How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [6]
However, once cooking classes are under way, I think it would be a good idea to overhaul the entire curriculum. I’ve argued since I was a boy that school, in its present form, is almost completely useless. The dim kids work and work and work until their little hormones are fried and then emerge after five years, suicidal, mad and with an A-level in media studies. The bright kids, meanwhile, lounge around all day, knowing that a CV will never be checked so, when asked how many A-levels they have, they can lie and say 264.
All school does is put you off things that might, in later life, be interesting.
Having been forced into chapel every Sunday for five years, I vowed I would never set foot in a church until the day I died. And not even then. I’ve said in my will that I want my funeral service to be held in a burger van. What’s more, by being made to read William Shakespeare at the age of fourteen, I developed a lifelong aversion to the Bard and his silly witterings. And I still can’t eat meat pie. I look back now at those wasted hours in maths lessons, learning about algebra and matrices and sines, and I think, what was the point? It’s the same story with linear air tracks and oxbow lakes and civil-war battles. They’re all as pointless as a blunt stick.
This is why I fervently believe school should be rather more than a factory-numbering system, churning out kids with a C or a D or an A*. It should be a place where you learn how to be an adult. And cooking is a start.
Polish is a good idea too. Why teach us French when we all know that they can understand what we’re on about perfectly well if we poke them in the chest often enough? Far better to be able to say, in a Warsaw burr, ‘My boiler is broken. Can you come and mend it?’
Or better still, why not teach everyone how to mend their own boiler instead. Seriously. Why not have plumbing lessons? Because basic welding, I promise, will stand you in better stead as an adult than being able to conjugate Julius Caesar’s table.
Do you know something? I distinctly remember being put on to the school minibus when I was fourteen and driven, on vomity roads, to the Peak District simply so that I could see a millstone grit outcrop. Why? Who thought that would be in any way relevant to anything I might one day do for a living? Couldn’t they have spent the time instead teaching me how to change the spark plugs on a car, or how to remove a low-voltage bulb without burning my fingers, or how to carve a leg of lamb, or how to play poker, or how to cut hair?
Or, and this brings me on to the most important point of all, they could have opened my eyes to the joys and importance of reading a newspaper. I really do mean this. My children can tell you about Portia’s gentle rain and when to use the imperative but they don’t have the first clue about what’s going on in Kenya or why Hillary Clinton is a loony. No teacher sits them down and discusses what we used to call current affairs. This is madness. If we can find forty-five minutes in the school timetable to teach the children how to make food out of tofu and lentils, then surely we could also find a similar period for them to discuss the issues of the day. This way they would be less round and, er, more rounded. If you see what I mean.
Sunday 27 January 2008
Oi, state birdbrains – leave our land alone
Two years ago, a pub and restaurant tycoon called Michael Cannon bought a massive 3,000-acre Co. Durham grouse moor from the family of the Queen Mother. And last week his management company appeared in court, accused of ruining it. Government agents said the moor – a site of special scientific interest – had been crisscrossed with new roads, car parks, turning circles and drainage ditches. In total 4,433 square metres of important upland habitat for merlins, moorhens, short-eared owls, snipe, curlews and redshanks had been buried under 11,300 tons of almost certainly unsustainable, non-organic aggregate.
Cannon’s company put its hands up to three breaches of the Wildlife and