Thursday, March 10, 2005
Mouse mats and inspiration
Looking for inspiration this morning and casting around in my usual fashion for a hook upon which to hang this piece I came across this quotation from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations:
‘Avoid public schools, hire good private teachers and accept that the resulting costs are money well spent.’ No changes there then in the last eighteen centuries.
On the BBC radio 4 Today programme this morning I heard a report from a recent survey which suggested that a horrifyingly large number of children thought that Gandalf really existed and had a part to play in our history!! Perhaps the Labour Government should look at what Marcus has to say about education and its purpose ie teaching children to read and write properly and helping them to acquire some genuine knowledge about the world and its history.
Well I don’t know what any of that has to do with mouse mats, like many people of my age I am really angry about the waste over the last 20 years of time, money, energy, goodwill, and hope for the future. Both the Conservative and Labour parties seem to be incapable of getting a grip on the problems. There will be no future for us if the politicians get it wrong again. Our children and grand children are as bright and intelligent and as hungry for knowledge as any of my generation were at their age, but they are being denied access to two millennia of human skills, crafts and thinking. Our descendants will not understand the world they live in or know how to cope with the problems that they will undoubtedly inherit from us. Poor world, poor children.
