Dear John,

Albert Einstein (or someone – sources vary) famously said “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”

You never really understood that. Partly because you don’t forget much; I reckon at 46 I could still pass most of my GCSEs and A-levels, though I might need to revise a couple of them to get good grades.

I think what Einstein meant was that it’s about the way of thinking and the skills learnt more than the knowledge acquired. And that’s doubtless true – I use almost zero facts that I learnt in my first degree on a daily basis, but loads of the skills, thought structures and self-knowledge that I had to acquire to get through it.

But what baffles me most about my time at school, decades after leaving, and after spending a while as a teacher too, is why they taught the things they did and not the things they didn’t.

Let’s take maths as an example; you always were good at it (until you tried learning Green’s Functions while unable to write, but that’s still a few years off). You did a lot of maths at school; at one point your timetable gave you something like 9 consecutive maths lessons, and even though you had four different maths teachers at that point, it was still a lot.

You didn’t need all those maths lessons. Not that the material wasn’t fun or useful, but you really didn’t need to spend that much time on it. Remember that one teacher ran out of maths to teach from the syllabus, so then taught you all the maths they could remember from university, then moved onto teaching you card games?

Or remember the time when another teacher tried an experiment on you by giving you an A level module test before you’d studied any of the material? You found it quite a challenge – you had to derive it all from first principles and struggled for time for once, but you still got 100%!

You really didn’t need all those maths lessons. But it also should have been obvious to anyone who met you, especially with your chaotic home life (which the staff knew about too) that there was a lot of other stuff you needed to learn that wasn’t on the syllabus.

Like how body language works, or how to make a good first impression, or how to do networking, or ways to socialise that fit with your social awkwardness. And you weren’t the only person in your class with those kind of issues, and there were people around who knew how to do that stuff, and there were always books they could have got you to read. Something like a 1 lesson a week “life skills for autistic folks” in 6th form, and skipping a maths lesson to do it.

Why didn’t they? Because the whole school system was set around “normal” people, and it assumes that everyone thinks the way they do. It assumes that everyone finds basic social skills easy and calculus hard. Obviously that assumption isn’t true – you find calculus much easier than having a conversation with someone who doesn’t share a major interest with you! Even while in ordained ministry, I have been known to set myself a tricky maths problem to get me through a boring meeting…

I don’t want to be too hard on the school – there were some staff there who really kept an eye out for you and made space for you to flourish, particularly with extra-curricular stuff. But there were some easy fixes they could have done to the structure of the timetable in 6th form which would have helped a lot. But they didn’t. That was either because they really didn’t have an understanding of what it was like to be you (or any of the other kids like you in school) or because they didn’t think it was that important. Either way, it’s a problem.

All the best,

Future John