They’ve been at home, schools closed, fun stopped, friends gone, and books unopened. Oh, the poor things, they have missed education and are now on the precipice about to tumble into the valley of the thick and moronic. A whole generation of know-nothings condemned to a lifetime of licking windows.
We need to get them back into the place we don’t want them back in for fear of spreading the virus. Yet, we need them back there to make up for this lost time. Time in which it would seem the general consensus is they have all been in stasis, waiting for the world to start again, like a million dead Walt Disneys in cryogenic rest.
Many have loads of ideas to make up for the brain melting fudge of lockdown. None of them thought through and none of them addressing anything, or actually seeing the situation for what it is.
Give them all a break. Nothing bad is happening. We are not making our kids stupid.
Extend education into the summer? Make up the holiday time by extending half terms in the winter? Brilliant. We’ve been locked up in grim weather and grim times, and when summer comes, with our Jab and go Ryanair holidays, we’ll keep them locked up in school, getting stressed, being forced to learn at super speed, so they catch up in some miraculous way over 14 days that make up for the months of home schooling. But, don’t worry, it is all ok, you’ll get free time back! Only, in the winter when it is too cold to go out. You’ll be locked up at home again, because it is dark out, and too dismal to hang in the park with your friends.
I’m all for getting kids back into school, but to be there for what school is: hanging out with your mates, messing about, flirting, getting into trouble, being daft, and occasionally doing some work so the teacher doesn’t take away your break. School is so much more than academic education, something that seems to be forgotten and more often than not dismissed.
I think if they do go back for an extra two weeks in the summer, it should be two weeks of PE, but not the classic PE of cross-country crying. Let’s go back to the ones where you chose ‘Dance’ because the teacher doesn’t care – their career on stage had failed and led to this - and you can all sit, gossip, flirt and be rude.
This is much more preferable to getting kids to study a limited curriculum so they can sit a test that resembles previous years but isn’t anywhere the same. All this just so they can be given a number that looks like other years’ numbers (a Four is always mathematically a Four in English, even if you have done two completely different courses)
Kids have been studying, online, and it really isn’t great, nowhere near the experience of school. But just like the teenagers have been using stuff like snaptalk and socialface to stay in touch with friends, it has been adequate in the circumstances. It is by no means a glimpse into the future.
I caught my own sixteen-year-old daughter, in her room, on an online lesson. The computer from which a teacher’s voice droned was behind her, a mirror and make-up in front of her. Her headphones were in her ears, but the headphones were connected to her phone and youngcoolmusic app was on. I asked her how she was doing, and how her friends were. She said they were all bored and wanting to meet up, wanting to do something. Then I remembered my school days. Five lessons in which I did a total of maybe one hours work and spent the rest of the time messing about with friends, most of whom I have stayed in touch with for life (thanks Facebook). They are not at school because we need them to understand Pythagoras, the Cosine rule or what the hell a coulomb does. We need them to be good people with character, sociable with friends and able to connect. Education with character that can only be achieved in this way.
Those doing exam years, we can give numbers based on flight-paths, and their goals that have been set since they were eleven (how can you predict outcomes from the results of a test you did at 10?) They have always been graded, and stamped with a number, and told they are on-target, below-target, or exceeding a target that was typed into a system years before. Maybe these kids, who would usually need a grade from an exam to make the next step, maybe they could be given unconditional offers, along with unconditional love, based on conversations with them, hearing what they say and how they say it, instead of seeing them as a series of increasingly irrelevant numbers on an excel spreadsheet. Through talking to them, you’ll spot the good, the bad, the blaggers, the lazies, the ambitious and the not. They don’t need to study for exams.
What they need, and this is from the youngest to the oldest, is to experience things, to find what they like and to pursue those dreams. Education is always fun – best days of your life, but not because of all the academic stuff you learn. It’s because of all the experiences you have. Sure, read books and listen to teachers but understand school they are missing is not knowledge they are avoiding but experiences they are lacking. Let them have fun, let them hang out. Organise proms and gatherings, and parties, and activities, not exams, and study, and tests, and failure.
We have a minister in Gavin Williamson who has imposed restrictions and rules on schools. He has been hard-line, because he wants to be a modern Norman Tebbit, all rottweiler menace as the Tory enforcer. A former whip and a man so hard he kept tarantula in his office (akin to someone professing they have a quirky personality because they are wearing a comedy hat) He is no Norman Tebbit, he is a Norman Wisdom in the body of Frank Spencer - ask your grandparents) encapsulating their exaggerated comedic incompetence. It would be an idea, Gav, to listen to head teachers and unions.
Boris has realised the error of his ways with the NHS, moving away from privatisation and free-market competition and starting to see it as the pillar of British society, something that we all look after and need. Education is next, the most important of public services. Maybe we can make an investment and step away from a factory line of underfunded adolescent academia – the Henry Ford model of mass-produced, identical replicas, and start giving them space to breathe.
Maybe through not attending school or studying so hard, kids won’t end up like Boris, and won’t spout Greek myths, throwing in Latin words to make the utter lack of intelligence of whatever he is saying sound somehow educated. Let them be, give them an opportunity to grow instead of forcing them into some arbitrary mechanism they must unlock to reach the next level.
The only thing they have missed out on in lockdown is friendships. It is best that post lock down this is what they work on rather than how to apply rigorous critiques to the third act of Macbeth.
