Save your children – take them out of school

A good decade or so ago I wrote a fairly vituperative article in response to a piece by the writer James Bartholomew in this magazine, who had announced that he intended to home-school his daughter Alex, aged nine. James had explained in great detail how he would inculcate his charge in the liberal arts: ‘I don’t want to give the impression that I will be a Gradgrind. We will have some fun, too. Alex loves to paint. We will go to the major Cézanne exhibition in Aix and see his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Then we will see the mountain itself from the same viewpoint that he used. I hope we will settle down to paint it ourselves — perhaps copying Cézanne’s technique.’

Ever the class warrior, I was annoyed by this paragraph in particular. I could visualise the two of them at that exhibition and I had an immediate acid reflux.