A quick post before bed.
I have discovered a few things since graduation:
1. My sleeping timetable is completely broken. Everyone in my house is asleep, but here I am, reading CakeWrecks and playing FreeCell. Good times.
2. The Bay of Naples is beautiful, particularly if you can avoid getting mugged, as I did. Another post for another time.
3. When you don’t study Classics, your country becomes Soviet.
I’m serious about the last one! I’m reading the incredible ‘Child 44′ by Tom Rob Smith, which is set in the USSR in the 1950s, and came across this passage (most important bit in bold):
Secondary School 7- a rectangular building raised on concrete legs- happened to be one of the gems of the State education policy. Much photographed and publicized, it was opened by none other than Nikita Khrushchev, who’d made a speech in the new gymnasium, the floor of which had been waxed to such an extent that his bodyguards struggled not to slip. He’d claimed that education must be tailored to the country’s needs. And what the country needed were highly productive, healthy young scientists, engineers and Olympic gold-medal-winning athletes. The cathedral-sized gymnasium, adjacent to the main building, was wider and deeper than the school itself, equipped with an indoor running track, an array of mats, hoops, rope ladders and springboards, all of which were put to good use by an extra-curricular timetable that included an hour of training every day for every student regardless of age or ability. The implication of both his speech and the design of the school itself had been always very clear to Raisa: the country didn’t need poets, philosophers and priests. It needed productivity that could be measured and quantified, success that could be timed with a stopwatch.
So there you have it. If no one is allowed to do Classics, we’ll all end up in Soviet Russia (where, as we all know, education learns you).
