In Search of the Primal Oatcake

North Staffordshire, where I grew up (the growing up is an unfinished project by the way), has a few claims to fame. Readers of this blog will already have sighed "The setting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and of course that is foremost in my mind but there's more! The the six towns of the Potteries are where world class china was made: Minton, Royal Doulton, Spode, Wedgwood, Moorcroft, Midwinter, Shelley are just a few of the many, many pot banks (as we called them).

Isn't it shocking that so much beauty and utility came from such a degraded environment? 

It was the birth place of Reginald Mitchell the designer of the Spitfire. Hanley's Victoria Hall has one of the finest acoustics of any concert hall anywhere, much praised by Thomas Beecham and John Barbirolli. And then there's the Oatcake. Capitalisation is essential to differentiate it from the dry, small, rather impoverished Scottish oatcake that always reminds me of something that has half the recipe missing; the half that gives it flavour. No, the North Staffordshire Oatcake is a much more expansive and cosily enveloping affair altogether.  Imagine a substantial yeast leavened pancake made from wholemeal flour and oatmeal and cooked on a flat surface of hot metal lovingly rolled around a filling of your choice. It's Stoke's version of the tortilla.

Ex pats used to rely on visitors or returning home to get their oatcakes, usually from a little family concern preparing and selling the oatcakes in dozens from corner terraced houses or tiny shops. Nowadays you can get them from branches of bigger supermarkets from their Ethnic Breads shelf. These are rather smaller and seem less tasty than the ones from the homelier bakeries still dotted around North Staffs and each having their partisan supporters who swear that their source is best.

I've always loved oatcakes; Grandma used to do them with cheese and bacon and for a treat, a particularly delicious sweet filling of Golden Syrup on a hot buttered oatcake. It dripped lasciviously down your fingers and demanded to be sucked and licked........sorry........just a minute, I need to recompose myself after imagining such guilty pleasures. It's no wonder I used to struggle with my weight! 

In my healthier later days I've filled them with smoked salmon and rocket, cottage cheese and brinjal pickle and a particular favourite is chilli sans carne. Someone mentioned fusion? Thought not. At a pinch, just rolled up and dipped in homemade soup is good too. When I lived in London, before the Ethnic Bread stage, Mum gave me a recipe but it was complicated and I tried it once and then resorted to trips home up the A5 on a series of fast motorbikes to get my fix.

Fast forward twenty years. Roachside Cottage is a delightful holiday cottage run by an old school friend (he's younger than me though) where we stayed a couple of years ago, has one of the best holiday cottage libraries I've come across. As well as a few good books on Gritstone climbing, local history, and a couple of books on SGGK and some interesting fiction, there was this.

Pamela Sambrook wrote a fine history and also included some authentic recipes. As readers of earlier blogs will know, "authentic" has a hallowed tone when we pronounce it in our house. Getting Things Right is important. Getting Things Historically Right is even better. What Pamela discovered is that oats were a staple crop in the Staffordshire Moorlands and the oatcake was a very primitive way of eating that crop.  The simplest recipe just involved milled oats (Millstone Grit was in abundance) and water put in a previously used jug that hadn't been washed out. In other words, a sourdough. I'd been to San Francisco and never managed to recapture the sourdough I'd had there but I did recognise the technique. Pamela's wonderful little book also contained nuggets of culinary history: Did you know that oats from a good harvest were always milled? Rolled oats or what we know as porridge oats were the poorest oats that hadn't got the full starch content. I didn't think so.
We have an excellent grocer's stall in Norwich Market called Herbs and Spices who sell all manner of cereals from big sacks measured into brown paper bags. Just my sort of shop. So armed with four bags of different grade oat flour ranging from pinhead to fine I went home and experimented. The optimum mix seemed to be more or less one volume measure of each type of flour. This is when I should give a recipe. I'm not going to because a huge amount of the pleasure of cooking is to find your own way of doing things. Experiment with small quantities, and when it's as you like it, stick to that way of doing things.
They are the ultimate healthy food! The only added fat is a smear of sunflower oil to coat the bake stone. I add a few scoops of oat bran to up the fibre and anti-cholesterol quotient too. Their primitiveness is very appealing and would that I had enough of a garden to grow my own, but at least I have total control of what goes in them. My oatcakes have become a bit of a joke with the family: no-one else eats them, but Taryn, Caitlin's best friend, and a proud vegan, absolutely loves them.

The search for the simplest oatcake has led me down a path of paring down ingredients and processes. I never weigh anything; it's all guesswork and cooking times are very loose depending on temperature of the bakestone. This means, of course, that each batch tastes different. No homogeneity here! The only packaging is brown paper, sourdough is a self sustaining leaven and at a pinch they could be cooked on a bakestone over a woodfire. Or even on the top of a wood-burning stove but I haven't tried this for fear of really upsetting the family. In a world festooned with plastic packages, food full of additives, dubious oils, harmful seasonings and animal products driven by suffering, the primal Oatcake is just a nod in the direction we should be going. 

Lévi-Strauss' Mountain Bike

Many, many years ago I was fortunate enough to study Religions at Lancaster University. Note the plural. That is the key to the department headed by Ninian Smart in the early seventies. One of the courses I took (and thoroughly enjoyed) was baldly titled Myth. Adrian Cunningham, later to be Head of the Department, started the course by encouraging us to analyse Jack and the Beanstalk from a myriad of viewpoints from Marx, through Jung, Freud and Adler to a chap I'd never heard of but who seemed to have a cachet of complexity and obscurity. This was Claude Lévi-Strauss, a structuralist whose view, put very simply, was that human beings perceived the world as a series of polar opposites or binaries. In the example of Jack and the Beanstalk we have many of these: human/giant, rich/poor, subsistence/cash economy, child/adult, foolishness/wisdom, male/female, etc. One of Lévi-Strauss' points was that a society's myths will attempt to mediate between these polarities and that "interesting things" happen when things don't quite fit into a binary. An obvious example is the figure of Jesus in Christianity who is neither Man nor God but blurs these distinctions.

In one of my favourite recipe books * "The Raw and the Cooked" Lévi-Strauss puts forward the view that far from being "primitive", the folk stories that people tell to each other say lots about their cultures and can highlight some very complex relationships. On a very simplistic level Raw/Cooked = Nature/Culture.... smoked salmon and cream cheese anyone?

So there I was on a track this afternoon cycling between Cromer and Northrepps as part of my stay-fit-and-keep-my-heart-healthy regime and having all sorts of childish fun. For most of the track there are two tyre tracked ruts and it's a relatively easy and quick decision to swap tracks if nettles, mud or stones slow you down. In fact it's so easy and quick it's unconscious almost all of the time. Part of the way, over an old railway bridge, there's a middle track too and at one point I had to decide which one of the other two would be a better alternative to the track I was on. I nearly skidded and fell off because it took so long to decide! I did choose a way but it was a close call! Which set me thinking about binaries and polar opposites. If it really is entrenched in our thinking as structural anthropologists seem to think, then it could account for some present and perennial difficulties. Politically we seem divided by left and right, religiously we are believers or atheists, and don't even start on Remain or Brexit. We try to come to terms with a hugely complex interconnected world with mental apparatus more suited to coping in a small village where we know everyone. Following on from my thoughts on evolution and anthropocentrism I just wonder if we need to step back from our thinking about the world and begin to think about our thinking before we make an utter and complete mess of things.

* I went into this wonderful shop about 25 years ago and found "The Raw and the Cooked" on its shelves: booksforcooks.

The Evolution of "Evolution"

Warning: This Blog may exhibit signs of nihilism. If this gets too much for you, instructions for Backgammon can be found here. It worked for David Hume!

Instructions for Backgammon

So is it Darwin's fault? This idea that we humans with our self consciousness, our aggression, our misplaced sense of superiority are somehow the goal of evolution. You know the sort of diagram:

We are the right hand end of a series of images implying not only direction but progress. Even subversive or humorous images use the same trope:

You've seen this sort of thing haven't you? All pervasive isn't it? T-shirts, adverts, cartoons, probably not stained glass though... I would argue that this seemingly innocuous image is violently dangerous, almost as dangerous as the Old Testament God's order to Adam and Eve to have dominion over the earth and subdue it. 

Let's get a bit of background: 

The Judaeo Christian myth of creation is a rather beautiful positioning of Humanity, God and the Universe. It plays on that deep human sense of importance, because we are made in the image of God, and that this God (the only God) tells us that the bounty of the earth is ours for the taking. Up until the later 19th century this was the world view of all the Christian world, the world of the imperial powers. Just ponder that for a while..... We have permission to treat the world as we like, in fact it's our Christian duty. And one of the reasons we have for this is that we are qualitatively different, higher if you like, from all the other animals on the planet. We know this because it's the word of God written in the Bible. (How we treated other peoples we may meet is another issue for another post!)

The Enlightenment, a bit like the Renaissance, is a blanket term for many diffuse activities that were never considered a "movement" at all. It's a hindsight thing I think. In England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and to a certain extent Italy in the late 16th and 17th century there was a fashion for analytical thought and the beginnings of what we call Science, they called it Natural Philosophy. Mathematicians like Isaac Newton and Willhelm Leibniz argued about who invented calculus while developing the tools we still use to describe and predict the movement of the planets and comets. From 17th century onwards many were beginning to question the truth of the creation story and ever so gradually the time scale of the universe was growing. Geological processes that were discovered by James Hutton in the 18th century needed a lot longer than the 6000 years or so that was calculated from the bible by Bishop James Ussher in 1650. As these discoveries and explanations extended and expanded our view of the Universe,  there were two religious responses: liberal creative acceptance or fundamentalist rejection and retrenchment. Newton himself was firmly Christian and saw his work as the affirmation of God's ordering of His creation.

   

William Blake, however, saw Newton in a very different light. (And no, it wasn't rainbow coloured!) To Blake, a visionary artist and poet, Newton was taking the wonder from the world and reducing it to an almost solipsistic mentation. This is such a key image and in it lies the danger of much of the thinking of recent times.

 Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, all pioneers of scientific thought, started the vision of a universe that wasn't centred on humanity. From a medieval world view of a world-centred small(ish) series of  nesting spheres described by the Greeks and set up by a Christian God, the Universe suddenly expanded and decentralised and became full of stars and planets all having their own orbits. And that was, pardon the pun, revolutionary. The world we lived on became a tiny part of a very big picture. You see, I think it's very seductive to think of the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific rationality as a value free way of seeing the Universe but it isn't at all. It's simply yet another incidence of anthropocentrism. We think Mathematics has given us access to God's tool box and His measures, in fact Newton saw his work as unlocking God's handicraft. Here's another Blake: look at God's instrument of creation.

Familiar? I don't think it's a coincidence: Blake is issuing a warning we have chosen to ignore. We think we're just discovering and describing the Universe, merely collecting and cataloguing creation almost passively, but our scientific endeavours are an ordering of things as a precursor of controlling and directing the world. And it's OUR order. This is I think what Blake is showing in his pictures. We are getting God like powers by our scientific endeavours. 

Another visual representation of how science works:

This a very interesting image, especially as was first seen in 1888. It's often taken for a medieval woodcut but it has been engraved by a technique not developed until the late 18th century. The traveller (look at his staff) has broken out of the limiting geocentric universe but he's seeing the wonders beyond in terms of machines, diagrams and graphs. His view, although he thinks it beyond the mundane, is governed and trammelled by his "scientific" notions. The image of the machine is particularly interesting. For Lewis Mumford, a 20th century American thinker, Science and it's partner, Technics (Mumford's word), were responsible for much of humanity's misery. They were not sui generis bad but had got out of control. For Mumford the machine pervaded Western society, indeed factories used humans as part of the machine. We had become alienated from nature and we needed to get back. He was a staunch fan of Garden Cities and fought for what we'd call a greening of the world.

I suppose here we'd better get back to Darwin! 

Just as the work of Natural Philosophers and later Scientists widened our notion of space and lengthened our concept of time and diminished our cosmic significance, so Charles Darwin tried to put the human animal in its rightful position as just another life form that populated a niche by dint of natural selection. What he absolutely did not do was to say that human beings were the present end of a natural progression towards anything. Humanity is not, repeat NOT the summit of a pyramid but the end of a tiny twig off a small branch of the tree of all living things. The wilful or ignorant misreading of the Origin of Species to put humanity as the end of a progression is, I think an attempt to claw back some lost ground in humanity's decentralisation. It may also be a sop to those of a religious persuasion who see humankind as somehow specially singled out and are liberal enough not to ditch evolution completely. What started out as a sort of clever shorthand for thinking about how animals can change over deep time becomes a dangerously misleading notion of how evolution works. It's not goal driven and we are not the goal. We are, in fact the problem in the changes we are seeing. No matter how many idiots deny that climate change is driven by our selfish and careless notions of dominion and human centrality, they will not bring back the species and the habitats we are destroying. Good grief, we've known long enough!

What movements such a Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and more recently and urgently Extinction Rebellion are telling us is that our relationship with the Earth is not one of subjugation, dominion nor control, but one of responsibility and compassionate care. It's the only home we have you know. It may be too late to undo all the damage but we must make a concerted effort to start.

Oh, and while we're at it, perhaps we could treat each other like that too. Just saying...

 Notes:

The image of the Earth from Apollo 8 is the first photograph of Eathrise. It's taken with a Hasselblad with monochrome film and I think has a better composition than the slightly later colour images. It also hasn't been rotated; it's as Bill Anders saw it.

Booklist:

In Search of Deep Time: Henry Gee (A thoroughly good chap and a personal friend)

Technics and Civilisation: Lewis Mumford

Evolution The Great Debate: Vernon Blackmore and Andrew Page

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Stephen Jay Gould

Essays Concerning Human Understanding: David Hume

Intimations of Mortality from the Collections of Second Childhood.

Yes, I know, it's a convoluted title but I just couldn't resist it and it's quite apposite.

I'm 67: fit, active, lucid(ish), not quite as strong as I was but still climbing to Grade 5 (HVS in proper terms) and doing most of the things I was doing in my teens and twenties. Last winter I had the new and uncomfortable feeling of being short of breath while leading one of my Gawain in the Landscape walks. In fact I had to stop talking going up an incline: a horrible experience. Another more serious bout of breathlessness and pounding chest on a cycle ride led me into the wonderful ministrations of the NHS. My GP treated it very seriously, gave me a cocktail of keeping alive drugs, arranged ECG, X-ray and blood tests and then sent me to the cardiac clinic where I was investigated. The outcome of various diagnostics was that I had three constrictions in my coronary arteries which are going to be treated with titanium mesh strengtheners.

Although I know I'm not immortal this has jolted me. Dad died of cancer when he was 65. The six weeks between diagnosis and death was a master class in bravery. All through my life he told me that he wanted to have his ashes scattered from the back of a motorbike around the TT circuit in the Isle of Man. On one of our last meetings he looked me in the eye and said "I'm serious you know". "What, Dad?" " You know bloody well what I mean!" and mimed a twist grip throttle. Yes, I knew he was serious because he rarely swore and as with most non swearers, he used it with precision. He accepted his death with dignity, no little humour and I was privileged to be with him when he slipped away. I use the term accurately. It was like untying the painter of a boat moored on a calm lake and it will drift slowly out into that lake. Death itself doesn't bother me anything like it used to before I witnessed it, pain management has become compassionately precise and when all else is said and done, I've had a very fortunate and full life. One of my great joys has been seeing Harvey and Caitlin turn into beautiful and caring young adults with equally beautiful and caring friends. Both of them join me in the local climbing centre Highball in Norwich and today Caitlin did a climb at a higher technical grade than I climb at.

It was beautiful to watch and very moving because it is how things should be. Our young people should be surpassing us, they should be confident enough to protest against the injustices and the stupidities they see in the world. They should widen their horizons to become part of the world not just our parochial bit. And how wonderful is it that so many teens do so? It's part of that timey wimey thing I suppose.

So, where do the "collections" come in I hear you ask. Well, over the last few months I've been gradually replacing my climbing rack. All those nuts, slings, harnesses, ropes, karabiners, belay devices that I sold or gave away all those years ago when I thought I'd never climb again. In a very Gerard Manley Hopkins way they look great, and above all they ring and rattle beautifully too. We're planning a trip to the Peak District later in the year when we can start some proper (more adventurous) climbing. The gear, tackle and trim don't aid our climbing, they are for protection against hitting the ground. Falling is permitted these days. When I started way back in the sixties the dictum was that the leader never fell because severe injury or death would follow even on the relatively short Gritstone routes we were doing. Now the development of artificial chockstones, camming devices, eccentric wedges, elastic ropes and comfortable harnesses has meant that routes considered unthinkably dangerous a few years ago are climbed by relative beginners. This is good, this is how it should be. Progress can be a dangerous concept which I'll explore in another blog, but as you know, I firmly believe that doing difficult and scary, exposed things should be a fundamental part of life. As I get older and I can see the end approaching, I see that things that once were easy become harder. I find certain hills around Cromer getting slower to cycle up and eventually I suppose that walking upstairs may become as difficult for me as a grade 5 climb is now. My dad, bless him, found breathing to be too difficult right at the very end of his life. Mortality is becoming for me a reality which must be embraced as a friend rather than scorned and ignored as an enemy. I was taught by an expert!

Risk and the High Desert.

More years ago than I care to remember I made a transition from scrambling to rock climbing. My family's reaction was of amused disbelief: I was the six year old terrified to climb the local slide. I soon discovered that I enjoyed the challenge immensely despite finding it neither easy nor comfortable. A group of six of us mid teenagers were well taught , completely free, by the brother of a Boys' Brigade officer over a period of about three months on most Sundays at a very local crag called the Roaches.

Gradually people dropped (curiously upsetting verb!) out and in the end just two of us continued. One Sunday we were making arrangements for the following week when Pat, our informal tutor, said he wouldn't be coming but that we were ready and safe to go ourselves. What followed was the fantastic excitement of three years exploring the Peak District, North Wales but mostly our own capabilities and limitations.
Would this happen now? I doubt it. The many issues with risk would be the major factor I suppose. The "instructor" wasn't accredited, there was no signature on a waiver form, and bizarrely Pat's amateur and status and his refusal to accept payment would bring up child protection issues. If we'd have had to have paid, there's no way I could have done this.

These days we have Adventure Centres falling over themselves to provide safe and fun tasters of everything from caving in unlit concrete sewer pipes (That really pushed my comfort a few years ago) to high rope traverses. All done completely risk free under the expertly enthusiastic supervision of a great role model. While I'm not decrying these great institutions for getting kids out and active, I question the "Adventure" word. Surely the key concept in any adventure is the unknown and the way we cope with it? I was saddened to hear of the death of people on Everest recently but, really, is the 8,000m queue to the summit adventure or tourism?

Later in life I questioned Mum about the encouragement to climb, about Dad buying my first motorbike at 18 and the unquestioned approval of scuba diving a bit later. She replied that I always managed to do dangerous things safely. Consequently I've had a life full of adventure ranging from the high risk activity of acapella performance singing, through solo scuba diving (please don't tell BSAC) to year round sea swimming. There's a huge delight to be had in flouting conventional ideas of "safe" activities! I'm absolutely not advocating foolhardiness, but what I am endorsing is the self reliance that only comes from intelligent preparation and the use of risk assessment techniques.

One of my all time favourite people is Alex Honnold and if you haven't seen the film Free Solo then find it immediately and do so.
Trailer from Nat Geo

But please don't,  DON'T, emulate him in free climbing without his assiduous training, his vast experience and his meticulous planning. He's totally alone in the highest desert you can imagine and has the time of his life and the look of sheer and pure joy that is occasionally captured by film teams always gets me tearful. I'm encouraging you to find your own adventures, encourage your children to find theirs, prepare them to plan and get out there. There's still lots of adventures to be had!

Sir Gawain's Landscape

After about fifty years I'm finally achieving an ambition: I'm taking a group of people around the Gawain landscape in the Leek Moorlands and retelling the story. Any readers of my previous posts will know my passion/obsession with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter known as SGGK), a fourteenth century alliterative poem. I came upon it after reading a guide book to the Peak District which mentioned the possibility that the hunt scenes may have been inspired by the topography to the north of the Roaches. On borrowing it from a bemused English teacher (I had already dropped English Literature as an exam subject), I was plunged into a world of chivalry, sexy posh frocks, armour, quests and challenges, seduction, and a hero young enough to be an elder brother. The biggest problem was the language. It was the Tolkien edited version and it looked like this:

In my youthful ignorance I had no idea that there were other available transliterations! So I plodded onward constantly referring to the glossary until I came to the word "bonk". Stop sniggering please.
I'd been born and bred in North Staffordshire and was used to the heavy dialect of the old folks. "You need to descend the hill." was delivered as: "Goo dinet' bonk!" Amidst much amusement from my family I took to reading it out aloud as best I could. It was much easier. I later found that Alan Garner found the same facility: he was raised in the next town.

The real joy came when I matched the descriptions to the landscape I knew so well from my walking and rock climbing. Not only did the general features such as those so vividly described in the above passage seem very real, but specific locations like Ludchurch, the Back Dane and the moors to the north of the Roaches were totally recognisable.

"They climbed by cliffs where the cold clung"

"Mist clothed the moor and melted on the mountains"

As the story unfolded I was as entranced by the descriptions of the minutiae of court life, dress and food as I was with the landscape. The fact that it was the hardest reading task I'd ever undertaken somehow made it mine. I became, and still am, evangelical about the craftsmanship of the poem as well as the messages within it about what it is to be human. So, what am I saying? Simply that in an age of instant texts, of a seemingly endless series of transliterations, to go back to the original (as near as we can get) version is a worthwhile enterprise. Perhaps, too, the work involved in fully appreciating a piece of work whether it's art, a building, music, sculpture or literature is a necessary part of its appreciation.

What has galled me over the last forty or so years is the reluctance of the locale to own SGGK. It's a bit like Stratford without Shakespeare. Yes, the author is anonymous and no-one will ever know for certain whether he lived around Leek, but the landscapes speak for themselves. And if you doubt me do a winter walk from Hen Cloud to Ludchurch, stopping for a well earned flask of coffee at Roach End where Gawain's guide leaves him to descend into the valley of the Back Dane to meet his fate. Then read the last quarter of the poem preferably in the original, Simon Armitage's retelling or in one of the many transliterations available on line.

New Beginnings, Revisited Convictions,

For the past seven years my much loved stepson has found school a difficult place to be. My wife Bel and I could never understand why as he had a wide vocabulary, good logical skills, a passion for reading and discussing, and a desire to learn. After Bel's autism diagnosis we wondered if Harvey's problems may be attributed to his being "on the spectrum" himself. So we duly got him a positive diagnosis of Aspergers, thinking that at least now his teachers would have some framework for their teaching.
This was about 18months ago and it made very little difference to how his primary school treated Harvey. Never mind, we thought, all will be different at secondary school. It wasn't. The persistent physical and verbal bullying continued, he was never enthused by lessons, and the hard pressed but well meaning staff generally never seemed to have enough time to spend with him to explain social expectations. After a few rather more serious incidents involving stolen spectacles, drawing pins planted in shoes in the changing room and a particularly nasty series of false allegations, we decided to remove Harvey from state education.
This was not a knee-jerk reaction; for the last two years I'd been semi retired from my teaching post and I knew I could make time if Harvey needed to be removed. We treated it as an ejection seat and told Harvey he could choose whether to pull the release or not. He pulled it ten days ago and has not been back to school since.

We've not been idle! Already he's made a series of autonomous and remote controlled LEGO robots, he's learned about rock types ready for our forthcoming trip to do the Snowdon Horseshoe and he's writing his own blog. Above all he seems to have lost all his anxiety symptoms and hasn't needed his usual "comfort blanket" of inane TV. He's genuinely excited in the robotics which he's never shown an interest in before and is already planning his rock collection. The weekend before he ejected, Harvey told me of the mask he feels he has to wear at school to fit in. He said he found it increasingly uncomfortable and wanted to be around people who accepted him as he was. This was at a Sacred Harp singing in Norwich we both belong to, a group of utter individuals if ever there was one! What I personally have found is that we've got the real authentic Harvey back; a young man who is articulate, quirky, an exhilaratingly fast learner, an independent thinker and a thoroughly nice chap. These were traits that school either squashed or his "friends" found irritating.



So armed with books by J.T. Gatto *and Ivan Illich**, both writers I'd come across before in my own journey of increasing dissatisfaction with how the English education system was evolving, we're deschooling Harvey and encouraging him to be himself. We're celebrating his many talents, enjoying his interests and embarking on a wonderful journey as a family. Keep reading!


*The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.


*It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.

**Everywhere not only education, but society as a whole needs deschooling.