THOUGHT FOR T'DAY ON EDUCATION

Education. Education. Education.

Parents send their children to school for an 'education'.

But that 'education' is simply to raise good citizens for the system to manipulate.

When I was growing up I was top of the year throughout junior school, and also in the first year of secondary school. But then in my 2nd year of secondary school, probably due to puberty, I started to rebel a bit. That rebellion grew so much so that in my final year of secondary school I was regularly truanting nearly half the subjects I was being taught, which were english, computer studies, history, french, but the teachers didn't seem to care. At the time I just thought they (subjects and teachers) were boring and irrelevant. I was interested in maths, physics and english literature (I wrote poetry about a girl I was in love with at the time).

So what has happened since then?

I have gone onto to gain a PhD in maths/computer science/physics as well as several Masters degrees, and am now researching a fascinating topic that brings all these together.

But what of the other subjects I used to truant?

Well, is or isn't it weird that two are combined in this blog: english and history.

And it is the history bit that is the most curious. I thought history was boring. We were taught stuff like the castles of North Wales, the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse Tung, and Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. To a working class boy/young man, with girls and football and weekend cider on his mind, the possible murder of two young royal boys centuries ago, or the growth of communism in a country half the way around the world are not going to be inspiring.

But looking back now, what would have really inspired me to study history at school, and possibly to have studied it and gained a PhD in history rather than in maths, would have been if we had been taught the true causes of world war, or basically everything I write about here.

So the thought for t'day is this: are children so difficult to educate because they know deep inside that what we are teaching them is absolute bollocks?