This Too Shall Pass

It must be a quiet time for news, waiting perhaps for the next ministerial resignation, for suddenly my newspapers are peppered with articles bemoaning the growth of "woke" education within the nation's independent schools.

This hardly qualifies as news, but suddenly it seems to be the end of civilisation. Fear not, this is just the latest educational fad, there will be another one along in a moment. For where now some schools are fixated on this, they once had a push on "mindfulness" or in one particularly self-aggrandising case went so far as to teach "happiness", or at least to claim to.

The reality is one many school leaders seem to forget. Very little of what is taught in school has any lasting influence. Many years ago I attended a very pleasant dinner party where I was something of a curiosity as I was practically the only person present who was not a barrister. When my profession was uncovered, these expensively-educated men and women paused for a silent moment before one of them held aloft his left hand, his thumb and first two fingers cocked at uncomfortable angles. Moments later they were all doing it. They all knew they had been taught it in school physics lessons, but not one of them could recall what is was for.

As with Fleming's Left-Hand Rule, or irregular Latin verbs, most of this new learning will be shed by the vast majority as soon as they walk out the examination hall for the last time. Use it or lose it? We are always told that most of our students will end up doing jobs that don't yet exist. For anyone over the age of about 25, Diversity and Inclusion Officer is simply not a job your school careers teacher could have told you about, so maybe for a few this will be more useful than a technique to find the direction of the force on an electric current in a magnetic field. I struggle to believe it could be less useful.

The wonderful thing about adolescents is that they are at heart rebellious. At least they should be, for how else are they to grow away from the older generation and build their own future? The trick of a good school is not to stifle that rebellion, but to channel it in constructive directions. The school at which I used to teach once boasted amongst its alumni a prominent Labour MP who was a thorn in Margaret Thatcher's side over the sinking of the General Belgrano, a leader of the Liberal Party and the founder of Amnesty International - now alas all dead. The leadership of the school back then was distinctly crusty. There were Tories and investment bankers too of course, bastions of the status quo, but now it seems there are nothing but.

And what of those exhortations to kindness and consideration for the less fortunate which replaced the happiness lessons, and will in time be replaced by some new fad? Well if recent press coverage is to be believed, they don't seem to have had the desired outcomes.