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THE FAILURE OF SCHOOLS TO EDUCATE
When the philosopher, Aristippus of Cyrene, was asked some 400 years BC, what boys should be taught, he replied:
"Those things which they will use when men"
Imbued with ancient wisdom, this response threatens to make a mockery of much which is taught in schools today.
Tragically, rather too many schools have lost sight of those things which will be used by our boys when they become men. We have lost our focus on education in favour of a concentration on the esoteric, the political and the convenient.
Rather too much teaching is packaged in artificial curricula delivered in artificial settings giving artificial help for the future. The authenticity of contemporary school education is compromised by many things, not least by examination systems designed not so much as to prepare boys for life, but to assist with selection into the tertiary education system. To this must be added the politicisation of curriculum content and an inappropriate specialisation in the senior school which gives substance to Will Roger’s assertion:
There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get off the thing that he was educated in.
What are the things that a boy will use when he is a man? Responses will vary to this question, but it is unlikely that a serious response is going to omit things like:
• The ability to live in community and to forge good relationships.
• The ability to communicate well.
• The ability to know yourself and what you believe.
• The ability to handle intimacy and sex.
• The ability to control emotions and impulses.
• The ability to manage financial matters.
• The ability to do practical things, to clean, cook, make and mend.
• The ability to be good mannered and to know etiquette.
• The ability to accept responsibility.
• The ability to be resilient and to deal with grief and loss.
Doubtless, more topics should be added to this list, but even a list of this length begins to illustrate a chasm between what a boy will use when a man, and what a boy is usually taught in school. There are glorious exceptions of course, and most schools would be doing some things in some areas. However, it is the contention of this paper that all schools should be teaching all things, or at least more things that relate to what a boy will use when a man.
It is easy to sensationalise this point and to go rather too far with this thesis and advocate that boys should become like Byron’s “Don Juan”.
He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery.
And how to scale a fortress – or a nunnery.
Schools should do more than train for a vocation of scaling nunnery walls. Schools must train the mind and do so through the vehicle of a variety of academic disciplines. However, schools must also recover the claim they are relevant to a boy’s future life, and as things stand at the moment, there is rather too much evidence that schools are failing in this regard.
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