A teenager is doing a week's work experience with us. In welcome contrast to some of the local youngsters we've had in over the years, who have been sent by their school because they have to do a week somewhere and we are an employer in the village, this one thought of it herself and asked the owner if she could come, because she is interested in plants. I don't really understand how we have escaped all having to be CRB checked. Having no children myself and not doing any youth work (the average audience member for woodland conservation talks is probably entitled to draw their pension) I am not familiar with the regulations. Her parents are friends of the owners so maybe they arranged it as a family matter and that gets us all off the hook.
She seems very nice and polite and genuinely interested. She started off helping with the watering, and watching her pulling the hose around I thought she looked like somebody used to heaving on lines, and asked her if she sailed. Turned out she did the Round the Island Race a couple of weeks ago. I tried to add some botanical interest to the weeding job she was given next, since she wants to do biology A levels after GCSEs next year, so gave her a crash course in the rules of Latin nomenclature and assorted observations on plant morphology through the day. I don't know what she was really expecting or hoping for. Tomorrow she will be introduced to the joys of potting.
As a brainy, upper-middle class girl at a major public school she will presumably go to university. I am very much in favour of people with academic aptitude going to university, and find the current utilitarian government bias in favour of science and engineering depressing. A country is more civilised when it produces some scholars who really know about mediaeval French, or the Opium Wars, or the history of English field patterns. Man cannot live by science and engineering alone, though they are very useful. But I find it equally depressing the way that vocational training has become regarded as so much a second best to going to a university, any university. A friend teaches at an institution that she herself admits is not in the top league. She loves her subject, manages to keep her research rating up, and takes her teaching duties extremely seriously, but she says that some of her students should not be there. If schools are guilty of teaching to the test, too many students are guilty of learning to it. Anything that isn't directly related to getting module points or exam marks is of no interest to them, they will cheat and plagiarise when they can, they check the internet on their mobiles and laptops during lectures and would never dream of reading round the subject. Why bother? They would learn much more in a workplace with a manager who wouldn't stand any nonsense from them, with part-time or day-release tuition to complement the practical experience. By the time they were 21 or 22, the age of the average graduate, they would have acquired work discipline and learnt a fair bit about their chosen field, while not having a mound of student debt. And I'd like to see universities structure their courses so that slightly older people, with a few year's work experience under their belts and a clearer idea of what they wanted to do than they had when they were 18, could go on to study for a degree if they thought it would enhance their career, with the option to combine work and study.
Back in the real world, we tried to think of ways of attracting new customers that didn't involve expensive advertising, and how to find somebody with good plant knowledge to replace a member of staff who is leaving. The boss likes the sound of a 20 year old who sent their CV in on spec. Age discrimination is of course illegal, but somebody two or three times that age who has been obsessively gardening for decades is likely to know more about plants. That's a tough conclusion, given how theoretically keen I am on on-the-job training.
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