In my latest Pink Elephant Podcast I speak to Stuart Waiton founder and chair of the
. Stuart is an academic, a former journalist, long time lefty (in the truest sense not the virtuous bubblegum we see today) and a Dad. He has been involved in politics for sometime and was one of the campaigners who led on the No to Named Person scheme. N2NP was a Scottish Government initiative to assign a state guardian to every child in the country undermining the parental role and the stability of family.
Stuart is a passionate ambassador for a knowledge based education system. He notes that it’s not the failing standards that concern him most greatly (although clearly that is a significant issue) but in the lack of subject knowledge.
About five years ago it occurred to me that my son had very little knowledge of the Bible. And then I extended that to his whole year group, and his school and the wider community. ‘This is significant’, I thought. Whether you are a ‘believer’ or not, one could easily argue the Bible is the most important and influential text in Western history. It has informed literature, science, law, and art. It has been part of our collective imagination, our cultural reference point through which we have built society and civilisation for 2000 years. Take a moment to consider the texts of your childhood, ones that maybe your parents also knew. How many are being handed to your children and the children around us? Our cultural legacy is being disappeared at a rate and speed unimagined. We might ask ourselves what legacy are we preserving or providing for future generations? What is the ground our children will stand on?
I came across a thread recently on twitter/x comparing children’s literature of today to previous iterations.
Tara Ann Thieke has gone to the effort of finding old and new versions of children’s books and the juxtaposition puts the problem in stark relief.
Ewan Morrison calls it ‘cute authoritarianism’. Gone are the luminous qualities of earlier children’s book illustrations. Our libraries are now filled with mass produced ‘grocery store books’ (as I call it). These volumes are not created with human hands, like the undead they are devoid of texture. We will see no ‘perfect imperfection’ one sees in hand drawn work. There is no sense of the human who created it. It punches down as opposed to looking up. In the thread of the tweet above one poster, a teacher, noted how much her students loved the original version of the book the Secret Garden, how its complex and beautiful verse “drew her students in”. I get that. During lockdown I read the Frances Hodgson Burnett book to my then 7 year old son and he would plead “one more page Mum!” before bed.
Yet when I asked (ask) my son’s teachers to please challenge (and inspire!) him more in his reading choices they say ‘you don’t want to turn him off to reading’. My question is who is going to light the fire in the first place? It is that attitude that keeps children down and denies them nourishment. And it is into that space Stuart speaks, the one where children can be inspired to be always curious, to seek excellence and to strive for values we might have found in our own Scottish Enlightenment. I do hope we can build that. Do check out
for some inspiration to get you going.Thanks to my current subscribers. Any contributions welcome!
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