There is no state more impotent than being a parent of a teenager doing A-levels | Zoe Williams

Holding a flashcard for chemistry or further maths fills me with a unique kind of horror. Does anyone really understand this?

There’s a chart doing the rounds on social media, ranking philosophers by how punk they are. Hobbes and Heidegger, it says, are “basically a cop”; while for Dionysius the Renegade, Marx and Parmenides, it declares: “They’re not punk, punk is them.” I have no way of knowing how true this is, or whether Žižek belongs so close to Engels, for example. To memorise this list would be beyond useless, like retaining the instructions for a plane you have neither licence for nor any reasonable prospect of flying. Yet, here I am, trying to memorise it; because it’s A-level season, and there is no state more howlingly impotent than trying to be supportive to people who are marching headlong into a knowledge inferno.

If someone had told you when they were tiny that, one day, you’d wave them cheerfully off as they went to scale an ice wall, and you had no idea what the conditions would be like, nor any clue whether that was the right kind of pick, and only the dimmest sense of their skill level, you’d say: “No, I will find a better way. I will scale the ice wall myself, and if I perish, so be it.” And yet, here we are; there isn’t a plan B.