Bemused, I stared at the chessboard again, trying to figure out which pieces went for bishops and knights. It wouldn’t be easy to play, I reckoned, because the difference in colour between the two armies wasn’t very distinct, and I didn’t know which general had a blonde wife and who had married a brunette. I moved the pieces around a little, putting the castle-shaped ones at the corners and queen opposite queen. I wasn’t comfortable with the not-quite-spoken implication that chess is not for women. I think I said some stuff about having taught my children to play, and someone said they thought my son might be good at playing chess. At all events, the room seemed to chill by a degree or so. Someone else repeated, firmly, that chess is hard. Because. The pieces. Don’t. All move the same way, and I realised I should have avoided the subject, or at least dropped it on cue.

It’s a trivial thing, but you need to spend time and attention figuring out the trivial things if you don’t want to keep finding yourself surrounded by women you’ve offended. So it’s another lesson learned: Don’t mention chess in a group of women. Talk about shops and smartphone stuff and mutual acquaintances’ illnesses. Stay inside the box of what’s socially accepted. Guess correctly ahead of time where the groupthink’s going to land within a topic.

Yes, I’ve learned the lesson, but I’m not sure I’ll put it into practice. It’s not right.

In a roomful of women, most of them professionals or thereabouts, I probably wasn’t the only one who’d ever touched a chessboard. I reckon at least one or two of the other women were nodding their heads and agreeing that chess is hard and no woman can possibly play chess… when secretly they know the game, but they also know how to agree with the majority opinion, and so they’re faking ignorance and inability. You can do anything you choose, schools tell girls nowadays, but by the time they reach teenage, girls pick it up from social cues: Always choose the pink option. And by the time they reach middle-age, these girls are telling their daughters, “You can do anything you choose,” while their actions say, more loudly than their words, “CHOOSE THE PINK OPTION!”
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It’s compounded by the terror of being labelled ableist. If a member of the group lets on that they can do something that the majority might subsequently decide is difficult, then that could trigger the insecurities of those who lack confidence in their own skillsets. Well sure, if someone said anything derogatory about those who can’t play chess, that might indeed be ableist. But at what point does anti-ableism become anti-ability? ​

Because (a) I wasn’t denigrating the non-chess-players, (b) if I were male, it wouldn’t have triggered anyone’s insecurities, and (c) everyone in that group knows I lack all sorts of skills in smartphones and apps and blueteeth and so on. So should I start hinting  that nobody may speak about technology in my presence? Why not? Because I’m not in the majority with that?

OK, if it all depends on whether you’re in the majority position or not, then that’s not anti-ableism. That’s just flock mentality. Chicken-coop stuff.

I can play chess. I like playing chess. I’m not a grandmaster (grandmistress?), but I get a buzz out of winning a battle of pawns and queens—or even losing a well-played game. I’m going to notice if there’s an unusual chess set and quite possibly mention the word chess. Even if I’m not male.
 

And then there are sixteen types of people in the world, because your husband decides to join a ministerial networking organisation, and both of you have to get Myers-Brigged so that they can properly quantify your joint potential…

It wasn’t my first time. I’ve met Myers-Briggs in various contexts, formal and informal. For a couple of decades they defined me as INFP; now it has changed to INTP. A tendency to act according to my feelings has morphed into a habit of thinking—or a thing I have always done has been recategorised as thinkish rather than feely. These days it’s done digitally, online, so it’s a robot that’s transferred me from one box into another and closed the lid on Exhibit FMJones. The people who use your MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) are usually extroverts who use words like “extrovert” and “introvert” as verbs as well as nouns, and who cannot accept that the MBTI system is anything other than infallible.
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It’s all done very politely. You’re meant to feel validated by the idea that you can still have worth even if you have different personality traits from the people on the Zoom meeting who are there to Discuss your Results. They smile, strenuously, but you can see the dismay in their eyes as they repeat the mantra: Every personality type can display useful functionalities. Even introverts, they carefully avoid saying aloud. In the end they decide that if your husband is a very pronounced extrovert, his gifts can balance out your, er, well let’s say gifts too, because we’re all very diversity-conscious here, and we tolerate ALL SORTS like a box of Bassett’s Liquorice. 

I’m not saying it’s invalid—not exactly. I’m saying it’s arbitrary, and it’s an artifact of whatever dimensions we decide are important, and whatever we consider is normal/neutral on each line. Maybe everyone should try a personality test or two, just to pick up a general idea of how the important people view us. Followed by a gullibility test, just to make sure we aren’t swallowing anything whole and defining ourselves by someone else’s framework.

I’m suspicious of placing any trust in the boxes we use to sort ourselves into types—whether historical or pseudo-scientific. Is “Oh you’re a Virgo” benign or dismissive? Does “Well I’m a People Person” acknowledge mutual tolerance or justify behaving in an intrusive manner? If you see a social media post offering to define your anxiety type, your neurodivergence or your social intelligence level, do you click through, and do you believe the result? Does a belief in the result affect subsequent self-image and behaviour?
According to the discipline of General Semantics, it does. The relationship between language and reality is two-way. Language describes reality, but there are ways in which our reality conforms to the language we’ve used. We define a characteristic or a trend, and in doing so we validate or stigmatise, become or avoid. Call me a thinker, and I will do more thinking; call me courageous, and I will try to live up to the word. Tell me I’m an introvert, and, mysteriously, I feel less drawn to social situations.
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Does General Semantics offer any solutions to the limiting effect our semantics can have on our realities? Well, not an easy one. It’s called E Prime. It’s an exercise in non-definition. You speak or write English but without any form of the verb “to be”. No “is”, “was”, “were”, “are”, etc. Suddenly you can no longer say you are or want to be something. You can’t say you are an artist, an expert, or an author. You can say you painted certain things, you have attained a certain level of expertise, or you’ve written something. 

Similarly, you can’t say someone is an introvert, or an annoying person, or a hero. You can say that they have shown certain tendencies, or have done certain things. They have danced with wolves, or stood with a fist. Something, I can’t quite say what, remains wide open, and suddenly everyone looks more nebulous, less finished, more soulful, untidier, harder to sort into boxes.

I will admit this: E Prime is just as artificial as the zodiac, the MBTI, the Generation grouping or whatever other Sorting Hat you’re accustomed to invoking. What’s more, it feels a lot more awkward at first encounter. But it does something the others don’t do: it de-crystallises our view of personality and what it means to belong to human society and to Earth.
I will not call myself a General Semanticist, but I sometimes have a go at writing in E Prime. It kicks a whole lot of bad writing habits—passive voice, overdependence on adjectives, general tropiness. You can’t say it WAS a dark and stormy night; you have to say what the storm DID in the darkness. Forced to work real verbs in the absence of the verb “to be”, you find yourself writing something that sounds poetic, compelling, almost mythic.

I don’t often do it, because most of my stories include dialogue, and you have to model dialogue on the way real people talk. I probably have a couple of nature-themed micros in E Prime floating around the literary side of the Internet, but this is the only story in E Prime that I’ve got—and, if you look carefully, you’ll find at least one flaw in its E Prime purity.

Let me recommend an antidote to the Standard Personality Test: Write a description of yourself in E Prime. No “to be” verbs: no am/is/was/have been/etc. Describe the things you have done, and confess what the events of your life have done to you. Owning the talents, admitting the flaws, accepting the open-endedness of it all, you might just surprise yourself. 

Once they accomplish this, they’ll find it’s a one-way street. There is no way back. The robot has “infinite patience” with inconsistent demands and inconsiderate/abusive behaviour, so parents will find that any interpersonal contact with their children has now become so unpleasant that they can only go and invest in further technology to maintain the distance.
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The Parents of the Future will appreciate how much time the devices are saving, for by now the school will be pursuing them with all sorts of ridiculous and time-consuming requests. Admin want to set up meetings regarding the children’s demanding/disruptive tendencies. So unreasonable! Clearly the schools have failed to gear up for the Children of the Future yet: children accustomed to getting everything that they want at home (except for human contact). If a child is aggressive or attention-seeking, maybe it’s the school’s fault for failing to accommodate their big emotions? Time to go out and buy additional technology, including an AI that will complete all homework without any living person needing to look at it. This will mean working extra hours to afford it all, but at least the Parents of the Future don’t have to waste any valuable time interacting with their children. 

As the children grow up, there will be concerns over their academic scores, their mental health, their futures. Maybe the kids just need more individually-tailored support—counselling apps, self-regulation coaching apps, emotional validation apps?—but nothing seems to work. What is going wrong? The Parents of the Future have done everything they could possibly think of. It has to be the school’s fault, the mental health services, all of society...

OK, I’m not saying every family who buys an AI device is headed for disaster, but I meet too many children who are not thriving mentally and emotionally, and who would do better with less technology and more face-to-face parenting. Meanwhile, I see too many parents on social media praising the convenience of chatbots in their homes: an instant and effortless answer to every question, giving them an easy way to disengage from their child’s developing mind. One or two other parents complain that chatbots don’t always supply the right answers for homework tasks, but everyone seems confident that a tweak here and there will finally free parents from the onerous necessity of any meaningful interaction with their children.
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I was going to talk about the devaluation of learning, when questions receive instant answers, answers are instantly forgotten, and there is never any need to remember anything or join knowledge together into a coherent perspective. I was going to talk about the poor quality of chatbot responses: stock answers, contradictory assertions presented as fact, hidden biases. I was going to talk about the lack of any relevant model of knowledge-seeking: the missing stages of finding out, reasoning and evaluating. The value of a parent admitting to the boundaries of their own knowledge, setting an example of lifelong learning. 

But the biggest loss when we use robots to replace parental involvement is relational, emotional, psychological.

You know how they tell burnt-out teachers to “remember your why”? The idea is that if teachers remind themselves why they entered the profession to begin with, they will be better equipped to withstand the rising tide of harassment and abuse children feel entitled to throw at them. Well, I think the Parents of the Future need to be asked to “remember your why”. Why did they have children? Did they really envision working harder and harder to pay for the material demands of a brood of strangers with psychiatric issues?

Didn’t we all kind of hope that we would know and love our children, and that they would know and love us? That when they reached teenage they would still look us in the eyes and tell what they’re thinking? That when they develop a sarcastic sense of humour or they want to comment on our driving skills they will make eye contact to be sure they’re not being too harsh? That doesn’t happen automatically.

I made a deliberate decision, when my sons were little, to work part-time. To dress them in other children’s cast-offs and buy books and gifts secondhand. To make them choose between taking the bus home from town, or buying the snack they wanted and then walking home. Both children were perfectly comfortable with this. It was other people who weren’t. For years the women at church were busy comparing notes on what a terrible mother I was, refusing to provide for my children. But my first son had told me, “Mummy, God thinks Mummy-time is more important than money,” and I chose to assume he knew God better than they did.

I get that not everyone is free to make all the same choices. Circumstances change, and life gets expensive. However, I will say that life only gets more expensive if the children are not OK, and they won’t be OK if most of the attention they crave comes from robots.
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We don’t all have the same level of financial privilege, but can we agree to normalise face-to-face interaction with our children? At the very least, can we agree not to brag about how much of the parent-child relationship we’ve managed to turn over to AI chatbots? 

I had seen it happen to others: plastic bricks crowding into plastic blocks falling in among lidless felt-tip pens spilling over broken plastic links all mixed in with incomplete sets of finger-puppets, magnetic construction kits, shape-sorters, counting-games, dolls and cars—floorfuls and roomfuls of plastic, periodically scooped up and rammed into a mudge of everything where nothing was coherent enough for any purposeful play. I’d seen so many children given new games and toys almost every week but who never had anything to play with, and who were missing out on any opportunity to develop their concentration skills. If  you’ve seen a child who’s surrounded by too much stuff, you’ll notice how they touch one item, drop it, move on to another, turn it over, give up and pull at something else, only to throw it down again without giving any real attention to anything. It’s mildly disturbing to watch.
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I was going to do it differently. 

I knew what to do: just not buy the stuff. Make Christmas and birthdays about experiences more than possessions; buy gifts of edibles and art materials; let my children play with boxes instead of whatever toys came into fashion. After all, it would be more £££ to put into their trust accounts for when they reached 18.
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How well did I do it? I did buy a few plastic items I thought had good play potential. Secondhand of course. The stacking cubes, the big bricks, the alphabet toy, the farm set and later the marble run. I hinted, broadly, to friends and relatives that we didn’t have room for loads of plastic clobber, but I didn’t refuse the SpongeBill cars or the BuilderBill plastic tools—or even the broken toys my mother-in-law kept buying in secondhand shops because parts of them still kind of worked. I just quietly disappeared as much of it as I could. A lot of stuff went into the bin. Good-quality but superfluous stuff went into cupboards for a rainy day (and most of it never came out until it was time to move house). The toys that my children favoured could stay—but even those, I rotated in and out of storage so that we wouldn’t have too much to cope with at one time, and so that there was some degree of novelty as each toy made its reappearance. 

I’m going to give myself a B. Maybe a B+. Waves of plastic did break over our lives, leaving at times a flotsam of random pieces belonging to nobody knew what. I remember days—weeks—when I struggled to clean the floors because I couldn’t find enough floor to clean.

But, for most of the year, both my children played more with sticks and mud than plastic. My first son loved keeping plants, and my second son invented projects using natural materials instead of plastic. We still have a pillow he made when he was ten or twelve—a pillow stuffed with bulrush-fluff instead of polyester. Both children developed purposeful and imaginative play, and both knew how to concentrate when they went to school.

It was hard.
It shouldn’t be so hard.

Parents and children shouldn’t be inundated by more stuff than they can live with. Children don’t thrive if overfed; similarly, children don’t thrive if loaded with too many possessions. Fossil fuels shouldn’t be pulled from the ground to make all this plastic, to package it, transport it and then take it away again to landfill. It’s doing nobody any good: adults, children, the planet. None of us.

Someone needs to be braver than I was. To stand up against the plastic tide, refuse superfluous gifts, re-normalise a childhood filled with undirected imaginative play instead of plastic clutter. 

Are we afraid our children might resent us if they don’t have all the shiny stuff their friends are drowning in? Well, I can only speak for my family here, but neither of my sons ever felt deprived of toys, and I don’t think any of their friends noticed they didn’t have as many material goods, for they were the ones with the beach bonfire parties and the woodland expeditions. Fewer possessions meant a better attachment to the things they did own, and more gratitude when they did receive something they’d really wanted. To the parents who wonder why their children aren’t “grateful” for what they have… Maybe they can’t develop gratitude when they’re drowning?
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We need to turn back the tide and normalise plastic-free play. 

I’d like us to stand and stare at the slow advancing micro-spikes of moss along tree-trunks and fences. The way moss covers and swallows a fallen tree, harbouring moisture, speeding the return of deadwood into earth. Am I imagining this, or has moss quickened in the years when forests have burned elsewhere? Do mosses remember their vulcan day of creation, and will they know what to do at the end of another high-carbon age?
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I want you to feel the velvet texture on stone walls, to see the almost-glow of mosses in low-pitched autumn sunlight. The mini-foliates of moss are thin, so thin you’d think they could smell the warm damp carbons even as you breathe. So thin they dry and seem to die, roughening and dulling like old carpet. But like a miracle they rehydrate in rain, and soak up water to grow again, to thicken and soak up more. It’s time the botanists took the stuff seriously, worked out how much moss a metropolis must muster if the metropolis is to maintain the health of its breathing citizens. 

They have made a start. There are cities where polluted air has refused to respond to laws and regulations. Cities where humans have been forced to think again and again until someone thought of moss. Cities where tall irrigated towers of moss absorb carbon and pollutants now from the vehicles running below. Let’s keep thinking. Why build metal-and-concrete towers among plentiful towering buildings? Why not house your tiny green symbiots on roofs and walls already there? If you roofed half your city in moss, would it save you just a little in heating and cooling as well as swallowing your pollutants?
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And, while we’re at it, are there larger places that moss could help regreen? The oceanographers are learning new ways to re-seed bleached-out coral. Is there an easy way to kickstart the slow spread of lichens and mosses across ruined landscapes? Not deserts, perhaps, but quarries, post-industrial zones, or even burnt-out forest? Mosses and ferns once terraformed a planet far less hospitable than we know today. I think they would try to do it again, given time and opportunity. 

​It’s only talk, and talk is inexpensive. But we need to ask silly questions, share unlikely ideas, keep the discussion open, see where our children will take it. We need to talk about green things and greenness, greenery and moss.

“Tell me a dinosaur,” I say to my 19-year-old.

“Thesaurus,” he says with a sarcastic look, and I feel unreasonably proud of him. He gave me the wrong answer. He didn’t say T Rex. I must have brought him up well.

He used to have a stuftie dinosaur, named Bronte because we decided it was a brontosaurus. One of the long-necked types, with four legs, and usually depicted munching on tree-ferns. It’s fun doing dinosaur voices. One of the perks of parenthood, so to speak. No-one can say for sure how a dinosaur would have sounded, but with a neck like that, Bronte ought to moo like a didgeridoo.
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I seem to remember, too, an odd selection of hard plastic dinosaurs that got bundled away into the Farm Set every time someone trod on them barefoot. The toothy types always looked hyper-alert and grinning, as though they’d spotted easy prey among the plastic sheep and pigs. I liked Triceratops better. Ruminative like a rhinoceros, old-looking like a knotted tree, steady of gaze as though he thinks he knows the secret to survival. Except that nothing knows the secret to survival when the world ends. A meteor strikes the planet or a new species turns rogue, destroys all habitats except its own. They have too much in common, Triceratops and Rhinoceros. So long, and thanks for all the fossils, or the traditional medicines, and the slow cryptic look that was in your eyes while you lived. We’re in the Anthropocene Age now, and please don’t try to tell us what comes after. 

Think of a dinosaur: think of a thing that has died. But also a thing that has lived—has run, stomped, swum or flown across a younger, stranger Earth, and left its mark in rocks and mud and genes, in crocodiles and stories and dragons.
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“Give me a dinosaur,” I say to my younger son, and he generously gives it a moment of thought, then offers me Pterodactyl. Technically not the Cretaceousest of dinosaurs to a serious palaeontologist, but a soaring monster of prehistory, and good enough for me. Better than good enough. He’s amazing: an alien, birdlike, batlike, manta-style and sharkish reptile of a sky that’s all his own. 

​And a name that’s just enough of a mouthful to make you pause and say it twice. That elegant silent P, hanging off the not-so-silent echo of “terror”. Dactyl sounds appealingly rhythmic, almost ducklike, until you recall the toothiness of Pterodactyl’s jaws and the talons of his feet. He wouldn’t win in single combat with the Tyrant Rex, but he would rise above and taunt him, drop stones on his head, shriek like a murder of the crows that hadn’t arrived yet, and Tyrannosaur would slink away defeated. 

And, as the first few months of 2020 passed, some of the horror stories began to come true: hospitals in Europe overwhelmed, running out of oxygen supplies, people dying of suffocation as they queued for triage. Some countries slammed shut their borders, leaving travellers stranded. Other countries prioritised maintaining their economies. Here in the UK, fear ran especially high because our latitude and our grey skies tend to mean high infection rates with all types of coronaviruses. Even with hindsight, it would be hard to draw up a framework of best practice in anti-Covid measures for any specific country.
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Necessary, effective, dubious or draconian… several Covid restrictions hit hard at the time. The lockdown on travel felt particularly cruel to those whose close relatives lived far away. The hiatus on non-emergency medical procedures ended up costing lives. The reduction in social work left vulnerable people in danger. The closing of offices put some people out of work. And the dodging of restrictions by those in power hit like an insult on top of an injury. 

And then there were other restrictions that didn’t feel too painful at the time, but carried unexpected after-effects. Nobody anticipated how school closures would impact children’s behaviour and attainment, and nobody imagined how polarised and angry social networks would become when based predominantly online.

Here’s another thing that I think deserves a moment of silence: We stopped singing.

Honestly I can’t argue with the science on this one. Gathering into shared spaces, opening mouths and throats wide, exhaling long and deeply—that was identified early on as a “Superspreader” scenario. It was about as necessary as any anti-infection measure could be. But please mourn with me on this one. A thing can be necessary but still grievous. We stopped singing.
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Schools and social spaces opened up, in “Covid-secure” mode, and a staple part of early socialisation/education was missing: we didn’t sing. We were allowed to play alphabet or number songs, and we weren’t expected to forbid small children’s vocalising if they felt inclined, but songs were not sung. Churches and social events opened up, unrelieved by singing or chanting. For nearly two years, singing together was dead and almost forgotten. 

How nearly forgotten, I never realised until I attended an outdoor event with live music, and the singers were all off-key and out of practice. And until the restrictions were relaxed and I sang a simple song to a class of 5-year-olds, and they stared at me, open-mouthed, as though the last time they’d seen a person doing that outside of a screen was before they could well remember. And until I attended, in the course of my duties, a School Show rehearsal and applauded what I assumed was a plain-tone chant by the 11-year-olds. It was a song, not a chant, but they had forgotten how to sing.

If it’s true that communal singing is good for your physical, emotional and social wellbeing, then surely it’s time to climb out of that hole? A daily singing session in schools, maybe. Family-and-friends singalongs. Social events to include interactive music. Informal choirs. Whatever brings voices together and reduces tensions and rage.

We need to remember how to sing. 

One way or another, children must hold in abeyance their impulse to begin, try to consciously outline what idea just began to awaken in their heads, predict where that idea will proceed and decide ahead of time how it will end. 

Then, having produced a skeleton representation of whatever they can remember of their idea, they must begin again at the beginning, following their plan step by step, fleshing it out with description, detail and maybe dialogue.

I’m sure this method works, for someone, somewhere. Probably the writers of school curricula; I don’t know. But I do know it wouldn’t work for me. I don’t outline. My plan for a story is a half-formed thought in my head. I won’t know where it wants to go until I start writing and the characters begin to decide. I can’t decide my “story arc” beforehand, nor predict where it will go when I do catch it. My plan for a poem or a piece of poetic prose is nearly always a single phrase that hangs in my head, catching a connection with something that will drive its own course. Of course I will draft and redraft, but if there’s a plan, it’s deep below my consciousness; and if I had to drag it out and sort it into boxes before I began writing my piece, I’d probably lose the mood and essence of whatever it was going to be. Even now, I have only the vaguest notion of where I’m going, except that I need to see where my argument takes me. I can’t diagram that argument ahead of time. It organises itself like crystals, not like something from Ikea.

When you ask a group of authors whether they consider themselves “plotters” or “pantsers”, a good proportion will admit that they write without a detailed plan. They trust their instincts to recognise the best flow of the narrative; they trust their second draft to provide opportunities for revision. 

Why do we expect so much more than this from children? For the majority of key stage 2 children, NOTHING KILLS A STORY SO DEAD as having to produce an Outline Page before you’re allowed to write it. Time after time, I’ve seen a child cheerfully chatting about what’s happening in their preliminary sequence of drawings… only to find they have nothing left to say when the “plan” is completed, and nothing to write. They can’t, or won’t, go back and produce the story again. The creative process is completed, and the story is over. I can try to push the point without invalidating this, but inwardly I’m not so sure it’s productive.

If and when I’m allowed the freedom to deliver a writing lesson my own way, I find it works best to look first at examples of good writing. Book review, poem, descriptive piece, personal story… I want to let children discuss which words/phrases/structures are pleasurable to read, and why. Appreciation comes before emulation.

Only after that will I introduce the jumping-off point for the specific task. I want to move from stimulus to execution without placing obstacles in between. A single drawing, not a full sequence. A scribbled idea or two, not a required Planning Grid. Children who have read/listened to enough stories will have some sense of narrative, some inner awareness of the organics of storytelling. As the first sentences begin to take shape, I move around, pick out and read aloud successful openings or nice turns of phrase, and this helps the slower starters to find their way into the task.

This will depend on the level of neediness among the class—how many individuals require 1:1 attention; how many interpersonal dramas I’m trying to de-escalate. But, ideally, I will do the writing task alongside the class, and share mine (maybe anonymously) along with others at the end of the session. I will invite, and validate, criticisms of my work. If the lesson proceeds smoothly, children will go away with some sense of what’s within their own reach next time they meet a similar task. 

I promise I will never stop a child of any age from planning out a piece of writing if that is how they want to work. I will happily model any given planning process for children who are ready to experience different methods and to choose which one works for them. I agree that knowing how to outline a piece of writing before producing it may become a necessary skill in later life. If you’re going to take a PhD, for instance, of if you’re going to follow a career in writing school textbooks. But I think we are forcing it too young, demanding full-scale planning pages before children are ready. And we’re working against the grain, and sucking the joy out of writing.
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I’d like to see children given lots more experience in comparing and appreciating different written forms. I’d like to have a skills-related resource pack that contains not recommended planning formats but short, amusing writing samples. Formal letters, book reviews, sequences of instructions, character sketches, descriptive passages. Children are, nearly always, pantsers, not plotters. In all my years of teaching, I cannot remember a single child who would create a full-scale Writing Plan by preference. They need an end-product example, a what-does-success-look-like to focus on, not a painfully elongated construction process. 

Or again, there’s the claim that teachers (ohh, the monsters!) are trying to impart to children the powers of reading and writing when the children would rather be gaming or texting. A student responds aggressively when asked to turn their attention from their phone to their lesson? That’s clear evidence that education is failing to comply with children’s wishes!

And the thing that troubles me most is how much traction these posts get. The likes, the shares, the delighted comments: “I new I wad never need to no that stuff” and “Id of mist scowl all together if theyd of let me”, etc.

I have a terrible habit of throwing myself into the fray. Throwing my pebbles at the tide. Throwing down the gauntlet. Throwing my hat into the ring.
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“Your grandchildren,” I explain as politely as I feel able, “are going to be Flat Earthers. Mine are not, because I have parented my sons upon different principles. (I read to them as soon as they could sit; I discussed their learning with them and showed them how to take it further.) But yours will be Flat Earthers, because you don’t believe that knowledge has any intrinsic value. You don’t think your children should be learning anything beyond the prosaic necessities of everyday existence. You don’t think it’s worthwhile for your children to broaden their minds, to gain any understanding of the world that doesn’t have any immediate material value. Your children will bring up their own children, on similar principles, until your grandchildren, or maybe your great-grandchildren, are content to suppose that the Earth is flat and the Moon is made of green cheese.” 

It’s hyperbole, of course, but I think it’s true enough in its way. Conspiracy theories are (arguably) gaining ground and literacy is nosediving. One common cause could be the way in which education has become everyone’s football. Politicians whack it around to gain votes; tech companies look upon schools as their marketplace; the narrowest-minded and the most poorly-educated members of the public consider themselves best qualified to redesign the curriculum.
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As a teacher, as a parent and as a thinking member of society, I’m defending the principle of offering every child a broad general education that includes a foundation for whatever future they might choose. A curriculum that supports an understanding of the self and the wider world. Knowledge and experiences that develop the awareness and imagination. An education that opens possibilities instead of ticking the boxes of minimal functionality.

I am even going to argue that actively engaging in a broad and varied education helps to build transferable skills and self-confidence. A young person who has successfully negotiated a wide range of different tasks on and off paper, is probably going to survive an encounter with a tax form. ​

Halfway through July, I start carrying a large plastic jug around the south-facing slopes and the early-ripening varieties. Yes, wild blackberries do come in different varieties, just like cultivated ones. Large, loose-druped berries or smaller, more compact ones; long conical berries or rounder, sweeter ones. They’ll all go into the same pies and smoothies, but some are easier to gather than others, or are less susceptible to insect attack.

By now I’m armoured up in thick but ragged jeans, tough old jacket and long wellies. The first-ripe berries are always the easiest to reach, on the tip of each cluster, but any day now I’ll be scrambling waist-deep into nettles and thorns. Old men, walking their dogs, pause to give me advice, for they used to pick berries for pocket-money when they were children. The best month to go picking, or the best places to find them… all of which has changed in the intervening decades. I smile and do it my way. However long they’ve lived, they’ve never gathered anywhere near as many hundred kilograms as the crazy blackberry lady.
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My best place is down inside the river-bed, so long as the water’s low enough. It’s a scramble down a bank of thorns and sliding mud, but in the space of three hours I can fill ten litres, for these bushes with their roots in the water are drooping, heavy with fruit, and nobody else ever comes down here but me, the crazy blackberry lady. 

Systematically, I strip off everything purpler than red, clearing the bush as far as I can reach. I hardly need to check visually on what I’m picking, for over the years my fingers have learned to sense a good or bad berry by the way it snaps off at the husk. Poor-quality berries, mouldy or maggoty, come off with a blunt or slumpy feel. I drop them down into the water without slackening the pace of my picking. Filling jug after jug with the good fruit, I leave the bushes empty of all but what’s yet to ripen. This means that when I come back here in two or three days’ time, I’ll find clean clusters of fresh-ripened berries, firm, healthy and easy to gather. If you leave on the bush the berries you don’t want, they’ll only infect the new ones with fungus and flies.
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No, I’m not defrauding the birds of their food. There’s always a large part of blackberry bush that I can’t reach, and they can. I’m collecting and distributing wild-grown, zero-carbon food with no disposable packaging. I bake; I fill the freezers of friends; I supply the marvellous jam-maker with material for her work, and she sells her products for charity. 

Sometimes, while I’m out enjoying the sunshine, the fresh air and the exercise, I wonder when something as sane and sensible as this became a crazy-lady thing. Through most of human history, what I am doing was normal. Other people’s children wouldn’t have yelled at me; my friends wouldn’t have been surprised to see my takings; old men—maybe!—wouldn’t have assumed I needed advice.
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Perhaps that’s what’s crazy: I’m doing something that makes sense in a world that no longer does.