“Amy,” mused our drama teacher in our last lesson before we finished school, “I think you’re going to be in films. Sarah? I think you’re going to be a star of the theatre. Ben…”
Her gaze shifted around the table.
“I think you’re going to die young — on a pub floor.”
It’s fair to say that I was not a good A Level student. My teachers probably appreciated the times when I fell asleep in class because it did at least prevent me from asking irrelevant questions.
The fatigue was the result of dozing off deep into the early hours. The only time I fell asleep before 10 was the evening I should have been staying up all night to finish my long-delayed drama coursework.
I had always hated school. I hadn’t hated any one thing about school. I had had an inclusive, holistic hatred. There had been no inciting incident — no plot-friendly embarrassing event or act of casual spite or sadism. I simply hated the concept of systematic education. I hated being taught instead of teaching myself.
It would be hard to understate the scale of this adolescent obstinacy. “Most learning is not the result of instruction,” Ivan Illich wrote in Deschooling Society, “It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.” Even this would have sounded too overbearing in my disagreeable youth. I didn’t want to “participate” in anything, damn it — I wanted to be left alone with my books. (And why do I feel like what is “meaningful” to you, Double I, might not be “meaningful” to me?)
A bookshop was a world of intellectual and imaginative possibilities. A classroom was a narrow path through a barren field. This was truer when it came to the odd abstractions of mathematics, for example. But it also applied to literature or history. Your favourite food wouldn’t taste good if you were being force fed it.
I can’t blame my teachers for any of this. You can lead a horse to school but you can’t make it read a book. Still, it felt like any time some creative task would stir enthusiasm in my soul it would get rained on by instructional indifference. Once, I got really into writing a short story and received a few nitpicking comments about its grammar. Years on, this makes a lot of sense. When you’re marking stories from 32 schoolboys you can’t write a London Review of Books essay about any one of them. But at the time it reaffirmed the sense of futility. Trudging into school for seven hours every day, when I could have been reading books and watching documentaries, felt as if it actively impaired my education. Schooling felt like the antithesis of learning.
Then I went to university, to a creative writing course. This was so exciting. Finally! The freedom to explore the world of consciousness instead of being dragged around its duller suburbs.
We certainly had a lot of freedom on this course. (In fact, we barely saw our tutors.) The dread set in when I realised that I had no damn idea what to do with it.
I don’t think that anyone should be studying creative writing full-time (inasmuch as our studies were “full-time”). This is not just for blunt economic reasons but for creative reasons. What could be worse for potential writers than herding them all together in the same place, doing the same things? It’s stifling.
Besides, I had to realise something sad about myself. Mental gifts, like physical gifts, are real — but like physical gifts they need development. A naturally strong young man or woman will be weak if he or she sits on the sofa all day gobbling cheese puffs. A naturally curious and creative young man or woman will become intellectually and imaginatively sterile if their input and output amounts to reading the NME and writing maudlin lyrics. I wasn’t creatively frustrated any more. I was creatively arid (and bone idle).
Freedom of assembly means nothing to a hermit. The freedom to read and write what I liked, which had been such an impossibly attractive fantasy, meant nothing without inspiration. This creeping sense of existential pointlessness was a big contributor to my subsequent breakdown — an event, ironically, which did a lot to inspire me again.
I was wrong to be so obstinate about being educated when I was a teenager. Firstly, instruction and autonomy are not always at odds. Instruction can enable us to be autonomous. When I became an English teacher, years later, I hoped that I was giving students the freedom to communicate. It was not my business if they used their English skills to sing in the opera, write ad copy for a marketing firm, or conspire to rob a bank. Of course, I hoped they wouldn’t do something evil like writing ad copy for a marketing firm. But that was their decision.
Secondly, I had been arrogant enough not to appreciate the value of discipline — not discipline in the sense of a teacher hectoring their class but in the sense of establishing the personal and creative structures through which one’s gifts, whatever they are worth, can be expressed. Creativity, for example, cannot just float in the cultural breeze. It has to be attached to experiments and ambitions.
Still, I don’t want to sell out my youthful self. There is some extent to which education can be more of a hindrance than a help to curious and creative kids (often far more curious and creative kids than I was). It broke my heart whenever students at my English school would tell me that they didn’t have the time to read because they had too much homework. Sure, some of them would have found that time if they had stayed off Facebook and Instagram. But not all of them.
An overbearing educational ethos can have a profound damaging effect on young people. From Shelley, to Orwell, to Auden, the austere English public school system did much to turn some of our finer minds against tradition in general. I’m sure it had virtues too. But for all that “Such, Such Were the Joys” allegedly depended on exaggeration, the resentment that inspired it did not emerge from a vacuum.
The modern state schooling I dozed through had none of the caning and buggery that public schoolboys endured. Nonetheless, I fear that modern education has a lot more passive aggressive browbeating. It must be hard to be a curious and intelligent young person having to sit through an hour of being hectored about why real men don’t watch Andrew Tate videos.
Instruction without autonomy starves the creative spirit. The mind needs space in which to grow, and hemming it in with excessive education has the opposite effect to that which is intended. Yet autonomy without discipline and direction means that the creative spirit wears itself out. That doesn’t mean it has to come from an external source. But it has to come from somewhere.
I just speed read this story because I know it so well. I was in the advanced class established in 4th grade when I was 10 yers old. And our Ben was a Brian, a brilliant but disruptive(and always hilarious cut-up) kid who'd be in the back of the class facing away with his arms wrapped around his neck with the hands clasped around his neck appearing to be making out with some girl. But we, and he, were fortunate .Ms. Woodward, the most wonderful, patient woman in the world, was assigned to teach 30 (and over the next 3 years never more than 30) extremely bright kids who had all tested out with IQs over 150. So she never condemned Brian to a premature drunken death but would patiently call out to Brian, who would hold out so everyone could see the show, and coax him back to attention.
And I learned math and science and thrived at history and creative writing. I graduated 7th in a class of 350 eight years later, with all my 4th grade classmates in the top 50 of our graduating class. In 10th grade in a creative writing/lit class ,a paper I had written was read aloud by the teacher as the best. For the first time I experienced the muse, the energy that overcame me and the story came out the end of my pen and was complete with the first draft.
Without the quality of teachers provided to the brightest of the bright none of us would have excelled as professionals and artists and published poets. We lost very few over the years and in 2022 we gathered for our 50th reunion perhaps for the last time. And we'd all succeeded. No premature deaths to suicide or drug abuse. Brian was a successful father, husband and entrepreneur. I a U of Chicago grad and successful trial lawyer and political operative and musician.
Today the notion of accelerated classes, small in student size reserved for the high IQ kids, is condemned by idiots as exclusionary because one doesn't want to hurt somebody's (the parents) feelings. The nihilism of DEI, wokeism and claims of systemic racism are ruinous to our society and the education of our children. Thank goodness for Ms. Woodward and a generation born of The Depression and WWII who knew the brightest must excel to assure the success of society, and the sensitivity of other, emotionally stunted individuals must be ignored.
This is a wonderful piece. I’m pretty old, so it helps me see that I wasted both the structured instruction of my youth and the years of relative freedom that followed. But still! A wonderful piece!