Happy New
Year everyone! I wish you a healthy, prosperous and well published 2023!
The
transition to a new year is always a stimulus to think about the future, which
is certainly the case in what I’m aiming to suggest. A radical overhaul in what
we decide to teach our young people, not necessarily just in the UK.
I’ve written
before about how I think every child should know what a heffalump is… or meant
to be of course, even though I’ve met many children who looked at me blankly
when I referred to one.
Yesterday,
funnily enough, I finally got the chance to watch the film ‘Yesterday’ in which,
after an accident, the main character wakes up in a word where no one has heard
of the Beatles. The clever premise of the film is that it’s unimaginable to
think of a world devoid of the Fab Four. However, albeit they were all French,
I’ve spoken with a number of teenagers who claimed – pretty convincingly (I’m
at least worldly wise enough to know that teenagers can be ‘economical with the
truth’) – that they had no idea who the Beatles were. Indeed, I was chatting
with two of them (and their family) once on a plane flying into Liverpool
airport!
An
imaginative GCSE maths exam writer once produced a question that ran something
like this; ‘Ronnie wants to buy four candles, each costing 85p, calculate the
total cost.’ ‘Ho ho,’ I retorted when working with a teenager in Britain, ‘Ronnie…
four candles… fork handles… he he…’ He looked at me as if I was several candles
(or fork handles) short of a set. A reference to the sainted candles (or
handles) came up recently in a conversation in which my eldest grandson (also a
teenager) was included and initially he didn’t know what we adults were
tittering about. When he had it explained to him, he really appreciated the
genius of the classic sketch.
Similar blank
faces, sometimes including those of adults, have stared back at me when I’ve referred
to Narnia or Gulliver, Laurel & Hardy, Tower Bridge (surprisingly it’s not
in New York) and Julius Caesar. One wonderfully self-confident teenager once
told me that Florence Nightingale couldn’t have been famous because; ‘I’ve
never heard of her.’
I can’t
complain about the ignorance of others without revealing some of my own, though
it also supports my contention that we need to allow time for a general
education which places children in the world they are in and not just
intensively focuses on making sure they can spot a fronted adverbial at twenty
paces or distinguish a tetrahedron from an octahedron. My story also includes
an element of what I think should be happening in schools. PS In my defence
before I reveal my stupidity, I point out that there isn’t a town or city
called Lloyds or Barclays or TSB.
I teach several
adult professionals in Spain over the internet, some of whom work for a well-known
bank, which also has branches in Britain. A few of the staff regularly
volunteer to go into schools, mainly secondary, and talk to the children about
how to manage money. In other words, to provide them with basic information that
every child should have the opportunity to receive. Every child will one day
have to pay a household bill, not all of them will have to calculate the area
of a circle. One day, when I asked one of my students (most of whom are based
in Madrid) what he was doing during the week he told me he was going to
Santander. I expressed my puzzlement because I knew he worked for Santander… so
surely, he went there – i.e. to their offices – every day, didn’t he?
‘No, I mean
Santander the city,’ he explained. I was staggered by my own ignorance – I had
no idea there was a place called Santander! I thought it was a made-up
name… like Lloyds etc. Despite my own embarrassment it upset me that my own
education hadn’t provided me the opportunity to learn the name and location of
a major city. At one school our geography lessons consisted entirely for one
year of learning practically every benign fact you could think of about The
Great Lakes. Nothing else.
I love
language, so I think it’s great if a child blossoming into an adult can spot a
fronted adverbial at twenty paces, or tell the difference between a tetrahedron
and an octahedron but I think we should make time for children to learn more
general knowledge about the cultural heritage of the world they are in, an overview
of the geography and history of their world and basic knowledge of skills they
will need in the adult world, such as how to handle their finances and
relationships.
Not only do
I think this is important in itself but in relation to what we are doing,
writing for children. I think they will be able to gain more from what they
read as they will be able to place the ideas, themes and characters they come
across more freely in context with the world that they inhabit.
I would be
fascinated to know what you think.
2 comments:
I always try to remember that my students were born about 2008, so the Beatles had been broken up for almost forty years. There's a lot of cultural information to be had through reading books; when I was a tween I loved This Fabulous Century books, which taught me all about goldfish swallowing and hula hoop use. Elementary schools don't teach Mother Goose, Aesop's Fables, or other classic literature, and Bible references are understood by very few. The answer-- everyone read more! That said, I had to look up the fork handles reference. Apparently, that comedy sketch didn't make it across the pond.
Was not a hundred percent sure
Whether the Ronnies were Three or indeed Four...
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