Amen to that, Brother Uh-Oh

Within a week of my elder son starting school, 127 so-called education experts had clubbed together to warn me that I was ruining his life.

Because where we are going wrong in the UK, apparently, is sending children to school at the age of four. We should be waiting until they are six or seven before starting their formal education, as they do in Scandinavian countries that “consistently achieve better educational results as well as higher levels of wellbeing”.

To take this debate forward, I thought it might be helpful to obtain the views of a consumer. Charlie, aged 4¼, reports that he loves school so much that he would like to sleep there and not bother coming home.

(An opinion which raised my hopes of packing him off to boarding school in a year or two, if only I could overcome his mother’s veto and land a major lottery win to pay the fees).

When I was away last weekend, he said “I miss …” and Mrs Hann was surprised when the person in question proved not to be the traditional “Daddy” but “Mrs Tudor”, his form teacher.

Charlie is happy to get changed as soon as he comes home so as “not to spoil my beautiful school uniform”. He also cheerfully completes his reading homework each evening and appears to be making excellent progress on all fronts.

However, he has always been eager to learn. Indeed, the only problem we had in getting him to school in the first place was his confident but misplaced assertion that there was no need for him to go as “I already know everything”.

I also started school aged 4¼ and am sure it did me no harm, because I was similarly ready to learn. Indeed, my parents paid for me to go to a private school precisely because the local state primary would not admit me for another year, and they could not face me hanging around the house badgering them with questions.

What did do me harm was later being fast-tracked into taking my A-levels a year earlier than usual so that I could reach university well before I was socially equipped to make the most of it (though, to be fair, on that basis I should probably have deferred my degree course until I was nearer 30).

But then we all develop at different paces. When Charlie was 19 months old he was already addressing us in well-formed sentences. His younger brother Jamie, on the other hand, who is at that age now, says little more than “Mamma”, “Dadda” and “Uh-oh”, which is both his comment when anything goes wrong and his slightly disturbing name for his elder brother.

He also recently started saying “Amen”, which I took to be an early sign of religious awakening, but turns out to be his interpretation of the name of his best friend at nursery, a little girl called Carmen.

The day before Charlie started school my wife gave him his choice of special treat and he asked to be taken to one of those farms where kiddies are invited to stroke bunnies, feed lambs, milk cows and the like. On Saturday he asked us to pay it a repeat visit on the kind pretext of sharing this experience with his younger brother.

In reality, what we mainly witnessed were clear signs of growing confidence and independence as Charlie happily went off alone on the sort of tractor ride that he would previously have insisted on taking only with his mother.

All of which is, I can see, very bittersweet for Mummy, who sees her baby growing up at a pace rarely witnessed since Jack scattered those magic bean seeds in the pantomime.

Childhood and innocence are surprisingly short, and we are doing our best to savour what is left of it. Buoyed up by the knowledge that, at his current rate of progress, young Jamie will indeed be an ideal candidate for the 127 educationalists’ preferred “free play” until he is six or seven.

Which may work out particularly well if I can secure a free transfer of my PR skills to a company somewhere in Scandinavia, where my reputation is as yet untarnished by experience.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The world turned upside down

An old man recently asked whether I thought we would still be driving on the left when I reached his age. “Because,” he added, “it’s just about the only thing they haven’t changed in this country in my lifetime.”

He had been born into a white, Christian, English-speaking nation in which fathers exercised authority, divorce was exceptional, the monarchy and Parliament were respected, and it was naturally assumed that British was best.

Somehow, without anyone ever consulting him, he had seen it transformed into a multi-racial, multi-cultural society in which every religion (apart from Christianity) has to be carefully respected “to avoid giving offence”; women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities are sometimes given preference over heterosexual white males to improve representation, balance or simply compensate for centuries of alleged wrongs; children can no longer be disciplined; traditional institutions and values are relentlessly mocked; our armed forces have been run down and the essential attributes of national sovereignty quietly transferred to the European Union; and we have had to adjust ourselves to foreign weights, measures and even place names.

Education, for example, has been turned upside down. When I went to university I could have said, like Neil Kinnock, that I was the first member of my family in a thousand generations to do so; though unlike him I am well-educated enough to know that this is mainly because universities did not exist for around the first 975 generations in question.

In my day, if seeking admission to an Oxbridge college, it was a distinct advantage to have had a parent there before you; today it is a positive handicap. Both positions are equally unfair. Access to education at all levels should be based simply on ability, not manipulated to give a leg-up to the badly taught or thick.

My wife recently obtained a new British passport in which I noticed that some of the key information was translated into two sorts of gibberish. Not foreign languages that might actually be useful overseas, like French, Spanish, Russian or Mandarin, but what I finally worked out were Welsh and Gaelic. This is surely madness, because anyone so hopelessly monoglot in Gaelic that they cannot understand the English word “passport” is completely unequipped to leave their croft, let alone the country.

How long will it be before passports become 100 pages thick with translations into Cornish, Kurdish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Lallans, Swahili, Tagalog and every other conceivable minority language that might be spoken somewhere in this country?

Yet the clamour for change remains relentless. Open any national newspaper and you will read the whinges of self-appointed pressure groups complaining that our society is insufficiently adapted to their needs, say because BBC Radio 4 is still fronted by too many people who sound potentially white and middle class.

There are conspiracy theorists who argue that what has happened to Britain since the Second World War is the result of a carefully co-ordinated campaign by the Left. Having failed to achieve the glorious new dawn of communism, they turned to destroying society by systematically undermining and reversing all the assumptions on which it was based.

A revolution has undoubtedly been achieved, but it seems far too organised and brilliant for the Left as we know it ever to have effected it. The old Britain was simply asking to be toppled because it was a fundamentally decent place in which those in charge always thought it reasonable to listen to the other person’s point of view.

Now fears of being accused of racism or bigotry have silenced opposition so effectively that even the leadership of the Conservative Party is quick to condemn proponents of traditional values as “dinosaurs”. And so, oddly enough, our bright new “rainbow” society looks certain to be altogether less tolerant of dissent than the monochrome, patriarchal, deferential one we have lost. Is anyone surprised?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.