29 July

In some ways I have real affection for schools. I worked in them, and was a student in them. But I now realise they’re probably the most stupid thing humans have ever invented, and may yet destroy us all. I’m not exaggerating, bear with me. Look at the photo. An American sociologist brilliantly described schools as ‘a box of strangers’. That’s literally what they are. We throw hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kids who don’t know each other inside the walls of a school for the first 13 years of their life. Only a century ago the exact opposite was the case, not only did many kids not go to school, those that did still spent a long time with adults in their weeks, experiencing adult life. Why does this matter? It matters because without any connection with established adult life and institutions, kids in their box of strangers have to invent their own culture, with their own status hierarchies. The way they do that is almost exclusively using popularity, a brutal, stupid mechanism. And where it will destroy our societies is that they then take this culture they develop in schools, and re-make adult life the same way, when they leave. Social media has dramatically accelerated this transformation of adult life into high school. The same platforms are now used by adolescents and adults, it makes the transition seamless. And that’s the world we have today, where adult problems are ignored, because people have no experience of them, or of the expertise that used to solve them. Our entire culture is high school, it’s not an analogy. Cultures are made, and this is where we make ours. (If you’re unsure of this, find somebody whose favourite music at age 60 isn’t the music they loved at age 16. Just one indicator.)