Hats off to organs

The temperature will heat up in the home education world this week.

It could be thanks to Parliament and a select committee chewing over that review.

Or it could be more buzz on Badman and those statistics which mislead to deceive.

Perhaps it will be a shitload of bad news and anti-home ed propaganda, telling you how Grit and all her kind are goat slaughtering loonies whose children are at risk from not receiving a state education and must therefore be deprived, neglected, randomly poked with fish, and should be removed from poor parental care.

The sum total will be that Grit is more dedicated than ever to sounding like a drunk hanging around shop doorways shouting to passers by that home education is a perfectly normal, reasonable, and sane course of action, should you choose not to march your little kid off to a state testing centre Mon-Fri. With homework. At age four.

Like today. I take my little grits to see organs in a field.

Here's one.

I've got plenty more pictures like that. There were a lot of organs.

And all manner of Victorian music equipment.

Chin up, Squirrel. Only another 47 organs to go.

But then someone offers Shark the chance to have a grind on their organ.

And things start looking up. Because the delightful lady organ owner tells us stories which make organs sound completely fascinating and interesting. Now we all want a go.

All that grinding is hard work, so we have a bit more respect about these amazing hand built boxes, and their place in street culture. Seriously, Wikipedia doesn't do justice.

And we meet some extraordinarily knowledgeable people, who are engineers, artists and musicians rolled into one.

Receiving a lesson on sound waves, managing airflow and the applications of compressed air is probably on the National Curriculum somewhere. Here it is for us.

Some children will receive this lesson in a classroom. Probably the same classroom as thirty other kids, and the one Kirk is banned from, thanks to the hammer incident last week. They'll be tested on it soon. In a worksheet.

Our lesson was in a field in the sunshine from an expert. The same gentleman who, from pictures, observation of stained glass windows, principles of design, and discussions with researchers in medieval music, built a model of a twelfth century musical instrument.

I guess music history is somewhere in the National Curriculum too. Or perhaps the government decided this is not a subject primary school children need to know about.

Lucky us.