Freddy's blog: Education

We're starting to think about education for our daughter. Now she’s almost two, it feels like time. Or it's way overdue. I want to make sure she’s fluent in classical Greek at 6, can take her GCSEs by age 10 (even though I’d deprive myself of 6 extra years to understand the new grade system), sit A-Levels at 11, go to Cambridge at 12 and have a nervous breakdown like John Stuart Mill at 15. Actually that part about John Stuart Mill isn’t true (he felt suicidal at 20 for more utilitarian reasons) and seeing his photo on Wikipedia when I was fact-checking against this myth, I realised that the damage of extreme academic precocity shows in your eyes, so this whole plan is out of the window.

Really, this has come about for two reasons. Firstly I've spent some time over the last 9 months considering my career, which like everyone’s was determined in some way by my education. In your case that might be because you always knew you’d want to be a lawyer or an investment banker so you studied the right subjects. In mine it’s because I studied English and philosophy and had no idea what to do next and still don’t. 

The second reason is that we found out we don’t live in the catchment area for a single school. Fortunately the quality of schools in our area means we’ll almost definitely win the lottery of place allocation, but it might not be convenient for the commute, and anger and frustration on the trains should always come first.

Again fortunately, if we want to send our daughter to the nearest girls' prep, which is not at all close to the train station, it doesn’t matter that we didn’t put her name down that summer afternoon when she was conceived. Instead, she’d be assessed, and much of her future will depend on how she feels on one particular day. Welcome to life! And Mummy and Daddy get to pay! 

In fact it baffles me that representative bodies of UK businesses will tell you that nobody leaves school or university of any kind with the skills required in the workplace. Staking your life and sanity on a single day (assessment and exams) and using silly words to try and sound authoritative (philosophy, or whatever you studied) are what education is all about. 

And we're worrying about how much we spend on fees or a house and where that house is to try and make sure our daughter has the best possible chance of starting her career with our without those crucial or not-so-important skills. 

So a recent trip to Rome, my favourite city (and more toddler-friendly than I thought), gave me a different perspective. We mastered languages, with my daughter's shy 'ciao-ciao' earning lots of 'bellissima!' in return. We did petty workplace squabbles on the slide at the zoo (seems to crop up in my blogs). We did silly words to sound authoritative, though disappointingly I couldn't get her interested in baroque architecture or medieval mosaics (we'll try again in 5 years). We did health and wellbeing with a climb up Rome's many steps, some of them Spanish. And we did reward with a daily gelato in the sun. (Don't worry she only had a small one.)

I've got a year or so to think about schools and if I had to stake my life on a single day right now it would be a day spent doing those things. If I was going to stake this post on a saccharine ending I'd say they're the best education you can get. But they're not. They're anti-education. Time spent enjoying yourself which happens to involve learning something–  for example that cherry, white chocolate and vanilla is the best ice cream combination. Not time spent reducing learning to a bureaucratic and financial pursuit, part of a mission. 

So I'll tell her to put back those GCSEs until she's 13. She can do them at that prep school, though. 

Freddy works a nine-day fortnight as a kind of deluxe jack-of-all-trades for a trade association in the City. On his day off he and his bright, happy one-year-old daughter read books about animals, play with animal stickers and go to look at animals!.