The Last Samurai

Sibylla said, ‘Lu— Stephen. We can’t, that is even if I wanted you to stop working with Miss Lewis which I don’t we can’t afford to hire people who know about quantum mechanics and we especially can’t afford it on £5.50 an hour.’

I said, ‘Although the capacity to think vastly expands human capabilities, if put to faulty use, it can also serve as a major source of personal distress. Many human dysfunctions and torments stem from problems of thought. This is because, in their thoughts, people often dwell on painful pasts and on perturbing futures of their own invention. They burden themselves with stressful arousal through anxiety-provoking rumination. They debilitate their own efforts by self-doubting and other self-defeating ideation. They constrain and impoverish their lives through phobic thinking.’

Sibylla said I should not just quote things uncritically, the writer seemed to assume there was no such thing as an unsolicited memory, an assumption for which there seemed to be no evidence whatsoever.

I said that was exactly why it would be better for me not to go to school, I needed to learn to argue like J. S. Mill.

Miss Lewis said that while she did not mean to belittle what Sibylla had achieved there was a real danger of being cut off from reality.

Sibylla said Miss Lewis did not know what it was like to go to school in the type of place that was excited to be getting its first motel.

Miss Lewis said, ‘What?’

Sibylla said when she was growing up she only ever went to one school that even taught Greek and you had to have three years of French or Spanish and two years of Latin when she only had one year of French so she had to say she had two years of French and Latin lessons with a defrocked Jesuit priest from Quebec and forge a letter from the priest and most people couldn’t learn Arabic or Hebrew or Japanese even if they invented a defrocked Jesuit priest.

Miss Lewis said, ‘I think we are getting a little off the subject here. What do you think is the effect on a child who is progressing satisfactorily at Key Level Two and in fact is doing work if anything ahead of her age group, what do you think is the effect, as I say, on a child who has every reason to take pride in her achievements and have her self-confidence bolstered when Stephen comes up with a page covered with problems in six or seven figures and tells her there is no point in doing a problem unless the answer won’t fit on the display of a calculator? To say nothing of the effect on children who are having difficulty with the material. I have one boy who has been working his way through the alphabet one letter at a time and just last week he finally reached the stage where he could recognise all the letters with confidence, well, I am not saying Stephen necessarily means to be unkind but what do you think the effect is if Stephen starts writing all the names of the dinosaurs in Greek and explaining that a lot of the letters are the same? If you want my opinion that boy has more of an accomplishment to be genuinely proud of in that single alphabet than Stephen with dozens, but he was absolutely devastated. Weeks of work undone at a stroke. It has got to stop. Stephen has got to understand that there is more to life than how much you know.’

I said, ‘Does that mean I don’t have to go to school any more?’

Sibylla said, ‘I couldn’t agree with you more, we have been watching Seven Samurai on a weekly basis for about a year.’

Miss Lewis said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

Sibylla said, ‘Well, as I’m sure you know the whole issue of a skill in Kurosawa is highly— Why look, you’ve got a little book about samurai in the classroom, how marvellous!’

She picked up SAMURAI WARRIORS off my desk and she began to peruse it.

Miss Lewis said, ‘I think we should.’

Suddenly Sibylla exclaimed in accents of horror, ‘WHAT!’

‘What is it?’ asked Miss Lewis.

‘EXPERT IN A DIFFERENT COMBAT SKILL!’ cried Sibylla.

‘What?’ reiterated Miss Lewis.

‘How can they SLEEP AT NIGHT,’ said Sibylla, ‘having foisted this FABRICATION on unsuspecting SCHOOLCHILDREN! It says each of the samurai is an expert in a different combat skill. Combat skill my foot. What’s Katsushiro’s, the STICK? Or Heihachi’s—the AXE? What a SHAME he had to leave it behind with its owner so he couldn’t actually use it on the ENEMY.’

Miss Lewis said, ‘I really think.’

Sibylla said, ‘It’s only the merest CHANCE that we happen to know the facts of the matter, for all we know the school is crammed to the rafters with books full of mistakes on subjects where my son might have been hoping to LEARN something he didn’t already KNOW, which I had SUPPOSED was the object of EDUCATION. Oh what am I to do?’

Miss Lewis said, ‘I really don’t think.’

Sibylla said, ‘You might as well call a book the GENIUS OF SHAKESPEARE and then explain to a Japanese schoolchild that Laertes is the hero of HAMLET under the impression that he is the more INTERESTING CHARACTER. Oh what shall I do?’