ABSTRACT
Liz Waterland, in Not a perfect offering, presents a fiction-alised account of a girl beginning school. Art, as Picasso said, is a lie told to tell the truth. Here that lie opens many possibilities for those of us anxious to understand more of what a journalist might call the child’s angle on her first day at school. Information about how children behave in our fragmented times can only be found in the sterile garden of behaviourist psychology, and about how they think in books like Donaldson’s excellent but essentially non-artistic text Children’s Minds. If we are to understand Personal, Social and Moral Education, we might try to appreciate the children’s perspectives on their school. Indeed, we are not used to seeing school as viewable in different ways at all. Paul Merton, the comedian, recalled on Desert Island Discs how, encouraged by a teacher, he wrote a weekly diary at school, using it as a medium for imaginative writing.
