Since I started this blog, in June 2014, I have stated, probably over-stated, my case against school as we know it.  Change does happen slowly, but at the moment the system is heading speedily in the wrong direction.
I have repeated myself too many times, and as such, I have decided to give the blog a rest for a while.  I would rather add a post when I feel inspired to do so, rather than adding a post 'religiously' every Sunday.
I could extend the scope of my blog, which I may well do and soon.  Any feedback about this would be welcome.
In the meantime, for all those interested in real education, I recommend that you read the following:
Ivan Illich, John Holt, Bruno Bettelheim, Bertrand Russell, Homer Lane, A.S.Neill, Sir Kenneth Robinson, and John Taylor Gatto.  These wise minds have been largely ignored by governments and cultures around the world.  So what's new?  Whenever have great minds been heeded and acted upon by history?  All too rarely.

After last week's post , I was confronted with the usual, and understandable, challenge to John Gatto's plea to abolish all schools:
"But that would mean chaos!"
Gatto doesn't believe that there wouldn't be chaos, for a while, but unlike the majority, he doesn't have the 'original sin' view of humanity.  As he put it:
"Let them manage themselves".


History has shown us that, whether in politics, religion, or education, most people believe that we are incapable of behaving in a good, positive way unless we are told what to do - by a tiny minority, who claim to have all the answers. Unless we are guided and commanded by our 'leaders', we would be lost souls.  So goes the evil concept of 'original sin', the biggest con trick in human history.  I say 'evil', because of the immense damage such a view can inflict.


In  the film 'Life of Brian', the character of Brian sums up the mistake of being led when he says to the crowd:
"You don't need to follow me.  You don't need to follow anybody!". 
Although large numbers of people still consider the film immoral, Brian's statement of reality is deeply moral, and at the heart of the story.
The same applies to school.  Most believe that the only place we can learn is in school, and be taught only by professional teachers.  Well, most learning takes place outside the classroom, and every single person in the world is a teacher - of whatever skills and knowledge they possess.

Today I wish to continue broadcasting John Gatto and his views on education, and the best way to do this is to quote 3 of his most insightful observations:


"Children learn what they live.  Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even.  The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly." 


"I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt.  We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.  The solution, I think, is simple and glorious.  Let them manage themselves."


"I don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution 'schools' very well, but it does not 'educate'; that's inherent in the design of the thing.  It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little  money spent.  It's just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing."

John Taylor Gatto is such an interesting thinker on education that I intend to devote two posts to him.
He was an American teacher for 30 years and won 4 awards as 'Teacher of the Year' in New York City and State.
Like John Holt, the more he experienced the world of the modern school, the more he became convinced that the mere construct of school was anti-educational.
He is best known for his classic book Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.  Wade A. Carpenter, associate professor of education at Berry College, called Gatto's work 'scathing' and 'hyperbolic' but not 'inaccurate'.  Despite his criticism, the professor says that he is in agreement with Gatto.
JTG lectured for years on the benefits of homeschooling, unschooling and open source learning.


I cannot resist supplying a quotation from Gatto's book on dumbing down.  More next week.
I have noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet.  No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes.  The truth is that schools really don't teach anything except how to obey orders.  This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience.  It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

John Holt was one of America's most perceptive teachers and authors on the subject of school and education.  The more he observed children in school, the more he believed that school was actually a hindrance to education.  He wrote his findings in two excellent books, entitled 'How Children Fail' and 'How Children Learn'.  He questioned how an entire system could 'turn a torrent into a trickle' when it came to human potential.
Eventually, he became an advocate for home-schooling, a movement that now includes millions of children in the USA and thousands in the UK.  The issue of home-schooling is a hot one.  Its critics voice two main objections:
 1. It can create unsociable young people.
 2.  It can be used as a means of indoctrinating a child into a political or religious creed.


Of the few cases I have personally known, the children did not become unsociable and all had a circle of friends, most of whom were deeply envious of the home-schooler.
The second objection is a serious one.  I would guess that in some cases, home-inculcation occurs.  But if parents are hell-bent on indoctrinating their child, then they will do so, irrespective of school.
Millions of home-schooled children have done very well, in exams and in life.

I would like to end by quoting a review of Holt's 'How Children Learn'.  It puts into words, better than I could, John Holt's view of 'education':
"Left to themselves, young children are capable of grasping new ideas faster than most adults give them credit for.  But they have their own ways of understanding, of working things out; and in most cases this fresh, natural style of thinking is destroyed when the child goes to school and encounters formal methods of learning".

When I suggested, in my post of 27th September, that I hoped that one day school would be no more, I roused the ire of several friends and commentators.  For that reason, I plan to spend two or three posts on this subject, to explain more fully my statement and to convince some people that I haven't lost my mind.


When I suggest that no school is better than any school, the reaction is either laughter or disbelief, as if I concocted such an idea one night while imbibing a bottle of gin.
There are three teachers/authors I wish to write about, since all three saw clearly how school is the enemy of education.
The first is Ivan Illich, who wrote a brilliant book in the 1960s, entitled Deschooling Society.  He describes how learning can be integrated into society, so that 'school' as we know it would become superfluous.  Illich saw our system of education as deeply anti-educational.  Given enough resources, he believed that children would become much better educated without the hidden curriculum of school. "Universal education through schooling is not feasible", he maintained.  When people reacted to his idea, calling it 'mad', he would reply that sending children into a building to learn what they are not interested in, and yet must obey rules set down by others, is truly mad.


Time is against me today, so I shall leave until next week my post on John Holt and John Taylor Gatto, both worth looking up online.  They were forceful opponents of school.  Such a pity that the powers that be continue to trudge along the same, wrong path, deaf to such wise, experienced voices.

As an English teacher, I frequently emphasised the importance of 'subtext' - which in today's vernacular sounds like a hidden or underwater text message.
Subtext is vital in understanding literature, grasping the real meaning under the surface of the story.
I have found the same applies in life.  What lies behind an action is far more significant than the action itself.  A furious argument between two people can look like contempt and anger, but is really an expression of their interest in each other, if not mutual attraction.


A friend of mine's son, when he was 15 years old, complained to me that his mother was too worried about him all the time.  This used to bother me when I was his age, and I'm sure that it still irritates thousands of adolescents.  It took me quite a while to see that the opposite of concern is neglect.  Kids whose parents couldn't care less what they do, are sending the child a terrible message, one that will reverberate throughout their lives.
In an extreme example of this, a serial killer once said:
"When I was young, nobody cared at all about me, so I grew up not caring about anybody else."
This is not a simplistic excuse for his actions, but is perhaps the beginning of an understanding of why such people exist.
A parent's concern might be annoying and seemingly restrictive to a child, but the subtext of concern is a caring and loving attitude - and that goes for all our close relationships in life.

Whenever I point to the success of people who hardly ever, or never went to school (e.g. William Blake,  Mark Twain and Buster Keaton), I get the same reply:
"But they were exceptional people.  Others would fail."
It hardly ever occurs to anyone that they were successful because of their lack of traditional schooling, not in spite of.
John Taylor Gatto observed:
"As a teacher, I found that genius is as common as dirt."
The model of traditional schooling that most nations slavishly follow is becoming more and more anti-educational, more fixated on the academic side, and long ago became huge factories for producing tomorrow's workforce.
As I have said before, children are naturally curious and, largely left to their own devices, will learn far more than in school.  And they would, most importantly, love learning instead of loathing it.
The basic tools of learning are literacy and numeracy.  Once they are accomplished, the world is yours.  Like the keyboard of a piano, once you learn the keys and scales, you can compose anything.  Once you have learned how to drive, you can go anywhere.
Yet, even with literacy and numeracy, schools are failing terribly.  For children not to be able to read and write by the age of 10, reveals what poor teaching they have experienced.  I exclude children with certain conditions and learning difficulties.
With any luck, in the distant future I fear, school will be a thing of the past.

Recently, I found a photo, from the Western Daily Press in Bristol, in April, 1975.  It is, as you can plainly see, one of myself as a tiger in a children's theatre company show, and Oliver (aged 4), sitting on my leg.

The story of Oliver is a sad one, or at least was when we met him after one of our morning shows.  His mother, Anne Gubbay, was in tears as she explained to us how Oliver had never smiled or laughed in his life.  She had dressed him in a cowboy outfit and brought him to our show, in the hope that he would find something to chuckle at.

But alas, Oliver kept his stern face throughout.
We showed him the impressive puppets and clowned around as actors, but to no avail.  When he sat on my leg, I talked 'tiger-talk', which was no more than nonsense about cowboys and tigers.  Still, not a flicker.

Looking back on it now, I am sure that Oliver was on the autistic spectrum, especially since he hardly spoke to us.  It was beyond shyness.  But I sincerely hope that Oliver, who would now be about 36, has matured with a sense of humour.  I would love to know.

Of course, I felt a failure that day, but I don't know what else I could have done, or any of the theatre troupe.  It was the mum's distress which was so upsetting.


I apologise to my readers about this post two days ago. I had difficulty transferring the photo to the post and so I ended it abruptly and without the photo.
I'll come better prepared next Sunday.

At the risk of turning this blog into one on dogs, I would like to repeat a story, and in the process, ask if anyone of my readers has a copy of the programme. The possibility is remote, but hope springs eternal!

Some years ago, perhaps 7 or 8 years ago, Channel 4 broadcast a programme about two teenage boys, both young offenders, with histories of brutality at home and crime in public.

Separately, the boys were given a dog each, a pup, but not newborn.  They were monitored over the weeks that passed.  They had to feed the dog, walk the dog, wash the dog, and watch out for any reason to seek a vet's advice. 

In one case, the boy was overwhelmed by a creature that was always happy to see him, never judged him, and gave him unconditional love, all of which had been denied him in his life.  A dog was able to give him what his family did not!  After a while, the boy snapped.  He broke down completely, the first step in his recovery and his search for human love.

Unfortunately, the other boy did not respond much at all.  He took care of the dog, but the dog's adoration of him did not shatter his suffering, so damaged was he.  I remember thinking:

 "I hope, one day, his wounds will heal."

Dogs have saved lives, and not just physically.  They are, to quote a modern cliché, wonderful 'anti-stress machines'.  They just love to be loved.

Next week, back on track, whatever that means!

Reading aloud in class is a pleasure for some pupils but an agonizing, humiliating experience for many.  Of course, those who enjoy it are already good readers, but for those struggling to become literate, it can cause them to abandon their efforts, if mortified in front of their peers regularly.
Even one to one, kids can feel constantly judged and made to feel stupid when learning how to read fluently, no matter how patient and sensitive the teacher is.

There was a television news report some months ago, about a scheme that was tested in some primary schools in the north of England.  This scheme involved getting poor readers in school to read to dogs, i.e.one dog to one reader, and adults out of sight.  Naturally, the dogs chosen for this experiment had docile dispositions and were trained to sit or lie and listen to the reader - i.e. look at the reader, and 'listen' to the story.

What happened ?  Surprise! Surprise!  All the children involved improved their reading ability, in some cases substantially.  What sounded like a crazy idea works, and for a good reason - the readers do not feel judged by a dog and they don't fear being corrected all the time.  Most young children believe that the dog is actually listening to the story and enjoying it, so they want to read more.

One little boy said: "I looked up all the interesting things about dogs in the Guinness Book of Records, and told Murphy them.  I think he was very interested, at least he looked as if he was."

I recommend that all primary schools adopt this scheme, depending on the availability of dogs, because there is no shortage of children who need such a scheme.

Families with a dog, or a perhaps with a neighbour's dog, should try this out on their young ones if they are losing their confidence as readers.

Nicknames can be hilarious, savage, apt or devastating.

Whenever a pupil is referred to by a nickname, I always ask the pupil if they like being called Snowy, or Babyface, or whatever.  Since nicknames are almost always chosen by others, it is best to check with the bearer of this sobriquet if they are happy with it or not.

Young people are particularly good at hitting their target when it comes to bestowing a nickname on a teacher.  I was taught at secondary school by a maths' teacher who was called Neuter Gender by the boys.  When this curiously colourless, straight-laced man heard his nickname, he had a breakdown.
Conversely, some teachers relish their nicknames, as much as Margaret Thatcher did when she heard that she'd been called The Iron Lady.  Again, I had a teacher we called Ming the Merciless (after the grim villain in Flash Gordon comics). He referred to himself in class as Ming. We were both amused by this and also annoyed that he knew and delighted in his nickname.

Some nicknames can be therapeutic.  As I have mentioned in a previous post, when I discovered that the pupils called me Volcano, it was a warning to calm down.  And the more I relaxed, the better a teacher I became and lessons became more enjoyable.

Sometimes nicknames virtually become the person's name.  I have a friend I call Snake, and to this day I don't know his real name.  I might have known, a long time ago, but now he will forever be Snake.

The funniest thing about last week's post was that it was unfunny, especially since the topic was humour.

So this week, I intend to repeat a few short examples of humour that I experienced in schools.
I recall that my Latin teacher, in 1960, was asked: "Sir, what was Julius Caesar like at parties?" 

A sneer from the teacher was followed by a detention for the boy who asked the question.  Kids have been using this cheeky device for a long time.  One of my pupils once asked me: "What did Richard III say to you about school uniform?" 

I was tempted to reply that he believed that cheeky boys should be smothered in their sleep, but it sounded too awful if you were unaware of the story of 'the princes in the Tower'.  Besides, Richard III has been maligned enough.  Instead I replied, coolly: "He'd never heard of such things and therefore had no comment to make."

Non-sequiturs, usually uttered naively, can be amusing as well as surreal.  In the middle of a fairly intense English lesson, when the students were so involved about the novel we were studying that their questions reached a high level of enquiry, one boy put his hand up and asked: "Sir, where did you buy that shirt?"

At the time I didn't find his diversionary question funny, but I did laugh afterwards.  Then I read that the comedian Greg Davies, during a brilliant drama lesson, when he was a teacher, was asked, out of nowhere: "Can you do the lambada?"  He said it took him ages to stop laughing.

I once asked a primary school boy what Florence Nightingale's moniker was, expecting him to say: "The Lady with the Lamp." Instead of which I got: "The woman with the light," as if she had been a cigarette-girl at the Balaclava Cinema.

One of the best 'howlers' I have ever heard of came from a P.E. teacher I knew in Sydney.  During basketball practice, a boy was severely winded when the ball hit him in the stomach.  The teacher explained to the lad that that he'd been hit in the solar plexus.  The next day, the boy's mother appeared at the school and demanded to know why a teacher told her son that he'd been hit in the sexual polar!

Enough of the heavy stuff!  After the serious blasts of the last two weeks, I thought that I should lighten the mood and talk about humour in school, especially in the classroom.
From my experience, too many teachers see cheek and banter as a disrespectful attempt to undermine their authority, and sometimes it is, but often it's not.  Personal jibes should be dealt with, but I have derived huge amounts of pleasure from humour as a teacher.
When I started life as a teacher, in my early 20s, I discovered that within a short while, my nickname, bestowed by the pupils of course, was 'volcano'.  This upset me quite a bit, and gave me a message to calm down.  I found, over the course of my teaching life, that the more I relaxed, the better the lessons were and the better the communication between the pupils and me.  And humour became a useful tool for both learning and defusing tense situations.


Advice given in staffrooms at the beginning of the new school year, especially to new, young teachers, is often: "Don't smile until Christmas!"  Many teachers feel that if they drop their teacher's demeanour, or smile, or, heaven forbid, laugh, the students will lose all respect for them and then riot.
Such a notion is unfounded, in fact, the opposite is true.  The more you show yourself as a real, fallible person, the more respect you will get.  A recently retired teacher said:
"I never really showed myself to a class, fearful they would rebel.  Now that I know that they never would rebel, I am sorry I never showed them the real me".  Sad, but quite common.


I shall never forget the late Brian Glover, the actor, famous for his role as the sadistic sports' teacher in the film Kes, being interviewed on television many years ago.  He revealed that he had actually been a teacher, before he went into acting.  He reassured the audience that he was nothing like the character he portrayed so brilliantly in Kes.  The interviewer then asked if he missed teaching and he replied:
"Oh yes, heaps!  It was the best job in the world."
"Why?" asked the interviewer.
"Because it was so funny, often hilarious.  Kids are the best audience and the funniest people in the world". 
You can see why I remembered that interview.

Trying to tackle an issue as huge as 'power' was not wise, especially for a short, powerless blog.  However, I feel I must clarify certain points I made in last week's post and respond to several comments.
"With power comes responsibility".  I wholeheartedly agree.  When  children are given power, it should be explained to them that the consequences of their decisions cannot be blamed on anyone except themselves, if the decision was a wrong one.  As I said, the freedom to make mistakes teaches us the real meaning of responsibility, and this should be a vital part of every child's life. But if you are not permitted power you will not learn what responsibility means.
As Adlai Stevenson said "Power corrupts, but powerlessness corrupts absolutely".  Children who have no power, give up caring and seek power wherever they can find it, whether that means killing insects with glee or joining a gang.  This goes to the heart of why gangs exist.  They give power to young people who have little or none.  Of course, this kind of power is an illusion, and a dangerous one at that, but it is understandable why so many are attracted to gang-life - it makes them feel powerful. 
There is nothing for parents and teachers to give up on, except the child as a human being.  All they have to do is give children the power to change their lives, learning along the way how to handle power sensibly.
Many schools have school councils, which is window-dressing on a huge scale.  Most councils have no right to change anything in the school except perhaps the colour of the pupils' toilets.  Neill of Summerhill and Lane of The Little Commonwealth found that many of the most balanced and insightful opinions and decisions were often made at school meetings by the children, sometimes by 9 and 10 year olds.
On the subject of kids' rights and responsibilities, I often encountered this at the last secondary school I was in.  In fact, none of the pupils really knew their actual, legal rights.  They blurted out these comments to stir teachers, something I never responded to, except to indulge in a bit of banter and occasionally to tell them what their rights were.
It is very difficult to set the standard of power with responsibility, when all around are glaring examples of the opposite. Far too many leaders and institutions of our societies have indulged in power without responsibility.  Powerful companies such as Distillers (the Thalidomide case) and Union Carbide (the Bhopal disaster), plus mass-killers, such as Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush literally get away with murder, taking no responsibility for their actions.  So it is not easy to teach a child ethics in a world of hypocrisy, with greedy bankers stealing as a profession and avoiding justice.  So too with politicians who make decisions that are damaging to society and yet never admit to making a wrong decision or apologising to the public.
I could go on, but I won't.  Not for this week anyway.

Most children, even with wonderful parents, have no real power.  They live in an adult-dominated world and are told what to do and what not to do.  Of course, when we are very young, the parents must protect and guide the child.  But as the child grows older, power is denied them, until they leave school and home.
John Holt raised this issue when he detailed how people can give children power.  A child should be free to choose what their room should look like - if they are lucky enough to have one. If the child shares it with a sibling, it is a golden opportunity to teach a child the meaning of compromise and peaceful co-existence.  The child should also be free to choose their clothes, haircut, and even school.
The child should be part of family decisions when possible and not dismissed as too young and too silly.  Ownership of one's private possessions is very important to children, since they have so few compared to adults.  When I saw Anne Frank's actual diary in Amsterdam, I wept at how small, how precious it looked.  Even Karl Marx conceded that private possessions are one's own, not the state's.


If all this sounds as if I always favour children above parents, I would ask you to look at the real damage done by not giving children power.  It is amazing that we allow children almost no power and then expect them to use power as an adult in a balanced and wise way. The more you give children power to govern their own lives and make their own choices, the better they will handle it later on.  They should be given the freedom to make choices, make mistakes, and learn from them.  People who were severely repressed as children tend to grow up ego-centric and undisciplined, living out their rebellion throughout their troubled lives, abusing their power when they can. The more extreme cases of this often earn a place in the history books as psychopathic mass murderers.
Abraham Lincoln, the most reluctant president the United States of America ever had, said of power:
"The real use of power is in its non-use".

The vast majority of parents in the UK swallow the usual nonsense about school being education, without the slightest questioning of the system at all.  Even worse are parents who see private boarding-schools as the 'gold standard of education', completely ignoring the wishes of their children, the vast majority of whom hate the idea of school, let alone living in one, sometimes very far from home and friends.  What continues to stagger me is that even the most intelligent, caring parents still cling to the propaganda and myths above the real wishes of their child.  This, to me, is bad parenting.
I have known only three pupils who relished being at boarding-school, and viewed it as some kind of cross between a leisure park and a place for free academic and sporting facilities.  Only three.  The rest of the people I have known or met who spent time at boarding-school, sometimes from the age of six, have told stories of misery, cruelty and loathing. 
It is illegal in the UK to abandon your children - unless you abandon them to a carpeted prison run by many dubious people.  Then abandonment is seen as a thoughtful and caring action.  This reveals how twisted thinking can be.  On top of being exiled to a place they don't want to be, most graduates of boarding-school I have spoken to, felt abandoned by the people who ostensibly loved them.
One friend of mine told me the story of his first day at boarding-school, at the age of 12.   I have met his parents and they are fine people and generally good parents.  However, they decided to send their son to boarding-school, a school only forty miles away from their home.  There was a local day school, which seemingly produced well-rounded and successful graduates, and where most of my friend's friends attended.  Incredibly, the parents bowed to pressure from family and friends, who fervently, but stupidly, believed that boarding-schools were better for 'educating' than any other type of school.
My friend told me how he sobbed all the way to the school, begging his parents not to consign him to the place.  All of them in tears, and deaf to his pleas, his mother and father said their unnecessary 'goodbyes' and drove off.  He said he felt as if he'd done something wrong to deserve this punishment.  Worse still, my friend kept begging his parents, over five 'horrible' years he was at the school, all to no avail.  Deaf to reality and submission to fantasy!  Very bad parenting!
Since the very rationale for board-schools has evaporated, it is time to abolish these anachronistic institutions once and for all.

The other day, Fred came to mind.  I'm not sure why, but it has prompted this post about him, one of the most admirable people I have known.


In my young, naïve days, I took up a position as English/History teacher at a small boarding school in Kent.  I was greeted in the driveway by a plump, jolly Dutchman called Fred.  I was soon to learn that Fred was on the bottom rung of the levels of importance in the school, the pupils being the ground on which the ladder stood!
Fred was about 50, married, with grown-up children.  He lived locally and was employed to clean the boys' shoes, heave heavy trunks up and down staircases, and as a general dogsbody for jobs nobody else wanted to do.  He was always cheerful, smiling and joking.  Whenever I asked him how he was, he'd reply, in a mock Yorkshire accent:
"Mustn't grumble!"
At night, Fred would dress very smartly and go for a couple of pints at his favourite pub.  It was considered by the school staff  'not correct' to associate with Fred in the pub, a place where several teachers drank, but never with Fred.
Because of his uncompromising position in the school, the boys felt free to jibe him, joke with him, and, more importantly, know that there was a shoulder to cry on, someone who would listen sympathetically as they poured out their private misery.
Fred really loved the kids and they loved him.
Years after I left the school, I met up with an ex-pupil, now 28.  During our conversation, Fred's name cropped up.  Charles regaled me with stories of Fred's kindness, patience and wisdom.  He then added:
"Fred was the lowliest in the school, but he was loved more than anyone else in the school.  If I hadn't had Fred to lean on, I think I'd have gone mad!"
The gratitude the boys felt for this wonderful man will last throughout their lives, and for much longer than their teachers' influence.

Two years ago, I had a small skin cancer removed from my scalp.  It was not life-threatening, as many melanoma conditions are.  The doctor who operated told me that I had most probably got the cancer about 40-50 years ago, when I was living in Australia.  It had taken that long to 'mature'.  Of course, in Australia in the 1950s and 60s, it was common for people to lie on the beach half the day, doing what Australians correctly call 'sun-baking'.  I avoided that but wore no hats.  My mother died of melanoma cancer.
Recently, my brother, who lives in Sydney, raised the issue of ignorant Australians roasting themselves in their own sweat without any protection, and how it is continuing.


I used to present a story called Kid In A Bin to my English class of 12-13 year olds. It is a curious story with a strong message.  The author left the story unfinished, so that the pupils could end it themselves.
The story is about a boy who lives in a garbage bin in a branch of McDonald's.  He hides in the bin all day and emerges at night to make himself a meal in the kitchen.  We come to see that he has paper-clippings in the bin with him, newspaper articles that reveal that his father and sister have been searching for him since he left home, immediately after his mother died.  She had died of melanoma, and, sadly, the little boy overheard a doctor say to another doctor:
"When will people learn that the sun can kill you?"
So the boy decided to stay out of the sun - permanently!  And the best place he could think of to hide was in one of the McDonald's bins.
One night, as he is creeping to the kitchen , he sees his father and sister staring through the window at him.  He has no option but to let them in.  At this point the story stops - for the pupils' ending.
Most wrote that his father explained to him that a little sun is good for you, but a lot of sun is bad.  Reassured, the boy returns home with his father and sister.
One pupil I recall vividly, a natural lateral-thinker, wrote as his finale:
"When the boy had finished explaining to his father and sister why he had hidden in a bin, they agreed that it was the best place to be, and so all three now live in a bin in McDonald's."

"Soap and education are not as sudden as massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run".
When I first read these words of Mark Twain, when I was young, I laughed at the apparent nonsense of such an idea, as well as the juxtaposition of something as tangible as soap with something as abstract as education.
Over my adult life, I have come to believe that Twain uttered something very profound.
'Soap' symbolises hygiene and cleanliness, and 'education' knowledge and conscious thought.
So what's wrong with  being clean and knowledgeable?  On the surface, nothing, but soap and education have come to dominate and near destroy many of our human qualities over millennia.
Of course we are all glad that we live in a generally cleaner society than in the past.  Unfortunately, it has made just about everyone neurotically concerned about germs and disorder.
Education is more complicated.  Since the message of my blog is that school is anti-educational and that a real education springs from curiosity and the willingness to live and learn from life's experiences, I should baulk at Twain's cynicism.  But I think he's referring to something deeper than knowledge or thought.  He is referring to the conscious mind and its awareness, as opposed to the subconscious, the real driver of our lives.  Our society over-values knowledge and awareness to a level where the cerebral overtakes our lives.
I know this is a huge issue and one open to debate.  I welcome other interpretations.
I rarely quote the Bible these days, but there is a great truth in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter I, Verse 18:
"For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth  knowledge increaseth sorrow".