Dogma and Tradition: An England for the future!

I see Minister Gove, our renowned educationalist, has pronounced again.

Remember he toured China a couple of years ago? How he was starstruck? Especially how those hard-working Chinese come toppety-top in international measuring sticks for maths, science, more maths, and more science.

The might of Chinese education! How seductive it is. How powerful the man who brings it about! But to achieve it, Minister Gove must first Reeducate the People of England and Wales using the Chinese Characteristics witnessed at first hand.

Then what can we expect? We stubby-fingered, stumpy legged Anglo Saxon types? Clinging doggedly to our romantic Swallows and Amazons myths of agrarian childhoods while we look no further than the pig's mud we are grubbing for hedgehogs to roast.

1. Tinkertop, never too young.
Parents, in the Reeducation of the People With Chinese Characteristics, this will become your first Govian duty!

Brush up Tinkertop's interviewing technique. Even though she's aged two. If she is to succeed in our glorious national enterprise, Tinkertop must offer herself up to scrutiny, identify her failings, and make self-criticism as necessary. Then she may learn properly how to lay out the train set according to true Govian principles.

Welcome to Gove's model of early Asian education. Nurseries in Hong Kong run interviews. This is serious busine$$. The nursery Tinkertop attends can affect her final university place, so she must provide the correct interview answers! (It's bread.)

Not only good for Tinkertop, but good for business! Price competitive pre-school education sessions, crammer courses, and intensive toddler coaching!

You think I'm joking, no?

2. The 12-hour school day.
Tinkertop can never relax now she won that nursery place! She must maintain the intellectual pace of the intellectual elite. A twelve-hour day for school kids, including after-school-school, weekend camps, plus a punishing amount of homework.

3. No play. 
In the Govian future, of course it will not be possible to send your ten-year old out to play.

Let's adopt the Chinese approach to playground provision. Playgrounds for anyone over the age of five? Forget it. Remember, hedgehog grubbers, kid playing is A WASTE OF TIME. Outdoor activities prevent desk study. Sitting on a wobbly duck will not help you memorise Govian-certified facts. The energy expended by legs is proved to drain the brain. Climbing a monkey bar will never improve a maths score.

Parents, the school will expect you to do your duty. Schedule, schedule, schedule. All the way to graduation.

4. Continuous testing. 
Monitoring, testing, surveillance. All here to benefit Tinkertop and her ilk who would backslide into hedgehog roasting the moment the pressure is off. International scores must be maintained and their acceptance reinforced.

(And if Tinkertop stubbornly refuses to perform well in her exams, this is probably due to her moral failure, her spineless parents, and her gutless agrarian-noddled teachers.)

5. Teacher beware.
Under the Gove regime, Tinkertop must achieve A grades. Otherwise your pay will dip. Under Minister Gove, all teachers will compete and be paid by results where the results are grades. You will be made to comply via classroom inspections; at every opportunity these will weed out any who maintain wrong thinking - that schools are performing some sort of fluffy community goal.

In the Reeducated future, name-and-shame techniques will be used to identify bad teachers who fail to deliver the prescribed curriculum. Then let Chairman Gove come to save us!

6. Keep Tinkertop's brain busy.
Now Tinkertop reaches secondary level. Preferably in a crowd, where expressions of individuality invite social humiliation, where rote learning and chanting are good, where demonstrations of independent thinking are bad.

Keep Tinkertop occupied with mindless repetitive tasks; this is the perfect training for work.

(What do you mean, sounds like preparation for a life spent making steel in a backyard furnace? It's keeping people employed without the use of any critical faculties at all!)

7. Create an elite. 
Power cares not about left or right, capitalism or communism. Power is. Chairman Mao cared not about 'levelling the playing field'. Gove can learn from this. Talk equality but via the educational system put into place an elite; where family dynasties reign supreme, and where business covertly stitches up deals with government in areas of common interest.

8. Bring in the enforcers.
Obviously the Annoying People won't give in quietly to the programme of Govian Reeducation. Better steamroller the lot of them, throwing up smokescreens of politics and criticising them all as anti-patriotic fifth columnists. Meanwhile, effect all changes quick and dirty; avoid challenging statute law; use pressure on reluctants via the special advisers. (Trans for the awkward squads: Gove is coming to get you.)

9. Effect a culture change. 
Unfortunately, England does not share the knee-jerk cultural reaction when you mention the gaokao. In China, the gaokao exam is everything. It is access to your future life. Everything stops for the gaokao. Planes are re-routed, traffic ceases, neighbourhoods are monitored for noise. Shame that the wild and wilful Anglo Saxon hoards with their annoying finger-jabby anti-authoritarian leanings are not so deferential. But they can be persuaded, no? We can start with single exam boards; they will be far easier to manipulate directly from government.

10. Create a national fantasy. 
Under the influence of Mao, whole villages strived to out-do each other with evidence of high crop yields, the marvellous record on steel production, the wonders of increased productivity! Chairman Gove needs to similarly encourage the information-propaganda machine: tell us how his changes have reaped wonderful rewards. Expect tales of international success and excellence. A new utopia is at hand. Out with the olds. In with Chairman Gove!

Soon, Chairman Gove will have his name by every white board in the land. The photograph will follow. See then! The Reeducation of the People With Chinese Characteristics is complete! Our Great Leader Chairman Gove!

We love Chairman Gove! We love Chairman Gove!

That was a day

Say what you like about Thatcher, she did me a favour.

There I was, providing my junior Shark, Squirrel and Tiger with a lecture on 1980s British social and political history, introducing them to the Toxteth riots, which naturally segued into an explanation of Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher, took a diversion into unionised labour, fell into an extended riff on the place of women then and now, before finishing with a replay of The Specials Ghost Town, and WALLOP! I find the very subject of my educational endeavours, she died.

Bang on cue. My extended lecture on the 1980s no longer 'mother wittering on again', but suddenly relevant to us all, and this time not for my happy reminiscences about my sticky-up Thompson Twins hairstyle (which totally suited me, if you're wondering).

Tiger, Squirrel and Shark, they looked at me with a new and quiet awe. Mama had clearly brought about this state of affairs through educational mind power alone. If she can do that to ex-prime ministers, what can she do to us?

At the very least, my children, place you in one of the key areas of the country when you can honestly answer that question, Where were you when Thatcher died? with 'In Liverpool, home of anti-Thatcher riots, place of Militant Tendency, above a pole dancing club, where we can listen to the explosions and cheers of the street revelers below'.

I'm assuming this sequence of events is pure coincidence by the way, and not the power of the spoken word, carried on a special poisoned air, flying from this place to hers, to knock her sideways. But I'm not telling the kids that.

For me, I don't know whether to punch the air or continue my lecture with a sober addendum on woman power. At this point, I can't tell the little grits whether Thatcher saw the inevitable changes that were coming to the UK's industrial heritage and simply precipitated them, or whether she caused the misery and grief and mayhem out of blind ignorance and willful spite aimed at male-dominated union power. Maybe both.

But Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have certainly had an educational time of it. Not only have we delivered the death of a most controversial ex-prime minister, we've renegotiated the Slavery Museum and the Maritime Museum, both of which bring an odd tangential support to an impromptu politics lesson while we explore the world in terms of power and control, resistance and defiance.

And thanks, Liverpool. You're certainly making this outing one to remember.

Let's eat Africa!

Perhaps it should be somewhat embarrassing to be eating Africa, given that our normal consumption of this diverse continent is a media diet of starving children, lost migrants, mad dictators, unsanitary refugee camps, bloody civil wars, sky-rocketing crime rates, bizarre voodoo rituals, genital mutilation and slaughtered wildlife. It all seems to require us not to provide cake, but a general sense of powerlessness, misery, regret and guilt.

Unfortunately, I do not do those states very well. But I do make a mean cake. Then let us proceed unashamedly. Biscuit dough with a huge dollop of cocoa powder makes a fine land mass. Chocolate chips make mountains, marzipan makes effective desert and the chemistry lab can provide us with blue running rivers for the Nile, Congo, Niger, and Lake Victoria.

Enjoy.

Thank you, Ellen McHenry, for supporting this child-friendly approach to African history, politics and economy in Mapping the world with Art. (And cake.) 

1931/2012, it's all the same

Thanks to MKG Art Gallery, took Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to watch a film about thievery, prostitution, financial corruption, self-interest, and greed; all pursued in a criminal society with no moral compass to raise it from the mire.

Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera, as filmed by Pabst (1931).

Afterwards I make everyone watch this analysis from Shooting Down Pictures, not least for another listen to Lotte Lenya sing Pirate Jenny. A beautiful song, simultaneously melancholic and sinister; foreboding and romantic. Fantastic.

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger emerge from it all not sure what to think. I suggest that's probably the proper response: uncertainty and a sense of discomfort about what we thought we knew is the intention of Brecht, Weill and Pabst.

They want you to be no longer sure; they want you to observe how the morals we think we live by can be easily turned by greed and self-interest. But hey, it still creates a society we can recognise, and in one interpretation of the role of the financial industry, a society that looks remarkably similar to our own.

For my part, I loved the film. Throughout, it retains wry humour and powerful observation on us all. And it'll give me a great excuse to talk politics with the kids. Not because I want to raise mini Marxists, but because I want to give any future politician in Westminster a run for their money.

Deniable

I am sure we had this conversation, you and I, about art, politics, society, and responsibility. Shhh. It made sense at the time. But guess what? I think someone listened. Because a guerrilla artist just put all that talk into action.

I think the working desk of the artist probably looks something like this...


Maybe it involved crayons, paint, ribbon, and not a small amount of glue...


With an agitprop message on reverse...


Then these fish appeared, fluttering all around town! Particularly, I note, outside the seafood restaurants.


I have NO IDEA who the secret artist might be.

Government Fun Day

When I write my next words, a deadly streak of lightening will tear apart the sky. My mother's dead but immortal rolling pin will bear down between the rips asunder, and give me a damn good thrashing.

Because what I am about to say, Mother Ghost, is that this government-controlled fun atmosphere is the logical end for your Labour Party.


The Labour Party was Mother Ghost's unerring party of choice, thanks to the behaviour of the Tories in the 1920s depression. (I told you our family don't bear grudges.)

It was also the party I also stupidly voted for, like a turkey for Christmas in 1997, and never will again. (The Greens and their fairies worth fighting for attract my natural hippie vote, but even they can be a bit dodgy.)

Anyway, while I now dive under the blows of the Sturdy Pastry Help, I will make the next point, and it is this.

What is important, is that in England, if you do not like the Labour Party (as people so clearly showed) then there is some freedom of choice and a system of voting. (Even if, to do it, you must show your unforgivable disloyalty to your trade-unioned, Labour-hugging family.)

But how glad I am that voting exists. At least it creates some sort of means by which you can chuck the buggers out.

Unlike Hong Kong. Hong Kong is ultimately a colony of Beijing, China, and no-one messes with them.

Now, if you want to imagine the style of local government this system produces down here, in this particular SAR, then conjure up the controlling social mentality of the Labour Party together with the property-developing, stitch-up merchants of the Tories.

And that's how it stays: whatever superficial gloss is given, the government still owns all the land, continues to side with property interests, manages the economy for an engineered result of society, never allows Beijing to be upset, creates the terms of your engagement, controls the parameters of protest, and organises what you do in the high street, and this includes the FUN.

Fun round here has a social, useful, organised point. Take this example, from a poster pinned up on the ferry pier announcing tonight's government-sponsored party. Seriously, I cannot tell the difference between this poster and a school lesson plan for PSE, as to be monitored by Ofsted and reported on as part of your end-of-term teaching appraisal. It is the sort of atmos, isn't it, that the Labour Party so loved to bring to us all:

Event: Mid Autumn Festival Community Party

Purpose: To spread entertainment activities and increase traditional festival atmosphere.

Content: Singing, guessing lantern riddles, booth games, lucky draw.

We only lack the information to tell us how the teacher will lead the activities, and give a time allocation for each one.


Well of course we have to go along to this community fixture, if only to join in the happy fun in the usual Chinese manner.


Even if we weren't really invited. Well, we English people were not signalled as part of the community. Despite the posters in English, the event was entirely Cantonese-speaking. Clearly, we either had to be married into the family or needed to show willing in a lot more phrases than thank you, sorry, and toilet.

So the point of this post is - apart from the fact that now I have a dented head, thanks to the betrayal of my mother's loyalty and thus no longer deserve the place of daughter - be glad you have a system of voting.

You should use it, always, because imagine what life would be like for you now, if the Labour Party was still in power, and in control of all the fun in England.

Mother Ghost, I do not deserve your fish

Mother Ghost is chasing me with gutted fish.

I don't care if gutting trout is a dying kitchen art. I don't care that women nowadays don't properly belly cut a mackerel.

She knows I cannot stand the grisly sight. Its oily blood and flopping bladder. She knows that to escape, I would squeeze my entire body through the miniature ventilation window in the bathroom, rather than pull the lock on the bathroom door, creep back through the house, across the kitchen, past the red drain, see the dead heart and the terrible staring eyes.

But when she catches me, I know she is going to rub my face in its turned out innards.

That will be her punishment on me. She is one furious Mother Ghost, and it's just deserts for what I've done.

And worse, a bit of my conscience thinks I do deserve me. Oh yes. Because when I heard that a posh and privileged baby-faced Tory boy was Prime Minister of this country, my heart filliped a double somersault, I fist pumped the air, felt like I lifted my body two meters off the ground in jubilation, and screamed YES!

Mother Ghost, forgive me.

My mother was born in 1920. She had no childhood in a mining village in Yorkshire. She shook her head in memory of the tin bath, the candlewax, the kettle. No nostalgia there. She grew up watching a Conservative government lower taxes for the rich, and in a family poor enough to worry how to pay for the doctor to call. She watched women campaign for social reform, she saw the birth of the Communist Party in Britain, she saw her mother weep in the General Strike. She voted Labour, most of her life, because there were people who cared about her, and the society she hoped for.

And I, Mother Ghost daughter, just celebrated a Tory taking power. You can see why a part of my soul is shrivelling up with the shame of that betrayal. I may as well dig up the Mother Bones and sell them because this would amount to the same thing.

Now excuse me while I dodge the swinging blows of that punishing and vengeful fish. The Mother Ghost face is mean, and she doesn't smile when she swings that weapon in my disloyal direction.

Mother Ghost, put the fish down, and listen.

Look at my alternative. The Labour Party is not the same. They have pushed and pushed into our community, into our lives, and right to the door of this house. Sometimes I swear I have gone to sleep at night feeling their body weight creak against the windows. I've woken up, eye to eye with that dreadful bill, championed by Ed Balls, with so much horrendous implication for us as parents, educators, citizens.

Then I watched that awful bill make its steady walk to Law. With each step, coming closer, bringing with it the right of judgement by government minister. Giving up my rights, to a stranger who can walk into my house, inspect our home, demand paperwork, licence me, identify fault, interview your grandchildren without me, then force my compliance, and deny my freedom of choice. That was the Labour Party, eighty years on. And the thought of that bill re-emerging again, as ministers promised it would, if only they could return to power, chilled me to my heart.

That is why I celebrated the Tory win. I felt excited about that news, scared at the same time. I hope - and that is a pointless, foolish feeling, but I still feel it - that the most eager of the Tories are hindered by the Liberal Democrats. Perhaps the worst of what the Tory party can do is made less harmful, less bitter, less divisive, less fearful. Maybe it won't last. Maybe it will last long enough to cause disaster. Maybe they'll be stumbling men, tied together in a three-legged juddering stop-start circle, and will hobble on, eventually curling off to a new direction.

Mother Ghost, think about how times have changed. I have not wronged you. We need your protection. Your gutted fish will be better placed round another's head. You could turn your wrath to a worse one than me, and worse for us all if he takes the throne.

The arch-schemer, the long-game player, the strong-armed bully. Please, Mother Ghost, not me. Take your gutted fish to Morley and Outwood, and there, slap it round Ed Balls.

I did mean to stay up all night, I really did.

But I am weak. By 2am I am passed out on the sofa, snoring, surrounded by empty beer bottles and flattened packets of crisps.

I'd like to think Dig might find that sight arousing. But he had taken one look at the exit polls at 10pm then taken to his bed, saying that years of political experience told him things were not likely to change much, so you get your hung parliament, well done, goodnight, see you in the morning.

I wake myself up with my own throat rattling about 2.30, catch an eyeful of Andrew Neil and am immediately up and alarmed, like something horrible has happened to his face! Why is it all red and lumpy like an old foam pillow? I'm sure it wasn't like that at 1am, and maybe something totally wild happened while I'm asleep, like he and Peter Mandelson had a raging fist fight over who ate the last pork pie.

I spend a good ten minutes trying to work that out, but everyone in the BBC is behaving normally, like no-one mentions the punch up, so maybe I dreamed it. Then I began to dream of bed, and that seemed good.

I really wanted to see slimeball Balls stand up and face the baying hordes, so I'm cross at my own lack of stamina. I'll be kind to myself. Maybe the infill line of political interviewing over how to solve the international debt crisis overwhelmed me. Especially as the political commentators were Joan Collins' uplifted cheekbones, Bruce Forsyth's deceased hairpiece and Fern Britton's used gastric band.

So I woke this morning and there it was, a hung parliament, which is what I wanted. For the whole bunch of them to be so busy crawling around their own innards that they leave me alone to get on with my life. I guess they now do all the manoeuvring for power - not for themselves you understand - but in the national interest. Don't tell them that my interest right now is to enjoy the thought of them all floundering around some slimy length of intestine somewhere hoping to grab onto a floating bit of spaghetti.

And of course I discover on waking that BullyBoyBalls isn't Portillo. I am in mourning. That was so close, and I think there should be a recount, with all the people who couldn't vote going round to Morley and Outwood and voting there. It could just change that outcome.

But now it's all done and dusted. Apart from like, er, who governs. Yet there is one burning question left for me in this strange hanging-about-the-radio day. And that is how do those BBC presenters keep up all night? Are they taking something? I want some of that. There's Dimbleby and he must be aged over 70 and he can keep going all night. Why doesn't he fall facestraightdown into his papers zzzzzzzzzz at 3am?

Next time, whatever he's having, I want some in my beer.

For the best laugh I had all day

I just want to thank the person responsible for the page layout yesterday at the bottom of page 5 of the Independent newspaper, Election Guide 2010.

I'm not talking redesign. I could witter on there about the leading and letter spacing. No, it is for the following reprinted opinion piece about Balls, which is in itself gratifying to the likes of me and penned by Matthew Norman, but especially delicious for the practical page turning intrusion:

28 April: Matthew Norman - 'Will Blinky Balls consign Labour to history?'

On Monday's Newsnight Blinky Balls barely blinked at all. No doubt he noticed the line in a newspaper piece about him, that wakeful rapid eye movement is the body language for 'pathological liar'. ... Cocky, fake, slimy, inelegant, charmless, witless, weird, sinister, glacially cold and luminescently remote, he may be the most chillingly repulsive politician of even this golden generation. If Pixar set out to create a CGI character to embody everything the public has learned to despise about its political class, they'd be thrilled to come up with this lizardy schemer, who may have slipped through a tear in the fabric of space-time himself. Certainly he seems best suited to skulking beneath stone archways, in a purple robe, sibilantly sidling poison into the bloodstream of the medieval Vatican. ... If he has a political philosophy, it is the domineering, top-down, we-know-best,

- Continued on page 6 -

infantilising statism of Gordon himself ... For Mr Balls, it is football thug tribalism – a with-us-or-against-us Manichean sensibility next to which Mrs Thatcher seems a proto-Cleggian champion of consensus.

I loved that. Continued on page 6. This is a gag that could run and run, and of those of us who've suffered him, we could fill pages and pages of wicked wonderful on the perils of the hideous Balls - Continued on page 7 - unredeemed by any human feature, odious and smarmy, slipping into power with double tongue and corporate suit - Continued on page 8 - and we could continue, we could.

But I am so fingers crossed that Balls does not.

Grit's guide to politics with kids. Rule 5.

Election fever has gripped this house. La Famille Grit is urgently discussing the key issues, morning, noon and night. Along with who stole the last chocolate hobnob, which is almost as big as the economy in the scale of things. When we find out who did that, and who's got the missing UK trillions, we're going to give them both a good hiding.

To help sort out one discussion from another and focus our minds on who says what, mama Grit has turned the front room into the Election Nerve Centre.

So this is Rule 5 in this house, and the final rule in Grit's fantastic quick-fix for kids, politics guide:

Rule 5. Grab the fever. Turn your house into a set worthy of Election Night Special.

So far we have created an array of up-to-the-minute interactive display boards, designed to bring superior political analysis and interpretation of live news results. Hark! I think the BBC is banging on the front door right now, hoping to take advantage of our state-of-the-art display system.

No, just the milkman threatening us with the Old Bill. Never mind, while we wait for the BBC, here is some of Grit's Election Night Display.


OK, I admit that the only flyer we have so far stuck up on the know-your-candidate board is the Green Party. We had to print that flyer off the website because the bastards won't deliver us one on the basis that we can't be trusted to recycle it.

David Cameron was up there but the slimy posh boy keeps dropping off. I don't have enough blutack to hold him up.

And don't ask me where the liberal democrats have gone. I did have a flyer to stick up but I possibly used it for a shopping list and wrote mackerel over King Clegg's face before stuffing it in my handbag.

But the minorities are very nearly up there. We have a BNP leaflet but my hand won't let me stick it to the wall.

No-one can find out anything about the independent candidate, although we've tried. He's done no canvassing at our door, he has no website, and I've seen no posters or leaflets. I may vote for him on the basis he will leave us alone and do nothing, and that is more or less what I'd like for a few years.

You'll notice the Labour Party is not up there yet. They will go up, oh yes they will, in the interests of fair minded and balanced politics, and Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are quite entitled to vote for them oh yes they are. I have not brain washed my children that far, just reminded them about the micromanaging culture that is destroying our community, and the way the Labour Party hounded and vilified home educators over the last year, then told all resident bodies in this house that if they do put Ed Balls back in power I'm going on strike so they will starve to death and have to eat the floorboards. I think that is fair.

So on balance, right now, at this moment, we are an undecided family, although the Election Display Board is helping allocate votes on a policy-for-policy basis.

I have to admit, there is one party the children like best, and especially their manifesto which promises to make wire coat hangers illegal.


Of course we are tempted by the multilingual Clegg, because he is not one or the other.

There again, we might revert to type, and go Green, because Squirrel says, having thought about it, that fairies really do need fighting for.

Grit's guide to politics with kids. Rule 4.

In January 2009, the Labour government decided to advertise home education.

They did it quite well. Within four months of their campaign starting, the perfectly legal option of education outside state school was covered in every major newspaper and magazine. It was the subject of TV news programmes. Videos created by adults, researchers, community groups and children blew across YouTube. Twitter and hundreds of blogs blasted out the news.

Another few months saw hundreds of thousands of documents, posters, leaflets, gatherings, picnics, celebration events and letters to lords, ladies, and Members of Parliament.

The home education agenda made thousands and thousands of people aware. Education is compulsory. School isn't.

That activity was a fantastic response. It showed what leverage ordinary people apply in government. We received applause from lords, and we sent bats down the bosoms of baronesses. Our reach went far. We made history.

We'll do it again. And I would say this is the best education in politics I could have given Shark, Squirrel and Tiger.

Rule 4. Get active.

My children did things. They went places. They talked about the issues. They followed the progress of a bill in Parliament. They found out how to meet other people who had different and the same opinions. They found out how people make their voices heard through petitions, arguments, demonstration. They saw how visual and print media worked to support or undermine an issue. They learned about the role of an MP, and how MPs can pick and choose the cause they'll support. My children learned that they can make a difference.

So that's what I recommend. Look at the bills proposed by the government we get next week. Pick one to follow - one that matters - and follow it day by day, as it progresses to an Act. Watch it, read about it, go visit Parliament or your MP. It is by far the most active way you can teach your child about the political process.

More suggestions on how to involve kids actively in politics are over here.

For the moment though we're busy on important matters. Balancing chinchillas on Shark's head requires precision timing.

Grit's guide to politics with kids. Rule 3.

No messing.

Rule 3: Follow the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Here's Grit, always first with the news, eh!

But this is the real stuff. OK, you haven't got time to do it before the actual election in the UK, which is like, um, days away. But the classics are an excellent educational route into politics and power.

Don't suggest children cannot follow this fantastic history or get to grips with some of the issues contained in this slice of time. That breaks rule 2.

Because from Rome we get to talk about life. We stop being nice to each other. People bash, stab, poison and thump their way to power. They announce themselves conquerors, jackboot their way into foreign lands, stitch up dodgy deals, and over in Egypt shove snakes down their bras.

I can tell you from first-hand experience that Shark, Squirrel and Tiger, all aged ten, are enjoying themselves hugely with this; with tales of Tarquin the BAD, Tarquin the EVEN WORSE, Octavius the Sneaky GIT, Caligula the BONKERS. They're thinking about the nature of power itself and the grip of the dynasty. They're thinking about checks and balances of talking chambers, advisers, group interests. They're learning how each of these characters ruled with or without consent, with or without fear, as tyrants, dictators, kings, nutcases. Which I think is communicating some pretty valuable and relevant lessons for 21st century global living.

But consider this: why is it in state schools that kids are not taught this stuff? They are taught that Romans mean central heating, sewers, nice baths, and olive oil.

But strangely, if you pay 20K in school fees, the Romans are about monarchy, republic, conspiracy, tyranny, dictatorship, the creation of a patriarchal society, the power of rhetoric, the role of the lawmaker and the merits of military rule. In other words, pay for it, and you get the stuff of politics.

It is not an accident then that the British Empire was furthered and built by men who went to posh schools and had a direct training in the classics. It is not a fluke that rich, privately educated blokes who today tumble out of Oxbridge Philosophy, Politics and Economics courses become heads of Tory parties.

Now Grit may be an old anarchist hippie but I believe this division between the know and knownot - the way that some people are allowed near the juicy stuff of the classics but lesser mortals are kept away - is all part of a long tradition of maintaining privileged knowledge; and some knowledge clearly is to be kept away from the clutches of the gutter classes. Which sort of answers that question, Why isn't politics taught in schools?

I wouldn't exactly call it a conspiracy, but I think we have a society where some kids are kept in ignorance and taught about sewers while other kids are taught about politics, and power.

Well stuff that. Today we have more books than we can count. We have information pouring out of our screens. We have access to all knowledge. We can find out how politics works, think about questions of power, consider approaches to democracy, empower ourselves as citizens.

So that's one of the angles of politics I'm passing on to Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. And I'll leave it to their growing wisdoms over the years to steadily draw out the parallels between 496BC and 2010AD.

Grit's guide to politics with kids. Rule 2.

When you cannot figure out the menu functions on the new DVD and you pass that remote control to your six-year old, at that moment you acknowledge their expert status as supreme being of all household media.

Similarly, when I want to understand what Gordon Brown means when he talks about managing the economy, I turn to the experts. I ask, Squirrel, what would you say if Tiger borrowed your whole pocket money, blew it on chocolate Maltesers and then told you that you're going to be grounded for non-payment of her library fines?

Squirrel would deliver a strongly worded opinion about that financial management, and I would almost certainly this time remove the metal bar before we got started on that discussion.

But the point is, I assume my kids are experts already. In almost everything. From economy, education, welfare and society through to the environment, trade, defence and the benefits and hazards of the justice system.

For which read, politics.

Rule 2: Assume kids are already experts

This is obvious, if you think about it. By age two, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger had definite opinions on my parenting skills. They shared those opinions freely, loudly, and in Tesco, to a maximum capacity audience. So their ideas about social cohesion were formed.

By age three their opinions were expressed about power, and how much of it they could exert over any situation if they locked themselves in the bathroom and removed all their clothes. Maybe, with fine timing, they could explore the literal concept of naked power five minutes after I said let's go shopping.

By age four they had views on crime and punishment thanks to the incident with the rock and scissors and the soil down the toilet. The NHS came shortly after thanks to the head wound from the first day at nursery.

At age five, they had a worked out approach to solving the educational problems of this country. Mostly created while watching their peers frogmarched down Bash Street School dressed in grey and white, while they took a leisurely breakfast and decided today they'd like to build a den in the woods.

And so it has gone on. Now Shark, Squirrel and Tiger offer challenging opinions on all manner of political issues, from the notion of fairness to the practicalities of the economy, thanks to the pocket money regime monitored by the Bank of Grit.

So I'm saying that kids should be treated like the people they are when it comes to politics. Wise, knowledgeable, experienced. Anything less sounds patronising and, given their expertise with rock, scissors and metal bar, round here I wouldn't try anything other than rational debate.

Grit's guide to politics with kids. Rule 1.

It's no good, is it? I have to talk about it. The general election. Because Grit, like most smug home educating bastards, must seize this moment. I must grasp this stingingnettle opportunity.

Yes. I must now teach the little grits about politics.

I bet you'd like to think, given that we home educating types are brainwashing hothousing childabusing zealots*, that teaching my kids about politics means threatening them with rope and shouting Vote for the green-flavoured dope-smoking hippies or I tie you to the radiators again you little grits.

Unfortunately, the little grits run fast when they see the rope. They also, like most home ed kids, take no notice of a pointless parental unit like me, especially on matters which fall into the category called make up your own mind. Worse, these small opinionated people are by now thoroughly deinstitutionalised and completely individualised. Which means they roll out of bed with their own ideas on how they're going to run the planet.

Let's hope then you and me are in a spaceship heading for ZeltaMinor, that's all I'm saying, because some of those planet running ways include forced consumption of pasta and compulsory horse kissing.

Anyway, like most kids, my little grits combine a total certainty about the way to run a planet with their rights over who sits where at the breakfast table and who's not wearing mama's old cardigan again. They then mix this opinionated mishmash with a bunch of half-baked ideas sprinkled with half-arsed questions. Like Why can't conger eels rule the world? and What would happen if Gordon Brown ate only helium?

But this is where any Parent-Teacher comes in, and this is politics with kids Rule Number One that I can share with you, lovely thisfar-reader.

In fact, now I'm in full rhetorical mode, I'll don my best public service hat and tell you that these are my hard-earned wisdoms. Indeed I gladly pass them on to you, if you are looking to seize this election moment too, and educate your offspring in the ways of the world political.

Rule one. Answer all the questions about Gordon in a frock.

Yes, all the questions. Every one. You must answer them. No matter how pointless, stupid, and annoying.

In fact, this is how I teach anything, if you can call it teaching. Well OK, I don't. I listen to the questions asked by my little grits Tiger, Squirrel and Shark, and I answer them, as best I can. Sometimes my answer is, I do not know, I never thought about that, then I follow it up with Let's find out, and the consequent printing of fourmillionwikipediapages and the purchasing of 65 books on Amazon. After three weeks I can legitimately say It is all more complicated than I thought.

Now I know we don't have time for that, because there is an election to decide. But it is in this spirit that we approach the election with kids. They ask questions, we think up answers, and we all talk about it round the breakfast table, or at the side of the radiator if anyone's feeling uncooperative.

Fifteen minutes in and you may find that small offspring are filled with questions like Why is he doing that? What is he talking about? These are good questions and if we are going to join the great enterprise of educating the nation's youth in matters political, the answer must not be Shut up and eat your tea.** A bit more time and they are offering opinions like He would look stupid in a dress and He's not making me eat peas for anything. This is all good stuff, and round here we professionals call that engagement.

Now, that is Grit's fantastic Rule Number One.

I bet you can barely contain yourself for Rule Number Two.

*Balls, your crimes aren't forgiven.

**All you experienced home educators are rolling your eyes now, aren't you? Because of course you detect I have succumbed to that home ed crime of twisting everything the offspring say just to the subject I actually want to them to talk about. So Squirrel will casually say Gordon Brown would look better in a frock, and I will say Yes Squirrel, Gordon Brown would look better in a frock. And it is a jolly silly thing in our society that he cannot do that if he wants. Now let's talk about citizenship, autocracy and monarchy from the point of view that all men including Gordon Brown and the Duke of Edinburgh should be free to wear frocks, if they want.