Loaded Objects 1: The Tennents Lager Lovelies Cans

I’m not sure how old I was when these first floated into my consciousness, but it would have been at some point in the late eighties when I was at primary school and gradually beginning to focus my attention outside of my childish circle of friends and activity into the mysterious world of adults.

The tins (tinnies): marvellous in their ranked uniformity:  the front of the can emblazoned with that bold red T with the turned down ends on the top and the sky blue background perfectly setting off the foamy-topped glass of amber liquid, and then, like a conjuring trick, you’d circle round the display in Prestos Supermarket (radio jingle: “You’ll be impressed in Presto!”) to see the many and varied lovelies on the back. How many of them were there? I never had a sense of it. Linda and Kelly and Janis and all those other reassuringly bland names. Who were they? Where did they come from? What did their mammies and daddies think about them being on the back of a beer can?

Even at that young age the cans provoked a deep curiosity accompanied by a simultaneous deep unease in me. On the one hand I liked looking at the lovelies (of course, that was the whole point of them) – their helmets of moussed hair, so fashionable in those days; the Bowieseque streaks of harsh pink blusher (considered so tacky now, but the absolute height of fashion then); and their exotic outfits, sometimes reassuring, like a fluffy pink sweater, other times risqué verging on the pornographic – baby blue satin nightgowns or glimpses of lingerie, utterly exotic when all you’ve seen is you and your mam’s faded sensible knickers hanging on the line. But along with the titillation and the aesthetic pleasure of looking at pretty young women there was something else – something that I wasn’t then able to put into words or form into a coherent question. I was taken up by the who and the what – who was Linda and what was she wearing? But the questions I was unable to form were all why – why were these women on the back of beer cans? Why were some of them wearing fancy (I didn’t yet know the word ‘sexy’) clothes? Why were there no men on the back of the cans?

There was something highly collectible about the tins, which as a child I understood very keenly. These cylindrical tubes, each with their shiny pretty lady on the back were the next step up from the Paninni stickers we traded in the playground. I imagined the men who bought the cans arranging them in similar pyramidal displays on their mantelpieces, sitting swigging their Tennents and looking at their collection of lovelies. I thought about what they might be thinking as they looked at their tinnies and I felt strange and uncomfortable inside. I knew it was best not to ask anyone about what this meant.

But there were things I dimly understood. Tennents and tinnies in general were for men, which meant that the pictures of the lovelies were for men, not for ladies. It was a bit embarrassing to look at them, to think about what Mam and Dad would say if they caught me sneaking peeks them. But then, why were they there in big displays in Prestos? You couldn’t not look at them! I’d seen the dirty magazines hidden away on the top shelves of newsagents and somehow I knew these tinnies, although they were on display right in front of the main doors of the town supermarket just like Fairy Liquid and Daz, were from the same family of items as those magazines, and that there was something not quite right going on, something that made my dull little local supermarket, in my grubby little seaside hometown, suddenly feel like a hostile environment.

To this day I’ve never had even a sip of Tennents – partly out of a class-based snobbishness (somehow I’m sure it won’t taste as good as the cold crisp expensive Italian lagers I love) but also because of the invisible gender-based taboo that was imprinted within me during the run of that advertising campaign. I wasn’t then aware of the grim drinking culture that existed in Scotland, or how masculine it was. My dad didn’t drink Tennents and my grandpa preferred to drink his beer draught, in the company of other people at the local pub. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I became aware of the tradition of the ‘carry out’ – and the fondness for Scots to sit drinking tin after tin in their own houses, or to build my imagined pyramids of empty cans on every available surface in the living room and kitchen.

The campaign ended in 1991, apparently, when I was 13. I suspect it had started to look a little gauche in the wake of lads’ magazines and Eurotrash. I feel no nostalgia for the Tennents lovelies, but perhaps some misplaced admiration for the campaign strategists that took the objectification of women to its logical apex, and persuaded an entire nation for several decades to unthinkingly sling Linda, Kelly and Janis into their baskets alongside their toilet rolls and discount dogfood. Cheers.

How we radicalise our children

Radio 4 on while I eat my lunch. I’m half listening, half focused on my tuna salad. It’s sunny outside, but looks like it might turn any moment.

A woman’s voice: frustrated, indignant, proud. I catch snatches of her conversation with a posh male interviewer. She’s foreign, but it’s not clear from where. She’s lived in the UK for many years; experienced a lot of racism. Her son is in the Middle East. He’s fighting for something or other. She doesn’t understand. It’s not how she raised him. It’s not what she wants for him.

I shudder to myself: impossible to conceive how a young British girl or boy would choose to go and fight a foreign war. Could slip off their cushy life in the UK like a snake shedding its skin and bed down with bearded infidels in some sandstorm shithole. Stop wanting iPhones and Happy Meals and yearn for Jihad and the cold steel of a Kalashnikov on their shoulder. Then I shudder again, check myself. ‘You know exactly how it happens. Exactly.’

The first doll I chose for myself was black. The first boy I kissed was Chinese. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I was drawn to difference - not out of curiosity; out of recognition. Growing up in rural Scotland with an English accent, English parents and Scandinavian looks marked me out as ‘not one of us’, and no matter how hard I tried I never managed to fit in. Had to learn to be that square peg, forever squashing myself into a round hole.

My family had very few real Scottish friends – that was the first thing. We lived at the end of a dead end road a mile from any neighbours, and we kept mostly to ourselves. Five years of happy isolation had already made me an outcast, although I didn’t realise it until I started school, whereupon it was rapidly made clear to me: ‘You’re not Scottish. You’re English.’ I soon learned that any reference to an English person was inevitably preceded by the adjective ‘fucking’ and followed by the nouns ‘prick’ or ‘bastard’. The kids in the year above, who hated me on sight, called me FEB, a handy little marker, which could be applied to sassenachs of either gender and meant ‘fucking English bitch’ or ‘fucking English bastard’. I put my head down and got on with things. Learned to be funny. Learned to appease.

In secondary school things improved slightly, as we gradually learned to assume the sheen of civilised behaviour that is required of young adults. The other kids mostly hid their direct hatred of me. But the anti-English rhetoric was constant, and occasionally even my best friends would forget themselves, as in the occasion when my closest friend ended a long bitter rant with the words, ‘I fucking hate the English.’ When he suddenly realised I was present… ‘but not you Kirsten, you’re ok’. By this stage, it didn’t even occur to me to point out that I was born in Inverness, had lived in Scotland all my life. Knew fuck all about England and what it means to be English. I’d pretty much forgotten, because everyone else was so convinced about who I really was. Imagine all your friends and enemies, for years and years and years, saying to you: you aren’t white, you’re black; you aren’t human, you’re from Mars.’ Eventually you start to accept it.

I survived the thirteen years of school by absorbing the descriptions applied to me and just getting on with things. At university in Edinburgh, where for the first time I was surrounded by many English people and people from other parts of the world, the anger suddenly rose in me, fresh and vivid as the blood spurt from a knife wound. I began to think about why. Began to resent what had happened to me. Began to realise how pummelled and bruised my sense of identity was. Began to question the future of this, ‘my’ country.

The result of this intense period of self-examination and reevaluation of the past was a nascent radicalisation. ‘Fuck you all’ was my conclusion. ‘Racist parents filling the heads of children with ignorant hatefulness, and nodding as they do the same to their children and their children’s children. Fuck 1707. Fuck you all. Your beautiful country, which you don’t deserve, needs to be severed from the rest of the world before you infect it. The Romans had the right idea with their wall. Independence is what you need. Then you can’t blame your pathetic inconsequential lives on innocent “foreign” children. You’ll have to stand on your own without me and my kind as a prop.’ 

This wasn’t Northern Ireland. There was no war for me to join. I joined the SNP instead, sent in my cheque and got my little plastic black and yellow card in the mail the next week. I didn’t join up because I loved my country: I joined because I hated it. I wanted the same thing the nationalists wanted but for a very different reason. I wanted them to leave me, and all the future mes the fuck alone. It wasn’t a mature response. It wasn’t even rational, but it was something. It was the beginning of kicking back, reclaiming my identity.

So what? You might think. Some kids were mean to you at school and you got angry about it. Big fucking deal. Well here’s the thing. Here’s why I listened to that woman on Radio 4 and understood completely why her son is where he is, doing what he’s chosen to do. What happened to me was nothing… nothing at all compared to what black kids, brown kids, Muslim kids, 'foreign' kids have to go through. Especially those who are vulnerable – separated from their pack, without backup, without the social skills or the desire to rise above it all. My school days were a cake walk compared to what so many kids have to endure and yet the rejection - both the outright hostility and the subtle kind - have stayed with me and formed me. Formed my politics, formed my actions, formed my identity. Nothing about me is especially radical, yet I was radicalised, and I know that all I have to do to radicalise another is to make him understand that he won’t ever be joining my gang. I don’t need to beat him, torture him or humiliate him. I don’t even need to say it to his face, but there are a million tiny ways to communicate to him with absolute clarity ‘You will never belong.’

The smug Radio 4 interviewer ended by asking the woman if she loved Britain. The presumption in that question made me want to punch my fist into the radio. Instead of losing her temper with him, as I would have done, she gave a careful, evasive answer. She thought there were many good things about living here. Britain was a very civilised place. She is glad to be here. She’s decided to live with it, in other words. I didn’t. I got out. Left my home. Chose exile. Her son got out too. As will many others, on and on, marching off into an uncertain future, until we learn, collectively, to open our hearts a great deal more: to welcome the strange ones in.

The Magic Beans of Educational Technology

One of the trends I’ve noticed recently in my consultancy work is to get part of the way through an engagement before we reach what I’ve taken to calling ‘the magic beans moment’.

Sometimes this happens close to the beginning and sometimes almost at the end of a project, but it always involves a meeting with someone in the client organisation realising that the technology solution they’ve opted for is not the automatic route to profit/sexiness/increased student retention/a BAFTA (delete as appropriate) that they were hoping for. In other words, the magic beans they thought had been planted have resulted in a fairly standard-looking plant, not the mighty forest of their dreams.

To be fair, most of the people I work with don’t believe in magic beans. They’ve been around educational software and hardware long enough to understand that there are always limitations; that technology is not a substitute for good teaching or good instructional design, but there will always be some people - often those who control budgets and decisions - who believe that technology alone is enough.

One of the hardest things about being a consultant is having to deliver the news that I can’t perform miracles. At one meeting, a senior person in a technology team actually asked me to tell him why the software he was working a 70-hour week to build wasn’t ‘just a gimmick’. I went away and thought long and hard about it, but in the end I wasn’t able to reassure him. I decided that his product was potentially very useful (in conjunction with great pedagogy and teachers), but that wasn’t the headline-grabbing answer he was looking for. In short, I couldn’t give him the magic beans.

10 Good Things About School

School comes in for a lot of criticism, including from me. I'm really not convinced school is the best place for most of us, and if I had a child of my own (I have two step kids) I'd be very keen to home school them, rather than send them into the current UK education system.

But…

I've read John Holt; I've read Ivan Illich; and as convincing as they are, and as right as they may be, society has to be organised somehow. School isn't perfect, but as an exercise in optimism and honesty, I thought I'd try to come up with ten good things about school, partly as an experiment, and partly just to see if I could.

1. It gets kids away from their parents
This works both ways. Parents can earn a living and gain some respite from the ceaseless tedious demands of their youngsters, regaining a sense of themselves as autonomous individuals as a result. Meanwhile kids meet other adults with (if they're lucky) entirely different opinions, approaches, skin colours and habits to their parents. By being presented with variety kids gain a sense of difference, and can choose their role models. (Obviously I'm biased, but I also thing kids with two sets of parents have an advantage over those from nuclear families…)

2. It introduces risk in a secure environment
If kids were taught about the world in uncontrolled, unstructured environments (as many around the world still are), a lot more of them would suffer, and a lot more would die in horrible accidents. Schools and teachers are really, really good at introducing kids to physical and intellectual tasks in a graded, secure manner, which builds up their confidence and abilities gradually. This is considerably better than the days when kids were chucked into swimming pools and (literally) told to sink or swim.

3. It encourages creativity
I read a quote recently that the only part of the UK school system which wasn't broken was primary school, because of its emphasis on encouraging constant creative exploration. Even if it's true that this stops at secondary (and I don't think it is true), that's still 7 years of being encouraged to explore, make messes and experiment. If kids were all schooled at home, or in creches in the workplace, I think it's unlikely that they'd be given as much time or space over so many years to explore so many different subjects, write so many stories, paint so many pictures or just muck about in the grass and the sandpit.

4. It encourages competition AND collaboration
Try as they might, schools can't eliminate competition. Kids will always measure their achievements against those of their peers, just as they will continue to do as adults. Good schools will channel this spirit of competition to drive students on to do their best. A child educated at home or in an adult environment will only have their own achievements or those of unsuitable 'opponents' to measure themselves against. Similarly I can't conceive of a school environment where daily collaboration between peers wouldn't be the norm. Collaboration is essential in all human environments, but there are few where it can be as common or as well planned as in schools.

5. It provides increasing responsibility at points when *most* students are ready for it
I didn't think my step-daughter was ready for sitting an important series of tests like SATs (I'm still not happy that anyone has to sit them at such a young age), but she really surprised me by rising to the challenge of revising for and getting top marks in all of them (with a fair amount of encouragement at home, it has to be said). Most of her peers did well or well enough in them. If it had been left up to me I would never have challenged her with such high-stakes tests at her age. I'm too emotionally close with her to want to put her through something like that. And that's probably why it shouldn't be me making the judgement about when she's 'ready' to be given that responsibility.

6. It challenges them
School is hard. It's hard physically, emotionally and intellectually. My kids are often exhausted at the end of a school day, and no wonder. If they were studying at home with me I doubt I'd be able to keep them as busy, as well-organised or as engaged as they are at school. I still think that the year I sat my Highers was probably the most demanding one of my life. Many argue that school doesn't prepare kids adequately for the workplace, and in some respects this is almost certainly true, but in other respects, what experience better prepares them for negotiating complex, hierarchical organisations; getting along with their peers; coping with enormous workloads and juggling a wide variety of projects at once?

7. It gives kids opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have
If my parents had been responsible for educating me I doubt I'd have spent as much time as I did playing musical instruments, using industrial lathes, interviewing astronauts, visiting Moscow or being encouraged to study computer science. Even the poorest kids are given significantly better opportunities and experiences through school than they would otherwise have.

8. It teaches kids things their parents can't
Despite getting good marks in maths all the way through school I found myself really struggling at times to coach my step-daughter in preparation for her Maths SATs. There is no way I could help my step-son with his GCSEs without sitting them first myself. There are many other school subjects I feel ill-equipped to help my step-children with, and I know from experience that my advice can sometimes confuse matters, especially with maths, where different schools have different approaches to things. I'm glad my kids are being taught by specialists with professional training and (mostly) several years of experience in their subject.

9. It teaches them good behaviour
It's a rare child who isn't better behaved in school than at home. Because of the intense emotional closeness between children and their parents, kids generally feel freer to criticise or play up around their parents. I remember being quite shocked to see my step-daughter bring home a school report which praised her 'exemplary' manners and behaviour at school. If only I were able to report the same! That's not to say that parents can't teach good manners, but the organisational structures of school, and the emotional distance between teachers and pupils, is probably better designed for the transmission of social norms and codes of behaviour.

10. It's fun
Not all the time. Not even most of the time if I'm really honest about my own time there. But my abiding memory of my last few years of school at least is the amount of time I spent having a laugh, both with friends and teachers. Sure I was bored a lot of the time, I was bullied, I disliked a lot of my teachers and classmates - I wouldn't go back if you paid me, but I frequently used to laugh so hard my sides ached - that happens maybe once a year now, if I'm lucky. Maybe that's just a function of youth, but there again, who better to share your youth with than with other young people, and where better to do that than in school?