By The staff at my son’s nursery handed me a leaflet. It read ‘Is your child school ready?’. My first response was to think “Well, we haven’t had a chance to sit him down and explain how to build an impenetrable layer of scar tissue across his heart in order to dampen the relentless agony of life on Earth yet, so probably not”.
But then I read it. Weirdly – and in my estimation, wrongly – the leaflet didn’t pay too much attention to the necessity of constructing a series of crippling psychological defence mechanisms to cope with the harsh reality of school. Instead it was more like ‘Make sure he can hold a cup’.
And apparently that’s a big thing. The head of Ofsted just gave a speech complaining about parents who relinquish their most basic responsibilities to schools. Evidence suggests that kids are turning up for their first day of reception unable to use the toilet, putting even more of a burden on teachers than normal. Or they can’t put their shoes on. Or they don’t know how zips work. Or they arrive in a buggy and don’t know their own name. The list goes on and on.
She has a point. All this stuff is hard to teach – toilet training alone involves a month of introducing the alien concept of bladder pressure, three weeks of chasing your kid around with a mop and then six months of hyper-vigilant toilet proximity awareness, which is the closest you’ll ever come to being handed a live grenade – but that’s our job.
It’s silly to rely on schools to raise our children. We’re the ones who made the little bastards, so the least we can do is bring them up properly. Toilet training is just the start; after that comes manners and morals and sex education and financial management and self-respect and self-sufficiency. You can’t just lob a kid into the education system and assume they’ll come out of it intact. It’s a school, for crying out loud. It’s prison rules out there. Unless society suddenly develops a newfound respect for those proficient in stabbing their peers with a maths compass, school is the worst place possible to shape a person.
Which brings me to something that’s been on my mind lately. What if I homeschooled them? What if I didn’t bother with school at all, and quit my job, and just spent my life teaching my kids how to function in the world? All the schools we’re picking have been impressive in their own way, but they’ve also each delivered a gut-punch of buried, half-remembered dread. I didn’t like school, and I’ve convinced myself that my kids won’t like school, and so I keep entertaining the thought of going it alone.
We’d prise ourselves away from the mechanically reclaimed grind of the national curriculum and become a family of autodidacts. We’d learn all the important stuff, but we’d also just follow our natural paths of curiosity together. Interested in dinosaurs? Great! Here’s a film about dinosaurs, and this is how you spell their names, and here’s a pile of books about dinosaurs, and now we’re at the Natural History Museum, and here’s a story all about the Bone Wars of the 1800s. Laser-focused, one-to-one teaching designed to amplify individual strengths and bolster individual weakness. Isn’t that the best possible form of education? Wouldn’t you want that for your kids?
Give me 12 years and I’ll release my children into the world as champions. They’ll know more, and want to know more, than all those other school-educated dipshits put together. They’ll be happy and curious, and crucially they won’t have spent their entire childhood having their sense of self-esteem eroded to the point of invisibility by an uncaring procession of feral peers and indifferent staff.
Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Shame it’ll never happen. It can’t happen. The system is completely stacked against me. The day I give up work is the day my household craters into financial ruin, for instance. Also, my entire life has been a pattern of enthusiastic adoption followed by slow neglect, which means that by the second term all my lessons would just involve letting the kids do a load of cereal packet mazes while I napped.
And, you know, school’s supposed to beat the shit out of you, right? That’s what it’s for. You turn up, you get battered around a bit and as a result adult life becomes slightly less intolerable. That’s the most important lesson of all. I couldn’t take that away from my children. If I raised them myself, they’d be eaten alive as soon as they set foot in the real world.
So, fine, school does actually make quite a lot of sense. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve got ten months to teach my son how to hold a cup. Wish me luck!
