One of the things the pandemic has highlighted incredibly sharply is the degree to which the purpose of state schooling is childcare rather than education.

When you look at what you learn in a system geared to the progression of the median (or slightly below) and the amount of time you take to do so, it's difficult not to think of the practice as wasting quite a lot of potential.

This of course is to say nothing about the entire fraught area of education passing on values which may be very, very different to those of the parents, and the circumstances under which we might view that as desirable.

The idea that perhaps there's nothing unusual about some children struggling with being locked into a room with 30 other kids and one adult for 6 hours of the day should probably be more mainstream.