“How do you work a washing machine?!”

Peak lockdown I saw a piece on the news about the struggles some were having negotiating everyday life now that their teams of service providers were unavailable for work.

The interview was with the head of an agency that manages “high-wealth clients”, and she spoke of how she had had to field calls from people who didn’t know how to put a wash on or put up an ironing board.

Craft vs consumption

It’s an amusing story but, fundamentally, it shows the balance we all strike between what we do for ourselves and what we pay others to do for us: one of craft vs consumption.

No one makes their phone rather than buying one. Most buy bread and pasta rather than make them fresh. Some employ gardeners or cleaners. It’s a trade-off we all make.

Lockdown shifted this balance entirely, though. Some had to learn how to work a washing machine, others had to grapple with a rake or flour for the first time in a while.

But perhaps the biggest shift was in education. “Dear God,” many whispered in shock, “here is a child. What do I do with it?”

Two things are immediately noteworthy. Firstly, it has been refreshing to see people come to a fresh understanding that, yes, teaching is one of the specialisms integral to our socioeconomic wellbeing that requires a high level of skill.

Secondly, though, it has also been refreshing seeing everyone - myself included - reflect on where their new balance is.

Buying bread? Actually, I will start baking it. Fast fashion? No, I’ll dust off the sewing machine and make something.

Doing it ourselves

This pandemic has been a terrible tragedy, a scourge that we in no way welcome. But out of this tragedy, people have rediscovered something precious: the deeper value of craft.

Put a loaf in your online order; gather the kids and make a loaf. Either way, you have bread, but there is a very human difference.

This shift away from consumption to craft could have an important message for education. People have spoken of a desire to “return to different” post-Covid.

Good questions are being asked about the sense of working crazy hours, about the advantages of slowing down. My great hope is that this re-evaluation of work-life balance will include a debate about the school-home balance, too.

Parental responsibilities

Sadly, with people busy trying to make ends meet, dealing with children - like the garden, like the cleaning - has been farmed off to specialists.

This is fine when those employed can focus on their particular skill - gardening, cleaning, teaching.

What many of my colleagues in education feel, though, is that there has been overreach of where the government has asked for this line to be drawn with regards to what teachers are asked to do with children.

Should it be down to schools to teach cookery basics or healthy eating? Should teachers be having to toilet train, to explain how to open a bank account, to teach a child to tie their laces?

I am convinced that one of the reasons some parents have found lockdown home-schooling so challenging is because schools have been taking on so much of this “school-homing”.

A stretched society

The blame is not with parents, it is with an economic model of over-work that leaves us deskilled, proficient consumers but weak on craft - something that GPs are seeing is at the heart of our mental health crisis.

We can all laugh at the oligarch having to phone their agent to ask how to work a washing machine. Less funny is the parent who, used to farming everything out to specialists, finds that they have never before sat with their child and taught them to sew.

Less funny, still, is the parent who has been denigrated as “unskilled”, who is paid so little that they start to believe that they are low worth, who, after generations of this, lacks confidence in their ability to teach anything meaningful to their child.

Rediscovering our core purposes

If there is any beauty in the current tectonic realignment of our economy, it might be that - forced to redraw the line of specialism - schools and parents could all find a better normal.

With society having a great appreciation of their truly specialist skills, teachers ought to enjoy greater status; with delivery drivers, carers and hospital cleaners understood as the real key workers, pay and conditions should be improved.

But, in tandem, with the time that this should release, education needs rebalancing. Teachers should be allowed refocus on their true specialisms because parents will have rediscovered confidence in passing on life skills to their children. Tying shoelaces, doing laundry, hand and toilet hygiene and more.

But, more deeply than this, something vital and good about the craft of life, too.

Kester Brewin has taught mathematics across a wide variety of schools for the past 20 years. He tweets at @kesterbrewin