字幕列表 影片播放
-
We want to do well at school for an obvious reason: because – as we’re often told
-
– it’s the primary route to doing well at life. Few of us are in love with the A
-
grades themselves – we want them because we’re understandably interested in one day
-
having a fulfilling career, a pleasant house and the respect of others. But, sometimes,
-
more often than seems entirely reassuring, something pretty confusing occurs: we come across
-
people who triumphed at school – but flunked at life. And vice versa. The former stars
-
who once knew exactly how to satisfy their teachers may now be flatlining in a law office,
-
or relocating to a provincial town in the hope of finding something better. The path
-
that seemed guaranteed to lead to success has run into the sand. We shouldn’t actually
-
be surprised: school curricula are not designed by people who necessarily have much experience
-
of, or talent at, the world beyond. School curricula are not reverse engineered from
-
fulfilled adult lives in the here and now. They were intellectually influenced by all
-
kinds of slightly random forces over hundreds of years of evolution – shaped by, among
-
other things, the curricula of Medieval monasteries, the ideas of some 19th-century German educationalists,
-
and the concerns of aristocratic court societies. This helps to explain the many bad habits
-
that schools can inculcate. They suggest that the most important things are already known; that
-
what is is all that could be. They can’t help but warn us about the dangers of originality.
-
They want us to put up our hands and wait to be asked. They want us to keep asking
-
other people for permission. They teach us to deliver on, rather than change, expectations.
-
They teach us to redeploy ideas rather than originate them. They teach us to respect
-
people in authority – rather than imagine that – in rather inspiring
-
ways – no one actually knows quite what’s going on.
-
They teach us everything other than the two skills that really determine the quality of adult life:
-
knowing how to choose right job for us and knowing how to form satisfactory relationships.
-
They instruct us in Latin and how to measure the circumference of a circle
-
long before they teach us these core subjects: Work and Love. That said, it isn’t that
-
all we need to do to succeed at life is flunk school. A good life requires us to do two
-
very tricky things: be a very good boy or girl for 20 years; and simultaneously never
-
really believe blindly in the long-term validity or seriousness of what we’re being asked
-
to study. We need to be outwardly entirely obedient while inwardly intelligently and
-
unashamedly rebellious.
