Did you ever really leave school?
In a deep part of our minds, we may linger long into adulthood, not in a classroom, but in terms of how our minds work, caged within the confines of a school-based worldview, says a new book by The School of Life
We could hardly expect it to do anything else, but one thing that school has an unparalleled genius for is subtly but powerfully enforcing the message of how important a role it should play in any well-lived life.
In small ways and large, it teaches us that those who most faithfully follow its dictates will prosper, and, correspondingly, that those who insist on doubting, rebelling, cursing and defying it will founder. From a hugely impressionable age, we have it impressed on us that school is the ultimate arbiter of who will succeed and who must go astray.
It can take a very long time until a more complex moral emerges: that those who do best at school do not, over the long term, necessarily do well in life. And vice versa. The former stars who once knew exactly how to score highly in papers may now be questioning the path they took – has it led to happiness or even recognition in the outside world?
They may be listless and unanchored, unable to form the right sort of friendships, or intemperate and lonely within relationships. The path that seemed assured of success has run into trouble. We shouldn’t be overly surprised: school curricula are not necessarily designed by people who have much engagement with, experience of, or talent at, the intricacies of the world beyond. School curricula are not engineered on the basis of close study of the determining ingredients of fulfilled adult lives.
This helps to explain some of the questionable habits of mind that, despite themselves, schools may end up inculcating. They can 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 have a set number of topics they want to talk us through, and must – to a greater or lesser extent – distract us from wandering too far away from their own ideas. They teach us to redeploy concepts rather than originate them. They teach us to deliver on, rather than change, expectations.
Along the way, they teach us to respect people in authority rather than imagine that, in a rather inspiring sense, in a great many fields, no one actually knows exactly what’s going on. They want us to put up our hands and wait to be picked. They want us to keep asking other people for permission.
They teach us everything other than the two skills that in many ways decisively determine the quality of adult life: knowing how to choose the right job for ourselves and knowing how to form satisfactory relationships. They’ll instruct us in cell division and how to measure the circumference of a circle long before they come to those core (and surprisingly teachable) subjects: Work and Love.
It isn’t, of course, that all we need to do to succeed at life is angrily fail at school. There is nothing automatically wise about the rebel either, someone who swears at the teachers, dyes their hair, smokes in the toilets and then, after years of sullen resistance, ends up in a modest job in a declining town.
A good life requires us to do two relatively tricky things: know how to go along with the rules sufficiently well so as not to get mired in needless fights with authority; and simultaneously never to believe too blindly or too passively in the long-term validity of everything we’re asked to study. We need to be outwardly obedient and inwardly discerning.
What we most need to do is to remember properly to leave school. Technically, most of us quit at 18
– an event that tends to be vividly etched in memory and surrounded by considerabe ceremony and emotion. Yet many of us in fact don’t manage to leave at that point at all. In a deep part of our minds, we may linger long into adulthood, not in a classroom precisely, but in terms of how our minds work, caged within the confines of a school-based worldview – generating immense and unnecessary degrees of unhappiness and compromise in the process.
First and foremost, a school worldview inspires a belief that those in authority know what they are doing and that one’s task is to obey.
There’s a feeling too that all work should, when it’s going well, feel substantially irksome, dull and somewhat pointless, as homework once did. Schools teach us to forget, or ignore, the clues offered to us by our own boredom.
All the while, school teaches us that authority is benign, that ‘they’ (those who know, the machine, the big people) want what is good for us and speak on behalf of our longterm interests: ‘We’ll look after you. If you follow our rules, you will thrive. The exam (and all its successors) are fundamentally accurate. They, those who know, have worked out the ultimate test of your value. You are what you score.”
To be in thrall to such ways of thinking doesn’t require us to be sitting in a geography class. We might be in an office selling garden furniture to the Belgian market and thinking like this; we might have children of our own and by all appearances be an adult, and yet still be living within as though there were ‘exams’ to pass and cups to be won.
What would it mean to break the mould? What would it mean finally to leave school? To know some of the following: that there is no guarantee of a path to fulfilment laid out by authority figures.
Our boredom is a vital tool. It is telling us what is slowly killing us – and reminding us that time is short. Authority is not by definition benign.
The former stars who once knew exactly how to score highly in papers may now be questioning the path they took
The teachers and their substitutes have no real plan for us – except in so far as it suits their own advancement. It looks like they want our supreme good but in reality they want us to play their game for their own benefit. At the end, they have no proper prize to offer us.
We shouldn’t be tough on ourselves for lingering so long. School is an immensely impressive system. We start there when we are not much bigger than a chair. For more than a decade, it’s all we know, it is the outside world – and is what those who love us most tell us we should respect. It speaks with immense confidence not just about itself, but about life in general. It is sold to us as a preparation for the whole of existence.
But of course, the main thing it does is to prepare us for yet more school; it is an education in how to thrive within its own profoundly peculiar rules – with only a tenuous connection to the world beyond. Knowing all this, we might do a very strange-sounding thing: finally work up the courage to leave our inner school, be that at age 28, 35 or 62, and start to study what we need to honour our own potential and happiness, those truly core subjects we may have been in flight from for too long. This is an edited extract from What They Forgot To Teach You At School by The School of Life