Many years ago I started work in the publications department of an old-established City institution. I was a lowly editorial assistant, and I fetched coffee and accompanied photographers and did a lot of filing, in the basement of a beautiful building, but in an environment where I never saw natural light, and everything was either orange or a sludge colour.
One of the banes of my life was a task I had to do for the staff magazine every quarter. The staff magazine was not a photocopied sheet passed around but an official glossy magazine, which was still at that point typeset and printed with hot metal printing methods. The organisation had thousands of surveyors around the world, who were regularly moved from posting to posting. Once a quarter we would receive a long list of names and places from the Staff department, and it was the editorial assistant’s job to put them in order.
I was trained in the right ordering of the transfers list. First of all HQ to HQ transfers, the HQ to UK, then HQ to Outports (as far-flung offices were known). Then UK to HQ, then Outports to UK, the UK to UK….
As you can imagine, with a list of hundreds of names, it wasn’t so easy, even though I was familiar with which places were in the UK and which were not.,
Some months after I joined as editorial assistant, my editor conveniently had a baby and left me in charge, having appointed my own editorial assistant, an extremely bright and able young lady who is now a producer at the BBC. Lucy was not at all the quietly compliant editorial assistant that I had been. The first time I explained to her how to handle the transfers, she said: "why?"
I considered the question and found it reasonable, and immediately set out to find out why. I phoned the Staff department. No one there had any idea. I phoned my colleague on maternity leave. "Well, I don’t know, that’s what my editor told me when I joined…". I tackled aforesaid editor, who had been promoted to Press Officer, beginning to feel that I had learned an important lesson.
We dug around some more, and eventually discovered that many years ago the headings for the transfers had appeared on the page. The transfers page in the magazine was punctuated with headings that made sense of the arcane arrangement of information. HQ to HQ with a list of HQ to HQ transfers underneath it made a lot more sense than a long list of names which apparently was printed in no particular order unless you knew the key.
It’s a small example, but it taught me a valuable lesson in challenging the orthodox, and questioning what you were told to do when it made no sense. I looked within myself to see why I hadn’t immediately asked questions about why I was being asked to do something that seemed so ridiculous and had taken such a lot of time.
I concluded that my natural state was one of compliance, because that is what I had been schooled to do. I was used to taking instructions from a person in authority, and not questioning those orders. I did what I was told.
It was several years more before I realised that it went deeper than that. I accepted things which were patently ridiculous because they were familiar and seemed "normal". My schooling had convinced me that many things which make no sense, make sense.
For people who have attended school, most especially now, when the fifth or sixth generation of families has passed into compulsory education, school and its idiocies make sense, and they do not question them. I have friends who will talk over the heads of their children who demonstrate their concentration and application to lego or drawing or making things out of playdough, and coolly assert that the child cannot concentrate. The school has told them so.
Well you know what? If I was asked to start a lesson on poetry and just as I was really getting to the heart of what a poem meant for me, I was switched to maths, and no sooner had I started to understand what the maths was about before I was kicked into the playground for a spot of shivering in the corner… I think my concentration might be totally shot to pieces too.
It seems normal because it is what we have known, but opening your eyes and really looking at what’s going on, that takes a certain sort of mindset, or something that triggers you to realise what is going on.
Looking beyond the trivial instance that I have given, we can all think of ways in which our training in schooling has made us ripe for exploitation in the real world. Is it any wonder that people will obey authority and officials when we have been taught to do this from an early age?
When I was at school, when my children were at school, I thought of the kids who disrupted classes as anti-social and badly behaved, and I made value judgements about the parenting they had received. I had been brainwashed into thinking that in order to be a positive and contributing member of society, one had to be compliant and well-behaved.
Nowadays, I think those kids were the sanest and least damaged in the school, because they were asserting their personalities, and refusing to comply. Where once I believed that our society required people who would become socialised in school and conform to the majority, now I begin to realise for our world to survive we need the mavericks and mismatchers who refuse to comply, and ideally, we need people who think for themselves and challenge what is being done.
As John Taylor Gatto and other commentators have often observed, modern schooling came into being because the Prussian army found that unschooled people made bad soldiers. They didn’t do what they were told, they questioned orders and refused to just follow them. The aims of the education system appear to have been to make children and adult compliant, and latterly to provide people who were fit to work in factories.
Conventional wisdom is that people weren’t educated enough for the faqctories and offices of the post-industrial world, but the plain fact is that most people were too educated, and too self-willed, to be useful employees. The evidence of their education or lack of it is all linked to literacy, because in the modern world, the measure of education is literacy. But that isn’t the whole story.
The qualities that mark out the people who have been truly remarkable in invention, discovery, creative thinking and art, are questioning, not accepting other people’s world view, and developing their own ideas. We had better hope that we wake up to the fact, as a culture, that we are schooling those things out of most people by the time they grow up.