Claire: School Days

You go to school from the age of five to 16 to learn everything you need to know for a successful and wholesome adulthood.

Only you don’t.

Where, during your time in school, do you learn about taxes? How to buy a house? What you have to do to get divorced? How to cram 27 appointments into a working week when you have a full-time job?

All is not lost though, I’m bloody superb at algebra. And if you want to know the difference between an isosceles triangle and a scalene triangle – I’m your girl.

I remember when I was at both primary and secondary school, and we’d occasionally have a lesson that was all about life. The real stuff: how to manage your finances, how to know what career you’d like and what you need to do to get it, and more. I loved it. I think, in all those years, I spent about five lessons in total studying this. All I took away from it was that as a mechanic*, I wouldn’t be able to afford a Ferrari and an eight-bed house in Mayfair. Go figure.

So, as a fully-fledged 29 year old trying to understand the HMRC and how to buy my next home, I decided to put my two pence into how the educational system could be improved. Take note, Gavin Williamson.

What we learnt: The recorder.
What we should have learnt: The guitar.

As a professionally trained musician and creative, I’m all for having music, drama and art in our children’s curriculum. But the recorder? I mean, it never sounds good, does it? You wouldn’t see a recorder player winning Britain’s Got Talent. You probably wouldn’t tip a busking recorder player unless they were four years old and you felt sorry for them for being forced to perform by their parents. A recorder player is unlikely to make it on Radio 1. They probably wouldn’t even make it onto Eurovision, and that’s full of rubbish.

The guitar on the other hand… all I need to say is: Ed Sheeran, Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana. Mic drop.

What we learnt: The periodic table.
What we should have learnt: That Google is not a reliable source for medical information.

I’m just gonna throw it out there and say that science probably shouldn’t be treated as one of the most important subjects in school. Like, having it up there with English and Maths is debatable. Unless you’re going to be a scientist in the future (in which case you’d choose that down the line), it shouldn’t really be forced in place of something more useful.

As much as it’s helped me in my professional life as a writer to know that Ag means Silver, which is not at all, I could really have done with knowing that if we want to find out what kind of backache we have then not to check Dr Google. In reality, I learnt not to trust Google’s symptom checker by being told I probably had scurvy – when it was just an iron deficiency. Yarrrrrrgh**.

What we learnt: How to make a piggy bank out of papier-mâché.
What we should have learnt: How to make a steak and ale pie.

I think I probably speak for all of us when I say that I’ve not touched papier-mâché since I was five and three quarters. I have, however, eaten about 739 quite average steak and ale pies since the age of five and three quarters. Which skill would have been more useful? You do the math.

What we learnt: How to use an overhead projector.
What we should have learnt: How to use a washing machine.

Remember the overhead projector? If you were really lucky, you and a friend would be chosen to wheel it out from the caretaker’s cupboard of dreams and in front of the white board to beam up everyone’s favourite hymn or excerpt from the book you were reading. I left school knowing exactly the right distance to position said OHP to ensure the best text-to-screen ratio. But I still don’t know what the H stands for on my washing machine’s dial.

I mean, I could go on about this forever. Somewhere in my brain is a fly’s entire life cycle, but I still find someone else to change my lightbulbs for me. And as I doggy paddle my way through adulthood like an elephant in a bathtub, I often think fondly of my lessons on the signing of the Magna Carta.

*No, not at any point did I want to be a mechanic.

**Pirate noises because scurvy.