No marks for personality development

Nonetheless, illiterate as we were compared to our counterparts of today, I think we were allowed to acquire something which we deny to our children to wit, a personality. We chose our subjects because we liked something or did not like it. Some of my classmates did badly in the exams not because they did not care about their subjects, but because they cared too much, and could not bring themselves to restrict their reading to the syllabus.

But like8217; is a word I have not heard a student utter in the past several years. Top-ranking students claim that they chose subject x or y because it will either helped them to go abroad; helped them to make money, or it was easy to switch from it if necessary.

These are sadly lifeless calculations for age fifteen. It would not matter otherwise after all, as a society we preach that success means either going abroad or making money, so our children are only being obedient but the ability to like is a serious matter for another reason, and that reason concerns us all.

A liking, after all, does not drop out of the sky. It is acquired with the actual process of living, like a biological accretion it forms itself as you experience situations, areas of life, ways of learning. The ability to like, in other words, is an index of your ability to engage with life. And being able to engage with life, I am fairly sure, is a good definition of a productive citizen.

Our children, obsessed with the business of getting marks, do not have the time or opportunity to engage with anything. The result is what we see that while brilliant performers stream out of the educational institutions every year, the key systems in our society the civil services, the public health system, the universities, the police, the public utilities continue to be dismal. And we have top-notch specialists in all fields who are incapable of any peripheral activity at all, whether it is running a department or making a speech.

But surely there is a sense in which these ordinary activities are more important to society than the specialist ones. G.K. Chesterton has put it thus in as essay entitled, The Twelve Men8217;, in which he speaks of the importance of the work done by a jury: When society wants a library catalogued, or a solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing around. The same thing was done, if I remember rightly, by the Founder of Christianity.quot;