Gaps In Knowledge

My evenings at the ATC are sometimes quite straightforward: I have to talk through the Corps' 'basic values' and encourage the cadets to think a bit more deeply about what they're doing, and to see some of the ambiguities around authority and responsibility. But when I am doing 'Padré's Hour' with the more senior cadets I am left to my own devices and must therefore, as HL Mencken said and as I am fond of quoting, 'squeeze my brain until something comes out'. The truth is that I have a very limited idea of what's really of concern to a collection of teenagers (albeit the best-behaved teenagers you could imagine), and so try to come up with a session that opens out of something that's happened to me, or is happening at the moment, and out of that provide some opportunity for thought and exploration.

But I am increasingly aware of how I have gathered rafts of general knowledge over the course of fifty years and they haven't, and I'm not certain whether it's simply because they haven't had the time or because young people don't come across the same things now. On Tuesday I found myself explaining what the Elgin Marbles are and, perhaps more surprisingly, that there had been such a thing as the Spanish Civil War - I covered that, to some degree, at school when we did The Causes of the Second World War. I suppose if I can communicate the sense that the world is a richer and stranger place than the cadets might otherwise have realised, and that Christianity is part of that, I won't be completely wasting my time.

Mind you - I remember the time when I asked them what the bloodiest battle fought on British soil was. The Battle of Britain? they tried, and a couple of other guesses. Then one of the chaps who always reminded me of a young Matt Smith put up his hand hesitantly and it was though I could see him dredging something up from the back of his mind. With a slight frown he said, 'Was it ... Towton?' 

And, dear reader, of course it was. I could have wept for joy.