Beginner's Mind

Much is spoken about how we should consider and value education, what subjects are valuable and what standards we should apply to them. The previous UK Prime Minister set great store by the extended teaching of mathematics, arguing that all should be compulsorily taught until the age of eighteen, an idea both impractical and frankly pointless to the lives of most people, as I think I've pointed out before in these [virtual] pages. To be honest, for a good general education and a healthy and informed populace, a wide variety of subjects, across both the sciences and the arts & humanities - including politics and economics - need to be taught to some degree. Where one goes on to from secondary education can build upon this solid base in increasingly specialised, focussed fields.

Those on the right politically in this country tend to view anything other than STEM subjects as unnecessary trinkets that are best avoided, with the arts at the bottom of their list of educational priorities. Most people only see education as a means to a career path, starting at the age of fifteen or sixteen, paving the way towards a university degree. The fact is that such goals these days will lead to frustration more often that not, with most graduates leaving to find a black hole where they imagined the bottom rung of their career ladder to be. It's a fact. And that frustration of thwarted and imagined upward progress to success also misses the central point of an education: the positive effect on the person being educated.

An education helps us frame the complexities of and make some sense of this world, and most importantly, teaches us how to learn. In and of itself, it sets one up as an individual. What one makes of it career-wise is a mixture of personal application, luck, and still, in certain fields of endeavour, class. I for one chose not to go down the career path. Let's face it, although my first degree in Fine Art was good enough to move on to a good MA course without trouble, the prospect of the inevitable re-entry into the system as a lecturer in the subject didn't exactly enthuse me, so I studied postgraduate Linguistics instead, which taught me lots of stuff that, in keeping with the Fine Art degree, was of little specific use in my life, but was interesting nevertheless. Education gave me choices, not a career leg-up that I neither expected nor desired. I chose my path, which meandered a very great deal over forty-odd years and ended up here, in our mountain fastness in Caellwyngrydd.

Not many people know this, but a decade after my flirtation with Linguistics, I took the Civil Service entrance examination, which was two papers over, I think, two days, with the vague aim of calming my scattered work life down a bit by becoming an Executive Officer in The Valuation Office, which I guess would have suited my mild OCD, but I fear the structure and rules would have got to me in the end, as I'm essentially un-clubbable. Anyhow, despite an exam result of ninety-eight percent, I didn't get past the interview stage: they obviously didn't like the cut of my jib, and anyway they would have known that I was - and still am - a card-carrying member of The Labour Party. Sorry, old chap, wrong colour! My point is that all of this past experience, both in and out of education, is part of who I am, less an indicator of where I am or have been.  It strikes me as a very healthy way to view one's life, even now in  the retrospection of old age...