That's it. That's what I remember from three years of History classes in a grammar school. Oh, and a line from a poem that had all these ideas about, 'When you are sick you are green/ When you are angry you are red' – that sort of thing – with the last line, 'And you have the cheek to call me coloured?' I thought at the time it was quite neat, but after three years in Africa you come to realise that people here who are coloured are damn insulted to be called anything other than coloured. I'm pretty sure the most useful thing I learned in school was how to use a band saw.
I read Rimbaud and Sartre the way kids today read 'Twilight' and 'Harry Potter'. Is it any wonder I produced such a perfect piece after my Auschwitz visit – wasted as part of my English Language GCSE Portfolio. It was the year after Diana died and we were all expected to write about how that made us feel; I informed my teacher that, lovely lady though I'm sure the self-titled 'People's Princess' was, I had no opinions whatsoever worth considering and would much rather choose my own topic. The poor guy had long ago concluded it was far easier just to let me have my way...
And now, thanks to the Internet and a hefty dose of good fortune, I earn my living by writing. Some of it is diabolical, it really is. Worse than the drivel I inflict on blog readers. This morning I wrote about China's only female monarch, Wu Zetian. Someone who loved poetry, and cheerfully killed a bunch of concubines in order to be successful. Oh, and her daughter (just incase she grew up to be an even more obnoxious, ambitious little tart). I think Lady Macbeth was modelled on her. Last week, I focussed on smartphones and how they have changed the work place. And Sappho, I wrote about Sappho.
When I wrote about Auschwitz, I didn't really care about the end product. I didn't know what 'alliteration' meant; I hadn't studied speeches and the art of rhetoric. A few years earlier I wrote a couple of poems, one of which was about child abuse and I am proud to say disturbed my psychologist mother to such an extent she charged off to the nearest Abuse Expert and begged their opinion. For none of these pieces did I, in theory, know what I was doing – I just wrote what flowed from the pen.
I'm worried that I've lost that ability, irretrievably. The chance to perfectly capture a moment, to weigh words against each other somewhere inside of me, to know instinctively how something should be. I taught myself to read – I don't remember doing this, and my mother certainly doesn't remember teaching me, but she knows I picked up a book one day and read it aloud. Formal education is something that is supposed to expand our horizons but all it has done is limit mine. It forces us into ever tighter corners, limiting our possibilities and futures and dreams. It stamps out creativity and difference and originality because these are 'difficult' for teachers to deal with. As long as we allow teachers into our classrooms who are scared to encounter a student smarter than themselves, the education system is fundamentally flawed.
I've struggled to end this – education and writing are both subjects close to my heart and I could produce reams on either. But I think I'll close with the words of Ken Robinson; if you haven't yet seen his TED talks then go there immediately. I just wish that governments would acknowledge the importance of what he is saying and make the changes before it is too late – before we have created a system whereby nobody cares any more, and nobody sees anything wrong with the way things are.
“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardising in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”
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