It’s approaching mid-July, and all over the country children
are staring wistfully from classroom windows* at the azure celestial canopy,
and the blazing trail of Helios as he makes his way through the heavens**. And they wait. For within the week they will
be set free from their shackles and be ejected into six weeks of
give-not-a-fuck-about-anythingness. The summer holidays are almost upon us.
I’ll lay my deck of cards of bias out on the table of truth
before I start this –I’m a teacher and have a vested interest in the long
holidays we get. I love them, and they are the sole perk of the job***.
Elsewhere, in education land, Pob
is at it again. Not content with fucking up every other aspect of the Education
system, he’s now proposing that school term dates be set by headteachers. To bastardise a popular, very irritating phrase
– it’s decentralisation gone mad. Properly mad. Not Blackadder’s
pencil-up-the-nose, underpants on head mad. Not even the madness of Charles
VI of France – helpfully known as Charles the Mad - who thought he was made of
glass. No – this is more of the calibre of Everyone’s Favourite Roman Emperor:
Caligula. A man so mad he would have people tied upside down and chew at their
testicles as punishment. An Emperor so
insane he tried to make his horse consul****. A proper nutter, you might say. A
picnic short of a picnic.
The major problem with this idea – other than the mere fact
it is Gove’s, and so arrives from his mouth already tainted by his brain, is
that it seems to be working on the principle that schools are factories,
students are products, and teacher are cunts. It is the brainchild of man who
values neither brain nor child. And it designed to shorten the summer holidays, on the grounds that students aren't learning in every possible waking moment and if we allow this to continue China and Korea will invade and we'll be condemned to a future reliant on the Chinese economy and cheap imported goods from the far east. Or something equally ill-conceived. It is the unbaked idea of someone who thinks England's heyday was under Queen Victoria, and therefore we should return to said era for inspiration.
Dickens lampooned the Victorian School System in the novels Hard Times and Nicholas Nickleby, creating the monstrous establishments of Gradgrind
and Dotheyboys respectively. Coincidentally,
Pob is in favour of all students reading a Dickens novel, despite the fact that
it is beyond most adults. In fact, most
adults seem to think they’ve read a Dickens novel, but on close questioning it
is usually ascertained that they have, in fact, seen Oliver! when they were at
school, and remember watching Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tales.
It seems clear from his two pronouncements that Pob is
indeed familiar with the oeuvre of Mr. Dickens, but has made a seismic error-
he thinks they are the ideas of his policy wonks, not social satire. With this
realisation I now fully expect he shall look to Oliver Twist for ideas –
instead of Work Related Learning, students not fluent in Latin by thirteen will
be sent to the workhouse. He shall glean inspiration from Great Expectations,
with students lacking social ambition sent to mad old spinsters to be bullied, mocked and forced to play arcane card games, like, Hello Mr Punch, Go-Johnny-Go-Go-Go and Bamalafizzfazz. And, in a masterstroke of imbecility, those children who fail to
grasp the fundamentals of Christian Tradition will be visited by three strange
men while they sleep, with threats of death and a shit Christmas.
In fact, Pob’s mission in life seems to be straightforward –
to take all joy out of childhood; to squeeze the little blighters through the
grinder of education; and to dehumanise both teachers and children alike. Life
is not about being fitter, stronger, faster, better all the time. Sometimes it’s
about just being. Being free to do nothing, to achieve nothing. To rest while the cerebral fruits of academic
labours take a root. To grow up, to explore, to be more than we were.
Some of us may be stuck, sitting in classrooms, but we’re
looking to the skies. School’s almost out for summer. For teachers, it’s a chance to be people. For
students, it’s a chance to become people. Take that away, and we condemn both to life of unquestioning servitude and burnout.
Sometimes, you’ve got to have time to sit on the dock on the
bay, watching the tides. So, Pob, leave those kids alone. They’re neither bricks in the wall, candles in
the wind nor pawns in your game. In the words of a great sage, to everything
there is a time.
It’s time to kick back, crack open a can of Stella, and give-not-a-fuck. For six glorious, lazy weeks.
* Or climbing out of them, depending on the nature of the
school and child
** Or the sun in the sky, for the more prosaically-minded
*** Not the sole reason, of course. We do it for the kids,
innit.
****. an appointment whose ludicrous factor is only matched
by CallMeDave’s appointment of an ill-informed ideologue a Secretary for State
for Education.
