Alan Thompson - Thoughts on Education

Parenting is - even at its least complicated - a really tough job. And while we celebrate the unique individuality of each child,  that very uniqueness does mean that there is no guide book for parenting - what works for one can be disastrous for another (even when the apparent circumstances seem identical).     In addition to there being no ‘one-size-fits-all’ set of rules for parenting, we each take into our parenting roles all sorts of learned behaviours that are informed by our own childhood experiences, traumas, and psychologies. On top of that still is the fact that our parenting is only one voice in a situational chorus of influences from peers, society at large, and social media. Many of these voices are more influential and exciting than the humdrum parenting voice – they inform the exciting while our voice informs the necessary.    There are all sorts of traps that well-intentioned parents can fall into – living vicariously through our childr...

Have you noticed how hard the world tries to make us think in binary choices? I marvel at how, what should be deeply nuanced conversations are distilled into straight choices between, for example, Democrat or Republican, Conservative or Labour,  when in fact, on deeper analysis, there is little fundamental difference upon which to differentiate between them. While the personalities involved are projected as stark choices, beyond the labels there is much more in common between them than one would initially think.    Indeed, the think-tank, focus-group mumbo-jumbo that passes for contemporary global political discourse marks a low-point in our democratic progression, not least because much of it is manipulated by third parties to cynically influence social media trends.    And it is not just politics. How often do we fall into the (intellectual) trap of declaring undying love for one product, and denigrating its obvious (constructed) rival? I am a Land-Rover ...

  Once, when travelling, I stayed overnight at a beautiful B&B.  It was a work trip, though, and I was not in the mood for socializing. How irritating, then, when I realized it was one of these ‘shared table’ breakfast arrangements where I would have to earn my bacon and eggs by sitting opposite a complete stranger - themselves chagrined by the set-up - and make small talk prefaced by the dreadfully inane ‘so what do you do’?   It turns out that he actually had a most unusual job. He was an engineer who travelled the world commissioning robots. Not just any old robots, though. This engineer’s life work (for the moment at least) was commissioning robots that would then go on to commission robots without the help of humans. Apart from being complicit in his own redundancy, he was a fascinating breakfast partner as he explained the future of machines, robotics, machine learning, and AI. Far from being worried that these things were threatening his future, he was, in...

“Monseigneur Bienvenu had been formerly, according to the accounts of his youth and even of his early manhood, a passionate, perhaps a violent man. His universal tenderness was less an instinct of nature than the result of a strong conviction filtered through life into his heart, slowly dropping in upon him, thought by thought; for a character, as well as a rock, may be worn into by drops of water.”     ―   Victor Hugo,   Les Misérables   I hate generation theory. The very idea that a generation’s worth of unique souls can be pigeon-holed (and often caricatured) irritates me. It is an intellectual shortcut to generalize at such scale, and I do my best not to do it. That said, there are certainly significant differences in the way that I (and my generation) grew up compared to how a child would experience the world today.   And as tempting it is to get all curmudgeonly and reflect on the ‘good old days’ in a Gen-X kind of way, that is not the point of t...