Clarity for Teachers: Day 3
‘Don’t just learn how, but actually do what is needed to become clear.’
My dad went to a grammar school in Birmingham. There was a boy who transferred from another school part-way through the year. He’d sat in Latin class for over a term, learning the conjugations and declensions, before it dawned on him that this thing called Latin was a language.
Alan Garner tells a story of his grandfather, a blacksmith, bright enough as a boy that the vicar let him leave school three years early, at the age of nine, since ‘he had learnt all that was required of his future station’. Among the uses to which he put his intelligence, he subscribed to the timetable of the London Omnibus Service and memorised each new edition from cover to cover:
He went to London only once, and my grandmother said it was like having her own private limousine. She saw all of London, and never had to wait for a bus, because Joe carried everything in his head.
It was, Garner observes, a ‘chilling waste’ of a brilliant mind.
Today’s advice gets me thinking about the gap between learning and doing, how wide this gap can open, what can fall down it.
As a kid, I had a knack for exams. It got me hooked on being right, knowing the answer, getting recognition for my performance. It took me years to get out from under that curse. I sat in French lessons, handed in my homework, got grades that put me near the top of the class — but whatever I learned, it never amounted to actually doing what is needed to have a conversation in French.
The organisation of modern society is based around the institutional separation of learning and doing. A school is an institution where you learn by participating in useless exercises, set apart from the spaces in which useful activity is carried out. Look into the history of modern schooling systems and you’ll find two competing motives: to rescue children from the new horrors of the industrial workplace, and to breed adults who are willing to tolerate the monotony and meaninglessness of the industrial workplace.
I’m not arguing for the return of child labour! I’m not arguing for anything, here — just puzzling at the strangeness of what we’ve taken for granted around here, lately. Just noticing that those of us who did best at school may have learned unhelpful lessons along the way, and that there is more than one way that intelligence can go to waste.
So for me, today’s advice is a reminder to pay attention to what is needed, rather than taking pride in how much I may have learned.
Stockholm, 6 March, 2020
This is the third in a series of reflections on the verses of ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the classic Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing this commentary as I take part in the Clarity for Teachers course. You’ll find more on Charlie’s work on the How To Be Clear website. ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’ will be available shortly as a set of forty-two cards.
