School For Failures

Like so many kids I hated school and it was a complete mystery to me what it was for and what I was doing there.All the teachers appeared to be speaking in a foreign language and what was going on outside the window always seemed more interesting than what was going on in the classroom even if it was just passing traffic on the main road.It was a catholic secondary modern but even so the lessons were over my head, modern maths being a particularly arcane mystery to me.So I left school feeling somewhat cheated and drifted in and out of dead end jobs and to this day have never had a trade or career and have had to resort to living by my wits to some extent.

Of course each individual has to find their own way through life but the schools do not help or facilitate here and if anything can be a road block to progress by screwing with children's minds and crippling potential by uninspired lessons and an incoherent disparate curicula that can stunt growth and impair and arrest cognitive development

It was only due to the fact that I discovered books at about 14 that I was able to glimpse a new world of ideas and literature that would enable me to have something approaching an intellectual inner life.One day my mother told father to take me to the library when she discovered I had never actually read a book.It may in retrospect have been a fatal error as I was later to be accused of forever having my nose in a book and not doing anything practical but anyway at the time I was not relishing the prospect of having to read a book.I grabbed at random a few titles,one a huge coffee table book of the Monkees which had mostly photos in it and little text but I did include a proper book as well and later that day idly opened it and soon became engrossed in the story of a junior James Bond type adventure involving a geek who would climb out of his bedroom window at night and solve crime and then go back to his geeky persona come morning.I was hooked,I wanted more of this stuff.

A world to escape into,adventure excitement.Ghost stories,horror, stories,crime,I seemed to go from genre to genre,exhausting one then discovering another with whole yawning vistas opening up before me until I came across a book by Iris Murdoch called Bruno's Dream and it was like nothing I had ever experienced before,a weird world that yet was somehow strangely familiar imbued with a dream like quality peopled by odd characters with deep psychological flaws,just plain weird but intoxicating.I became a Murdoch fan.Then it was Truman Capote,Hemingway, Fitzgerald,Dickens,Shakespeare, Kafka Proust,Joyce et al.

I may now in retrospect be very skeptical of these writers but at the time they offered an alternative reality that was far more interesting than the mundane everyday world that most people appeared to inhabit.

I don't know what it is like in schools today forty years later but from what I hear there does not seem to have been any improvement at all and generations are being turned out disaffected and ill equipped to meet the challenges of global competition.Our universities have dumbed down,grade inflation has destroyed the qualifications system and a radical overhaul is now under way to turn things around.Will Gove succeed or will the institutionliased inertia of a Marxised union driven State education system mean that stasis prevails and the rot continues.We will have to wait and see.