Good luck ... but it’s impossible to revise for real life
Like a wind from east european mountains, there’s an icy breath heading towards teenagers today, as they discover their National and Higher results.
What can we tell the winners and losers? That a lack of intellectual curiosity needn’t be a bar to a well-paid career? After all, Alex Salmond recently boasted to a student newspaper that he appeared eight times at the edinburgh Book Festival without reading a book. He also praised iain Banks as ‘brilliant and fantastic’. Which he was. And that’s why you should read his books.
Since i sound vaguely posh, people often assume my family was wealthy and i went to private school. They weren’t, i didn’t: i attended a comprehensive, where i was lazy and easily distracted. i had no clue you were supposed to revise for months, not three days before the exam, and although an excellent english teacher managed to instil a basic appreciation for Hamlet and Thomas Hardy, i passed off a David Bowie song off as a poem and wrote an essay about that instead.
THE day i got my Higher results felt like backto-front Lewis Carroll Day, because i did much better than anyone expected, especially me. People tell you that modern exams are far too easy, yet back in the dark ages i got an A in chemistry with no understanding of the subject. in the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Mary Macgregor is regarded as a dunce until she excels at algebra. That brilliance collapses when someone discovers Mary thinks it is a language. My success in alkalines and acids was equally bewildering, so i quit while i was ahead.
instead, i studied law because i watched Crown Court, and i chose to go to Aberdeen University, because i had never been to Aberdeen before. This underlines why 17-year-olds should not be allowed to make life-changing choices without some sort of intervention, even if it means setting fire to the UCAS application form while i fill it out. Law is terribly boring, especially if you rock up thinking it involves poring over murder, robbery and fraud cases. The reality is these subjects are taught for eight weeks. After that, it’s tax, bankruptcy and how to sell houses, although i did find the Sale of Goods Act (Scotland) very useful for returning shoes to Next.
i’m now lucky enough to work in a field where being unable to recall the details of Donoghue vs Stevenson is not a huge impediment to drinking coffee and staring at a laptop. This leaves me with mixed feelings about exams and education: i’m glad i didn’t go to a private school, if a little jealous of the confidence it seems to instil.
The most useful thing you get from education is a space in which you can try and fail, or try and succeed, where you discover being good at games doesn’t matter, and develop some emotional intelligence about how to treat people.
Whether you pass or fail, you will be unprepared for what follows, because life will always be the waking feeling of that dream you have about sitting a test without any revision.