The “invisible enemy” is forcing us to engage differently with the world: as producers, as consumers, as believers and non-believers, as friends, as family. For me, it’s come as a – somewhat surprising (but welcome) – opportunity to try to homeschool my kids, or at least the one who’s old enough to be ‘schooled’. You’ll be relieved to hear that we are taking a very relaxed approach: we didn’t do anything at all in week one.
So Monday was day one and we decided that we would do a ‘tallest buildings in the world’ project to go along with his current tallest mountains obsession. I showed him a video (on YouTube) of a kid visiting Mecca. We (both) learned that Muslims had to get their haircut as part of the Umrah. And, of course, we began what’s hopefully a long-term project of trying to learn some Chinese (because most of the buildings on the list seem to be in China).
我是中国人。 你是中国人。 一二三四有五六七七八有九十。Wǒ shì zhōngguó rén. Nǐ shì zhōngguó rén. Yī, èr, sān, sì, yǒu, wǔ, liù, qī, bā, yǒu, jiǔ, shí. Will we have the patience for this? I don’t know. The kid who isn’t old enough to be ‘schooled’ seems to be rather better at Chinese than either of us, which makes a lot of sense.
On day two, we watched a Vice documentary about Russian military bases in the borderlands of South Ossetia. I have exciting visions of making him learn the names, locations, flags and capitals of all fifteen former countries of the USSR. I realise that he’s already developing a ‘Promethean’ view of Russia. Incidentally, he’s a (candidate) altar server – in happier times of being allowed to leave the flat – and when we watched a Vox documentary on Vladimir Putin, he seemed to leave all of this (very heartfelt Prometheanism) behind to vent his (mock) outrage at the activities of Pussy Riot. For me, it was an interesting insight into what it means (what it can mean) to be an Eastern European.
As day two came to a close, he’s playing with a runway that he’s made himself out of long thin strips of leftover panelling (or packaging) and we start to think about barrel-rolls. So, back to YouTube and eventually this leads us to a vintage (VHS) documentary – filmed in the early 1990s or late 1980s, when I was his age – about Concord (“The World’s Greatest Airliner”). It brings back happy memories for me of those ‘End of History’ days when we thought (in England) that London, Paris and New York were the most important places in the world and that travelling between them quickly was the ultimate advancement in human progress.
Well, we all know what happened next but it would’ve come as a huge surprise to me back then that things could possibly be otherwise. Last summer, I got about half-way through ‘The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century’ (2005) by Thomas Friedman. It’s a book I’m increasingly feeling the need to go back to. I wonder if Coronavirus will be a flattener? I don’t think it will be a ‘gamechanger’ because the game seems to have already changed. A lot. And I wonder what fun day three will bring?
Autor
Thomas Riley
Thomas Riley runs the Flows and Frictions podcast for Strategy&Future. Originally from Manchester, England, he has been living and teaching English in Katowice since 2009.
Strategy&Future
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