NickBlack.com

What shall we do about the demographics in Britain – on the one hand Harriet Harman is telling us that people in their 60s and 70s should continue working to help the country recover from recession. On the other, Martin Amis is telling us to kill ourselves in street corner euthanasia booths because the “silver tsunami” will destroy the country. I assume he is planning on recycling all those wonderful red public telephone boxes we no longer use into euthanasia booths. It’ll be like the Matrix; you stagger down to the telephone box on your Zimmer frame, go in and pick up the fashionably retro receiver and you’re sucked out of existence. Of course Harriet’s version is even more sci-fi. Has no one thought to tell her that the unemployment levels for those over 50 are hilarious and that the corporate world hasn’t hired anyone over 35 since records began? So which is it, work until you die and save the country from a fate worse than death or go and kill yourself as rapidly as possible? For obvious reasons you can’t have it both ways.

Let’s go with Harriet’s version because one of the things Martin’s forgotten is that some old people remember how to do all kinds of things and when they go that knowledge goes with them. We don’t know which skills, or what knowledge our kids will need, so it’s probably best to get as much of it passed on as we can manage. You know how it is, the one thing you didn’t think was interesting, and the last woman who remembers how to do it goes to the euthanasia booth and bam, it turns out to be the thing that would have saved the species. How annoying would that be for the last three people alive? Right now I know for a fact there’s a guy called Terry Davis who lives in a little village in Shropshire. Terry is the last man in Britain who knows how to make a horse collar. Terry is 60 and he works alone. Do we really want to bet that we will never need to plough with horses again? Ever? Really?

Yeah I know, horse collars. I’ve got to be kidding. Of course I am, don’t be daft, this is the modern world. I’m kidding like the survey this week that told us that more than a quarter of British kids think oats grow on trees and bacon comes from sheep. Hell, 17% of kids and adults thought eggs were a big part of a bread recipe. Uh oh, hold that euthanasia booth. Grandma, don’t go! We don’t know how to bake a loaf of bread.

Enough of all this nostalgia nonsense. We get enough of that on the BBC with those same half-dozen famous old white guys wandering over hill and dale in their swishy north face anoraks saying ‘isn’t it lovely’ to every abandoned Victorian engineering marvel. No one under 30’s got any idea what they’re on about. What about modern? Like wind turbines, that’s modern; virtually avant-garde. We don’t make any. The skills shortage is so severe after 20 years of a service economy that all the turbines for the new offshore farms will be made in Denmark or Germany. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is spinning in his grave like a bloody turbine.

Vernacular education. That’s what I’ve got in mind. Before some of these folks go to the euthanasia booth, it might be a good idea to see if they’d pass some knowledge on. The way they would have if there were still communities built round common human interests, rather than your facebook friends or the kind of logos you wear. I’d hate to think of a whole range of skills disappearing, like biodiversity loss, it’s a kind of extinction. It may be a rough century and we need to send the kids off with more than an iphone and plastic lunch box.

Or to put it another way:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
— Robert Heinlein

So who’s going to tell em?

According to the news, no one. The universities – you know the places we train the next generation to push into the future –are now having their funding slashed. And you know who’s making the cuts? Boomers. The very people who benefited from grammar schools and FREE university education. Now they’ve got the big house and the cool job at the think tank, it’s time to screw the kids.

Maybe Martin’s right after all.