Your Education Will Not Be Improvised

After Gil Scott-Heron

(Original here. Lyrics here)

You will not be able stay home, brother.

You will not be able to turn off, tune out or drop maths.

You will not be able to lose yourself in dreams or skip out for play during lunchtimes because

Your education will not be improvised.

Your education will not be improvised.

Your education will not be brought to you by Minecraft on iPads 

without teacher interruptions.

Your education will not live up to adverts with teachers blowing bugles

or leading the charge like a Coach Carter, Iris Stevenson

or Samuel Pickering, Jr.

to eat haute cuisine concocted in Jamie Oliver’s ‘The Fifteen’.

Your education will not be improvised.

Your education will not be brought to you by or with any theatre.

It will not star Harper Lee, John Steinbeck or anyone not British.

Your education will not give you more self-esteem.

Your education will not get rid of your stress.

Your education will probably make you a whole lot thinner because

Your education will not be improvised, brother.

There will be no pictures of you and your best mate

pushing an Iceland trolley into a canal on YouTube

or trying to take the interactive whiteboard off the classroom wall.

The BBC will not be allowed to publish leaked reports of exam failures

or academy take-overs.

Your education will not be improvised.

There will be no pictures of Ministers shutting down schools with their deliberate policies.

There will be no pictures of Ministers shutting down schools with their deliberate policies.

There will be no pictures of Ken Robinson being run out of England on a rail 

for his brand new process.

There will be no slow motion or still life of cool kids walking down the corridor

with their hands in their pockets and chatting.

They can save that for some other occasion.

Bad Education, Waterloo Road, and Educating Essex will no longer seem so damned relevant,

and parents will not care if teachers are leaving the profession in unprecedented droves

because their kids will be in classrooms 

working for a brighter day.

Your education will not be improvised.

There will be no criticisms in the local or national news

and no pictures of scary-faced anti-Academy liberationists 

or Nicky Morgan holding her nose.

The theme song will not be produced by Daft Punk or Will.I.Am,

nor sung by Adele, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran or anyone who won the X Factor.

Your education will not be improvised.

Your education will not stray off task, all thanks to messages

contained in white papers, from Whitehall, written by white people.

You will not have to worry about group work in your classroom,

ever being asked to think, 

or if your education is whole.

Your education will not go better with Google.

Your education will not fight the GERM and may cause bad debt.

Your education will put you in the passenger seat.

Your education will not be improvised, will not be improvised,

will not be improvised, will not be improvised.

Your education won’t have no re-sits brother.

Your education will be scripted.