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by A S H Smyth
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
When I was 16, Simon Clark left school to work as a printer’s
apprentice. At my highly competitive but rather staid grammar school
this was pretty unusual, and True Son though I was, I remember being a
little envious of the fact that Simon was heading out into the big wide
world… at least until my mother pointed out what he would likely be
earning in the trade. ‘Don’t do it’, she said. And I listened, because
that’s what dutiful firstborns do when they’re not picking the scabs on
their knees.
Yeah, well, thanks, mum.
Simon – and everyone else who suckled on the great teet of Mammon at
the earliest opportunity – will have made, at the most conservative
estimate, a couple of hundred grand by now. I suspect he owns a car.
Maybe he’s even bought a house.
I have not yet earned, in my working life in this country, enough money
to pay tax. And I’m talking cumulative. I drive an unreliable pink Mini. It’s
not mine. I barely own everything that’s in my bedroom.
But to reach these dizzying heights of commercial and artistic success, I
spent two years doing four A-levels, and then four years doing two
degrees (if nothing else I am basically numerate). In between times, I’ve
been a teacher. So the one thing I do know about is the value of
education.
‘Tell us, tell us!’ I hear you cry.
Well, alright. Here, for all you wannabe-intellectuals, is a quick (but
nonetheless unabridged) run-down of what I’ve learned about what I’ve
learned, since I began my A-levels.
History
History has always made me chuckle. Someone tells you they have
studied History and you can bet your arse that they have a fleeting
acquaintance with maybe 13 years of the French Revolution (chancers
will try to stretch this to fit some kind of Long War theory) and possibly
a superficial understanding of the Wars of the Roses. Neither of these
areas of expertise will include any actual dates.
I studied the Wars of the Roses for two years solid, with a tyrant of a
schoolmaster who drilled us with weekly factual tests and would call us
unspeakable things – during the tests – when we confused the third
sister of Warwick the Kingmaker (motto: One King to Bind Them All) with
the second wife of Richard III’s blacksmith. Since they were all called
Catherine, this was easy to do.
And yet the only interesting thing I can tell you, right now, about this
130-year span of English history is that there are no plays about Henry
VII, and plenty of bloody good reasons why (I believe his one recognised
contribution was the advent of double-entry book-keeping in the
Exchequer*).
I guess you could argue that my general grounding in History has
provided me with skills and interests that facilitate further study. But to
what end? The only occasion on which my historical curiosity came in
handy was when I had to baby-sit a class of bored Sri Lankan 16-year-
olds, and managed to mesmerise them for a good two minutes with the
story of the Saxon king (Ethelbertha, or someone) who missed his
coronation feast because he was in bed with a hooker and the hooker’s
mother.
Music
I discovered that, for exam purposes, knowledge of the name of a thing
(including the third sister of Warwick the Kingmaker) is every bit as good
as any kind of understanding of that thing. This came in handy when
comparing The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ to Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’.
I also figured out that nothing drove Oli Jones more wild than my
unflinching assertion that Verdi was proper opera whereas Janacek or
somesuch was mostly composed by someone cack-hander (possibly not
even Janacek) throwing darts at a keyboard without parental
supervision. Oli and I are close friends to this day, but neither my
musical attitudes not their intellectual grounding have shifted one iota
(see Class. Civ. below).
Oh, also, Verdi drove a car, and died the year after Oscar Wilde.
Needless to say, these facts were not part of the syllabus.
In practical terms, I spent two years working towards getting a choral
scholarship at Oxford. From which I was promptly sacked.
English
Another class, another tyrant (they were ten a penny: it was an all-
boys school).
I loved Heart of Darkness. But have I ever read anything else by Joseph
Conrad? Nope. To my knowledge none of his other works was made into
a movie starring Brando and Martin Sheen.
Classic Civilisations
I know a lot about knob gags in ancient comedy (strap-ons, mostly),
and I know that Horatius saved the bridge in between what were
presumably rather easy Lays of Ancient Rome. Our tutor also once
informed us, in a slow drawl, that ‘goats are notoriously randy animals’:
a comment for which I am yet to find a use.
And so to what is colloquially called ‘Higher’ Education. Highlights of this
were dissertations on the (mis)treatments of Ancient Egypt in five
operas, and on The Scorpions, a South African elite anti-corruption
squad. Both were, in the parlance of contemporary reviewers, coolly
received.
Where did these noble efforts get me, then? Well, at the peak of my
game I was able to write my friend a postcard telling him, in
hieroglyphics, that I had set fire to his penis in Thebes. I now cannot
even read that postcard. I did not ‘become’ an Egyptologist.
And of course I can look very knowing when watching Thirteen Days,
and snigger when reflecting that James Bond wouldn’t last five minutes if
the real Kremlin was after him. But I did not, of course, become a spy,
either. As I keep having to tell people when I holiday near the Somali
border.
So, apart from being a fun topic at parties (for me, if for no-one else),
one could make a reasonable case that my entire education was A
Complete Waste Of Time.
This is not news, of course. But it all came floating back to the surface
with this week’s revelation that McDonald’s is going to start conferring
‘academic’ qualifications on its trainees. Naturally, the entire concept
shocks me more deeply than if I’d just found real chicken in my
McChicken Sandwich.
Still, there’s a horrible kind of logic at play. I’d be the first to argue that
educationalists should stop pretending you can gain a useful degree in
car maintenance and just get mechanics trained on the job. Ditto cat-
walk modelling (though the overalls would need a clean). If you’re going
to have a McJob, you might as well have the McA-levels to match.
The Financial Times reports:
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
When I was 16, Simon Clark left school to work as a printer’s
apprentice. At my highly competitive but rather staid grammar school
this was pretty unusual, and True Son though I was, I remember being a
little envious of the fact that Simon was heading out into the big wide
world… at least until my mother pointed out what he would likely be
earning in the trade. ‘Don’t do it’, she said. And I listened, because
that’s what dutiful firstborns do when they’re not picking the scabs on
their knees.
Yeah, well, thanks, mum.
Simon – and everyone else who suckled on the great teet of Mammon at
the earliest opportunity – will have made, at the most conservative
estimate, a couple of hundred grand by now. I suspect he owns a car.
Maybe he’s even bought a house.
I have not yet earned, in my working life in this country, enough money
to pay tax. And I’m talking cumulative. I drive an unreliable pink Mini. It’s
not mine. I barely own everything that’s in my bedroom.
But to reach these dizzying heights of commercial and artistic success, I
spent two years doing four A-levels, and then four years doing two
degrees (if nothing else I am basically numerate). In between times, I’ve
been a teacher. So the one thing I do know about is the value of
education.
‘Tell us, tell us!’ I hear you cry.
Well, alright. Here, for all you wannabe-intellectuals, is a quick (but
nonetheless unabridged) run-down of what I’ve learned about what I’ve
learned, since I began my A-levels.
History
History has always made me chuckle. Someone tells you they have
studied History and you can bet your arse that they have a fleeting
acquaintance with maybe 13 years of the French Revolution (chancers
will try to stretch this to fit some kind of Long War theory) and possibly
a superficial understanding of the Wars of the Roses. Neither of these
areas of expertise will include any actual dates.
I studied the Wars of the Roses for two years solid, with a tyrant of a
schoolmaster who drilled us with weekly factual tests and would call us
unspeakable things – during the tests – when we confused the third
sister of Warwick the Kingmaker (motto: One King to Bind Them All) with
the second wife of Richard III’s blacksmith. Since they were all called
Catherine, this was easy to do.
And yet the only interesting thing I can tell you, right now, about this
130-year span of English history is that there are no plays about Henry
VII, and plenty of bloody good reasons why (I believe his one recognised
contribution was the advent of double-entry book-keeping in the
Exchequer*).
I guess you could argue that my general grounding in History has
provided me with skills and interests that facilitate further study. But to
what end? The only occasion on which my historical curiosity came in
handy was when I had to baby-sit a class of bored Sri Lankan 16-year-
olds, and managed to mesmerise them for a good two minutes with the
story of the Saxon king (Ethelbertha, or someone) who missed his
coronation feast because he was in bed with a hooker and the hooker’s
mother.
Music
I discovered that, for exam purposes, knowledge of the name of a thing
(including the third sister of Warwick the Kingmaker) is every bit as good
as any kind of understanding of that thing. This came in handy when
comparing The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ to Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’.
I also figured out that nothing drove Oli Jones more wild than my
unflinching assertion that Verdi was proper opera whereas Janacek or
somesuch was mostly composed by someone cack-hander (possibly not
even Janacek) throwing darts at a keyboard without parental
supervision. Oli and I are close friends to this day, but neither my
musical attitudes not their intellectual grounding have shifted one iota
(see Class. Civ. below).
Oh, also, Verdi drove a car, and died the year after Oscar Wilde.
Needless to say, these facts were not part of the syllabus.
In practical terms, I spent two years working towards getting a choral
scholarship at Oxford. From which I was promptly sacked.
English
Another class, another tyrant (they were ten a penny: it was an all-
boys school).
I loved Heart of Darkness. But have I ever read anything else by Joseph
Conrad? Nope. To my knowledge none of his other works was made into
a movie starring Brando and Martin Sheen.
Classic Civilisations
I know a lot about knob gags in ancient comedy (strap-ons, mostly),
and I know that Horatius saved the bridge in between what were
presumably rather easy Lays of Ancient Rome. Our tutor also once
informed us, in a slow drawl, that ‘goats are notoriously randy animals’:
a comment for which I am yet to find a use.
And so to what is colloquially called ‘Higher’ Education. Highlights of this
were dissertations on the (mis)treatments of Ancient Egypt in five
operas, and on The Scorpions, a South African elite anti-corruption
squad. Both were, in the parlance of contemporary reviewers, coolly
received.
Where did these noble efforts get me, then? Well, at the peak of my
game I was able to write my friend a postcard telling him, in
hieroglyphics, that I had set fire to his penis in Thebes. I now cannot
even read that postcard. I did not ‘become’ an Egyptologist.
And of course I can look very knowing when watching Thirteen Days,
and snigger when reflecting that James Bond wouldn’t last five minutes if
the real Kremlin was after him. But I did not, of course, become a spy,
either. As I keep having to tell people when I holiday near the Somali
border.
So, apart from being a fun topic at parties (for me, if for no-one else),
one could make a reasonable case that my entire education was A
Complete Waste Of Time.
This is not news, of course. But it all came floating back to the surface
with this week’s revelation that McDonald’s is going to start conferring
‘academic’ qualifications on its trainees. Naturally, the entire concept
shocks me more deeply than if I’d just found real chicken in my
McChicken Sandwich.
Still, there’s a horrible kind of logic at play. I’d be the first to argue that
educationalists should stop pretending you can gain a useful degree in
car maintenance and just get mechanics trained on the job. Ditto cat-
walk modelling (though the overalls would need a clean). If you’re going
to have a McJob, you might as well have the McA-levels to match.
The Financial Times reports:
| CONTACT THE LIZARD |
| Updated at least 26½ times a day |
Heading for a McJob? You'll need
some McA-levels
some McA-levels
|
“Critics warn that McDonald’s ‘diplomas’ will devalue academic
attainment and create a workforce able to serve up fries and a
milk shake but not much else.”
attainment and create a workforce able to serve up fries and a
milk shake but not much else.”
If that’s our biggest concern, then bring on the McEducation! Academic
attainment could hardly fall much further than the situation where,
every August, universities fall over themselves to give away places on
Urdu courses to ‘students’ with D-grades in Domestic Science and P.E.
And as for a workforce capable only of serving up fries and a milk shake,
we already have it: the only tragedy is, they’re all working in HMV.
--
* One suspects Gordon Brown actually hopes to be remembered as
Henry VII.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Also see:
attainment could hardly fall much further than the situation where,
every August, universities fall over themselves to give away places on
Urdu courses to ‘students’ with D-grades in Domestic Science and P.E.
And as for a workforce capable only of serving up fries and a milk shake,
we already have it: the only tragedy is, they’re all working in HMV.
--
* One suspects Gordon Brown actually hopes to be remembered as
Henry VII.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2008
Also see: