I’ve been at a school of late, getting a sense of things.

On this particular day, many of the older kids have decided to spend lunch time in the sandpit, a place usually reserved for the littlies. They begin to dig deep holes until they are past the sand and into the earth below. The ‘problem’ boy is getting left out and desperately wants to explore the depths. But now all the spades have been taken. Melt down time. ‘Have a look in the equipment room.’ ‘They’ve all gone.’ He despairs and I go and find him a broken piece of plastic- that’ll do. A moment of parenting. He starts digging. Clay is found and possible flecks of gold. ‘We’ll need to screen it.’ These kids know about gold mining. Water is brought and the clay dug and washed. A teacher hovers – is this quite proper? Thankfully she goes. The clay is soaked in buckets of water. The problem boy has also discovered a layer of clay and is joined by another. Now he is part of the group. Dirty hands, dirty clothes. Seeking.

But the bell goes. The whole lunchtime has provided a wonderful topic for writing, and/or the clay could be used for a pottery session. But no, the task is a, ‘Be inspired by an achiever’ exercise, with quotes from Steve Adams and Richie McCaw and whoever… ‘Dream your dreams’ or ‘You are the dream’. Write an ad for Nike based on this neo liberal garbage. Conveniently forget that for every ‘success’ there are millions of ‘failures’.

This late capitalist propaganda is extraordinarily prevalent. Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was nothing compared to this. And who’s controlling it? Who’s promoting it? Who’s telling the schools to indoctrinate the kids with this celebrity shit?

And now the new fad, predictive analytics, the gathering of metadata to predict the troubled kids before they turn up, so that ‘support’ is available (‘support’ meaning some psychological snake oil about stress and anger levels). George Orwell was onto it, but couldn’t imagine the tools now available. Freire’s basing of education on what people know, on their world, has become a distant dream.

It’s time for the bureaucrats and the teachers to get back into the sandpit and join the kids in digging for gold.