It May Be Interesting, But It Doesn't Help With A Mortgage.

        For the majority of the country, school is, as discussed in 80's prog rock, out for summer. This means for countless parents around the country that they had better have arranged some form of supervision for their spawn; normally in the guise of relatives, summer camps, or just plain "working from home". Unless they work in Tesco's, in which case it's a bit of a runaround to take someone's weekly shop home to scan. For those without offspring, the only reminder about this fact is that the roads always seem strangely clear on the commute. This is something I've always found really strange; I've always understood rush-hour to be the time when everyone is heading into work at the same time, hence why 8am-9am and 5pm-6pm feels like the production line of a sardine factory. The fact that the morning commute on a bank holiday feels like a leisurely Saturday afternoon drive (in a suit, with a slight headache) shows just how many people clogging up the A1 in the morning aren't on their way to work, but are on their way to drop their litter off to learn the various skills to enable them to work, and thus further clog up the roads.



        Like most people, my memories of school are fading into the standard default setting for memories, which is what we refer to as "rose-tinted". This is normally where most people would descend into a rant about "state/private school is better than the alternative because of a variety of irrelevant platitudes, but mostly because I went there", but I can say with total honesty, mostly because I went to both private and state schools, that private schools totally outclass state ones in every conceivable way. This isn't meant to say that state school is rubbish: it's fantastic compared to many alternatives around the world, but private education totally outranked taxpayer-funded education in my experience. A large chunk of my latter years at (state) school consisted of sitting there for fifteen minutes, waiting for the teacher to control the disruptive pupils, and since excluding pupils who are merely disruptive is more difficult than solving the mystery of the Mary Celeste, I was stuck with it. In private school, they were simply told not to bring their demon-spawn back. In state school, my French teacher was an angry Scottish lady who once spat on me because she thought I was a Nazi (that's totally true, by the way). In private school, my French teacher was actually French! Middle school trips included a stay in Gloucestershire, which was fun, don't get me wrong. However, was it as fun as the skiing trip to Switzerland? See my point?

        But this is all by the by. In fact, I'd say that it doesn't matter what education you get from a school, whether it's an underfunded comprehensive in Brixton or if it's Eton; neither school will teach you any of the lessons you really need. I mean, learning correct spelling and grammar is important, but knowing the difference between a verb and a noun has never helped me budget my money, for example. Never have I signed an insurance policy, a rental agreement or a car finance deal safe in the knowledge that we covered this at 1pm on a Tuesday and Thursday with Mr Tyler. In fact, until I was on the verge of moving out and living independently, I had absolutely no idea how much it cost just to live. Once I'd added the cost of rent, council tax, food, bills, transport, phone, TV license, car and car maintenance, I had what can only be described as "a few quid" to allocate to going out, having fun and saving for a rainy day. I could have written a perfect sentence and done the 12x table all the way up to the 25th figure, but budgeting? Which one is the most important? The banks have paid out billions because they mis-sold PPI insurance. Now I don't suggest they are exhonerated from any wrong-doing, but how much of this could have been avoided if we taught people about their finances in school, rather than leaving them to guess it when they're adults?

        But I don't think this is the biggest surprise about leaving school and being thrown into the "real world". In fact, there are a million things that I think people absolutely need to be told when they're still surrounded by order and structure, and are being hand-guided by results-driven teachers; and that is that this comes grinding to a halt that very day that they leave full-time education. In school, we're used to being led by the adult at the front of the room so that if we go in the wrong direction, they can flag us down and guide us. Nobody tells us that after you leave, you don't find out that you're going wrong until you hit a wall. Every schoolchild is taught the maxim of the Golden Rule. It's a noble rule, I grant you, but as a friend was telling me the other week, "I was brought up by the Golden Rule. I was completely unprepared to deal with people who are happy to stab you in the back when I was prepared to trust everyone." These are far more important life lessons for people than learning about the Romans, or how quickly Henry VIII became bored of his lady-friends.

        Then there's the final issue. Grades are important. Studying hard is important, and learning a lot is important. But can we do away with this silly notion that studying hard is the only path to success? Do you often wonder why the ones who spend every evening playing World of Warcraft are the super-smart geeky guys? Why wouldn't they! See, they were fed the idea that studying was the sole route to success, so they passed on the parties and the socialising and all the important fun and social things that make life worth living beacuse they were stoking themselves for future success, thinking that the "popular" ones would be cleaning their Porsches when they leave education and are handed the keys to success that everyone's promised them. Only they get out of school and discover nobody really cares what their grades are, and getting a job is more about who you know than what you know and because they focused on school instead of friends, they lack in social skills and friends, especially because once you're outside of school, there's no forced interaction where you can easily make friends because you're around each other all day.

        And so they try something but because they've been able to breeze through school up to that point, they are totally unequipped to deal with failing. So they go "Well obviously everything I believed is a lie and I won't succeed or be happy ever because the world is a cruel and uncaring place" and retreat into video games and movies and the stuff they liked when they were a kid because that kind of cotton candy culture is the last thing they can remember that made them happy.

        Now this might sound an awful lot of a burden to put on such young minds, but I'm absolutely certain that if people are introduced to these ideas at a young age and made familiar with them, it'll be a much better outcome than leaving them to run into them all on their own, and then worry about being the only one to face that problem.

        Because when that happens, they put on a smiley face for the world to avoid "sticking out" as the only one with problems. Trouble is, everyone's so good at it, that nobody realises that we're all as confused by the world as each other, and are just winging it. Contrary to what we thought as kids in school, most adults don't have a clue what's going on, but we pretend that we do, and we do it so well that as kids, we were totally convinced adults knew everything. So when I'm surprised by no queues on half term, it's because I'm no different. I have no idea what's going on.

        Maybe if we were a bit more honest, we'd give the next generation a better chance of figuring it all out than we had.



images credited to freedigitalphotos.net

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