"... we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences."
- Nassim Nicholas TalebWho I am doesn't matter a great deal. What I know has some relevance, as does my experience. Where I came from has potentially the most importance in connection to this blog; Perhaps most of all, what I've done, and experienced.
I had a relatively uneventful upbringing in England, and was educated during the 70's and 80's, a time when teachers were only just beginning to "teach-to-test", and teachers had a great deal more autonomy than they clearly do today. I was fortunate to have a long line of "old school" teachers, who not only believed in classroom smarts, but also worldly smarts, and they taught "common-sense" to the pupils every day. Long before the PC crowd and idiotic principles such as "if Johnny gets one, everyone must have one, to be fair", idiotic, because life's not fair! Crazy ideas like "everyone's a winner" simply didn't exist and our teachers would be failing us, and would likely have created little monsters with a huge sense of entitlement, they wouldn't have been preparing us for a real world, where everyone clearly isn't a winner! And even though at the time, I didn't see these life lessons as anything more than the way things were; in contrast against todays methods, and with hindsight I now have the clarity of perspective that these old masters of teaching offered.
I'll be the first to agree that everything wasn't rosy or peachy. There was still mostly post-industrial learning-by rote and repetition, there still lacked any creative or critical method, beyond, letting you put your hand in a fire and watching you have the revelation that flames are hot and are not good for your hand. Obviously the previous example is an abstract one, no one would've allowed us to put our hands actually into flames (in case anyone is outraged and thinking about calling in the PC police for cruelty!!), but there was a lot of answering questions with experience, rather than spoon-feeding the students; we were allowed to make our own mistakes and understand the consequences, be they good or bad.
I was very fortunate to have been precocious at an early age, not in a conceited, smart-ass, "look at how smart I am" kind of way, but I was always quietly confident about my intellectual ability, long before my parents were called before the headmaster at primary school, because my IQ scores were so high (I don't put much faith in IQ scores, since it's just solving puzzles, basic reasoning skills). He was concerned that I wouldn't fulfill my potential, and I would remain under-challenged in the traditional school environment. I was never privy to the full details of the conversation, just the bits and pieces I picked up over the years when my parents happened to mention it, when I was spectacularly underachieving, which I did pretty much did, all the way through school. I worked just hard enough to pass subjects, but for the most part school didn't interest me, exams were easy, and didn't challenge me at all. I'd pay a little attention in class, but enough to pass exams, I rarely did homework. I was for all intents and purposes an educational slacker. I had "the potential to achieve great things" in an educational environment according to my primary school headmaster (although I'm still dubious as to what great things they might have been). These days, such a child
Life was just too damn interesting to me, to waste all of my time learning books. Ever since I was young I had the Henry Ford approach, I was always confused as to why books existed if we needed to memorise facts and regurgitate them at will for a board of professional educators, who give you a qualification based on how well you can apply memorised facts and memorised formula to elicit a prescribed response to canned questions; my approach was always, "if I need the information, I'll pick up a book and find it, or I'll ask someone that has already memorised the information". I often wondered how many people were wasting valuable brain space and cycles all walking around with the same information in their heads instead of using those cycles for thinking original thoughts and being creative. Clarity of thought was always far more important to me than simply memorising facts. I guess I graduated high school, although the UK has (or at least had) no formal graduation equivalent like people are so fond of here in the USA; you took your examinations, and you either passed with a grade on each or you failed. No grade point averages, no honour roll, just your final examination results; a letter to represent your skill at memorisation of a particular subject, or topic, or formulae. I memorised them about as well as I needed to, to get the heck out of there, and that's exactly what I did, feeling unfulfilled, with a pocket full of letters, that have been referred to maybe five or six times in my professional career, of which perhaps four of those were within my first two years of departing school.
And so onwards to my professional life; I began to notice very quickly (again the UK never used to have such a preoccupation with test results that the USA does, I personally think this is a wonderfully liberating thing), that many of the places I worked, were more interested in whether I could do a good job than whether I had sufficiently memorised whether Oliver Cromwell was a thoroughly nice chap or not. The thing I thought was truly amazing was this concept of a trial period when starting a new place of employment. I work for someone for three months (or whatever the time period was) and at the end of that three months, I get to decide if I like the job, and the job gets to decide if I'm a slacker, incapable of performing the tasks assigned to me! (after this point the employment usually becomes much more formal and binding) One of the things that surprises me time after time, is that the majority of employers in the USA uses the at-will style of employment. Without going into a great deal of detail about employment law it simply says that either the employee or employer can terminate employment without establishing just cause ( I digress, maybe there's an entire blog post in this particular subject). The short of it is that the trial period allowed me to to try my hand at all kinds of things that I found to be interesting, and pursue anything that I felt passionate about. If I did a bad job, the employer got to fire me; if the job didn't meet my expectations, I got to quit, no questions asked. From this perspective, the USA should be far less risk-averse in regards to hiring new people than the UK (given all the European legislation regarding employment), and yet the opposite is true. Using this principle, I worked my way through a number of jobs, that were surprising different from each other (Quantity Surveyor, Storeman, Courier, Transport Controller, to name just a few), and to each one, I brought experience, knowledge and skills from the last. I collected experience along the way and I believe made me more valuable to each consecutive employer. I can't recall the need for degree back then to be honest, but then I wouldn't have found myself applying for them if it was an essential prerequisite, so perhaps there was simply so much work that a degree wasn't mandatory for, that I never noticed the ones that were.
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