair attendant wanted for inaugural passage

A good friend of mine said that education doesn’t need a revolution. He says we’ve all had enough of that kind of thing. He says he’s got tricks up his sleave, a few quick fixes.

I love him to bits, but he’s wrong on this,

though he’s not alone in his timidity. There are many like him who just can’t let it go, or won’t, and I get that; it’s totally understandable: conjuring of this kind - the kind that will blast tunnels through mountains - is enormously draining and doubtful and easier to just avoid altogether,

but we mustn’t.

What I would say is that evolution is perhaps a better word; one which doesn’t risk us all ending up at the same point again in some distant future.

Maybe that’s what he meant, though he didn’t say so.

I then ask him about his tricks and am shocked to bits.

Large sample, massive impact, shocking conclusions, huge cost

The evidence is piling up all around us.

Children don’t want to go to school any more.

It upsets them and it worries them. It seems like it’s actually hurting some of them. It’s like the whole shebang is set up to find out what they can’t do. For all our empowering talk and growth mindsets, we’ve somehow managed to make too many of them feel like they just can’t do it well enough, and worse still, that what they can do beautifully we are not sufficiently interested in.

Not everyone of us, and certainly not all of them, but way too many for comfort or complacency.

We know all this, yet won’t see the dreaming through to the dawn.

My friend points to the evidence that what he dismissively calls ‘my way’ has limited impact; that it just doesn’t work

I knew that was coming, so I’m ready:

show me the evidence that your way does…

Here, take my hand

We know what’s wrong and we know how to fix it: there are a million brilliant ways,

so if this is the inflection point, then I put this to you:

Status Quo Vadis

Which’ll it be?