Lessons from snow... for the government and educators.

It's been quite a while since I last updated my post but I've been busy and ill, well haven't we all. Plus I don't really think that I've needed to. What's out there is saying it all. How many times do we need to repeat things in different ways?
Anyway, what I am about to say has probably been said already but what the heck.

I look out of my window and I see winter murk. Quite different from the last 2 weeks which have been dominated by snow and ice, and in the last few days, fog. So what I hear you say. Well our country grinds to a halt every time nature throws her less than predicatable white blanket over us. Why? We are all constantly told that we cannot drive unless it's an emergency, cannot play football/rugby on a pitch with a few centimetres of snow and cannot work if the temperature drops below a certain point. Luckily for us some people didn't worry about the 20cms of snow on the road when our sofa was delivered. Probably down to the fact that the driver had learned, by driving in these conditions, how to cope.

This brings me to my main point. Surely if learning happens in the front part of our brain, the part also responsible for taking risks, then shouldn't we be taking the risk to drive, carefully, in the snow so we can learn. It's no wonder that there are many accidents when no one takes risks because they're told not to and no one has the experience. I am not saying that driving in the snow is not very dangerous at times because it bloody well is! But how can we recognise the dangers if we have no experience of them? Risk taking will teach us what's safe and what is risky or even suicidal.
It might inprove a persons understanding of physics. Imagine that. A whole raft of physics undergraduates who were inspired by wierd driving in snow and ice!!! Perhaps we need compulsory elements in the driving test using skid pans.

One more thing. Is it good for society to rely on authorities to tell us when we should do something? Had we in our street waited for authorities to tell us to clear our road with shovels so we could get onto level ground and learn about driving on snow, then we wouldn't have done so. We didn't wait to be told. God help us in war. The Bulldog spirit of WWII involving common sense learned by weighing up risks would be more or less absent or wrong. Apathy and mistakes would rule.

Maybe that's what's wrong with many parts of British society now. It's about time our politicians developed some common sense of their own and stopped listening to those who are looking for scapegoats to compensate for their own shortcomings.