This was prompted when I was put under the spotlight by Young Laura yesterday evening (and yes, Young Laura, I know this isn’t your name but in getting your name deliberately wrong you should take it that I’m protectinag you, although the way you lay in to me sometimes I do wonder which one of it is that needs protecting!) this evening when she metaphorically pinned me to the wall and demanded to know the precise details of why a school and I parted under, ahem, expelling circumstances.
So I started thinking yesterday evening.
What’s the source of the very best education?
And no, I don’t mean the ‘behind the bike sheds’ kind (today’s youngsters -being far more ‘up front’ -probably don’t do it behind the bike sheds anyway).
I mean the source of the best and most soak-upable, understandable real education.
Hmm…
Like many of my contemporaries the majority of what I learned wasn’t from school but at the cinema on a Saturday morning.
I learned of Welsh heroism and how a major aspect of Welsh and African cultural history is intertwined in the film ‘Zulu‘.
I studied ancient military, socio-cultural and Roman-Egyptian dynamics with ‘Carry On Cleo‘.
In the subject of geography it was ‘Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.‘ that taught me St Albans was the sight of a massive hole (or am I remembering that incorrectly and really it’s that St Albans is a massive hole?).
And in American Studies I learned from various Saturday morning Westerns I that the Seventh Cavalry was always late, that a famous knife was invented by Colonel Jim Bread Bowie, that all American Indians were untrustworthy (except, for some peculiar reason, Tonto the genetic misfit who accompanied The Lone Ranger), that General George Armstrong Custer was a hero of the American people (except later in life I discovered he was a complete and utter tosspot who couldn’t manage a vertical urination in a place where beer is fermented) and that John Wayne’s name was really Marion. With an educational upbringing like this it’s easy to see how I’ve grown up to be so nowledeabel (joke!).
B.