Graeme's

I have just read a remarkably silly article in a popular news website.

I got a spam phone call from a tuition seller, but it is a worrying symptom of the rise of tuition in the UK.

People often say maths is useless in real life. it is boring, we do not use it, etc.

I recently visited the website of a amateur theatre company, and any web designer would say it is awful.

This passage from (Pseudo-)Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians, the last sentence in particular, could have been written today, and it seems we cannot run things better now than then.

I have lived in two countries, and worked in another, on different continents, and been obviously ethnic minority in all three.

Schools have been deteriorating for many years, and lockdown hastened the crisis this caused – but the deterioration dates back many years, and the underlying cause is the stubborn focus on a Victorian model of education and the addiction to metrics.

We have had many climate change agreements that have not changed anything.

My daughters were both home educated for many years (the younger one still is) and I want to share some things I have learned along the way with parents who find themselves temporarily home schooling because of lockdown.

The public view (shared by media and politicians) of home education often seems to be that it simultaneously means parents assiduously coaching children to get firsts in maths when they are 14 while simultaneously neglecting their education so they never…