What else can we make our kids do? We've already made it so that being out at night is probably a no-no with mosquito devices and police actively infringing on their liberties, we keep them in school until 18 and if not school then "learning a trade". We already have a culture of "you can't do that" with them and now we're moving fast in to interfering with just how they're educated as well. Quite aside from the genuinely positive move of cookery lessons (as long as they're state funded) we now have the government wanting kids to have a whole day of every week dedicated to "Culture".

When I first heard this I was outraged, how on earth the government would want to take up a fifth of a child's education with going to the opera or seeing a play seemed ludicrous, however this isn't actually what Ed Balls is saying...

All children and young people should have the chance to experience top quality culture - whether that is seeing a play or dance performance, learning a musical instrument or producing some creative writing.

Creative writing? Well that's English literature. Learning a musical instrument? There's your music lessons. No doubt learning about art and performing arts is a part of this idea (Art and Drama lessons respectively). Could it be the government is trying to look like it is raising the expectation on society's children without actually doing anything?

Assuming that at secondary school your child attends lessons as I did then they will have on average through the year a lesson a week on classical and creative writing, a lesson a week on drama, a lesson a week on music or art and a lesson a week of Religious (cultural) education. For me this already adds up to over three hours of education a week based around culture. We also had the majority of our class trips around visits to theatre or art exhibits, etc...so arguably through my educational life I received exactly what is supposedly a new proposal

The trouble is that perhaps I was lucky with my education in that sense, and also lucky with my parents ability to pay for field trips. If the government is set to inflict this on every school as they are doing with cookery lessons, without the appropriate funding, then it is doomed to fail. I would also suggest that without a reform of the way school trips are funded this is a proposal that could shoot itself in the foot. Alienating kids is the last thing you want to do while in education, yet making a small school at least 100 miles away from any quality culture have these field trips will cost the children (and thus parents) of those schools much more than children in, for example, London on Bristol.

Is culture something that only those in the big cities should be able to learn freely or is the government going to put some money where their mouth is if they truly believe children of the country are going to benefit from time being sifted away from the Three R's to make way for this among cookery and "citizenship" lessons? I'm afraid that it may be the former that is the case, with a leading party right now seemingly happy to say whatever it can to the media to make itself appear progressive and on top of things. This is not to say I think the idea is wholly a bad one, just that as with everything else it lacks clarity and true detail.