Where would we be without our education system? We’d be in the shit, make
no mistake about that. And before you start contradicting me, let’s be clear – you are wrong. I can hear you
rolling your eyes, groaning and snorting so hard you begin to inhale your own lips. The current education
system is far from perfect, I hear you say. It’s out of date, based on a long-dead ideology, teaching the irrelevant
to the uninterested. We must remove children from this government-controlled process and free the minds of our
repressed ankle-biters! The learning of Shakespearean verse, studying a narrow and imperialist historical perspective, GCSEs in Physical Education, even trigonometry. These are all pointless you yell. No use in the real world and little benefit to your overweight spawn. No use? Fie, I say! You are an idiot. The education system as we know it must prevail. Nothing can change. Stop whining, you sound like a little bitch.
Our society is built on the assumption that education should work exactly as it does at the present moment. If
the nation suddenly embraced the idea of home-schooling, chaos would ensue. Imagine job centres filled with
people boasting pointless degrees and no transferable skills, fighting for menial jobs with those who have
pointless degrees, no transferable skills, and slightly less experience. That’s the scenario for future generations,
rather than being sent off to teach as they are today. Those skilled and fully-developed managers who left
school at sixteen with three GCSEs and the desire to earn some money, would suddenly be inundated by
potential employees who got all sulky at the suggestion they might have to come to work some time in August.
Apparently that’s not how employee organization charts operate at Burger King.
A country without teachers to prevent impressionable minds answering exam questions solely in text-speak and
emoticons would be a terrible thing. As it is, teachers provide yet another valuable service by baby-sitting
children between the hours of eight and three. There simply aren’t enough nanny stereotypes to deal with the
projected demand should this cease to be. Obviously there are plenty of sexy au pairs flooding in from Eastern
Europe, but our country doesn’t possess enough lawyers to deal with potential divorce proceedings, paternity
cases, and crimes of passion involving sharp objects and the insertion thereof, that would ensue. So, with the
cloning of frumpy non-threatening nannies still the far-off dream of slightly geeky scientists who don’t meet
enough women, but feel they might have a shot with someone who can see past their lack of personal grooming,
teachers remain the cheapest and easiest solution. If parents were forced to stay at home, the damage to our
economy would be astronomical. Buses travelling empty, cars remaining parked from seven-thirty ‘til eight, then
again from three-thirty to four. The dogs and cats of Great Britain would have no time to get lonely and deposit
faeces around our homes, meaning no need for replacement settees or carpets, resulting in furniture warehouses around the country falling into disrepair. That tragedy, one of the worst we must confront as a race, should not even be contemplated.
And what of school buildings? These hospitable places of learning would lie empty, then go to ruin, lonely
janitors left to shine perfectly clean floors and no carefully hidden gum to remove or crudely-drawn cocks to
scrub off the desks. With children taught at home by idealistic hippies, devoid of a standardized curriculum, our
schools would be nothing but shells, shells waiting to be turned into flats, where we might store identical cloned
nannies. People, this is an absurd scenario! We cannot let such a future come to pass! All must persevere!
Fight on, my courageous band of supply teachers and underachieving Bachelors of Education! For our schools
are a symbol of what makes this nation great. Schools give purpose! Without the school, Jamie Oliver would
have remained a cheeky, chirpy, cunty chef who earned millions and suffered an unbearable wife as some kind
of karmic penance. Now he’s a national hero! Without our current schooling system and it’s menopausal, animal
fat peddling dinner ladies, Oliver wouldn’t be on our television screens telling school workers how to turn carrots
into an exciting base for a flan, or some kind of tart. I don’t want to live in a world where Jamie’s ideas for forcing
quiche on schoolchildren are ignored. Do you?
