Eraser in hand, evil lurks at schools
EDUCATIONAL theorists (provided nobody gives them any actual power) are a rich source of entertainment. The latest glorious pronouncement is from Professor Guy Claxton, a cognitive scientist, who says he would ban from the classroom all erasers (what my generation called rubbers, before the word got rude). Erasers are “instruments of the devil”, he says, because they perpetuate a “culture of shame” about getting anything wrong.
He says we need a culture where children learn without guilt from their mistakes. So we do. But erasers are actually part of that: a must-have in every pencil case, a source of gleeful power in small determined hands. Black end for ink, pink for pencil, your eraser is the very antithesis of shame, saving you from a dismal exercise book hatched with sweaty crossings-out.
Erasers are bungee-bouncy friends: solid little objects with a brisk practical use, reassuring in a world of keyboards. They also come in useful for pinging at enemies with a ruler.
They are also entertaining to draw pictures on with sticky ballpoint and print them on your hand, your desk, or your maths book. Once sanity has been restored in this land and smartphones have been banned from all schools, such creative pastimes will return.
In my children’s primary school, my son got through an eraser a week because of a craze for cutting them into tiny pieces with the craft scissors, drawing faces and ears on the fragments and calling them “electrobugs”. His seven-yearold peers would create and swap electrobug families, making up characters and stories for them and thus ensuring the future of the narrative arts.
Having had this refreshing fun, you can go home and make your parents buy you a new one. Because you still need it for rubbing out misspelt words and sums where you forgot to carry the two or offset the tens line when multiplying. Honestly, why deny children in those hot summer classrooms the blessing we all crave, of putting things right and forgetting that we’re sometimes fools?
Long before word processing, my temp-typist days meant getting through a bottle of Tipp-Ex every two days. Today, a flick of a finger banishes false starts in a second. Lovely.
But Claxton wants to ban this happy oblivion to children, does he? Wants to confront them with page after page of sad crossings-out — for if they don’t cross out mistakes, how do they remember which was the right answer? Little clever Dicks will have just the one clean page, while those who take longer to get things right will have to look back gloomily on the detritus of tear-stained effort . . . No, too much!
Especially in an age when adults, musing on our rather larger and more telling mistakes, are starting to demand the Right to be Forgotten Online. We resent more and more the horrifying eternity of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube embarrassments and the uncomfortable knowledge that any mischievous googler can call up our worst outfits, photos, remarks, interviews and romances. The other day a young colleague cacklingly told me he had been in some archive and found a rambunctious magazine interview I did at university in the ’70s when I was drunk, not yet 21, and foolishly flattered to be asked. Mistakes are there to be learnt from, blushed at, and erased. Let the kids start early. — © The Daily Telegraph, London