Discursive and argumentative writing

We Learn the Cosine Rule. Why Not How to Avoid Debt?

I can find the area of a triangle using two sides and the angle between them. I can name the rivers of three continents. What I cannot do — what almost none of us leaving school can do — is read a payslip, build a budget, or understand why a credit card charging twenty per cent interest is a trap dressed as a gift. This is not a small gap in our education. It is the gap that will cost us the most, for the longest, and it is time schools closed it.

The case is simple. Every one of us will, within a few years, handle money on our own: rent, bills, a first wage, a first loan, a first overdraft. None of it is optional. Yet the school timetable, which finds time for the cosine rule and the oxbow lake, finds none for the one skill we are all guaranteed to need. We are taught to solve problems we will rarely meet and left helpless before the ones we cannot avoid.

The cost of that silence is real. A young person who does not understand compound interest does not merely lose a few pounds; they can lose years. A debt that grows quietly while you are not looking is a debt that can shape a decade — where you can live, what work you can refuse, whether you can ever save. The student who was never taught how borrowing works does not make a free choice and get it wrong; they make a choice they were never equipped to understand. That is not their failure. It is ours, collectively, for sending them out unarmed.

Now, some teachers will say the timetable is already full — that there is simply no room for another subject. And they are right that the day is crowded; nobody is pretending otherwise. But this objection assumes finance must be a whole new subject competing for hours, when in truth it could live inside the ones we have. Budgets are percentages and ratios — that is mathematics. Contracts and terms are close reading — that is English. The skill need not displace the timetable; it can enrich it, by making the abstract suddenly, urgently useful.

Others will say that finance is best learned at home. Perhaps — for those whose homes can teach it. But a young person whose family already understands money will learn it anyway; a young person whose family is itself struggling will not. To leave financial education to the home is to guarantee that the children who most need it are the ones least likely to get it. School exists precisely to give every child what not every home can.

So here is what I am asking for, and it is not much: a few hours, woven into the subjects we already study, on the money decisions every one of us will face. Not a new exam. Not more homework. Just the difference between leaving school able to read a contract and leaving school hoping for the best.

We are taught to find the area of a triangle we will never need to measure. Surely we can be taught to read the one bill that will arrive, every month, for the rest of our lives.

Dear Editor,

The proposal to ban cars from our high street has divided the town more sharply than any local question in years. The shopkeepers warn of ruin; the campaigners promise a renaissance. Yet the truth, I suspect, lies in neither camp's confidence, and I write to weigh the case as fairly as I can — because a decision this large deserves more than a slogan.

The argument for pedestrianisation is genuinely strong. A high street without cars is a high street people can linger in: children can walk safely, café tables can spill onto the pavement, and the constant noise and fumes that drive shoppers away are simply removed. Towns that have done this often report not the collapse traders feared but the opposite — more footfall, longer visits, and a centre that feels like a place to spend an afternoon rather than a road to hurry across. The space we have given to moving cars, this case argues, could be given back to the people the shops exist to serve.

And yet the traders' fears are not foolish, and it would be dishonest to dismiss them. Many of their customers are elderly, or carry heavy shopping, or come from villages with no bus, and for them a car is not a luxury but the only practical way to reach the shops at all. A pedestrianisation that ignores them does not open the high street to everyone; it quietly closes it to some. The deliveries that keep the shops stocked, too, cannot simply vanish — a bakery needs its flour before it needs its atmosphere.

So the question is not really 'cars or no cars'. It is whether the benefits can be had without paying their full price — and here, I think, the evidence leans toward a careful yes. The towns that have pedestrianised most successfully did not ban cars absolutely. They restricted them: deliveries before the shops open, disabled access preserved, parking moved to the edge with short, level walks and frequent shuttles for those who cannot manage them. The choice was never between a road and a piazza; it was between a thoughtless ban and a thoughtful one.

Weighed together, then, I find the case for change the stronger — but only on conditions the campaigners too often skip past. A high street given back to people is a prize worth having. A high street that strands the elderly and starves the shops is not. The first is within reach; the second is the version we must take care not to build.

What I would urge, through your pages, is that we stop arguing as though there were only two answers. There is a third, and it is the one most likely to work: pedestrianise, yes, but pedestrianise with the people it must not exclude held firmly in mind. Get that right, and the divided town might find it was arguing about the wrong question all along.

Yours faithfully, R. Adeyemi

The Age Gate Cannot Wait

Every social media company in the world already knows, with uncanny precision, what its users want, where they go, and what will keep them scrolling. It can predict a purchase before the buyer has decided to make it. Yet ask these same companies one simple question — how old is this user? — and they spread their hands and plead ignorance. The pretence is no longer tolerable. The platforms that profit from children should be required, in law, to know they are children. Age verification cannot wait.

The first reason is the plainest: the harm is already here. A generation is growing up inside spaces designed by adults to be maximally compelling and minimally answerable, and the damage — to attention, to sleep, to the fragile business of liking oneself at thirteen — is no longer speculation but the daily testimony of parents, teachers and the young themselves. We do not let children buy alcohol, drive cars or sign contracts, because we accept that some thresholds require an age. A platform engineered to hold the gaze for hours is not obviously safer than these. To regulate the bottle and the car but not the feed is an inconsistency we maintain only because the feed is newer.

The second reason is that the companies could verify age if they were made to. They already perform identity checks of extraordinary sophistication for advertisers and for fraud. The claim that age is the one fact beyond their reach is not a technical limit; it is a business decision. Verification is inconvenient because a verified user base is a smaller one, and a smaller user base is less valuable. The ignorance, in other words, is profitable — and profitable ignorance is precisely the kind that the law exists to end.

Here the strongest objection arrives, and it deserves a fair hearing. Privacy campaigners warn — rightly — that forcing everyone to prove their age means forcing everyone to surrender their identity, handing yet more personal data to companies that have not earned our trust to hold it. An age gate, they argue, could become a surveillance gate, and the cure could prove worse than the disease.

This is a serious argument, and it cannot be waved away. But it is an argument against BAD verification, not against verification itself. The objection assumes only one method exists — uploading a passport to a company's servers — when in truth age can be confirmed by an independent third party that tells the platform only one thing ('this user is over thirteen') and tells it nothing else. The technology to verify a fact without revealing an identity already exists. The privacy concern is real; it is also solvable, and it is no excuse for the status quo, which protects neither children nor privacy but only profit.

What it would take is not a ban on social media, nor a war on the young people who love it, but a single, enforceable rule: that a company offering its services to the public must know, to a reasonable standard and by a privacy-preserving method, who among that public is a child — and must treat them accordingly. Stronger default settings. No algorithmic feed engineered to maximise hours. No data harvested for advertising. The things we would insist on for a child in any other space, insisted on here.

The platforms will say it is hard. Of course it is hard; things worth doing usually are. They will say it is not their job to raise other people's children. They are right — but it is their job not to profit from harming them, and that is all this rule requires. For two decades we have let the most powerful companies in history claim they simply cannot tell a child from an adult. We have indulged the fiction long enough. They know exactly who their users are. It is time the law required them to admit it — and to act on what they admit.

Friends, fellow students, members of staff — good afternoon.

We are here to ask whether competitive sport should remain compulsory in our schools, and I want to begin by admitting something a debate does not usually allow: I am not certain. The question is harder than either side likes to pretend, and I think we owe it the honesty of weighing it properly rather than the comfort of choosing a team. So let me put the cases — both of them, fairly — and only then tell you where, on balance, I land.

The case FOR compulsory competitive sport is not nothing, and we should resist the temptation to dismiss it. Sport teaches lessons no classroom can. It teaches you to lose — to be beaten, fairly, in front of others, and to shake the hand of the person who beat you. It teaches you that effort and outcome are not the same thing, that a team is stronger than its loudest member, and that the body, neglected, will eventually present its bill. For some students, the playing field is the one place in the school day where they shine — and to make sport optional is to risk those students quietly opting out of the very thing that makes them feel capable. There is real value here, and any honest answer must hold it.

And yet — and this is the case AGAINST — for every student who shines on the field, there is one for whom compulsory competitive sport is a weekly humiliation. Forced to compete in front of their peers at the one thing they cannot do, picked last, exposed, they learn not resilience but dread; not a love of movement but a lifelong association of exercise with shame. The irony is sharp: a policy meant to build healthy habits can destroy them, teaching the least sporty students that physical activity is a thing done TO them, painfully, in public. If the goal is lifelong health, compulsory COMPETITION may be the surest way to lose the very students it most needs to reach.

So how do we weigh these? Notice that both cases actually agree on the goal — they want students to be active, confident and well. They disagree only on whether COMPETITION is the road to it. And once the question is put that way, I think the evidence leans, though it does not shout. The benefits the first case describes — resilience, teamwork, the body's needs — do not actually require competition. They require participation. A student can learn teamwork in a non-competitive game, can build health by swimming or hiking or dancing, can taste effort and reward without ever being picked last. Competition delivers these goods to those who are good at competing — and withholds them from everyone else.

My judgement, then, is this: sport should remain compulsory, but competitive sport should not be the only road through that door. Keep physical activity in every week — non-negotiable, because the body's needs are real. But let students choose the FORM. Let the competitor compete, fiercely and proudly. And let the student who dreads the rugby pitch reach the same goal — health, confidence, the lessons of effort — by a route that does not begin with humiliation.

I said at the start that I was not certain, and on the broad question I am still not. But on the narrow one I have come to be: the value of sport is real, and so is the harm of forcing it into a single, competitive shape. We can keep the first and lose the second. That is not a fudge between two camps. It is, I think, the answer the evidence actually points to — and the one most likely to send every student, not just the sporty ones, out of this school with a body they have learned to use and trust.

Thank you.

Enough: The Case Against Growth Without End

There is a number that governs us more completely than any law, and almost nobody has voted for it. It is the growth figure — the quarterly verdict on whether the economy has expanded, and by how much. A government that delivers it is a success; one that does not is in crisis. We have organised our politics, our anxieties and our sense of national worth around the assumption that more is always the goal, and that an economy which merely stayed the same size would be an economy that had failed. I want to argue that this assumption, for the wealthy nations at least, has quietly stopped making sense — and that clinging to it now costs us more than it pays.

Begin with what growth was for. In a poor society, growth is unambiguously good: it is more food, more medicine, more roofs, the difference between scarcity and sufficiency. No serious person argues against growth for a nation that does not yet have enough. But the wealthy nations DO have enough — enough, at least, that the marginal extra unit of output buys astonishingly little extra wellbeing. The data on this is now unembarrassing: beyond a certain national income, more money stops reliably buying more happiness, more health, or more time. We crossed that line decades ago. We have simply not noticed, because the number kept rising and we kept saluting it.

What growth buys us now, increasingly, is not sufficiency but its side effects. To keep the figure rising, a rich economy must persuade people who already have enough to consume more — to replace the working phone, to upgrade the adequate kitchen, to want, perpetually, the next thing. It must treat the planet's finite materials as though they were infinite, and the atmosphere as a free drain. The pursuit of growth past the point of sufficiency does not make us richer in any sense that matters; it makes us busier, more indebted, more crowded with possessions and more frightened of losing them. We are running faster to stay in a place we have already reached.

Now to the objection that any honest version of this argument must meet head-on — because it is powerful, and because the careless versions of my case skip past it. Growth, the critic will say, is not a luxury but the thing that funds everything we value: the hospitals, the pensions, the schools, the safety net. Stop growth and you do not get a gentle plateau; you get austerity, unemployment, and the poor paying first and worst. To argue against growth, the objection runs, is a comfortable position available only to those already comfortable.

This is the strongest case against me, and I concede a great deal of it. An economy that simply stopped growing TODAY, with everything else unchanged, would indeed be a catastrophe, and it would fall hardest on those with least. The critic is right that our hospitals and pensions are, as currently financed, growth-dependent. But notice what this objection actually establishes: not that endless growth is good, but that we have BUILT a society that cannot survive without it. That is not a defence of the goal; it is a description of our trap. The argument is not that we should stop growing tomorrow, but that a society which can only fund its hospitals by consuming the planet without limit has set itself a problem it must, eventually, solve — and that the solution begins by admitting the goal was never sacred. We funded good things with growth because growth was the tool we had. The task now is to learn to fund them another way, while we still have the wealth to manage the change on our own terms rather than on the planet's.

I am not arguing for poverty, or for some romantic return to less. I am arguing for a different question. For two centuries we have asked, 'How do we produce more?' — and it was the right question for two centuries. But a question can be right for an age and wrong for the one that follows. The wealthy nations have answered the old question. It is time we had the confidence to ask the new one: not how to grow without end, but how to live well within enough. The first nation brave enough to ask it aloud will not be the one that fell behind. It will be the one that saw, before the others, where the race was actually heading.

The Cost of Honesty

'Always tell the truth.' It is among the first instructions we give children and among the last we manage to obey ourselves. We praise honesty as a near-absolute virtue, the bedrock of every other; and then, daily, we lie — kindly, strategically, almost without noticing. The gap between the maxim we teach and the conduct we practise is so wide that it ought to make us suspicious of the maxim. Is honesty truly a duty we should keep whatever the cost? Or is the very phrase 'whatever the cost' the place where a fine principle quietly becomes a foolish one? The question is worth weighing slowly, because the easy answers — 'always' and 'never' — are both, on inspection, indefensible.

The case for honesty without exception is more serious than it first appears. Its deepest argument is not about individual lies but about trust, which is the invisible currency every relationship and every society runs on. A lie, however small, spends that currency; and a person who lies 'only when it helps' becomes a person whose word, on inspection, means nothing, because the listener can never know which words to believe. The absolutist sees clearly that once you permit lying 'for good reasons', you have made yourself the judge of when reasons are good enough — and people are remarkably skilled at finding good enough reasons to do what suits them. The rule 'always be honest' is rigid precisely so that it cannot be bent by self-interest. There is real wisdom in this, and any honest weighing must grant it.

And yet the cost side of 'whatever the cost' cannot be ignored, because that phrase smuggles in horrors. The dying grandmother who asks if her garden is being cared for; the friend, grieving and fragile, who asks if the eulogy they wrote was any good; the refugee at the door whom a lie would shelter and the truth would doom. In each, honesty is not a virtue but a weapon, and the person who wields it 'whatever the cost' is not principled but cruel — hiding behind a rule to avoid the harder work of kindness. The absolutist's clean conscience is bought, in these cases, with someone else's suffering. A morality that can produce that result has surely mistaken a useful guideline for an inviolable law.

So where, weighing these, does the truth of the matter lie? Not, I think, in either absolute, but in noticing what the two cases are really arguing about. The absolutist is defending honesty as a DEFAULT — the position you hold unless there is a compelling reason to leave it. The exceptionalist is insisting that such reasons sometimes exist. Put that way, the two are less opposed than they seem: both can agree that honesty is the standing rule and that the burden of proof falls heavily on anyone who would break it. The disagreement is only over whether the burden can EVER be met — and once we admit the grieving friend and the refugee at the door, it plainly can.

The reasonable position, then, is neither 'always' nor 'when it suits me', but something more demanding than both: honesty as a powerful default that may be overridden only for the sake of someone other than yourself, and only when the harm prevented clearly exceeds the trust spent. This is harder than the absolute rule, because it asks for judgement rather than obedience — and judgement can be abused. That is the absolutist's real warning, and it should stay with us: the exception must be rare, other-regarding, and honestly examined, or it rots into mere convenience.

If I must land somewhere, it is here. The maxim should not be 'always be honest, whatever the cost', for that phrase licenses cruelty in the name of virtue. Nor should it be the lazy 'be honest when it helps', which licenses everything. It should be this: be honest unless honesty would serve only your own comfort or another's serious harm — and be deeply suspicious, always, of how easily you persuade yourself that a particular lie has met that test. The cost of honesty is sometimes too high to pay. But the cost of forgetting that it is the default we are departing from is higher still.