We’ve gone right off the boil here

Jan 25 2008 by Bill Oldfield, The Journal

SITTING in my history class in school, probably around the age of 13, I wondered what on earth the kings and queens of England had to do with my plans for extraordinary business success, extreme amounts of money, an end to war and world poverty and (probably top of the list) a successful career as a rock star.

Geography and religious studies fell into the same “obviously useless” category as history, supported by English – the fact that I could already read obviously meant that I was a genius – and maths which was also unnecessary because I was already a whizz at deducting darts scores.

It took some years for me to be brought down to earth and begin to realise that, actually, most of this stuff was quite useful and that without it I couldn’t have had such a good day out, showing off to my children at the Tower of London, or planning a narrowboat holiday through the seldom-seen parts of our industrial cities on the canals of England.

And actually, eons of common sense meant that my education was pretty well-rounded and set me up for most eventualities in life. It wasn’t perfect and had its shortcomings, including that I was never taught English in the way one was taught foreign languages. In fact, it wasn’t until I began French that I knew the difference between a verb, noun and adjective but, all-in-all, it was along the right lines.

It seemed to give me a bit of everything and recognised that nothing really happens in isolation. So for instance, if I were to plan a trip to London with the family, I’d need to get there (geography and a few social skills), budget for it (maths), choose locations and brush up on their relevance (reading), give out a few cheques (writing) and impress the kids (history and, of course, a little drama).

So why is it that one of the things we do every day, without fail, that’s integral to everything that we do, that we can’t live without and dominates the lives of so many of us, has been left out of the curriculum for so long? I was taught to cook at school and, despite the fact that it became my career later in life, the teaching itself had a profound effect on my life with almost immediate effect in that it enabled me to impress girls when I went to college.

But it also taught me that eating is not something in isolation from anything else that I do and experience.

It affects the quality of our lives in so many ways: social, family, business and health to name a few. And yet my children’s generation wasn’t taught it and have had to depend on nonsensical “rules” that don’t work in isolation such as “eat five a day” and end up believing that fat is bad for you, which is patently absurd.

But now we’ve got the even more absurd situation. I think the expression is “You couldn’t make it up”. First of all, let’s spend a generation not teaching cookery skills in schools and then, once we’ve fewer percentage of people actually cooking in the UK than ever before, we’ll announce that we’re going to start teaching cookery again.

And where are we going to find the teachers when nobody’s actually been studying the subject?

Knowing our leaders, we’ll just move a few science teachers over and go a few generations without teaching chemistry and physics before we realise that maybe they were important too, after all.