Britain's school leavers have learned a valuable lesson this week, one that, sadly, will be the most important they will ever learn. Sadder still that it cannot be learned without hardship and heartache.
This, it seems, is the way of our world.
They have learned that you cannot trust the Tories and that you cannot rely on a capitalist model of education.
When I were a lad teachers used the 'threat' of low wage/low quality (as they saw it) work as the lazy students reward. Every student was given the same Barnum statement; like an academic astrology forecast. As with horoscopes, it was horseshit designed to obfuscate a grift: the lot of the working class in this case. That statement: "does well, could try harder". If only he/she would apply themselves, they could achieve.
The reward for hard work, it seems, in modern Britain, as exposed by the virus, is still failure. Not only that but, in their misguided and demeaning wisdom, Tory grandees will tell you that you don't need an education. You just need, in the learned words of hereditary peer Lord Bethel, to hustle.
Why do we even have an education system then? So the working class can be properly ordered. You don't learn in schools. You are taught. Learning is a joy, a muscle to develop through boundless naturally swelling curiosity. It is passion. Schools are, by definition, prisons for the imagination, defined solely by their boundaries. That's not to say teachers neither work nor try hard. Of course they do, but they are just as constrained by a system beyond their design. I'm sure many would seek to change it, and would be among those best equipped to improve it.
Those people are also regularly denigrated. Gove called them 'the Blob'. An amorphous group of obstructionists. No wonder teaches are often regarded as lefties and Marxists (without ever explaining why such positions are problematic). I've no idea how many are, neither does Gove nor his chums in the despicable media that amplifies this class hatred.
But this is the year of revelations, Many truths are being revealed and facades of institutional dysfunction are being dismantled and exposed. This current exam crisis is among the most pungent of all the government's - the Tories' - ideological odours. One guaranteed to stink the house out.
Some things just cannot be taught in classrooms. They leave a scar but without them you cannot grow. I am sorry that Britain's kids have had to learn this way, but I'm not sorry that the are learning it. We can only hope they do not forgive and do not forget.
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