When I was ten the history teacher informed us that we were going on a school trip ‘to see the Alfred Jewel’. This announcement, which would have confused me as an adult, was taken by the whole class in our world-weary strides. We were used to baffling stuff. Having to absorb weird thing after weird thing after weird thing is what being at school largely consists of. Whatever the empathy-drive in history teaching, no adult, however great a teacher – not even Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poets-Society himself – can quite get their heads round the extent to which small children don’t have the first
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