Does prison work?

Well, it depends what you want it to do, doesn't it?

If you want to lock people up and forget about the problem, and if you are prepared to turn over more and more space and energy into building and maintaining prisons in order to accommodate larger and larger numbers of people, then yes, I suppose you might think that it does. If you have any other take on the problem then I would suggest that the answer must be a resounding NO.

If you've ever met me or read my views before, you might be unsurprised to know that I take a back to fundamental cause and effect view of this.

When I was doing my PGCE (post-graduate certificate of education) I did an extended study on the identification and treatment of the gifted child in schools. There are certain statistics which I learnt in the course of that which really stuck with me. First of these was the fact that the most important factor in how well you will do in your education is what your father does for a living. The achievements of children at the same school will vary along broadly demographically socio-economic lines. This is a stubborn statistic which government after government has tried to address with initiative after initiative. The second is that the prison population has a higher than average number of people with IQs significantly higher than the national average.

Personally I think these are linked. The one mantra which was drummed into me during my course was Children live up or down to their teachers' expectations. Children who may come into the classroom with less than impeccable manners and attitude may be viewed with suspicion by a teacher, who will make assumptions about their intellect based on their behaviour. They will be given undemanding work in the hope that they would be able to do it and would not give trouble. They may then become bored, and boredom breeds disaffection. So the behaviour may deteriorate and they may be removed to the lower sets so as not to get in the way of the 'good kids'. From then on the 'give a dog a bad name' syndrome kicks in.

Now I'm not saying this happens all the time by any means, but in large overcrowded schools where teachers are expected to teach what should be taught at home as well as their subject curriculum, it is understandable that they must set their own priorities. However, from a societal point of view we cannot allow the potential of great tranches of talent to seep out into bad behaviour and the remedial classes. Imagine how much talent sits confined in dismal cells in ghastly prisons around our realm.

It may be a knotty problem, but it's one of the most important issues to address and the fact that we haven't succeeded in unravelling it yet should only add urgency to the task.

(This is, incidentally, linked to my 'philosophy for all' campaign - teach logic, cause and effect, abstract thinking and maybe, just maybe, children will feel more in charge of their own lives as they go through school and come out the other end.)

Talking of knowing yourself...

I'm sitting here, full of joy, having sung along at the top of my lungs to the whole of Carole King's Tapestry while assembling my vegetarian lasagne for tomorrow's lunch. (I'm not a veggie, but we're lunching with veggies.)

I'm an old hippy, aren't I?

So much of what passes for life now upsets and confuses me. I just hate casual cruelty of the type meted out between kids, as entertainment on television, and reaching its nadir in drug-riddled hinterlands and middle-class suburbs alike as out-and-out war between generations living in the same miserable house, children abused by vicious, mindless parents or parents abused by slack-jawed teenagers. I hate that it has almost become the norm. I was only a little girl when Tapestry was made, my teens were in the late 70s when things were already much tougher, and my youth in the 80s when I was the only person I knew who had a long straight curtain of hair, and I still do now. Spiritually I'm a flower child.

In the nice, middle-class school where I teach, I was admonishing a class yesterday for calling out unpleasantnesses to one another, and I said "I don't like unpleasantness." One of the very nice, very gentle boys instantly retorted "Everyone's unpleasant, Miss." Now I know that's open to all sorts of philosophical interpretations, but as a knee-jerk reaction I find it troublesome. While I like an intellectual set-to as much as the next person, in the end I yearn for harmony. As I get older I find my skin getting thinner and thinner, to the point where I flinch at any injustice meted out to anyone anywhere. It's not quite as bad as it was when I was a new mother, but not far off. Everyone's child is my child. Everyone's environmental disaster is mine.

But in my own home, in my cocoon, I can play Simon and Garfunkel followed by Carole King and sing and dance, trying to ignore Daughter's disapproval, and kid myself that the world is full of love and knowledge and self-awareness and I can experience really the deepest joy.

As an aside, the same boy who piped up about everyone being unpleasant asked me as I was going around correcting French direct object pronouns last week "Do you like Leonard Cohen, Miss?" When I confirmed that I did, he said "Thought so." Do you think he thinks I'm an old hippy too?

I'm old, I'm a hippy and I'm proud.

Cakes at dawn

It's six thirty and son, eight, has just got his cakes into the oven. He's taken to baking in a big way. He does everything from turning on the oven measuring ingredients to getting them out at the end. And he's a very good baker. Daughter, 10, and friend are upstairs in bed, and won't get up until the very, very last minutes. He'll take them a warm cake later to try and winkle them out of their pits. But then this evening she'll have done her rugby, homework and story, and be busy practising for her gym competition and he'll be slumped in front of the telly, homework done as well as probably a bit of cartooning and some work on his scripts.

I'm very proud that they know who they are and that they don't feel constrained to live within any externally imposed paradigms. That's one of the great things about growing up now. I hope that as they approach their teens things will continue to be as rosy and they will continue to be as independent as they are.

My father, although he spent most of my childhood in the same job, never felt that he had finished looking for the next thing. He was a forester, a potter, a teacher, a diplomat, a dealer in ancient Chinese pottery, a calf farmer, a smallholder and then, in the decade before his death, a historian and biographer, publishing two books and becoming a renowned expert in two separate areas. My mother came in at the teacher stage, and totally supported him. She was for the most part a teacher, but in my childhood she was also, on our travels around the world, university lecturer, the editor of a literary review and a newsreader. Now retired she is a translator, sings in a choir, works for a charity providing funds for women who want to train themselves out of difficulties, is a school governor and more that I've forgotten. So when I announced I wanted to throw up a perfectly good career in IBM and retrain as a teacher, they totally supported and applauded me. And now Mum's too busy with her own life to follow my meanderings in and out of all my other endeavours. I hope to do the same for my chuldren. If they find their niche early in life, great, but if they never settle but always have the yen to try something new, well, it's in the genes.

Hallelujah! They're listening to me!

I mentioned when I first started this blog that one of my big bugbears is the failure of our educational system to teach children to think. I believe in philosophy lessons for children. And I do mean philosophy and not Philosophy. I mean that every child should be equipped with the ability to take raw data and question, organise and analyse it abstractly in order to arrive at conclusions. To anyone who says that it's an elitist idea, I say "You're an appalling snob." To suggest that only some children are capable of philosophical thinking is elitism.

If education is only about stuffing children's heads with unconnected and unrelated facts and figures, then give them a whacking great almanac at the age of five and test them on the contents at sixteen. The very word education comes from the Latin "e duco" - I bring out. Education is, or should be, about finding the gems in a child's brain, and developing them so that the child, and society itself, benefits from the raw talents which he or she possesses.

Don't think for a moment that I'm going down the "Every child is special" line, because by definition, if every chid is special then no one is. (As was so beautifully and succinctly put in "The Incredibles") What I am saying is that just because Jane is brilliant at Maths, and John, sitting next to her is rubbish at it, but John constructs the most amazing lego models while Jane can't stack two blocks on top of each other, don't think that Jane is, ergo, the more academic of the two. Teach Jane to work out what her maths tells her about the world, and teach John to derive the same lessons through his lego.

And hallelujah, this morning a shake-up of educational policy is announced. Philosophy, they say, should be taught to young primary age children. Hear, hear! say I. The first intelligent educational suggestion I've heard for a long time. And we're to go back to cookery lessons, as opposed to the appallingly sterile and disconnected "food technology"! Let's hear it for the government. And I don't often say that.

Now let's tell parents what THEY should be teaching. Don't let's be frightened to say yes, schools are responsible for a lot of what happens in a child's development, but so are families. If we need to use sticks and carrots to herd feckless parents into actually parenting their kids, let's do it.

And so, a month on, how do I feel?

Well, pretty bloody good actually.

As predicted, after the first awful week of caffeine deprivation, I felt great - full of energy and enthusiasm for life. I will never get over my addiction to caffeine, which I consider one of the most benign drugs available to me. I did give in a have a cup of coffee halfway through the month on a training course at held in a warm and airless room, when I had been travelling since 5.30 am. I reckon it was a necessity.

But otherwise I've managed the no wheat, no red meat, no dairy, no sugar, no caffeine, no nicotine, no alcohol thing without any ill effects. I've learned to love 100% rye bread in the mornings, drink hot water and lemon first thing in the morning, and cold water in the evenings. I've smoked my last cig and can't think of a reason why I should start again, and my God! Fish is so easy to cook! I even did a dinner party - three courses, all delicious and healthy.

I have lost 9lb, or 4kg, and people keep telling me how great my skin looks. Even I can see that my hair is good and my eyes are clear. So yes, I'm going to go back to my wine, and I'm going to have the occasional treat, but the fruit and veg and detox teas are here to stay. After all, there's a lost more weight to lose bfore I reach my goal.

I love January.