Why Missing A Year Of School Isn’t The End Of The World?

It has been a turbulent year for the pupils of this country. This time last year, the experience of a national lockdown was still novel and exciting. Now, the children of Britain are wearily exiting their third lockdown, having spent a year yo-yoing in and out of school. The British government say that missing a whole year of education could be catastrophic for their educational development, but are they correct? There are many examples of famous people who have achieved massively in life while missing out on their education, but I will focus on just one.

The man in the photograph was born in the small village of Kulshino, Russia, in 1934. His parents worked on the local collective farm: his father a carpenter and his mother in the dairy. In 1941, when he was 7 years old, the invading German army captured his village, burning down half of the village and commandeering his family home. The family were given permission to build a mud hut in the back garden, which is where they lived for the next three years. For five whole years, the village school was closed and he had no schooling at all. All he did receive were beatings from the German army because he wouldn’t work for the Germans. Eventually, the beatings were severe enough to put him in hospital. When he recovered, he worked in the hospital as an orderly. When the Germans were finally defeated, he worked with the Russian Red Army, removing landmines which the fleeing German army had buried in the roads around his village.

In 1946, he finally enrolled back in a school in the nearby town of Gzhatsk, where he finally learnt to read. Later, a former Russian air force pilot joined the school and taught the pupils maths and some science. He was fascinated by aeroplanes and was a member of a model aeroplane club at the school.

He left school in 1950 and began an apprenticeship as a foundry man at a huge steelworks. However, he carried on his education by enrolling at a local ‘young workers’ school. He also indulged his love of aeroplanes by joining a local flying club, where he learnt to fly bi-planes.

This lead to him enrolling, in 1955, into the flying school for the Soviet air force. When he graduated as a pilot, he was posted to Luostari Air Base, close to the Norwegian border. Being a Soviet pilot on the Russian/Norwegian border was very much the front line of the Cold War.

While at the airbase, he expressed an interest in space exploration, following the launch of the Luna 3 spacecraft. Luna 3 was an unmanned craft which travelled around the moon, taking photographs of the dark side of the moon. He was soon recommended for and accepted into the Soviet Space Programme,

From a pool of 154 qualified pilots, he was chosen to be the person who, on the 12th April 1961, was launched, in the Vostok spacecraft, to become the first person in human history to travel into space.

His name was Yuri Gagarin.

In an unusual return for an astronaut, the final stage of returning to earth included parachuting to the ground in full orange spacesuit. He landed in a potato field south of Moscow, to the startled horror of the farmer and her mother who were planting potatoes at the time. The shocked farmers were about to run away from this strange creature that had landed in their field when Gagarin tried to calm them down. Speaking Russian convinced them that he wasn't an alien. When the mother asked where he had come from, he said, "From the sky."

So when you read in a newspaper, or someone tells you, how desperately important it is that your child needs to catch up all the learning they have missed over the last twelve months, just turn around and say, “Yuri Gagarin managed to miss 5 years of his schooling during the second world war and he still managed to become the first human to travel into space. I’m sure my child will be absolutely fine.”