In my previous article I bellyached about people going to school prize givings and boasting about their results. I neglected to mention, and a commenter rightly pointed out, that we should celebrate people’s achievements and be glad for those that do well. I hope nobody thought that I was recommending some kind of ‘levelling’ – cutting down tall poppies or despising hard work and commitment.
Certainly those are things to be applauded. My point was a finer one than that. Hard work and commitment are good, yes, but hard work at what? Commitment to what? I’m not against education, but is that really what they’re doing? Spending years of your life memorising useless information that you are never going to need – is that really such a big achievement? Diligence at a meaningless task prescribed by a stranger is really just an exercise in conformity. In the context of a state school, it’s an exercise in submission to illegitimate authority. (Historically, civil government was not the source of authority in education and I do not believe that time has changed that.)
I know this is going against the grain of the conservative view, which is that good children work hard in school and get an education so that they can make a positive contribution to society and we can all be better off. Or some variation of that. And I’m sure there are people who did actually learn some things in school that they have ended up using in their adult working lives. It’s just funny how I hardly ever meet them. Doctors, I guess, lawyers and accountants, maybe. But the school system is largely a fraud. Its main purpose is to keep children out of the home so that both parents can go to work and pay tax. Most of what it ostensibly teaches is unimportant and irrelevant. Hence the need for prize givings: most people have no natural motive to spend years of their lives on this foolish nonsense, and so the system has to manufacture artificial motivations. Compliance and conformity are rewarded with enhanced social status – a process that will be repeated many times for the ‘successful’ students who land lucrative jobs in the government bureaucracy. Competence doesn’t come into this, as we’ve all found from experience.
Hence my frustration with people acting as if ‘doing well at school’ is a measure of intelligence and getting a school prize an achievement. It’s not. I’m all for celebrating others’ real achievements, such as running a business, building a house or writing a symphony. But a prize for learning to be a conformist, agreeing with things that you know are not true and devoting years of your life to things that are of no benefit to yourself or anyone else… Really?
