We Don't Need No Education

In a few months, I have GCSE examinations. If I fail them, life becomes very awkward. That's fine. I don't expect to fail them; quite the opposite. And I can live with the coursework. It seems like a lot, but if I really knuckled down I could probably finish most if it off in a weekend. Nonetheless, it's a pretty high-pressure situation: a pretty huge chunk of my future hangs in the balance. And so, one might think it reasonable to expect my school, when it's looking at my year, to basically focus its attention on this whole niggling business of qualification.

A few days ago, I received a questionnaire to fill out about the general state of the school, the bulk of which was a huge bank of statements that were to be labelled as true or false. Now, to be perfectly fair, there were a few about the actual teaching, but there were significantly more that, well, weren't. Also, the whole thing was written so that there were a multitude of possible reasons for each answer but one obvious interpretation they were going to make. For example, the form asked if I would expect to be caught and punished if I truanted, and I said that I wouldn't. The school does check up on truants pretty well, but I reckon that I could get away with it if I put my mind to it. Later, it wanted to know whether the school teaches me the difference between right and wrong, which it doesn't. But that is not a criticism, as I expect it will be seen. The school should not be teaching me the difference between right and wrong because that is what parents are for. That is what society is for. That is a large part of what the first eleven years of my life were for.

That said, they may just grasp the correct end of that particular stick, because they have proven themselves to be very good at confusing that matter. If your hair is too short, you are immediately pulled out of your lessons and made to work elsewhere, as once it reaches a certain point short hair can immediately trigger violent and anarchic tendencies in the most calm and courteous of pupils. Short hair is Bad. But of course, we would never be told such a thing in our PSRE (that's "personal, social and religious education", for the thankfully uninitiated) lessons. For once you are within the realm of PSRE, nothing can possibly be wrong. Drugs are fine. Have all the irresponsible, unprotected sex you like, with whomever you like. Euthanasia for all that want it, even when you don't know who those people are.

I'm not going to discuss any of those points. I just want to question the value of the lessons. I mean, I'm all for discussion of important issues, and it's only an hour out of the week even if it is an hour that could be spent earning a future, but the fact is that there is no discussion. In my last PSRE lesson, the assignment was to write a poem about euthanasia, expressing the feelings of someone on some side of the argument in some way. Now, this didn't benefit any of us in any way, nor was it likely to be checked up on, but I did it anyway, partially because I quite enjoy writing the odd bit of poetry, but mainly to block out the idiots around me. And just so you don't think I'm being condescending, the person to my left spent five minutes putting a bar across the relevant U's in the pre-written euthanasia poem "Ordinary Guy" that it might read "Ordinary Gay", and then a further ten laughing madly. It was an hour that could have been spent doing some maths coursework, or perhaps reading to an old person or some other charitable work, but instead it was spent producing three brief stanzas while someone to my right levered the word "bong" into as many lines of "My Last And Final Wish" as he could, and several that he couldn't. I include the poem for completeness, and because I've really lost the direction of this little rant and want to avoid concluding it in any meaningful way.

So They Say

Life, they say, is a journey,
From one start to one destination,
Though feet may blister,
And boots may split,
And the path may grow steep and cold,
The journey's end remains.

Life, they say, is preparation,
Just training for a new world to come,
A world without sorrow,
A world without pain,
A world without proof of existence,
Still, the life before remains.

My life, they say, is unworthy,
No purpose to it but to suffer,
Though my eyes may see,
And my ears may hear,
And my mind may live for itself,
Still, their chosen end remains.