Dear LPG, 

The internet informs that the average 11-year-old now has their own mobile phone and, while the world is trying to get all us older bods technologically intelligent, I bet any reader with a really young grandchild is likely to find that their little offshoot knows how to play with a tablet or their parents smart phone.

I have one such seven-year-old grandson who now has a smart watch which allows him some limited electronic independence.  His parents can programme in the telephone numbers of the people they want him to be able to call, and limit the times he can make contact, and I am privileged to be one of the selected few.    As a result, I am now quite used to being a part of frequent pre-school phone calls where the need to be ready for a fairly early morning conversation with relatively challenging content, gets me up and really  thinking in the mornings.  

One morning not so long ago we got talking about his love (or lack of it) for school and as a dutiful grandparent, I felt the need to point out how important school was even if he did not like it much because you learn so much there.    

In answer to that comment, he explained that he knows everything that he needs to know already, supporting his argument with the fact that he is not bad at what he is required to do academically when there, and also sighting his practical abilities with a computer and when it comes to dealing with everyday life.  

I cannot really remember what reply I gave to his answer but I became very aware of one irony of life that I think we only really learn as we get older.  

I suspect that my seven-year-old grandson is like many people of his age, young confident and self-assured with his knowledge of all things needed for contemporary living.  When I think back, things were very different when I was a seven-year-old, but I felt equally disenchanted with school and confident that I would have done equally as well without the experience.  

Somehow it is only when you get a bit older that you realise the value of spending that chunk of your life learning things, although I don’t think that I remember thinking that I knew absolutely everything back then.

The big irony is that, while I am not completely ignorant of the ways of the world, it has taken me over seven decades to realise just how little I know about so many aspects of the life and times that I live in. 

I have no doubt that sometime in the 2080s he and his generation will come to the same conclusion but, while I continue to try to encourage the need for school, who am I to burst his bubble?  

 DS, Camberwell