Melissa Benn

One of the many things that currently keeps me cheerful is the unswerving committment of so many thousands of parents to their local state school and the hard work that they put in to support and extend the work that the school does. These efforts are largely unsung and often wrongly pigeonholed as a form of charity. In fact, these same parents are on the whole subscribing, without undue fuss and fanfare, to a clear set of values, quite at odds with the values that underlie, and underline, private and highly selective education. They passionately support the need for high quality education in their own and every area; they know the importance this holds not just for their own child but for the children of families who cannot support them, for whatever reason, usually economic. Contrary to so much media reporting and gross distortion of the situation in education, they do not see their local school as second best or a den of iniquity and ill discipline but a community in which it is possible, with thoughtful application and hard work, to support those with the greatest advantage, the keenest gifts or indeed the greatest problems.

As firefighter, trade union activist and talented photographer Tim Hoy observes, in a lovely blog on his daughter Cydney’s education at Queens Park Community School in north west London, where our daughters also go, is that today’s state schooling is far more disciplined and the children better supported and hard working than in years past. We need to build on this, and the values that underlie the comprehensive idea. Failure to do this amounts to tacit acceptance that only the rich deserve a good education, an idea I find absolutely extraordinary in the 21st century.

Interesting piece by Rachel Cusk in the Guardian review yesterday, musing on the theme of A Room Of One’s Own, prompted in part by new editions of both Woolf and De Beauvoir, in which she suggests that women who make fiction out of the reality of most womens experience, that is, of the ‘repetitions’ of domestic life and the cycles of the body, rather than the outer world clashes of war or politics, tend not to win the same literary respect or prizes as those who tackle the so called bigger, more public themes: or I would add, garner the same interest accorded to women writers who describe other cultures, confirming modern fiction’s role as a form of reportage, personalised bulletins from far away places, including not just geography but the territory of youth,class and history.

More broadly, Cusk argues, women today are in many ways as defined by their relations to property as they were in Austen’s age, and the degree of their dependence on powerful men. We live in a post feminist period, that began in many ways circa the late seventies, in which we have not only obliterated our debt to feminism and the profound changes it has made in womens’ lives but that prohibits a shared public conversation about the truth of much female experience.

So are we ripe is for the return of a more public feminist politics, an end to surface reasonableness, conformity, the release of long pent up wholly legitimate resentments? Given the political ‘repetitions’ of some form of feminist movement from the mid 19th century onwards, I would argue that, yes, it’s about time for another cultural revolution, in every sense of the word.

I have just been to see 2001: A Space Odyssey with my family: part of a Darwin season – yes, really – at our new local cinema. The film itself provoked a storm of discussion within our little group with opinion divided between those who pronounced it ‘complete and utter tosh’ and those who argued that it was ‘ glorious, original film making, working to a different timescale.’ ( The film is very slow by modern standards.) Let’s just say, I was in a minority of one in enjoying its explosion of colour and concepts, its imaginative recreation of The Dawn of Man as well as Jupiter, Infinity and beyond. Everyone else was bored rigid.

But to return to the central question of time. I about ten years old when I first saw the film and like so many, saw it as a serious attempt to predict the future in terms of space travel, computer technology, furnishings and clothing and so on. It didn’t do badly, as it happens, with the imaginative projection of a a Skype like arrangement for telephone communication and some strange free standing raspberry furniture I am sure I have seen in several modern office blocks recently.

But of course the once distant future becomes the recent past. 2001 is now nearly a decade ago, a year that created its own story, its own extraordinary history. To watch now this projection of a far flung future is to feel the forceful limitation of prediction. As we, the viewer, free wheel through space to the strains of Wagner and Strauss ( amazing music, I thought) all I could think of was the Twin Towers burning and the bodies falling and the resilience and grief of New York.

Who could have guessed all that or understood what it meant? Who also could have guessed that interest in space travel would wane as the new century unfolded? That, in fact, there would be no regular package tours to the moon, in fact few missions to the moon at all, let alone a mission to Jupiter………………