Learning by doing

All we wanted was a chocolate cake.  But in one of the old pottery towns of Staffordshire that meant getting into a car and driving several miles through a lifeless urban landscape of derelict factories and boarded-up shops.  The supermarket, when we reached it, was huge and resembled the departure lounge of a decaying international airport; outside in the rain endless cars searched for parking places, while inside the crowd pushing down the endless aisle offering hundreds of varieties of virtually the same food, resembled a bad-tempered football crowd.

Acne-spotted youths and older men, who still look like the tired factory workers they had been five years before, stacked the shelves with little enthusiasm and total disregard for customers’ questions.  While posters advertised job seekers allowance and retraining courses at the local college, shoppers mechanically stocked high their trolleys as if this were their only physical activity of the day.

“I don’t feel hungry anymore,” said my wife, “even for chocolate cake.”

I longed to be at home in Somerset.  Yet the same thing has happened even in Georgian Bath.  The death of the small shop, the disappearance of the baker, the butcher and the grocer.  The disappearance also of something I can just remember from my youth – the delivery boys with their bikes, and the fiercely independent local shopkeepers, derided long ago by Napoleon, and adored by Margaret Thatcher as she recalled her own father and her childhood living alongside the shop.  In 1909, a hundred years ago and the year my grandfather became 21, Bath had a population of 60,000 people, two-thirds of its present size.  Serving that population were 56 bakeries, 49 butchers, 56 dairies, 27 fishmongers, 93 greengrocers and 99 grocers.  Probably some 600 boys would have carried their produce in the ample baskets in the front of their bikes, while hundreds of apprentices would have learned to bake, to prepare meat and manage vegetables, not to mention those in engineering, book publishing and construction.

Now there are only two butchers within a mile of the city centre, there is no baker and only one greengrocer.  We do have four supermarkets which sell everything, and their in-store bakeries ensure a constant aroma of freshly baked bread… but all the ingredients come ready-mixed from central depot, and shelf stacking has replaced apprentices.  Middle-aged men driving vans have taken the place of the bicycle delivery boy, and almost every shop in the city is part of a national chain, whereas in 1909 nearly every shop was privately owned.

There is an old biblical expression that echoes down the years, “by their works ye shall know them.”  Adolescents now, as in 1909, 909, or even B.C.9, still crave to become themselves by being recognised for the quality and relevance of what they are able to do.  In society’s hurry to accumulate ever more wealth the adolescent’s need to have something worthwhile to do has been ignored in favour of the customer loading his or her shopping trolley ever higher.  This may well satisfy people in the short-term, but the real thrill of retail therapy is spending the money you know you deserved to have been paid.  Today’s shoppers don’t look that happy, do they?  And the adolescents… don’t they simply crave for something meaningful to help them make sense of their lives?

See Part Three of Briefing Paper, and Action 4

This article is tagged: adolescents, children, Community.