From: Michelle

I'm wondering if you'd like to share any thoughts on education, maybe specifically on reading and writing, since that's your thing. Or maybe you've never really thought about it? I teach 8th and 9th grade (English and Social Studies), and education and kids are all I ever think about, so I often assume (wrongly) that it's on everyone else's mind also. Or maybe I just want it to be. To check in and give myself perspective and fresh ideas, I like to ask people outside the education world about education. Not about phonics or standardized testing and all that political crap, but about their beliefs, their values. Not that you're outside of the education world, exactly, but you don't teach younger kids, do you? Incidentally, I just re-read Ammonite and I found myself wishing for a stronger teen presence.

Speaking of education, what do you think of all these instances of people reading your book in classes they're taking? I mean, is that an honor, or do you wish they'd found the book in a more "authentic" way (or is that way indeed authentic)? Do you wonder what the instructors are saying about your work? What the students' assignments are? This is terrible for a teacher to say, but I can't help thinking that a book "studied" is rarely as glorious as a book naturally encountered. Although I'd say Faust was an exception.

And, as everyone else has said many times, your writing is fantastic and gets in deep. Thank you!

Okay, let's pretend I'm Empress of the Universe and am omniscent and omnipotent and can therefore talk with authority of things about which in reality I know nothing.

Learning can be split into four kinds: at home (your parents teach you manners, and how to cross the road, and to wash your hands before eating), early school (age five to fifteen), higher and vocational education (getting a PhD in astrophysics, studying drama at RADA, training to be nurse), and adult (learn how to listen, learn to play the guitar when you're fifty, learn yoga, learn how to treat the people you love). In my opinion, there are too many children being forced to study beyond the age of fifteen when they are not suited to it.

When there are millions of people being forced through the same system, many suffer. More would suffer but for the dedication of many teachers, who work longer hours than they should, and for less pay, at least in this country (though the same applies in the UK). Education is like love, it should be tailored to the individual or the very small group. All this of course presupposes that the world is a better place than it is, with more resources and a population with more smarts and more patience and more generosity. Education is expensive, in terms of time and resources. And home life and the learning there is only as good as the parents in charge.

In my universe, most children would leave school around age fifteen and start learning practical things. Until that age, they'd be in small groups where the learning was holistic: a whole day spent by a pond watching tadpoles, say, learning how things fit together. Evolution, physiology, climate, surface tension of water, geology, the history of land ownership and private property, the politics of environmental treaties, the psychology of politics...whatever. I think learning is all about seeing the ways things connect. I'd like to see more of that in schools (and at home).

Universities would be unlike the universities we know today. Students who couldn't write an essay would not be getting a degree. Students whose only talent was throwing a football would not be getting a degree. Students who were only attending because Daddy went there and endowed the new library would not be getting a degree. Learning at that level should be about the burning need to know. Instead, universities in this country have become self-perpetuating factories, churning out newly-minted PhDs like sausages, and a degree is becoming a prerequisite to many jobs. Leaf through any scholarly text in the humanities these days and you're likely to find sentences that don't really make sense and ideas that don't really hang together. I've been doing a lot of research into Western European history lately, and there's a direct correlation between date of publication and clarity of prose. Some of the recent books are, frankly, unreadable. And when I do slog through them, they're boring. And if I do overcome my boredom, they're useless: timid, factual, and self-contained. No one seems to be ranging about saying, "Aha! See how this juicy factoid fits with this here other thing, how cool, how exciting!" No one is trying to theorise, or even draw conclusions. A lot of the texts are merely book-length lists (objects found in grave sites; place names of Northern England; food items found at a long-buried trade centre) that, frankly, could have been compiled by an efficient admin. assistant. Many of these texts are written to to fulfill the requirements for a PhD. I have no idea why they are published.

When I was first dealing with the INS, one of the visa conditions I had to meet was a degree. I don't have one. But I submitted my qualitifications, such as they are, to an evaluations board, and they decided--

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