EDUCATION
There’s a film called ‘Kes’, by Ken Loach, you may have seen it.
It breaks my heart. A boy at school struggles to stay awake and keep up with the teacher. He’s constantly berated, spoken to like he’s an idiot, a ‘good-for-nothing’, worthless.
But what the teacher doesn’t realise is that this boy is actually something of a genius - not at Geography or Maths - learned in a rigid classroom set up but a genius with kestrels or, in particular, his kestrel called ‘Kes’.
It takes repeated acts of truancy to spur the teacher to go and find out where the boy is and what he’s up to. So, one day, storming off towards the boy’s house, he comes to a country park - and there in the middle of it is this young lad skillfully working the kestrel.
Taking care not to be seen, the teacher stands and observes. As he does, he quickly becomes spellbound by the boy’s mastery of his craft. It’s the love of working his kestrel that means the boy has little energy for anything else - but by the same measure, he has limitless energy for the subject he has chosen.
In the end, the teacher doesn’t just acknowledge his oversight but invites the boy to bring his kestrel into the classroom and do a presentation to the children. As you can imagine they are spellbound and the boy’s status is restored.
If education isn’t able to start with the innate genius or aptitudes of a particular child, it must at least do everything it can to discover that, make room for that and honour it in some way. Not simply press on with some formulaic pre-prescribed diet of knowledge to force feed the child hour after hour, day after day in a sweaty classroom.
I believed a whopping half-truth sold to me at my grammar school. “Do well at this and your future will be secure”. It made it seem like everything we did was about the future - why? Are we not now learning that actually, life is all about living in the present and making the most of it? And how much more important that is when you are young.
At 11 years old our daughter left the safe confines of her primary school and arrived at a secondary school 5 times the size. Within 3 months she’d lost everything - her confidence, her mental health and as a result her self-control at home. She was so drained trying to concentrate on material her mind was not able to follow, she arrived home threadbare and snapped endlessly at us if we asked her to do anything. But the real red-line was a comment she made to my wife, which still makes me well up whenever I think about it.
“Mummy” she said, “I’m full of ideas but at school I’m like a blank page”. That was it - I was having no more of that system that had, albeit unintentionally, diminished my daughter. We took her out of school and for the rest of the year completely disconnected her from the curriculum. We set up our own little school called KidsWhoCan with the aim of helping her become capable and confident at things - not just getting a head full of knowledge.
Every time she mentioned a topic she was interested in, we got on and did it. For example; “Daddy were there women pilots in the 2nd WW?” We spent a week looking into that and it was so much fun. We read Wordsworth by the river and filmed it so we could show mummy. We found 2 or 3 people in the town who loved teaching things but were retired. We agreed on an hourly rate and they imparted the best of what they had. Then, gradually we linked up with other local homeschoolers which led to a cooking club and trips to the science museum. Each day began with a bit of housework and a prayer for the day. After lunch, we had ‘rest and read’.
I hoped it would last because I wanted to prove the education system wrong - but actually, nothing in life is that straightforward and it proved really difficult to stay on top of it as well as trying to run our business.
So it came as something of a relief when my daughter said she felt it was time to go back to school now. But not just any school. She had been watching Mallory Towers and loved the idea of going to a smaller school. Believing in choice as we did, we invited her to go online and find half a dozen schools in the area she liked the look of. All of them were private with whopping great fees!
Anyway by some extraordinary providential miracle of called ‘the in-laws’, she is now at a private school. She is back under the curriculum and the metrics are still primarily to do with exam results but at least she has had a taste of the alternative and so have we.
