Education – The canteen was busy this morning …

I can never quite predict the demand. Some days it’s bedlam – queues looping around the corner, students (somewhat ironically) halfway through their lunchboxes while waiting for a hashbrown or a squeezy. Other days it’s mysteriously calm, where the hum of the fridges seems louder than the chatter.
Schools are like that. You plan carefully and then adolescence happens.

It’s one of my favourite places in the school. If you want the real temperature of a school, stand near the food. The students are usually up for a chat, and occasionally a tricep dip challenge on the bars. I’m pleased to report that my record remains intact, although I do choose my opponents carefully. One must be strategic in these matters.

“Manners, folks,” I reminded them while they shuffled forward. Let’s hear those pleases and thank-yous.

They’re actually pretty good at this. But schools don’t take manners for granted. Left unattended, they evaporate like puddles in the sun.

One of the boys asked how long I’d been teaching.

“I trained with chalk,” I told them.

The response was a sort of bemused bafflement, as if a distant relative had begun describing life during the gold rush. Chalk? Apparently this requires explanation now.

The students were unimpressed. Fair enough. Each generation assumes the previous one lived in mild technological darkness. Which, if we’re honest, we probably did.

But the funny thing about schools is that although the tools change – chalkboards, whiteboards, screens and whatever comes next – the core lessons remain remarkably stubborn.

Which brings me to a favourite line of advice from Hamlet. You may remember Polonius sending his son Laertes off into the world with a burst of parental wisdom:

“This above all – to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Polonius is not, it must be said, Shakespeare’s most reliable moral philosopher. He talks a lot and occasionally causes chaos. But in this instance, he lands on something important.

If you know what you stand for, if you are honest about your own values, then honesty with others becomes much easier. Integrity works from the inside out.

Schools spend an enormous amount of time thinking about achievement, qualifications and results. And rightly so. Knowledge matters enormously. But watching a group of students in the canteen queue is a useful reminder that education is also happening in smaller, quieter ways.

Those moments don’t appear in league tables. But they matter because eventually these young people will leave school and run the place. They will become the nurses, builders, engineers, teachers, parents, voters and citizens who decide what sort of society we live in.

And if they can manage a cheerful thank-you in a canteen queue on a busy Tuesday morning, there’s reason to think they might manage the bigger things, too.

Which, when you stand back from the hashbrowns and the dip bars, is rather the point of the whole enterprise.