A scourgy urge

I was impressed seeing (belatedly) last night  the response on Twitter to the Channel 5 programme: "Cyclists - scourge of the streets?"  I don't think I knew there was a Channel 5.  I imagine it is where they put reality television programmes, tabloid TV and that the "scourge of the streets" programme was there to set up a battleground, as if that were needed, between drivers and cyclists.  So many of us nowadays seem to go about our business recording one other surreptitiously on our phones or our dashcams.  Who needs Big Brother when the citizens will do it for you?  Cyclists at least record flagrantly on GoPro helmet-mounted devices.  A cyclist is not sitting in a chunk of metal waiting to nark you on their dashcam.  The cyclist's camera is an expensive plea to motorists for road space.  Not to digress further, somewhat against my will - because it was so late at night - I found myself agent for a poem which more or less wrote itself.  

One of the first tweets I saw with the #scourgeofthestreets hashtag was from Katy Moon, self-confessed gin-sodden strumpet, who is pretty, funny and foul-mouthed.  Detonators for spontaneous expletives in my own life include the council education department, primary school management, trite or no public consultation, forms of control, PMT and drivers who drive dangerously near me and my kids while we are on our bikes.  Originally, I wanted to end the poem with a reference to and in the spirit of Katy and her unabashed use of the language.  For open mic though, I realised that reading expletives aloud in cold blood did not come naturally.  I considered asking someone without this problem but around the same time, my ten-year-old wanted to know what I was writing.  "It's not child-friendly" I replied - patly, because it is my standard response for post-watershed TV.  "Has it got swears?"  he said gleefully and with unnerving instinct.  "No," I lied, digging a hole  - and proceeded to modify.  

The tweet I wanted to start with though was Bobi's whose username is Bobi Scourger Cykles and whose tag is "Human with #sarcoma (dismal prognosis) on a bike. Still prefers to arrive alive though".  Bobi's tweet was a video of him or her biking to hospital and seeing the company PedalMe transporting something huge on the back of this modern rickshaw.  Bobi's profile, tagline, tweet, and sense of humour generally were inspirational; cliché, I know, but there just is no other word for it.  

A couple of points that might not be immediately clear in the piece:

- PedalMe is a new app-based pedal-powered taxi and courier service in London, using specially adapted e-cargo bikes.

- Some people - like ccolquit's daughter who wanted a bike for her birthday - used the word "scourger" to refer to bikes.  Other people referred to themselves as scourgers.

If it seems to you there is disproportionate reference to street space given over to parking that is because, to anyone not in a car - a child, for instance - that use of the street space looks disproportionate.  Streets are not de facto for cars, as will be clear from any old photographs.  That is a choice we have made.  The same goes for the ironic references to scourgers riding at motorists.  If it is repeated it is perhaps an echo of how regularly motorists drive at me and my kids.  Usually, they are not paying attention, or have jumped a light.  Sometimes they just don't seem to give a shit.  It happens when we're on bikes or on foot on a zebra crossing.

Demonising cyclists is absurd, vicious and indicative of the intellect of those who do it.  Luckily, I am not in charge or they would be lobotomised directly.  Active travel in all its forms is practically a panacea for the current problems of pollution, traffic jams, accidents, road maintenance, human inactivity and a lack of greenery in our communities.

The title was inspired by Grum and the piece as a whole by The Scourge on Twitter.  Stay scourgy...

Bobi with cancer went scourging to hospital
Saw PedalMeApp scourgily moving a house
Alex Lieven called Bobi a hero
Call me a cyclist? Call me a louse.

"A scourger please?" said ccolquit's daughter
Ken Munn reminded us: hurtle and veer
In Wigan, with cycle lanes, scourging ain't easy;
Seen all the scourgers trying to text and to steer?

Dr Ed scourged his way to his practice
Then scourged to a friend's to return something lost;
Look at the scourgers, parked on the highway
A flipping disgrace, they don't give a toss.

Jimi Wall scourged the sh..ugar...out the East End
Spanko in Scotland scourged in the park
A boy on a balance bike scourged on the pavement
While someone was seen going scourging for larks.

Somebody scourgily drove at a motorist
Middle class Stephen scourged to the bank;
See that pollution? See all them traffic jams?
Know what it is - you've got scourgers to thank.

John Shanks for Scotland scourged up from Larbert
While iRocks scourged the bejuses in Wales
Awesome Jon scourged with kids in a trailer
If we speed right at 'em they'll soon turn tail.

Mike B's boy scourged his way to the school
The scourger-parking was clogging the roads;
Look at the potholes the scourgers have caused us
It's all of their weight, all of that load.

Eilidh Innes, scourge of the motorist,
Taking the whole road, passing too close;
Sing scourged the river path coaching his rowers
Green, cheap and healthy? Shut up with yer boasts.

Skully Ben's for the scourge in South London
Jeremy scourgily shopped High Street Ken
Seen all the pile-ups? The danger! The carnage!
Those scourgers are costing us: lycra clad men!

Hit and run scourgers. You killers. You cankers
Road use inequity? Liberal muck.
Alright, you've been warned - watch out for Katy,
She's going up Hammersmith scourging the...ducks.

Narrative Control II

There was a time when not many companies were active on social media. There were just people posting about cats and statements from places like positivelifetips.com: "You can always make money. You can't always make memories" - anaemic, trite and that is one of the better ones. Companies and people quickly got good at telling you all the great things they were doing. 

Trying to be greener I once bought the green cleaning ebook from one of the most well-known, green mummy blogs in the US offering natural health remedies and green tips for the home. The site doesn't feel commercial, not at first, and yet it is so perfect, so aspirational, so good.  Since I don't fancy an American-style lawsuit I'll keep the name undisclosed. Important warnings regarding the method for this cleaning recipe were omitted. I ended up in A&E with chemical burns to my eye. I went to their Facebook page to say what had happened and was met, puzzlingly, with a dead silence, not just from the mom herself, her sidekick or site administrator but from the thousands of followers. All I could think was that perhaps Americans don't like bad stories in public about the things they support.  Perhaps they were responding with a polite silence. Even so, this site has 200,000 'likes' and there wasn't one peep.  It was a mystery.  I decided to look on it as a "learning experience" to steer clear of these types of blogs and left it behind.

Some months later I was in the park when I was introduced to someone who ran the council's social media page. She happened to mention that as a Facebook administrator she could mute comments from the public she didn't want others to see.  If someone said something she thought was negative, or not "on brand", she would mute it, the poster would think their comment had been seen but in fact it would be hidden to everyone else. It is a trick, a dupe, a sleight of hand of which the site's audience remained oblivious. I suspected that is what had happened on the green mummy site.

Meanwhile, I noticed that when you commented on corporate social media sites you would get a response not from a person with a name, as you still would (usually) if you wrote a letter or an email but a response from the organisational voice: "McDonald's" say, not "John at McDonald's". Even weirder, while the Voice would - naturally - be "on brand" it could also sound informal, even fun, just like a real person.  In the beginning, it was a bit like when Innocent Smoothies came out with the jokes and quirky small print on their packaging - it felt new, friendly, a brand you might trust your kids with.  It was just a non-traditional, succesful marketing gimmick that was later picked up by many others.  Organisational social media with its branded but human voice and all that relentless positivity felt a bit the same.  If you looked too long or too closely it started to feel a bit like "The Truman Show".  Critiquing so-called positivity is a tough gig though.  Few noticed, more couldn't care less.  Now it wasn't just marketeers airbrushing adverts for their clients,  companies, individuals, everyone was spinning and cropping and setting up an angle.  The whole world was starting to feel airbrushed and nobody seemed to care.

A year or so later I joined a group of active travel enthusiasts who wanted a membership of like-minded people to be the public voice to the council to improve things like the infrastructure for walking and cycling and to help promote these as good things. When their social media presence was set up, in an effort to generate interest, somebody became the social media voice.  Interesting articles about active travel from around the web started to appear on their page and the voice would ask: what did we all think about this? The group was new and there wasn't much response. I had things I wanted to say, but not about other people's articles.  I wanted to say what was on my mind but about our local situation, black spots for instance, well known to the public, ideas we had for improving things.  I wanted the people, the users, to drive change but the group was bent on supporting the council taking that lead.  I had already been slapped down by a man in the council for too much initiative and stepping on his turf.   The council were involving the public, not meaningfully it seemed to me, but just to say they had - and not for the first time.  But no-one was going to want anyone to mention that.

I found that when I or anyone else posted on the social media page of this new community group it was relegated with everyone else's remarks to the "Community" section where nobody really goes. It wasn't on the main page with the Voice's articles. Despite there being a warning that all content needed to be child suitable, the community posts to this area that practically nobody saw were moderated.  The control was heavy.  So, for all its laudable aims and good intentions, it wasn't easy to post what you wanted to say, easily in a place where people would see it and contribute.  It didn't really feel like a true community group where everyone's voices could be heard, equally.  It was more a platform for the Voice, choosing the topics to which you could add comments which might or might not be muted - who was to know?  Everyone from the Marine Conservation Society to your local cafe does it now but if a community group is calling itself as such they should be walking that walk.  

Around the same time, the popular historiographical idea that history is written by the victors, started to roll around in my mind. That year I had started reading Ryan Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying:  Confessions of a Media Manipulator which was a similar story, only writ large, on a global scale.  The control of the media, of the story was the same though just more complex and fuelled by money not good intentions.  Cumulatively, gradually, these things fermented.  Eventually, I was reminded that s/he who controls the narrative, no matter what the platform or the context, controls not just the view of the past, but how things are right now. Social media is particularly insidious because everything has this positive spin, so you tend not to notice any agenda.  More importantly the person, group or institution who controls the narrative controls not just perception but, often, the consequences of that perception.  

*

"What do you think of this?" asks, politely,

the community page,

the interest group.

the council

on social media or surveys:

"This", obscuring things

a community might have raised.

"This", showing where lies

the real control of that scalene:

Where they urge you to:

'contribute',

'share',

and (impotently),

'shape'.

Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony - epilogue (or, 'Feedback')

This was what happened after I read for the first time ever at an open-mic event on 15 July 2019. One of the two poems I read was Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony.

Great poems! said the multi-published writer in the break
- to the local next to me,
who'd effed and blinded through his lines,
with stylish vigour and panache.
Accidentally, the author caught my eye;
"Yours too", he said,
excruciatingly polite.
"Didn't quite get what you were ...."
I watched him, frozen,
as you might a snake about to strike.
"Private school yours went to, did they?"
he continued.
"When you said 'the tattooed mums....'"

He trailed off while I forgot to praise his latest book
figuring something had just happened,
just not sure yet what.
"Er, no." I said and realised then,
he hadn't heard the poem, just the accent
and deafening instinct told him:
posh, prejudiced, privileged English sap.

About 'Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony'

I noticed the sensitive warnings young poets sometimes gave at readings about topics like mental health or miscarriage.  They called them a new word, "triggers".  It led me to think perhaps I should do one myself: if you work in Scottish education and you toe the party line you may wish to avoid what follows.

When I first read ''Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony' a guy (he shows up here) who had just published his sixth novel said in the politest tones, "I didn't quite....see what you were...getting at."  Later, a woman thanked me and said I should send the poem to the government. I said after the intimidation we had faced from our council, although mild in comparison to what has happened to others, I would be too scared.  I asked her if she knew the terms 'Named Person' or 'State Guardian', which appear in the poem. She said no and that is a common response.  People still don't know about the scandal that was and still is the Named Person  / State Guardian scheme nor moreoever, what it it is symptomatic of and what its legacy is today. So I wrote this piece.

My kids between them have received, so far, ten years of state education in three different primary schools.  They have been home-schooled twice.  There haven't been many opportunities to go into these schools although you do get an official ten minutes twice a year with the teacher. If, occasionally, parents are invited in, to for an event these are controlled and choreographed to the inch - except for the seating.  There is often insufficient seating. The latest end of year awards ceremony in the most recent school felt particularly oppressive. This piece is largely about the creeping, insidious, infiltration of authoritarianism in primary leadership, where headteachers are remote managers and administrators who appear to have little genuine interest in or human concern for the children themselves. Everyone is too busy these days covering their backs. They have, though, very much a governmental concern.  The government agenda in education is very strong these days and strengthening, particularly in terms of the kinds of responsibilities they are putting on headteachers.

This new breed of head, in my experience doesn't brook any sort of what they might call 'interference'. The 'children' might be yours but the 'pupils' are theirs and if you as a parent are not happy with your child's experience in school then it is just your problem.   There is rarely any working it out with you in a genuine and equal partnership because for them, there is no "it", no problem.   If, by any chance, there is a meeting, who is in charge will be clear.  It will be on their turf and you will be outnumbered by about three to one - the head, their witness and their scribe.  The scribe will set down what ostensibly is said - which is never what you think happened and what you thought was agreed.  Despite the likely ban of phones in school there is probably also a recording device somewhere.  At least that is what it feel like.  All that sets the tone. It's not just me.  Other parents report the same.

Nearly everyone seems to be oblivious to what is happening and it is convenient for time-strapped parents and of course to those managers in the education system that it is so.  Perhaps a few are lucky and have had a different experience but I have spoken to or heard from enough parents now and have had enough experience of the Scottish Primary system to taste the culture and understand the way it is heading. 

The terms State Guardian and Named Person refer to a Scottish National Party idea that became government policy in Scotland in February 2104.  These terms refer to a role usually accorded to a health visitor (for the under fives), a teacher or the school headteacher. Few people were nor still are aware of this change, partly because it was brought in, for good reason, without fanfare. I was told recently that it germinated from an idea inside Perth & Kinross council which many parents have told me is a particularly heavy-handed one and that, to put it mildly, is certainly my experience.

I think the State Guardian idea arose from a wish to protect children from the tragic cases of severe, sometimes fatal child abuse. These hit the headlines from time and time and caused difficulties for various local and national public sector departments: councils, the police, social work, doctors, teachers and so on. Most of these children were known to one or more of these departments. Rather than help the public sector areas communicate better between themselves someone had the idea, that in Scotland all children should be protected - no child should fall through the gap. Protected from what? Well, from their families because that is where the harm was. So suddenly all families were potential risks to their own children. Trainee teachers tell me this view is now part of standard training.  It is brainwashing.

The State decided there should be somebody from their side who would keep an eye - and more than that - on the child and the family.  This state guardian would be the 'Named Person'.  It wasn't just children at risk who got a Named Person, but all children and by extension, their families.  The state decided the person with the most access to and responsibility for the child was the school headteacher. That person would have the power to access and share all sorts of information from different areas about the child and about the family including medical records.  So you had better get on with your head because there were tick boxes which if checked increased the risk to the child.   Single Parent? Check.  Has more than four children?  Check.  Disagrees with a professional?  Check. Yes, if you disagreed with an agent of the state, the state increased the risk that you, your home, your family was to the child.

No wonder it was brought in on the quiet.  Besides, parents didn't have to do anything, so why make a fuss about it?  Parents would only get upset if they understood the full reach and scale of what had happened.  So teachers carried on having casual chats with parents.  The difference was that now, some of them were going away and making notes in reports, compiling secret dossiers about the child, the parent, the family.  And then there were the formal meetings about child welfare that came out of the blue for some families.  If parents don't comply with having meetings with any state representative you are deemed uncooperative and that again increases risk to your child.  You can see where it is heading, tragically for individual families and in terms of government tone for the wider society.  If you are starting to feel chilled, you have good reason.

In July 2016 the Supreme Court made an analogy which showed they thought the government was going too far. What follows is not a quotation by some extremist ranter convinced that the Scottish National Party is ramping up to some National Socialist agenda, it is the careful, considered and sober judgement of the supreme court:

“There is an inextricable link between the protection of the family and the protection of fundamental freedoms in liberal democracies...Different upbringings produce different people. The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world. Within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way.”

I cannot forget those words 'totalitarian regime' from the supreme court ruling on the Named Person policy, not because they are scare-mongering but because they ring so true.  For all that the judgement was a reprieve, we are still pointed that way. Named Persons still exist. They are your head teachers.  Schools hardly make it clear that by law your child having a State Guardian is voluntary now, but it is.  You aren't asked on the annual data check form whether you want a State Guardian.  Within those undefined limits parents don't have to be bossed around, legally, any more about how they are raising their child.  In theory, Named Persons can't share your family data the way they used to. However, in the minds of the people who had that power, and even more so, their council masters, the idea is still very much there:  we are the boss. You had better not get in our way. If we decide to think there' is any risk to your child we can make life difficult for you.  We can do anything we like. 

Populism?

I realised some years back that to get a platform or publicity or just to be heard in any way, not only do you need to do a lot of vulgar self-promotion but you have to say what is popular, easy to understand, positive and not too controversial, or that is only controversial in well-worn tabloid terms.


What is it that rules when
face time, air time, talk time means

promising the people what they want:
gin,
fags,
food,
freebies,
reality TV,
and those fickle twins:
vapid positivity
and the yellow press?

Education in Scotland

I have removed the piece 'Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony' which was here.  I don't want to prejudice my younger son's remaining two years at primary school. His experience in the Scottish education system has been bad enough already.

Few parents today can say the truth about what happened to their children and their family in Scottish education, what they think about their school or what we feel about that without fear of intimidation, recrimination, reprisal and consequence from the local authority.  Or simply, we don't want to risk our child being discriminated against in school - not getting chosen, not getting awards because the parent is trouble.

Why not just talk to the school?  That would be the obvious choice - a partnership between the parents and the school.  What a novel idea; but you can't have a partnership when one side thinks it is really its job alone, that parents are just an unfortunate nuisance that you have to listen to but ignore.  It is the same mentality from this council that my father experienced more than twenty years ago when he led his village council.  The man from the regional council came to see the village and (supposedly) hear what they wanted.  "We have to listen to you but we don't have to do anything you want" he said, bluntly. And they didn't.  Now, I see that, shocking though that was, at least it was honest. It isn't like that now.  Today, if you have kids - although I expect it is the same if you have to interact with the state for housing or benefits -  public sector workers write notes about you, share them with other state representatives and compile dossiers on you and your family.  If you find that hard to believe, watch the video stories of the families on the No To Named Person website.

We can't talk to the school because as the piece 'Correspondance' [sic] explains they do not want to know.  I know a mother who works in a particular area of special needs in which her own child has those needs but it was a battle for her to even get these recognised in school.  

It could though be that your child is bullied.  How many schools do you know that will admit bullying happens in their school or can provide testimonies from parents or child victims who felt the school got on the case and addressed the issues well?  In our area I find very few.   

What if your child is bored and you are trying to get extension activities beyond colouring in or asking please could they not turn her off literacy by making her write out and write out and write out words she already knows?   What if you don't think it's OK that the school lets out the Primary 1s and then just shuts the door without checking every child has someone to pick them up.  What if you think it's not OK when children are playing on condemned equipment in the school grounds?  What if you would like an alternative for your child than the religious worship  - worship, not learning mind - that Scottish primary schools are legally mandated to provide six times a year?  What if a teacher shuts the door in your face in the pouring rain because she says, fallaciously, maliciously, you and your child were not on time?  All of these are just a few examples from our school life. 

Even if they hear you out, none of it is taken on board.  Anything that could be perceived as criticism or, to put it another way, the subject of improvement, is quickly covered up because improvement can only come from within. The last school preached a "growth mindset" - being open to learning from your mistakes and yet is anything but.

I tried for years to get work for my son to alleviate his boredom at his first school  - which went through five heads in two years.  The battles just to get him to put on school uniform  - and what an anachronistic, controlling idea that is - are engraved on my mind.  Sometimes we had to take the car because trying to get him to walk there could be so difficult.  These problems are caused by the school and yet the parents have to deal with them and their repercussions.  Did anyone in Scottish education stop to even think that brainwashing a child and forcing them pray is a form of child abuse, likewise forcing them to write out words they know, likewise cooping them up in a box when they should be outside learning as much as possible?  

A question I learnt from Atul Gawande's superb Being Mortal is:  "For whose convenience is an institution, like a geriatric home set up? For whom is the marketing, the brochures, for whom the efficacy of the operational routines?  Similarly for whose convenience is school - for the suppliers or the children?  How would learning be or the celebration of success if children had a say in designing and organising it?

Schools won't brook what they would consider 'interference' in their school or the raising of concerns about their methods.  In their view, the parental role seems to be essentially to feed, water and house the child.  The state 'educates' and what a grim, perverted word that is. If this seems extreme, consider 'education': the spotlight on the teacher the educator, talking, doing, controlling, being important.  With 'edcuation' something external is being done to a child, willing or not, to meet targets. Consider learning:  more like growth, the focus on the child, the impetus from the child,  learning is autonomous, guided, social.  It is to do with something you take in to yourself, willingly, make your own, so that you can then use it, create with it.    

What happens before the child goes to school doesn't count as real learning in the view of educators.  It isn't valid.  Walking, talking and anything else that still remains entrusted to parents is just instinct.   It is clear by the lowering of the ages at which the governments in both England and Scotland want to get children in to free nursery care and in to school that the state wants children away from their families as soon as possible.

The headteacher in her recent spiel to the Primary 7 leavers had decided to appropriate even those things children do learn at home, to the school:

"You have learned
to read,
to write,
to tie your laces
to clear up after yourselves."
[extract:  'Primary End of Term Awards Ceremony']

Don't her pupils learn any of that at home?  And that would be schools' defence - many children don't, the supposedly 'many'  being one excuse for teaching to the lowest common denominator.  What you end up with is a generation held back to the pace of the slowest, as though education is a bike ride through the country.  Egalitarian?  By some lights, clearly.  Or just thwarted and let down?  Certainly, that "egalitarianism" is what the SNP wants.  Their cry "no child should be disadvantaged by their birth" is just the other side of  "no child should be advantaged by their birth".  The SNP solution?  Pull down any bright kids or any kid with an ounce of initiative so they don't get ahead of the rest, because if there is one thing Scotland under the SNP hates it is anyone getting ahead.

Today's Scottish state patently distrusts the idea of the home because in the home are all those subversive, varied influences of their families, for which, thank goodness, the Supreme Court, granted, at least, a reprieve.  It is hard for memories not to crowd in of Aldous Huxley's passage about the children in the state-run  hatcheries in the opening of Brave New World.

Another reason we can't talk to the school is because, we would be too worried about the note-taking, the report writing and the additions to the dossier the state has on us (see: Narrative Control).  I wouldn't want to make a "Subject Access Request" to find out what the State has been saying about me because I suspect it would be shockingly inaccurate and contain a depressing number of lies and distortions intended to cover and protect the failings of those managing and staffing the schools.

Those who feel they have no other option go to the newspapers and have to expose their families to public scrutiny.  To have your photographs plastered over the front pages, as a local mum did earlier this year because she had a ten-year-old, suicidal from bullying at school, to put your family through that, you must be truly desperate.  More and more families seem to be going that way.

'Correspondance'

This piece came about after our run-ins with the council education department.  It is grim reading but it ends on a tragi-comic note. 

My elder son came home from a new school with a note saying he had kicked another child. I was horrified.  In six years he had never been in trouble of this sort and he wasn't violent. It turned out the child was a known troublemaker, had bullied him all day, assaulted him more than once and eventually, after hours of insufficient support and intervention from staff, my son kicked him back, probably to try to end it.

I complained to the head about the way things had been handled.  The school said they had given my son "strategies to protect himself" as though that wasn't their job.  They blamed my eleven-year-old, new in the school, for not getting help sooner, which, in fact, he had. I wrote again saying none of that was good enough and why hadn't they acknowledged the incident.  I received the oddest, defensive letter back saying item by item that my complaints were opinion so none of it counted. 

I wrote to the council who implemented a tortuous complaints policy including time constraints on me, forgetting that they are supposed to provide a service to the people.  Meanwhile, they strategically changed tack.  Everything I had said was still mere opinion which still didn't count as complaint but on top of that, now they simply said: nothing had happened,  there was no "assault" their letter said contemptuously.  He wasn't hit in the face.  At most he might have been slightly jostled. In lines dripping with sarcasm, they did hope he was better now.   But if something had happened they said my son had kicked, remember and I should be careful because I sounded as if I was condoning that.  It was a sly, crafty, insinuating, intimidating letter with the full weight of the council behind it and it threatened legal action if we decided to pursue negligence.   To my knowledge no school in Scotland has ever been found legally negligent, for things far worse, not even Kingspark in Dundee. 

The school banned phones in school, threatening police action for anyone who contravened and recorded or photographed - convenient for suppressing evidence of anything. The council said to me that they were considering implementing an "individual communication protocol" in my case, which didn't sound fun. They threatened restricting my contact with the school. Communication from the school generally was poor. We heard about the Christmas concert a couple of days before it happened. Later a fete that had been advertised didn't happen.  I wasn't invited to the school coffee morning. I wasn't sure if the order had been implemented or not.   The uncertainty, probably deliberate, was stressful. Some months after Christmas the council wrote again to say that was it, they had decided to implement their protocol, essentially blacklisted, banned from contacting the school. One day not long after my younger son didn't come home from school. The river Tay is between that school and our house and we had seen a guy almost certainly on drugs acting weirdly on the island. I feared the worst and raced about looking for him - school, town, river, home, repeat. Eventually, I stood outside the school in dread, unwelcome, worried to go in, worried not to, clutching my phone, desperate to call, to know when he had last been seen. Then my husband phoned.  He had remembered there was chess club. You aren't banned, said the council, scornfully, when later I mentioned this, just....restricted.

We had struggled to get my younger son's simple support needs recognised and addressed for a medical condition.  He just needed a few seconds daily assistance from a member of staff but the head dragged and dragged her feet and wanted his busy hospital consultant to attend a meeting.

The same child started to experience violence in that school not only directed at him, but generally. The school did nothing about the incidents, said nothing. I only knew a couple of parents to speak to.  One of them told me their son, my son's classmate had his head bashed repeatedly against a wall by another child in the same class. "What did the school do?"  I asked.  "Nothing really.  They 'downplayed' it", said the quiet, young parents.  Months before the chair of the parent council had said behaviour and the "disciplinary process" were issues. I didn't take it seriously at the time.  Middle-class anxieties I thought, in that professional catchment.

The aggression in school continued.  My son lost his appetite, begged not to go any more, suffered anxiety. We called in sick for two days.  The school docked two days attendance as "unauthorised absences". I asked why.  We didn't hear back. I moved him out of there to another school.  The council said it was my choice if I chose not to raise the latest issues but what was the point?  They hadn't done anything before.  The whole culture was about covering things up, not sorting them out and certainly not about engaging in a meaningful and non-authoritarian way with parents.  But how likely is that when we still call our councils "local authorities"?

I wrote hopefully, to the new school with a profile about my son - saying what he could and couldn't do academically, telling them about the medical condition, about his recent anxieties and the violence that had engendered them and, for transparency, about my "individual communications protocol" - the head would probably have been warned anyway.  However, the new head, covering her back again I suppose, forwarded the letter to the council.   They wrote to me saying any mention of the old school was inappropriate.

On the day I moved my younger boy out, back in the old school the same child who had attacked my elder son months before did so again, drawing blood. My son did nothing before or after he was attacked and the whole class was on his side.  But what the council had called "nothing" had happened, all over again and with the same child.  At least this time I got a phone call from the school, not from the head though whom I had long ago refused to ever meet or speak to again.  I said I was appalled.  The voice of the admin or support staff on the other end said, "I'm so sorry".  It was the most we ever got from them.  I felt that with that human touch she must be transgressing the rules.  She probably did too.  It wasn't much but when you get nothing it felt like everything.   

Over the year I had asked around of other parents, was it just us? But stories came in from parents of kids in schools all over the county.   The school, or the council, or both "downplayed" whatever their troubles were was a word that came up again and again.  I didn't know if it was worse to know it was affecting so many and that they all felt isolated and without help or recourse or better to know that at least we weren't alone.

*

'Correspondance'

Came the missives from the council:

You have complained,
claimed things.
Since phones are banned in school
where's your evidence of violence?

We've told you before:  

"You believed a child?" 

Why must you talk about support needs?  You're
meddlesome,
bothersome,
agitating.
So we'll apply an:

'Individual Communications Protocol':
from contacting your boys' school
you're restricted, blacklisted, 

banned,

.

One such arrived from the
'Schools Improvement Officer',
responsible for inspections
(and making parents ruly),
titled: 'Correspondance':
C O R R E S P O N D A N C E

Narrative control I

This piece came after hearing the most recent story from a couple with a young child whose challenges mean it would make ordinary school currently impossible.  If you have read the shocking article in the Guardian recently about Kingspark, a school for children with special needs in Dundee you may be wondering how it could happen that school remains operational.   It is thanks to a campaigning mum, Beth Morrison, winner of many awards, that this came to national attention else those abuses would still not be known.  

The couple I met had made a Subject Access Request and found out what had been written and shared about them from informal conversations they had had with public sector workers.  The people working for the public bodies had secretly written down the conversations and the inferences they had drawn and then reported them.  These behaviours by their employees are sanctioned by the state if there may be a "perceived risk" to a  child deemed "in need".

I have known this couple slightly for some years and I have also seen them from time to time out walking as a family in town. They always struck me as kind, doting, aware and committed to their child.  I never once saw anything I would have considered a risk - quite the opposite.  On the other hand I have known someone with the power to instigate the removal of children from their homes who themselves lived a troubled life,  in squalid conditions, with children.

This state-snooping is what happens when citizens in ordinary jobs are given extraordinary powers. When state-snoopers, the foot soldiers, are doing research on the case against the family, no one person is responsible for what happens to them, so if they have any doubts, their consciences are salved, though not always.  'Angela Allan' is a parent whose story is on the No2NP website.  She was confronted with the consequences of tittle-tattle reported by a teacher resulting in a closed meeting with fifteen people from different state departments and a social work order for Angela.  The teacher ultimately apologised saying she had been sent to spy on Angela under the guise of helping her son who was flexi-schooling, schooling part-time at home.  She reported things like the child had been wearing a onesie at home. The headteacher in Perth and Kinross had sent her and the teacher had not felt able to say no.  While the foot soldiers gather the information the decision to act against the family is left to someone higher up. Everyone involved though is complicit.  Consider how a causal conversation can today turn into a file on a family. A chat with the 'subjects', seen in a certain light, becomes, too readily, a concern.  Officials start to see things the same way as the instigator because of peer pressure and because who wants to find themselves not 'covered'.  Weirdly, this collusion starts to be a good thing for the authorities - we have all decided to think the same so it must be true.

*

It was like this, says
the housing officer,
fitting,
the social worker,
skewing,
the health visitor,
slanting,
the teacher,
assuming,
the police,
concluding,
colluding in meetings
behind closed doors.

No, there is no obligation to inform you;
you may apply,
request,
ask permission,
make a "Subject Access Request"
to the appropriate government department
with payment of the relevant fee.

That friendly chat with the council Blockwart? 
She mentioned her family,
the pet dog,
then wrote a report:
there were pans on the stove,
the house was cluttered,
a duvet in the living room.
The child is autistic,
folglich: "in need",
Forderung: a hearing
And the Children's Reporter.

Notes:

Blockwart "the title of a lower Nazi Party political rank responsible for the political supervision of a neighborhood. Referred to in common parlance as Blockwart (Block Warden), the officials were in charge to form the link between the Nazi authorities and the general population. The derogatory term Blockwart ("snoop") survives in German colloquial language." (Wikipedia)

Folglich: therefore (German)

Forderung: Official or legal recommendation. (German)

Role of the Children's Reporter:  Receives referrals for children and young people who are believed to require compulsory measures of supervision. Investigates and refers to a hearing if necessary.

Disguised compliance

This piece came about when a couple I know were facing a Compulsory Order for social work involvement.   No matter what they did, they were at fault, whether they did what they were told by the council or whether they didn't.

 For more background and a related poem see, Narrative Control I. 

It's a rigged game, I said,
Every which way -
right or wrong,
unfalsifiable,
unwinnable
with reason.

Jump the hoop,
tug the forelock,
doff the cap, say
you will, you can, you must,
say yes, say yes, say yes,
say they know best.

No, he said.
They call that: 'disguised compliance'.
We know it as definitively set-up.
So when...? So how...?

We'll help you really mean it:
Repeat again:
In the name of
the council, the social,
and the children's reporter:
"I will",
My council, my guardian, my god.

Supply-side advantage

Straggle-haired,
pasty-faced,
gimlet-eyed,
frumpy, dumpy
in leggings.
Rolled off the sofa
to exhort "Health and wellbeing".
Driving home in a Discovery,
long hols,
fat cat.

300 metres to the council palisade;
Off she waddles,
Arms full of files,
Improbable government agent.
Absent to the kids,
unaccountable to parents,
plotting
a rigged game;
protected
dominie.

Inches

The day Jeremy and Boris came to Perth
we were travelling by bike,
crossing a side street
when we met a man I'd never seen: 
Forties, grey suit, a stranger
on his way to the debate perhaps
or homeward from the station to wealthy Kinnoull.

His red face opened to speak.
I slowed, 
smiled,
expecting an enquiry, directions.
Angrily, his voice rose, 
Unfortunately English, 
(I say, with contagious prejudice):
"Shouldn't you guys be on the road?"
and he wagged his umbrella, high. 

I couldn't hear at first for the traffic
and the lorry thundering past
on the ring-road
by a roundabout
without a cycle lane.

It's his outrage that remains
and watching my ten-year-old, 
ride ahead on the empty pavement,
taking, conscientiously, the outside,
and still within inches.  

Three Wee Kingdoms

Three wee kingdoms:
The doctor, the council, the school.
Meant to serve you,
Meant to ask: how well do we do?
Meant to ask - and mean it:
How can we improve?
But: no, no, no.
We can't. We wont. We don't.
They point to the rules
Telling you what to do.

Civilised places

Plastercast of the Farnese Hercules in Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology 

I read, shocked, recently, that German Jews have been warned not to wear kippas in the face of a rising tide of anti-semitism. This however only contrasts in its small-mindedness with Angela Merkel's gesture to welcome some one and half million mostly young refugees to that country while other parts of Europe closed their borders. According to a recent Washington Post article that act is already starting to benefit the German economy.

Why is anti-Semitism apparently on the rise? The German government's anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein, quoted in the BBC, article suggested as reasons: "the lifting of inhibitions and the uncouthness" of society could be behind the spike in anti-Semitic crimes. The internet, social media and "constant attacks against our culture of remembrance" may be contributing factors, he said.

Uncouthness is a malaise often ascribed by older people to those younger and perhaps always has been. John Cleese was lambasted recently for saying from his Caribbean home - one he had escaped to as he turns 80: "I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it."

I felt sorry for him, misunderstood perhaps by people who never knew the England he remembers. Maybe John Cleese is another Peter Hitchens whom I saw memorably lambasted, in his absence, by his brother (probably around the time of their falling out).  Christopher claimed that Peter wanted, today, an England of steam trains where porters in uniform would meet you off the train and take your luggage.  But Cleese is an ageing former comic and Hitchens even twenty years ago was a  journalist writing for the Mail on Sunday. The poet Philip Larkin also mourned what he saw as the coarsening and concreting over of Britain, physically and metaphorically.  We could tar all three as misanthropic, probably misogynist, outmoded moaners.  The former two, certainly advocate against political correctness which makes them fantastically easy targets.  Any nuance there might be in their views, that perhaps we are losing, have already lost something, is already thrown out with that dirty water.  Meanwhile, people become busier and unhappier in manic lives lived relentlessly and sanitised on social media.  We might agree there could be something intangible wrong in the way we are living, but no way might they in any sense be right...

I grew up in something of a bubble, among the families of British Army officers, overwhelmingly nuclear, of course, straight, where people were civilised to one another, generous and humourous.  Those pleasant social behaviours come so much more easily when one doesn't have worries about money, employment, marriage and the accompanying ills and strife associated with the shadowed side of those things. So I don't know if Cleese is imagining or remembering, though I suspect the latter. You glimpse it when you speak to some older people. One is never sure if their courteousness has come about through the mellowing of age or whether they always were like that, but again I think the latter.   At the end of my street I wound down the car window the other day to ask an elderly lady if she was alright. She was sitting at an odd angle perched on a push-along shopping walker under a bridge full of softly cooing, defecating pigeons - a place where people never do stop.  She answered with great dignity and appreciation that she was thank-you-very-much. She is the sort of older person I mean.

I for one, as much as possible, hide from modern life.  Or rather, it's not modern life I dislike.  Much technology is empowering.  It is rather that I try to avoid people in modern life.  Some I can't avoid: teachers, school management, doctors, council officials - very often harassed, self-important, arrogant, patronising with barely an attempt to disguise those invidious traits.  One wants to avoid them because such interactions are rife with double-dealing, self-interest, inattention and, worst of all, can have a coarsening effect.  

The other place I meet people is on the street.  Believing the car responsible for many societal ills, I am mostly a pedestrian.  Occasionally I use the train.  In place of buses I prefer a bicycle.  I practically cheered my son when, discussing the topic, perennial in our house, of cars and zebra crossings, he suggested horse and trap as better suited to the city than cars.  In many ways I agree.  On the street I meet spitters, cars that turn into side streets but never do give way to pedestrians as is the law; cars that drive deliberately at pedestrians, cars that drive routinely over zebra crossings and cars which cut up vulnerable cyclists.

Last week, after not a few requests, the council, at last, repainted the zebra crossing on Tay Street near our house in Perth.  My friend recently described it as the one that "would soon kill someone".   Motorists regularly failed to stop at this crossing, partly because it is on a long stretch of straight road without traffic calming measures, partly because they are often distracted, partly because the paint was all but invisible and also just because - "might is right" - they can.  I have used it with my children several times daily over the last year and it is a rare day when cars always stop for us. Last week I was standing on the crossing, with my bike also half on the crossing when three cars drove over the crossing without stopping.  They tend to adopt a copycat attitude.  I decided to make a point - not the wisest idea - and force the issue.  I walked into the path of the oncoming car, so that my large bike was fully on the crossing.  I have some practice at this and assumed the car would be forced to stop.  The woman saw me and with a coolness that took my breath away, instead of stopping, drove around me  - because she could.  It is that same arrogance I mentioned. Sadly behaviour like this has happened many times.   The council said their van driver (and others like her) simply hadn't seen the pedestrian on the crossing, as though that were an excuse. But it is illegal to drive over a pedestrian crossing in use.

So these days and increasingly, like John Cleese - albeit he is on Nevis and I am in Perth - I try to avoid people.  There is a superb early passage in a book I think by Ian McEwan describing a woman, worn down by poverty and the associated ills, maltreating a toddler.  It is a scene, shocking in its plausibility, that has stayed with me for many years and it is a stark reminder that exposure to the brutal sides of life has a brutalising effect.  But the cause and effect at work there is not just connected to poverty, it works at other levels.  Deal with people coarse and crass in manner and you are likely to become coarsened.  Deal with the sly or the uncaring and you are likely to take on those characteristics.  A.C. Grayling has written in one of his essays that the appropriate attitude in such circumstances is to withhold communication from those behaving crassly, boorishly or are otherwise uncivilized, but this is difficult when the behaviour comes from those in positions of responsibility.  I know it to my cost from my recent dealings people in the professions I mentioned, but never more so than with the Perth & Kinross council education department - infamous across Scotland for their bullying and intimidation of families actually in need of support.  While I respect the professor immensely it has often occurred to me that some of his advice is easier in theory than in practice; still those essays are useful signposts when the way feels uncharted. It is uncharted because these are behaviours simply not expected from those with the privilege of working for the society they are supposed to serve.   It is however what happens when there is little transparency or accountability to those they should serve and no recourse but the ombudsman for complaints about behaviours and policies in, for example, councils and doctors surgeries.

While there may not currently be a cure there is an antidote of sorts, a place to at least forget these unassailable dens of iniquity.  Go to the civilised places.  This does not always require money.  Museums and galleries are civilised places and they are free.  True, they can be mobbed by people aimlessly wandering about taking little in.  The new V&A in Dundee is a case in point.  It has been crammed since it opened, last September, largely because of the huge publicity.  In contrast, the Queen's Gallery, Holyrood, a picture gallery of superlative quality, I had to myself for an hour between 5 and 6pm on one recent Sunday visit.  But museum-goers are usually in attendance for good motives and are at worst, like peaceable beasts lumbering around a waterhole.   Museums and galleries are packed with artefacts relating to the best endeavours, achievements and stories of remarkable people.  

Wonderful things happen in civilised places.  In Cambridge this weekend I enjoyed several of the many museums.  Among the naked bodies in the (free) museum of classical archaeology, a magnificent collection of plaster casts of famous statues, I found myself in conversation with a jovial man, like me visiting that weekend and at something of a loose end.  He offered to show me his college (ordinarily tourists pay), including the baronial dining hall, which was just closing.  So we went for lunch in the "grad pad", the graduate restaurant with views of the river and rooftops and then punting with some people we met, at a fiver apiece, something I would not have done alone.

Punting, Cambridge

Walking into any good quality public art gallery is however, to be confronted with how much we have lost, culturally.  Art before the mid-twentieth century is jammed with references to the great stories from the Bible and from classical literature.  If you do not know those stories - and how many do, today? - you will be at sea.  Latin and the associated classical education in Britain was systematically erased with the educational reforms in Britain of the 196os and 70s which was part of the general 'democratisation' of society.   

Museums and galleries are like modern temples.  The soul finds peace, solace, nourishment, inspiration.  The imagination can take flight. But how relevant are they to most people, requiring, as they do an intellectual investment to do them justice.  Without that, one painting can look very like another.  If you do not know the story of Judith and Holofernes then the fact that Cristofano Allori painted himself as the severed head and Judith, as apparently, the girlfriend who spurned him, will mean little. At the recent exhibition in the Queen's Gallery there were two paintings of the infant Christ affectionately playing with John the Baptist. Poignantly, the saint's head appears midway between these two paintings on Salome's platter but the story of Salmone and Herodias gives that painting meaning.

Norwich castle in the 21sr centrury

In Britain we should not take for granted the great blessing that many of these institutions make no charge.  I rather felt that Norwich castle museum was letting the side down by charging £10 entry for the half a day it opens on the Sunday I visited.  It charges extra for tours but for that ten pounds you get to see a keep with impressive medieval graffiti, more museum galleries than I could even look in and a series of excellent picture galleries - exploration aplenty for a full day at the very least.  Especially in Scotland, an outmoded, moribund education system, strangled by procedure and rules is failing many.  But, thanks to the enduring Victorian legacy of public art, museums, galleries and libraries, those motivated to do so can, throughout Britain, forge their own education, especially in the arts.  It will be one with more stimulation, interaction, interest and freedom than is usually found in the classroom.  Sometimes I think it is our only hope.

Unreality

Yesterday my son asked to use his Amazon gift card.

- Sure. What did you have in mind? I said, thinking with guilty relief: For once, no tussle about getting a book from the library instead of buying it. He has a book habit I am pleased about but, oh, the cost, not to mention the hassle of getting rid of them afterwards.
- An Xbox credit, he replied
- No, I don't think so, was my first thought. But we had been to see the Videogames exhibition at the V&A museum in Dundee. Having learned a little about Journey and Kentucky Route Zero I tried to be a little less dismissive. The only thing my son had wanted on his tenth birthday (apart from a party with traditional games) was me to play a videogame with him where you have to build a course full of hazards which you then try to get across. 

- What do you want the Xbox credit for? I said with, I thought, gratifying restraint.
- So I can buy some Robucks he said quietly, close to unhopeful resignation.
- Robucks! What for? I said, that patience wearing thin. Robucks is virtual currency for the platform Roblox that lets users design and create their own games and use those created by other users.
- So I can get a game pass.
This was starting to sound like the episode 15 million merits from the TV series Black Mirror, on Netflix, about the imagined effects of technology on life in the future. In this episode, citizens in a controlled society live in small individual rooms, buy food from vending machines and cycle on exercise bikes all day, in buildings without windows, to gain merits, a form of currency. This aside the greater purpose of this activity is unclear. They spend the merits on things like changing the virtual clothes of the avatars on their screens. Thus they have some choices in life but nothing meaningful. They earn something that isn't real to buy things that aren't real. If they save their merits they might gain entry to a competition where the prize is ostensibly freedom to another kind of life.

- So, you want to use an Amazon credit to get an Xbox credit to get some Robucks to get a Game Pass?
- Yes, he said, his end still clearly in sight.
- And what can you do with the Game Pass?
- It lets you get skills.
- What do you mean?
- You can skip having to earn skills in a game. The Game Pass gives them to you automatically so you can progress to another level. 
- Don't you think you should learn the skills yourself?

I can't remember what he said, if anything, at this point, but it might not inconceivably have been Not really, at which point, I probably thought: Ten years of conscientious parenting...!
- Look, in the old days if you were in the army you could, with enough money, buy yourself a commission to be an officer. That hasn't been possible since 1871. You have to prove that you have the right qualities to be an officer. You can't just buy them.
But it seems that things may be regressing...

For some years I and my children have used Duolingo, "the world's largest language learning platform". In August 2018 it had 300 million users, up 100 million on the year before. This statistic does not appear to have changed in 2019. Duolingo isn't necessarily the best language learning platform. I have tried most of the leading ones. It isn’t particularly personalised and despite its test features that let you skip content you still have to wade through bogs of beginner material to get to the intermediate content. But it is still free. As well as the lessons in simple, user-friendly format, it also has interactive stories and podcasts. The site though is ridden with virtual rewards to buy virtual stuff like changing the virtual clothing of Duo owl - the company mascot which pops up on your screen now and then.

Duolingo has a dizzying array of virtual credits and currencies - XP experience points, Powerups, Streaks, Lingots, Achievement shields, Crowns, Levels, Checkpoints, Leagues. I am sure there are more I have forgotten. Every time I look, I find new ones. In the forums, users vote comments up and, if you can believe it, down...both anonymously - if, that is, you care to participate in what is a kind of Lord of the Flies mob rule with the controlling gods watching, but not participating. Apparently, there are also community moderators.  

Using virtual currencies to buy trivial stuff that doesn't exist is absolutely and worryingly normal for children who go online - and how many, nowadays, don't? And where is the line between incentivizing people to learn a language and just incentivizing them to participate in the meaningless addiction to these currencies and credits? “Engagement is the main way we measure success” was the message of one recent Duolingo blog post. Why aren't people learning to identify where there are rich learning opportunities? Why are people made dependent on XP. Why are they chasing crowns and achievement shields? We seem to be unthinking slaves on a treadmill of achievement that doesn't mean very much and is addictive. Why are people talking about their lingots and not about that?

Recently, it was announced that "Liking" comments on some social media platforms might be banned for under-18s in the UK under concerns that "likes" encourage people to share personal data and spend too much time online. This may be a good thing though why it is specifically "likes" that do that than the other aspects of social media isn't clear.

How many of us do not participate in a virtual world of one sort or another be it video games, social media, learning platforms or something else? We start to mimic that sort of world, and the real world begins to take on the characteristics and values of these online worlds. The relentlessness of good, positive news which is really just another form of advertising is one example; the overvaluing of points and trivial 'rewards' is another.

Duolingo is not by any means the most pernicious of the platforms that promote this behaviour. It is just the one we happen to use. It has laudable aims. Its mission is "to make education free, fun and accessible to all". And Duolingo does create real differences in the world. People learn languages, do better at work, live richer lives. For me, learning languages was one of the most enriching things I have done in my life. Using those languages in the countries where they are spoken unlocked cultures, opened new worlds, brought insight, texture, knowledge, understanding, freedom and independence. But Duolingo's use of these addictive features shows that even well-intentioned(?) organisations are contributing to this problem.

My son and compromised on his buying Journey and us playing it together.

- Where do we get it from?
- Check Steam.
- What's Steam?
- It's a platform.
- It's a store, said his brother, walking in, where you buy games.
- How do you know it's not a platform?
- I don't really know what a platform is, he said. I felt some relief. I say some because while he runs and plays basketball this is the strong twelve-year-old with whom I wrestled at length for the computer mouse and keyboard the other day, just to shut down the computer.

Steam is, in fact, a platform for "playing, discussing and making games". There is a store too. So we checked Steam but Journey is not available for Xbox and isn't released yet for Windows.

I wondered if that last sentence would make any sense in 100 years. Or even to my mother. I was reminded of another Black Mirror episode: Bandersnatch. In the programme, a game developer in the 1980s is developing a branching game along the line of the "choose your own adventure books" that I remember from the 1980s where you move to a different section of a book, depending on the answer you choose to a question about what you want to happen. In an amplification of the idea, the Netflix user makes decisions about the programme itself. There are therefore many possible stories and many different possible endings. At one point in the Netflix episode, the 1980s game developer, while in his bedroom, asks in frustration, the world at large for a sign - a sign about his sense of not having free will in his decisions. At this point the Netflix viewer is presented with a choice to give the game developer the sign "Netflix" or another choice. Your selection of the choice "Netflix" causes the game developer's 1980s computer screen in the episode to show text saying that he is being controlled by a user on Netflix. "What is Netflix?" he asks, mystified. "An online entertainment screening service" comes the reply on his screen. So now, controlled from the future, for the entertainment of others, he really does think he is going mad... This Netflix user at least paused to reflect the extent to which we are ourselves controlled by the technologies we use. As one user commented in a Duolingo discussion about to what extent Duolingo is free, "if something is being provided 'free', the chances are, you are the product....".

What decision did my son make, eventually?
- OK, then, I'll get Two Point Hospital, he said, tentatively. As far as I could tell this is a game about building and managing hospitals.
- But don't you already play games like that?
- Not really. 

I gave up. It was his money after all and at least there wasn't any shooting.

Human Affection

It will be Mother's Day soon. Both my sons are affectionate, but the younger one is still a child, not yet ten, very much like the child in this poem.  It is still hard to believe that in a couple of years things will likely be quite different, harder still to imagine that it is only six short years before my elder boy is grown up and will, I learnt in the supermarket yesterday, be able to...buy matches!  Those walks to school with my youngest, thinking about both of my sons, reminded me of this quiet poem of much power:

Human Affection

Mother, I love you so.
Said the child, I love you more than I know.
She laid her head on her mother’s arm,
And the love between them kept them warm.
                                                                                  - Stevie Smith

Public education

Walking through the park with my younger son, and especially coming home with him is the highlight of my day and of my life.  My twelve year old now likes to make his own way to and from school.  For many years I have had the privilege of that warm little hand, pressing mine and glancing at me with a smile if he wants to send a silent message.  I have felt the skip in his step, heard his bubbly conversation, seen that ready smile, the glint of gold in his hair, the quick light in his eyes and known that strong mutual bond of love that if anything grows as he gets older.  Better yet, I get to do it twice a day.

Several days last week were sunny and gorgeous, though chilly. Going to school one day we walked across the railway bridge over the full and rushing Tay, the sun full in our faces. Our river is also tidal so we see its ebb and rise over the day as well as across the seasons.

The Tay, St Matthew's church and Smeaton's Bridge, Perth

I was reminded of Ted Hughes’ poem, The river in March. It begins.

In the Riverside park we saw the new blossom in the park and the daffodils, so much earlier now than they used to be.  We heard the birds chirping in the trees and bushes; beauty on all sides. We paused to pet the friendly dogs on their morning walks and exchange remarks or greetings with the owners. On my way home, I paused to remind myself of the symbolism on the Geddes monument.

Geddes monument in Rodney Gardens, Perth

Patrick Geddes was brought up in Perth. He became an ecologist and town planner. He believed we should "Live by the leaf" - use nature as a guide and inspiration in out lives.  He thought we should look within and without - this applied to ourselves and our surroundings and to our place in the wider world. In this he is remembered for the slogan, still modern today: Think global, act local. The park in which this monument is found is a fusion of art and nature.  

Millais' viewpoint, Perth

The inclusion of sculpture in the park is a reminder of stories and opportunities for reflection on ideas. Some scultpures are not particularly beautiful or profound but others are.  Millais' viewpoint for instance. The view across the scented heather garden, is a picturesque one of the town and a reminder that Millais was a painter, a member of the pre-Raphaelites that his wife, Effie, is buried in the graveyard within that view.  Thinking of Effie one cannot be reminded of the sad story of Effie and her first husband, John Ruskin.  The cut edges of the frame are a reminder of mortality. 

Autumn Leaves

The leaves around the frame of the sculpture recall one of Millais' paintings, Autumn Leaves in which young girls, burning leaves might evoke a similar sense of the transience of life.

From Millais' viewpoint, you can almost see the art gallery containing some of his work.  Waking and Effie Millais nee Gray.  Thus, are we reminded of the layers and richnesses all around. 

Public education means different things to different people.  Some Americans may think of it as state-provided education.  A public school in Britain means a private, fee-paying school.  But I think public education is that which is around us, available to the general public by which, through an engaged and interested mind and a natural facility to make connections we may make our own education and learn independently.  It is the only real way.  It is only when the mind is allowed to spark itself into interest that we take anything further or are simply truly engaged.  School is merely a way in which children are repeatedly subjected to stimuli, some of which may catch some of their interest.  But too often in school, that spark fails or ingite.  Or it is put out through routine, the unnecessary repetition of spelling and sums that children already know or simply noise, fear of bullies or being told what is and what to do and when and how to do it. 

Geddes had something to say about teaching:  "Good teaching begins neither with knowledge or discipline, but through delight".

I scented a fellow enthusiast for learning over teaching. How fitting then that I discovered by chance that in Edinburgh a "plaster shield, above the entrance to the inner pend, is a replica of the one which Geddes would have commissioned when he created University Hall at Riddle’s Court in 1890." The motto,carved into the arch of the pend, is ascribed to Geddes himself:

 Vivendo Discimus - By Living We Learn.