In three weeks’ time we’re set to fly back to the UK. It’s full-on – we don’t have any idea where we’re going to live yet, and both kids start school in September.
Yep, both kids will slot into the British education system and melt in with the homogeny that is the national curriculum, complete with mock tests, exams, targets and box-ticking. But I’m feeling knock-kneed about it. Not because for Ben, who is starting school for the first time, it will be a tumultuous day of teary farewells at the gate and - cripes! - double the lunchbox assembly; not because my last baby has flown the nest, where development once lay in innocent pursuits like Lego and Sesame Street. I’m feeling a bit wobbly because.... I’m not sure it’s what I want for them.
I didn't have a rough time; it's not because of that - I wasn't bullied, I didn't have learning disabilities. I was privileged and passed the uppity entrance exam (they wanted intellectual insurance as well as five thou a term... to invest in league tables, no doubt) to gain entrance into a Girls Public Day School Trust establishment – a proper one, with inspirational my-captain-my-captain English Lit teacher (thank you Miss B), a history teacher with blood-red talons and an eye for the male maths teacher and a stocky-set hot-tempered headmistress with fiery breath and hairy legs.
Of course, I complained about the lot of them profusely at the time, but those days were really quite okay thinking back, and an experience to remember – I did the bad girl routine very well, coming away with dawdling A-Level grades which, having been scored highly in mocks, had been well eroded by truancy, concentration issues and a fascination with what went on outside of the tall brick walls come the finals.
And while I’d love my children to have a chance of meeting the hotch potch society of school goers, teachers, instructors and misdemeanours, I’m not so keen on their meeting the education. What would you know, Skiver, you might say. Four trips to the headmistress was it – with parents?
True. But what I do know is that life’s kind of changed. When I was ushered into my posh girls school age 10 the capitalist world was budding and blooming, budding and blooming in all sectors. For all girls, the glass ceilings looked as if they were giving way and we could be the ones to take the final crack at them in whichever way we wanted; there were teenage girls in chemistry classes with Marie Curie eyes, burning aspirations to be like that bird who actually discovered DNA's double helix but didn’t realise it – but these girls would realise it, they’d hunt it down, write papers and have their names branded onto the world of academia; and for creative types like me there was PR, advertising, journalism, all ripe and ready for our boldening world of supply, demand, package and sell. I was going to be all of them – PR guru, advertising creative and journalist; why not? Just after the next bike-shed ciggie...
But now... Career as in job prospect is running hand in hand with career as in out of control. The world is rethinking, for the present anyway, its greed-based future. Advertising budgets are being slashed, PR is a luxury, even journalists are having a rotten time – everything’s on the internet. And there’s too much on the internet. And anyone can write - most of them do it gratis (you read it here, folks). Besides, we have too much information. We have too much communication. And science... well, haven't we discovered enough? Do we need to save more people so they can have more babies and extended lifespans?... The planet is suffering. The parasites will soon kill the host and then what?
That's the bigger picture - the doomsday one that plagues me. More immediately, more now, I'm concerned that sending the kids to school so they can be like every other child is just, well, pointless. I know this isn't very eloquent (shows you what a high-falutin private education can do for you...), but after reading and hearing about schools fattening up children as 'fodder for the economy', about their tendency to kill creativity, pasteurise breakouts of individuality, level out the playing field for every pupil so that the ones who fly at one subject are reined in, told to concentrate on the subjects they're not so good at... That's just senseless.
But what are the alternatives? Home-schooling? Me, a teacher? Naaa. What then?
Where can my children continue to play-learn, promoting emotional intelligence (which academic chanelling can stunt if administered too early on)? Where can they go that isn't tied to term dates which could end up imprisoning their parents were they to be taken on holiday out of season, where they'd learn a wealth of fascinating stuff (tell me what boy is taught medieval French politics and castle construction at primary school?)? Where can they pursue their natural gifts and learn subjects immediately relative to their time, their now - not the back then now of our generation? Environment, permaculture, eco-solutions?
We're inching closer and closer to the new school year, and unless someone offers an alternative to the common formula, I'll have to start researching The Good School Guide, spend on branded blazers and stout shoes. I don't know what part of the country we'll be in, but while we're falling into line at the local school, I shall be worrying what in the world my kids are doing there.
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