One Question
“That version of education is a veneer, a symbol. It doesn’t actually cut deep enough.” Simon Gunning “[People] are terrified to admit that there’s something wrong with [a loved one], and I think that comes down to us not wanting to admit that there’s something wrong with the world or the system – we would do anything to protect the system. I don’t know when we’re going to start to admit that society is broken and that’s the reason people are fucked up and taking their own lives. Then we’d be breaking down this thing that we all support and endorse, [and that’s a] more tricky one, that’s more sensitive, because we might feel a bit guilty.” James Golding
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economic precarity and financial struggle in the current cost of living crisis have exacerbated a country-wide tidal wave of mental ill-health. In the face of these monoliths, what impact can education hope to have? As we have seen again and again, it is impossible to extricate society from the forces that constitute it. The institutions that give our lives structure, the stories that give them meaning, must ultimately shift in order to make space for the smaller entities – food, media, law – to follow suit. As such, the answer to our question is perhaps about scale as much as substance. Education is ‘the answer’, if we can reframe the constraints of the conversation to encompass education itself – new ways of reasoning are crucial, and they’re just as likely to come from artists as politicians; from conversations as edicts. If in its purest form, education boils down to answering questions, it seems we must be prepared to ask altogether new ones.
