Where going to school means pleasure

 Ah, school days! The best days of your life, so a popular line goes. But be honest now. What was it like for you? Mine can be summed up in a word, and it isn't a synonym for happiness, or pleasure, or for that matter learning - at least not the learning that curriculums are supposed to be about.

To be fair to the schools and one's fellow pupils, the rotten experience may not be entirely their fault. My first days of schooling, my first couple of years, were spent at a really good school in Hampshire where the staff - the religious staff for it was a church school - cared about their pupils.

It seems odd to say this, from what was about to follow, but the pupils didn't fight each other, shout, insult, act like little demons.

Regulars to these blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, will know the family left food-rationed Britain for Gods' Own, a second land of hope and glory, New Zealand.

Mocked and bullied

It was not that, not for a child. Being shouted at, hit, mocked for my accent, and generally bullied, should have made for a very unhappy human.

Why didn't the state of God's Own do something about the appalling (lack of) standard of education?

It didn't need to be like that as my good friend Bankim showed me today when he told me some details of Finland's approach to schooling.

It is amazing. Finland is another small country, yet it seems very removed from modern UK schooling and the moans you hear about it from teaching associates. Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com