I felt like a lobotomised Neanderthal in the presence of Einstein when pupils of our Greenpower Engineering Team recently showed me around the electric car they had just built. How can children build (and race) full size cars? We didn’t build cars at School. We did woodwork. (Our creative summit was achieved by a friend who built an electric guitar in woodwork. It was a thing of beauty but, tragically, too heavy to pick up. To play it you had to stand next to it and strum it while it lay on a table. This did not make for a rockin’ stage show, and our band had to operate in a niche market of ourselves and whoever lent us the table). Anyway, the car is, I think, going to race at Rockingham and there are aspirations for Goodwood. Gone indeed are the days when to make an electric car faster you hitched it to a tow-truck.
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Imagine going into the ring with Mike Tyson, lowering your guard and saying “Come on then big fella, hit me with your best shot.” This is akin to how I felt when sending out a parental survey via which all Prep and Senior parents have the opportunity not only to answer a bunch of questions but also comment on the School in any way they see fit. Now the results are in, however, I am not whimpering on the canvas for my mum, but rather undergoing Nietzschean invigoration. Sure, a very few people rained a flurry of merciless blows on the exposed Bromsgrove underbelly, but on the whole people were wonderfully positive and such criticism as there was seemed..... well, essentially Edwardian: a fact for which I am most grateful. Along the lines of: “Look, you’re a decent sort but sometimes even good eggs need a biffing. Now after I’ve thrashed you, I want you to learn your lesson, stand up and shake hands so we can get on with things. Righto?”
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Strange how Mr. Gove’s words work on the puerile mind: his love of tablets, for instance, still evokes in me images of children etching Latin onto stone. Now that he wants “I levels”, I am bound to recall the homonymous theme tune to Van der Valk which sat atop the pop charts for four weeks of my early childhood. (Only British oldies will understand .. some of you will have played it on the recorder in 1973). “I levels” will apparently be graded from 1 (inconceivably dreadful) to 8 (godlike), and the core subjects will be effectively free from coursework and modules. But why stop here? For example, perhaps people studying Environmental Studies could take C levels. And so on. Alas, all the fun seems to have gone from the examination hall. We had a teacher who wrote above the wall clock in my O level Physics exam:”Time will pass. Will you?” That’s jail today.
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Deep, deep down I’m all flowers and madrigals, but I admit it felt good to don the white hard hat recently and return to the bad, butch world of building sites. It’s he-man country at Housman Hall where two whopping new buildings are going up and two shockers are coming down. From the emerging first floor of the new build one can pose in a hi-vis jacket and hang around flexing a pec next to a pneumatic drill. At such times, I fancy cement dust is, to me, what sea-spray was to John Masefield. But then a real builder appears carrying bricks in his teeth, and I’m obliged to hand back my tough-guy outfit and slope quietly down the Kidderminster Road in a suit. As the now eponymous resident of Housman Hall once wrote:
And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they'll say that I
Am quite myself again.
