We should surely applaud any organisation that has raised more than £10 million this year to help provide free laptops for children.

But what if it is, in fact, a news organisation inclined to the union-thwacking right, and even more inclined to display surplus quantities of celebrity thigh and cleavage at every available opportunity? 

Aren’t we teachers supposed to condemn everything about that sort of organisation? This doesn’t fit the narrative at all.

So how do I react to such news? The easy response, of course, is just to dismiss it with a glib “nah”, and regard it as a mere PR stunt.  

Though maybe a better - but tougher - option is for me to accept that I am too entrenched, too tethered to an oversimplified, stereotypical view of that media organisation.  

I am not suggesting that I should now reconsider it as some kind of Mother Teresa of the Laptops. Nor do I believe that I have been consistently misjudging this agent of philanthropy all these years.  

Entrenched opinions on Gavin Williamson and Sir Michael Wilshaw

But maybe these kind of news stories - another is that of 74-year-old former Ofsted boss Sir Michael Wilshaw volunteering to teach at a school short-staffed by Covid - serve as a reminder that most people and issues are much more layered and nuanced than we sometimes find it convenient to accept, write, or post on social media. 

It’s so much simpler just to stick to long-held views, rather than for us regularly to research, update, question and adjust our position accordingly. 

To take another example: how do we react inside when we hear more tales of schools in deprived areas achieving stunning exam results, often with what sounds like an almost penitentiary environment - silent corridors and the like. And the pupils and parents seem perfectly happy there, damn it! 

Do we tend to look for comforting evidence that might cast a shadow over that success? How many of us seriously consider whether they might have a better approach - given the nature of school “success” at the moment - than ours? I am not arguing on either side, just suggesting that we might question that inner response of ours.   

Knee-jerk hostility

Consider, also, the knee-jerk hostility we tend to have towards education secretary Gavin Williamson’s every utterance now. Should we really dismiss and deride absolutely all that he says, just because we are unhappy with much of his decision-making, indecision and posturing over the past year? 

Did his recent recommendation of “traditional teaching”, for instance, really deserve the hammering it got? Isn’t such teaching rather inevitable anyway at the moment, given the safety arrangements in classrooms right now?

And maybe we should afford him some sympathy for admitting that the past year has been tough for him, too, and for confessing that his family and pets have been a great solace? He is just a person.  

But my point here is not to defend any of these people or organisations. I just worry that so much - in education and beyond - is increasingly the recitation of entrenched views, often with more of an eye on social-media acceptance and approval than on any genuine quest to discover new truths. 

So when we finally emerge from the dark and distressing trench of Covid-19, I hope that we might start to emerge from those other trenches, too. Time to take off those protective masks and let challenging debate and discussion breathe again - in schools, online, in pub gardens, everywhere. 

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire