As any fule kno

U

But what does any fool know?

Do you know who I'm quoting? Do you know who this is, on the right?*

I can't imagine not knowing that, but then nor can I imagine not knowing, as I discovered no-one on Simon Mayo's radio show did a couple of weeks ago, that Artemis was (is?) a woman.

I can't imagine not knowing the basic plot of most Shakespeare plays (I'm a bit woolly on the Merry Wives of Windsor and Love's Labours Lost, among others), or most of the major Bible stories (at least all the ones that don't involve endless lists of "sons of").  I know my Greek and Roman myths, as you can tell, as well as which god translates as which from the one to the other.  I've got a general grasp of Norse mythology too.

I know my Kings and Queens of England, and what order they come in, though I'm rubbish at the Scottish ones.    I can put most of the countries of Europe on a map, and Asia, but not Africa.

But I don't know one end of the periodic table from the other.  I have no idea about Hindu mythology, or the Koran, or what the difference is between a Buddha and a Boddhisatva.  I couldn't tell you which were the Kings that got defenestrated, and I once went to a Norwegian independence day party in full ignorance of who it was that Norway was independent of (Sweden, as it happens).  Despite years of musical training, I have no knowledge of any music that doesn't originate in Europe or America.

Does it matter?  Does it make a difference what random facts I have and you don't, or vice versa? Why was I so horrified (lots of shouting at the radio) that no-one pulled Simon up on the fact that Artemis was unlikely ever to have been the lover of Aphrodite (although I think he called her Venus, just to confuse) - although come to think of it, the frisky types those Greeks were, anything's possible.

There's an American academic called E D Hirsch who came up with the concepts of Cultural Literacy and Core Knowledge.  Paraphrasing very drastically, essentially what he says is that to get on within a society, and specifically to understand the written word, you need to have a set of common cultural references - so reading my blog is much harder if you don't, say, know who Molesworth is, and reading Shakespeare is much harder if you don't know that Henry V came after Henry IV, and functioning generally in Britain today is tricky if you have no idea who 1D or Miley Cyrus are (I may have made that last one up, but sometimes it feels true).

We've all been in situations where everyone's laughing or shaking their heads over a common cultural reference, and we're the only one looking blank.  Wouldn't it be nice if that were never the case?

Michael Gove's a big fan, apparently, and when you look at it at the outset you can see the attraction (though not of Michael Gove personally).  E D Hirsch discovered that very bright students from disadvantaged (often immigrant) families struggled to understand the literature he taught in his classes because they just didn't have the frame of reference of the other students who automatically knew that Germany was in Europe, or that Mozart was a composer and not an artist.  They understood the words, but not the references (and inferences) made.

So he came up with the idea of a list - a set of cultural facts that everyone should know.

And this, of course, is where it gets tricky.  Which facts?  And who decides?  Because it's very easy, that way, to slip into Maoist territory: to control what people know and, in so doing to expunge, delete, do away with the other stuff they don't know.  And if you're doing that it's ever so tempting to get rid of the unpalatable and the unflattering.

It's particularly easy to see how that could happen with history, but it works with literature and music too:  Don't like Wagner? Don't teach him.  Don't want children to be exposed to difficult ideas in art?  Don't let them see Guernica or the Massacre of the Innocents or the Raft of the Medusa. And what about science?  Anyone want to join the FlatEarthers?

And though the original aim of E D Hirsch's theory was, as I understand it, to be inclusive, surely the end result is the opposite.  Because if everyone knows something and you're the one person who doesn't, you're excluded from the outset. 

I don't know that there is an answer.  In fact I'm sure there's not: because you can't get away from the fact (pun intended) that we all have a tendency to assume that people have the same cultural experiences we do ourselves - I've found that out living here: people go blank when I say particularly English things, and I have to have the children's school lunch menu translated for me.  And I'm only 350 miles from where I was brought up, not a continent or a generation away.   Nor can you deny, as Hirsch identified, that it is easier to read Dickens or Eliot if you understand the cultural references they make.

So however unattractive (when you take it to its extreme) the solution he drew, and that Michael Gove has allegedly adopted so enthusiastically, there is truth in it.

But then just because something's true, doesn't make it right.

I find myself descending into trite platitudes here, trying to find a conclusion rather than limply draining away, but maybe that in itself is the conclusion.  You can't conclude any more than you can draw up a list of the things everything should know, because this issue, like knowledge itself, is open-ended.  The fact that I know who Artemis is doesn't preclude me from also finding out who Lakshmi is, and each bit of knowledge I gain leads me on to more.

Maybe actually what any fule should know is that there's always more out there to learn.



* Iota does,  she quoted it in her last post too.  Obviously something Molesworthian in the air up here at the moment.   Click over there for some light relief in the form of a video (warning: it requires an element of cultural knowledge).

Holiday doublethink

Ah! The Summer holidays!

They start tomorrow.

I'll repeat that for those of you in England (or probably elsewhere) who may be reeling in disbelief.  Yup, the Summer holidays, in this particular corner of Scotland, start at 3.15 tomorrow afternoon and don't end until Tuesday 21 August.

And, despite the fact that the weather is being accommodatingly very Summer-holiday-ish (although not swimsuits-outside-worthy quite yet), I am reminded of Nineteen Eighty-four.

No, not because that was (although it was, I'm sure) a particularly fine Summer holiday (we probably went to Frinton), nor because Summer holidays are my personal room 101 (far from it), but because of doublethink.

I find myself, as I contemplate the next six weeks, simultaneously thinking both:

Oh, hooray! The Summer holidays!  Less than 24 hours to go! No  alarm, no routine, no uniform, no dragging tired children out of bed or forcing them to do homework in a snatched hurry between bites of breakfast.  Long lazy days of doing nothing and enjoying it.  Hooray for the Summer holidays!

and

Oh help! That makes it 53 days. Or 1,272 hours.  Or 76,320 minutes before I get five seconds of peace.

Can't wait.

A nest of (uniformed) vipers

Remember Gulliver's Travels?

I don't, not really. Don't tell anyone but I haven't ever read the actual book, although I did have a highly excellent (probably ladybird) illustrated version. 

As I say, I don't remember much about it, but I do recall the Big-endians and the Little-endians. Two separate factions of Lilliputians (technically, I now learn from wikipedia, some were Blefuscans, but we'll gloss over that bit, as I suspect my source text did) caught in vicious internecine squabbles about which end of an egg is up.

Personally I'm a little-endian, but I can cope with the alternative, if I must.

Anyway, I digress.  The point is that this has nothing on what's going on at school at the moment.

We have a new(ish) head.  She has arrived with a lovely, equally new, broom, with which she intends to sweep clean any corners she's not so keen on. 

One of those corners is uniform.

As it happens, I think she's right.  Bearing in mind I went to a school that required me to have (and my parents to invest large sums of money in), in addition to my every day uniform, a full length cloak (with lined hood), as well as a blazer, a boater and a suit for Sundays, asking everyone to look reasonably neat in matching sweatshirts and polo shirts (secretly I'd rather they were wearing proper shirts but you can't have it all) doesn't seem to me too much.  And, if the truth be told, lots of the children, particularly the older ones (whose parents, I suspect, have wearied of that particular battle) were beginning to get rather scruffy.  I also happen (and I realise it makes me sound a bit Daily youknowwhat) to think uniform makes a difference.  We dress up for things that are important and we make an effort for people we respect, so I think asking children to dress smartly encourages them to think of school and what they do there as something that matters.

And most of the other parents agree.   There is universal approval for the idea that the children should be neatened up a bit.

There is no agreement on how.

The playground is full of secretive huddles of whispering parents you are frightened to approach for fear they'll ask you what you think.  Are you a Little-Endian or a Big-Endian?  Should jerseys be red or black?  Trousers be black or grey?   Have they realised that the local supermarket doesn't stock black?  (Though that particular problem seems rather chicken and egg (whichever way up) to me.)  Can girls wear trousers? Or cardigans?  What if it's cold?  And where do you stand on the irresolvable problem of gingham dresses?

Everyone has their preferred choice and everyone has a (invariably contradictory) story about some child hauled before the head for wearing it.

And no-one, but no-one (and yes, I include myself), is saying anything about the new literacy programme she's also introduced.

Am I really dooming my children to failure by sending them to a (gasp) state school?

An admission:

I am expensively privately educated.  So is B.  In fact (possibly ironically) the only part of either of our education that our parents didn't pay for was the university bit.

Our children, on the other hand, are going to be educated at the taxpayer's (and yes, that does include us) expense.  State schools all the way.  Mostly because we can't afford otherwise, but also partially because we are woolly Guardian reading types who believe in state education.  I look at my friends from university, all highly (if not equally, most of them are much cleverer than me) intelligent, articulate, gifted people, and I see a mix of educational backgrounds.  Admittedly they aren't representative of the statistics: if 93% of the population goes to state school, surely 93% of my university friends should have done likewise.  No prizes for guessing that it's nothing like that much, but it's still a majority, as it should be, and it was a pretty good university too.

I am, admittedly, being a little disingenuous.  One of the reasons we moved out of London was because we didn't want to end up in the panic of being allocated a "bad" school, and we did (of course we did) check out the HMIE (Ofsted to anyone South of Coldstream) reports on the schools round here before we moved.  And, if I'm honest, if we'd been told all the schools were disastrous, we wouldn't have moved here but would have waited to find a house somewhere where we felt our children would get a better education.

But here we are. Our town has two primary schools and one high school, and we've already picked the primary school (it's the bigger one, so that we can separate A&S if we decide that's the right thing for them), and are looking at the high school pupils in disbelief that our children will ever be old enough to wear that uniform.

But, you know what? I remain, a little, frightened of this decision.  We went to look at the primary school a couple of months ago and I was terrified.  I think, somewhere in my privately-educated subconscious, I genuinely thought it was going to be a hideous, dirty, disorganised place, probably with metal detectors on the doors, and 8-year-olds shooting up in the playground.  And (funnily enough) it's not.  Admittedly the buildings aren't the most beautiful, but the staff were clearly committed, kind and interesting, and the work displayed was of excellent quality. Most importantly the children were pleasant and polite and clearly enjoyed their time there.

And I don't think that's unrepresentative.  I suspect that the vast majority of UK primary schools, particularly those outside the bigger cities, are like that.  I suspect that most children are getting a decent education and are making good friends, rather than taking weapons to school, or drinking in their lunchbreak, or swearing at the staff.

Yet that's not the image we get is it?  There was (and this is what has provoked this post) a long article (part of a series) in yesterday's Sunday Times (I can't link to it, because you'd have to pay), telling the fictionalised story of a school in which the teachers are terrified to use discipline, the children attack each other with iron bars, and the head tells his staff not to stand in front of the class and actually teach the pupils (sorry, "students").

Katharine Birbalsingh, the author, was formerly the deputy head of a South London comprehensive, so must have a wealth of experience, and I don't for a second suggest that she's made any of it up in her quest to ensure that no-one is identifiable.  I'm sure it is true, but it's true, or at least I hope against hope that's it's true, only in a tiny, tiny minority of cases.   And what gets me is that it perpetuates a myth.  The myth that your children will be doomed if you educate them in the state system. The myth that echoes unspoken round the privately-educated minority: that state school equals failure. Failure for the children, and failure by the parents who have not given their children, for whatever reason, the best start in life.

And I think that this has a knock on effect.  I'm sure that if everyone was state educated, and we didn't have a two-tier system, then the system would be better for everyone.  For a start, a significant minority of talented teachers wouldn't be being creamed out, and the parents, who must in the main care deeply about their children's education (else why fork out all that money?) would be putting their time and committment and interest into schools that benefit everyone, not just the children of other, similar, parents.

But that's not going to happen, is it? Or at least it's not going to happen while the myth prevails.  People who can afford to will opt out, because they'll remain (as a small part of me still is) scared not to. Now, I realise that I am, once again, talking about the media, and I realise that "I had a perfectly lovely time at my state school and came out with fine results and no drug habit and am now reading an interesting degree at a good university" is hardly going to sell newspapers, but wouldn't it be lovely to see it?  Just once?

Or am I wrong?  Are my children doomed?  And is the lottery my only hope?