Kids are going back to school for the sake of their education and mental health and a raft of other reasons.

I'm not challenging this, but I would like to comment on the rationale of this policy.

Not so long ago, generations of kids in the UK had little or no education. Schools/universities were for the privileged. Kids were sent out to work on farms and in factories at a young age, unable to read and write. Even when there was a concerted drive to educate, which spawned the Education Act of 1870, education for the majority ended at fourteen.

Are we to assume that for centuries folk were messed up for the rest of their lives because of being uneducated?

A balancing thought I'd add is that I have personal experience of missing important fundamentals of learning. I went to a Grammar School in 1957. It was a good school which produced among others a British Prime Minister. After six weeks, we sat an exam to grade us. I was stuck at home with Asian 'flu for five of those weeks and was graded as a 'D' pupil. At the end of the year, I was in the top ten of the entire year of 150. I started the next term in a class that studied Latin. As a 'D' pupil I hadn't been taught Latin; the top classes had. I NEVER got to grips with the language and only passed 'O' level GCE because I learnt 600 lines of Virgil English translation by heart.

So I know that missing out on the basics of education is very damaging. That has been my experience.

I've always thought that education is not just about teaching subjects, but also prepares us for the big wide world. So, how concerned should we be that the education of kids has been interrupted for about a year?

(I have little doubt that this thread will have few replies and will quickly slip off the first page - like most of my threads. Don't really care. It helps to put my rambling thoughts in some semblance of order. )