Lesson one will be The Point of Other People as our children get used to having friends round and interacting IRL
Can schoolchildren catch up on their education over the summer? Would parents surrender them to their teachers over the holidays, to make up for the great deficit in their understanding of grammatical terms that none of the rest of us understand anyway? It seems rather unlikely, but just for the record, I would die first. All children need urgent hothousing, but not in anything you could measure with a SAT.
Their first module, very immersive like one of those residential driving courses, would be in The Point of Other People. We did a good job, I think, both for ourselves and the younger generation, in making out that you could replicate intimacy remotely. The problem is, they took it at face value and we were just blowing it out of our butts. Now I sit fantasising about what it will be like when the kids can have their friends round, and they’re baffled. They just spent three hours with their friends on Discord with a side order of Minecraft, and cannot see any point at at all in real life. I might as well have said it would be fun to wash our sheets in a stream.
