Dreaming Shires

 

I have read 'Jude the Obscure' by Thomas Hardy, and now I need therapy.

Miss, Educated

'Educated' by Tara Westover (Penguin Random House, 2018)

With schools still closed or partially closed due to Covid-19, education is back in the headlines.  At first, it seemed like a dream scenario for many students, but the novelty soon wore off, and many are now realising the long term damage of a disrupted education.  Someone who knows more than most about the challenges of catching up on missed classroom time is Tara Westover, author of memoir 'Educated'.

Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho, USA, the youngest of seven children in a family dominated by her father.  His twin obsessions were becoming as self-sufficient as possible in preparation for the end of the world, and avoiding contact with the authorities.  As such, while the children didn't go to school or see doctors, they learned to preserve food, use firearms and hide resources such as fuel around the family homestead.  They worked as his crew in their scrap yard, often risking life and limb in an environment where health and safety amounted to decaying steel toe-capped boots and not much else.  When accidents occur, the children are treated by their herbalist mother.  As she grows up, Tara's relationship with her siblings changes as they each begin living lives of their own.  While Tyler shows her there may be hope beyond the farmstead, the mercurial Shawn leaves her broken and doubting her own mind.  When Tara herself finally decides to pursue formal education, she manages to overcome her father's opposition, but, when challenged by life in an alien outside world, will she flee and return to the familiarity of home?

A Little Bit of Politics...

I have just finished my first, really serious book since starting this project and I would definitely recommend it to anyone born in 1979 or after, any parent of someone born in 1979 or after and any one with an interest in what's happening to the generation born in 1979 or after.  Basically, what I'm saying is that everyone in the UK should read this book.

'Jilted Generation' by Ed Howler and Shiv Malik is a polemical analysis of the challenges faced by this age group in the UK, how these difficulties came about and, to an extent, on what can be done about them.  The authors have focused on four main areas; housing, jobs, inheritance and politics.

'Jilted Generation: How Britain has
Bankrupted its Youth' by Ed Howker
and Shiv Malik (Icon Books, 2010)

I found this book absolutely fascinating.  You'd have to have spent the last decade living in a cave to not know that life can be far from easy for the post-79 generation of late.  The housing boom has priced them out of the market, they're finding it harder to get started in a career, the cost of Higher and Further Education is rising and they're facing the long term prospect of an unimaginable national debt.  Basically, it ain't pretty.  This book, in simple-ish language (that even I understood), explained how this generation has ended up in this predicament.

I have been a bit dubious in the past about whether the post-79 generation really had anything to complain about.  It's easy to dismiss them as a spend-thrift, transitory generation that manages to afford huge TVs, complicated phones and tiny MP3 players but not save for house deposits.  They seem to have so much more than previous generations, but you don't have to look to hard to realise that all these things are really just trinkets.  It's almost as if they're all comfort shopping because they're waiting to start a proper life.  That's all very well for the retail sector, but it's indicative of something rather scarier in the long term and bigger pictures.

My one minor criticism of this book is that it seemed to run out of steam a bit towards the end.  It was almost as if having noticed and analysed the problem, the authors bottled it when trying to come up with any answers.  To be fair, though, correcting the 'now, now, now' focus of politicians is not something they can probably do much about!  It probably doesn't help that I'm quite a 'what can I do?' sort of a person and by the end of the book wanted a pull out check list of practical things to do to start getting this potentially devastating situation sorted out.

What this book does do fantastically well is highlight the difficulties faced by the 'jilted' generation and explain what has caused them in simple terms.  As such, it's well worth a read if you care about the future of the UK and I will be recommending it to lots of my friends.  Hopefully the authors will bring out a sequel discussing possible ways to improve the situation in more depth.  Or, better still, maybe enough politicians and voters will read this book to start a change in thinking which will actually do something to help the post-79 generation before it's too late.