The know-it-all snowflakes who think it’s an insult to go to school
HEADMASTER Matthew Raggett of the Doon all-boys’ college in the Himalayan foothills, one of the world’s most successful schools, reckons the biggest scourge for teachers is the mobile phone.
up to 80 per cent of problems in the classroom are caused by the distractions of electronic devices, he says. A child with a smartphone is incapable of concentrating on anything else.
Indian Summer School (C4) highlighted the benefits of Raggett’s firm, but gentle, insistence on banning all mobiles. His students, many from India’s wealthiest families, were impeccably well behaved — much as you’d also expect at a top English private school.
But as five under- achieving British lads joined the classes, this show revealed a deeper malaise in UK education, even more pernicious and destructive than the Facebook, selfie culture.
It’s worse than a truculent refusal to learn. Today’s teens are taught, through celebrity worship and starmaker shows such as The X Factor, that they are born uniquely perfect, and any attempt to mould or educate them is tantamount to abuse.
Cocky, lazy Jake summed it up best. The 18-year-old treated the Indian teachers with contempt from the day he arrived, smuggling a couple of bottles of rum in his suitcase and scrawling swearwords across his test papers. ‘That’s my character,’ he said smugly, ‘ so obviously I’m not going to change.’
The producers didn’t challenge the notion that every snowflake is sacrosanct. Even the school treated the idea with respect.
Inevitably, one of the five boys, 17-year-old Ethan from the Welsh valleys, believed he’d been ‘born in the wrong body’. He wanted to ‘transition’ as soon as he could afford sex- change surgery, but in the meantime he graciously allowed the teachers to address him as a male. ‘It don’t offend me,’ he assured the camera.
But the idea of having his shoulder-length hair cut to meet school regulations reduced him to hysterics. Nonsensically, he claimed short hair would prevent him from embracing his true feminine nature later in life — as if hair didn’t grow, or no woman ever had a severe bob.
The school buckled and let him keep his locks. The other three boys in the experiment knuckled down and were soon improving their grades, hoping to pass the English and Maths GCSEs that had eluded them in Britain.
It’s no coincidence that Ethan and Jake, the boys given leeway to ‘be themselves’, gained least from the experience.
Looking around with a sneer, Jake proclaimed that his obedient Indian classmates had allowed themselves to be ‘brainwashed’. But he’s the one who has been duped, along with an entire British generation that thinks it’s an insult to be asked to learn.
Indian education was the theme of a superb episode of Civilisations ( BBC2), as art historian Simon Schama explored the flowering of Mughal culture from the walled city of Lahore to the splendour of the Taj Mahal. This series has sputtered as it attempts to include all world history, but it came thrillingly to life when Schama compared the Renaissance in East and West.
He was in awe of the gilded beauty created by Muslim artists, and imperiously confident as he explained the meanings hidden in great Dutch and Italian works.
His description of how Cellini cast a bronze statue of the Greek hero Perseus slaying Medusa was as breathless as an action movie — with a great twist at the end of the tale.
And his deconstruction of Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch could change the way we view it for ever. unmissable.