Been sent this by regular correspondant Scott Gunem, and it is indeed wonderful - a Guardian piece from Philip Pullman, author of the epic His Dark Materials, called "common sense has much to learn from moonshine" - an attack on overly-grammatical literacy teaching for kids, and a celebration of linguistic playfulness:
It's when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won't make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.
Great Guardian postbag on it today. A sample: "Philip Pulman saves the best till last, when he writes, prophetically, 'true education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility'. In some future time, when Sats, league tables etc have all been discredited, this neat encapsulation of the joys of learning may well be seized upon as the basis of a new educational revolution."
Sometimes, the world seems very civilized...
