The Principal’s Speech
Ok so there is a speech day every year at ******** School and in 2015 procedures were handled by the new Principal, a man who is happy to be known for his enthusiastic creation of and strict adherence to procedures. While that itself is not problematic, as procedure is necessary for a machine (school) of this size, it should at this point, I hope, worryingly foreshadow the further disparaging remarks I intend to make about him and his ilk. I implicate in this rant all of the happy-clappy audience as well as the teaching staff and even the school children themselves, though I do admit that they may be too young and too unseasoned to have the experience, the rest of this gathering I believe should have by now assimilated, to have known better; I am of course referring to the, supposedly, highly educated here (LOL).
A few opening quotes from the principal that, for our assuredness, are an attempt to make viscerally concrete his allegiance to the current pedagogical paradigm. They are from the writings of Matthew Syed’s well known book BOUNCE on how excellence is a product of will and determination, our great educator is here trying to assert the already disproved or at least well challenged theory of TABULA RASA, or in plain speak the blank slate. In days gone by it served the bourgeois, as a form of penitence and self-reflection to their obvious awareness of the necessary and inherent cruelty of ambition, greed and lust for power, to believe that there was a foundation that was justifiable to appropriating the loftier and more rewarding status above the commoner. In modernity there would have to be a reason for the wealthy to be wealthy and to keep from the less fortunate the spoils of their dealings without feeling an immense burden of guilt and shame that, in reasonable circumstances, reasonable men would I hope, have in abundance or else not be able to call themselves reasonable men. There would, I need to believe, have to be a psychological mechanism by which a rich man could sleep well at night with a clear conscience while down in the street a fellow human may starve or freeze in a doorway (a condition that they, if indeed reasonable men, would simply do something about as a matter of human decency). This reason is that in some small way they must believe that these are just desserts where they themselves deserve because of their own choices the position they hold while the beggar must surely also have had ample opportunities to be more than they currently are yet did not take them and therefore become the sole architect of their own destiny. There must also be an adoption of this mental position on the part of the common man for they certainly outnumber the privileged few to such a great extent that no force could restrain them from taking what they need save for their own ideals. It is through the kind of thinking that I have described that there can be the chief executives of private elitist schools waving the twin flags of conformity and positivism in the faces of their students while promising that staying to this narrow path will pay dividends because all that those worshipers achieve will be subsequently merited. There are no meritocracies in competitions where there is no unified starting point, you cannot rise from penury to wealth by making the same choices as the privileged without the same set of opportunities, and such choices will not be present for all persons anyway. I did not have the choice between Oxford and Cambridge; I had the choice between the local technical college or finding a job, that’s not a criticism of me it is a fundamental of my social circumstances, that I am simply not from the background that goes on to study at elite establishments, neither are any of the other folks I went to school with. But this essay is not about me so let’s move on….
Let us now also look at the circumstances in which this speech is being given, we happened to be seated at a private school, one that charges at least £800 a month (£9600 p.a) for 5 years (7 if A levels), which is not a small sum since a lot of folks earn little more than that in full time employment. In such circumstances one would expect to find the children of men and women who occupy the same bourgeois set as this principal (with a few working class stooges like me dotted sporadically and wondering how in hell we got here). This is a monologue for a class of people who already agreed with it before they heard it, a preach to the choir, in such company there is no challenge to these words except in the minds of those who may have read more widely (the idea that you read the opposition to your position so that you can be sure of your opposition to it or to find merit and learn more from it, Hegelian dialectic) or those who through life experience know that opportunities simply do not appear in the working class schools the same as they do in this one. Folks don’t grow up and brag about going to the local comprehensive unless that brag denotes a lower starting rung and therefore a greater climb to the currently occupied step, being of course for the purpose of impressing the no-doubt enthralled or unlucky listener even more.
Our next entertainment is from a woman who has climbed the highest mountain on earth, her story is interesting indeed and I would not attempt to trivialise this or any other of her great achievements but I can’t help thinking that the audience is missing the point a little when at the end of her speech, which of course was instruction to the learners that whatever they wish to achieve they can do so through hard work and will, is met with enthusiastic applause. The failure here is one of not recognising the necessary conditions that need be in place for such achievements, working individuals from low and middle income families cannot decide on a wet Tuesday morning that their new goal, instead of turning up at the factory, is to climb a mountain or kayak across an ocean or go to the north pole on foot and subsequently commit the next 6 months to a 24/7 training regime in order to see that goal realised, these folks are busy paying the TV licence and picking out curtains for the flat they can just afford the deposit on. It is only from one class of society that these swashbucklers come to prove and then laud their superior adventuring skills to the rest of us normal folks. I am sure and will concede that desire is a component part of this as without it the task would be too great but I am also convinced that given the opportunity and the circumstances as well as the desire to climb or run or swim or fly then nearly everyone is capable, at certain physically peaked points of their lives, of doing the same exciting tasks as these adventurers have. Add to this the fact that by making speeches about it to young school children and writing books as well as making TV programs there may be gained a certain suspicion that this is in fact a person who wishes to be praised, the sort of girl who does these things because they desire the description of INSPIRATIONAL, LEADER, HERO etc a lot more than they would like to admit. I, along with a lot of others, fear and mistrust the ambitious, that has been a good policy for me so far and I am sticking with it for now. Is it not enough to achieve something and know that you did it? Must it be shared with others to be real or more real than real, hyper-real? If I met someone who had climbed Everest and not told anyone unless they happened to be asked I would be much more impressed than if it were the very first thing I had come to know about them. If I happen to be right in my estimation that most folks could in fact achieve these goals given the right circumstances then why are we even praising someone who has done this task that by such measure would be banality anyway? It is by this skewed sort of logic that we deem it appropriate to waste our every Saturday night sitting in front of the television watching people perform the quite unremarkable feat of singing in tune when it is estimated that one person in every six on the planet could do exactly the same thing, and just as well, that’s 1.7 billion people and if that amount of people are able to do a thing it is not worth spending large amounts of the better days of your life being impressed by just one of them for doing it. I tend to lean toward being impressed when a person does something somewhat unique that anyone could do but very few ever actually do like hitting a 147 on a snooker table or a 9 dart game or writing an essay that is actually worth reading.
I know I seem to be being a little harsh here but if Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzig Norgay climbed that big mountain and got praise for it as they rightly should have in 1953 but thousands of people have climbed it since to the point where now nobody is going to get famous by doing so unless they ascend dressed in only a mankini then yes something difficult has been done but not something that deserves praise in the same way as the first time it was realised. The fact that the speaker had to narrow down the qualifying criteria of uniqueness to her being both Welsh and female (there have been welsh males who earlier had climbed Everest as well as females from all over the world) to make her achievement remarkable only bolsters the point I am making here. I suppose if I wanted to be really facetious I could suggest that the next criteria will have to be Welsh combined with female and ginger haired or left-handed (yes that’s a bit harsh but the point isn’t) for there to be anything left worth speaking about. People all over the world are doing amazing things all the time but there are arbitrary factors that cannot be ignored when praising them, those of opportunity. When Princess Di pretended to pull landmines from the ground we all were fooled into thinking that there was something heroic going on, she wore the right equipment and posed for the cameras but as soon as the cameras went she went too leaving the real munitions experts to do their jobs in her absence and in the absence of praise, praise that would be appropriate only if their job was somewhat their choice and not simply the only lousy one they could get in a country of great distributive injustice, I wonder how many Angolan elites can be found out in fields with shovels? It is in the negative liberties that we find there to be no reason why any of us cannot scale Everest but in the positive ones that we discover why most of us will never do so; to put that in plain speak I could climb the mountain yes, there’s nothing to stand in my way but there is, most importantly, nothing enabling me to do so, no money, no time, no support group such as the UK forces, not a charity that will back me……. no reason why my doing so would be unique enough to be of merit. If I were to do so, by these speakers’ assessment criteria anyway, I would still become nothing of merit as other Northern Irish males have done it first, in fact I have met at least one I am sure of at a walk in the Mournes mountain range in 2008 for the Child Brain Injury Trust charity, I think his name was Banjo…
Back to our principal, the book is bounce and the idea is that excellence is a feature cultivated by attitude and repetition. While I don’t disagree that practice makes perfect I disagree with the thematic of Syed’s book that there is no natural component of talent predefined by genetics that plays a role in the future sporting success of athletes. Syed highlights the fact that all the best UK table tennis players emerged from the same club and were taught by the same coach, he claims that Roger Federer would be no good at tennis if he had not been thoroughly schooled as a youngster, while there is truth to his conclusion there are, however, many arguments against his premises. Firstly, Fed has succeeded where many others, who have put in just as much effort, have failed, this is the case in most sports, you see the elites succeeding then invariably putting their success down to their own effort and desire to do so, it cannot be the case that the guy who comes 10th in the marathon has just not wanted it enough to win. Secondly, there can only be one winner to a race or a tournament, does that mean there is only one person who is mentally able to will themselves to success? Thirdly, there are many cases where nature has beaten nurture in sports, think of chess and the great Russian system of producing champions where they were schooled from an early age and faced an elite system that should have produced the finest chess minds of the 60’s and 70’s and then think of Bobby Fischer, an American loner who taught himself to play and surpassed the best Russian players of his day to win the world championship in 1972 and prove that the best coaching in the world will not stand up in the face of an out-and-out natural. Finally, how many times have we seen a person claim a victory, praise themselves and their own efforts, receive praise for their win from all commentators as if they have won on their own and then they, in an act that is completely paradoxical, proceed to thank and implicate, all those other actors who made it possible for the very circumstances of their success. Nothing should seem more foolish than a man who argues with himself.
The young lady who spoke did this very thing, after describing herself as a woman of inspiration to others she mentioned the team that helped her and the of course the Sherpa’s, who have clocked many more climbs of Everest than any western hero, who provided her guidance. She then even thanked her parents for being supportive throughout, as if that was all they had provided. I find this attitude of first presenting the self as a unique achiever then presenting the cultivators and enablers associated with said achievement as being significant factors in such endeavours to be an irresolvable immanent critique that provides no synthesis; these are seemingly opposing positions. Coupled with the blasé and nonchalant opinion that even though something special has apparently happened, that warrants this praise, the same thing is not beyond the future grasp of anyone in this particular room of privileged children to be one of the greatest crimes of naivety ever witnessed at a speaking event.
Back to our principal, he is smiling gladly after the speeches by the head boy and the head girl, and rightly he should, they have poured accolade after accolade toward the school. How sweet of them to praise the institution that has enabled them to be favored for being the very best adherents to its rules, its procedures, its methods. How many times have we sat through this mutual back slapping ceremony where the proof of the pudding is judged by the very folks who baked it, this is not unique in society, it is systemic, financiers go on television to tell us how the country’s wealth is doing, politicians tell us how our foreign relations policies will play out when they are the very architects of them, it comes to something when the most honest critic in our media is probably Robbie Savage on Match Of The Day. Anyway, I didn’t expect our principal to be part of a real ceremony any more than I expect my backside to one day produce a snowball, I expected this ingratiating car salesman type to have a big shit-eating grin all though proceedings and in that respect at least I was not disappointed. What I did not expect was that an academic of lofty position would wave the flag of tabula rasa so vigorously when that argument is far from being settled conclusively.
I am only an onlooker and I have no power and no position that would enable me to stand in challenge of this man of education but in my own humble opinion I can say that if this is what my family pay £800 a month for I am justified in writing this essay in response to it. I expect pluralism from academics when there is clearly merit to both positions in an argument (nature V nurture) that was already ancient when this 600 year old school was first opened. Science has discovered that there are genetic predispositions that cannot be overcome by desire alone such as the ability to resist cold temperatures (there are people who can swim in the arctic waters where others would freeze), the ability to consume large amounts of alcohol without adverse reaction, the ability to run very quickly over short distances (Western African genes), the ability to run very long distances well (Eastern African genes) or even the striking differences in gender abilities where we can see in front of us that the average male is usually a lot stronger than his similarly sized female counterpart. It is a fool that discounts these traits offhand, but we cannot blame this fool alone for being such, we must look to the rotten and spoiled meat of this top-down structured society that would so often and so cruelly dangle the carrot of success in front of the average person as if they could simply will themselves to reach and eat it. In an effort to alleviate its own guilt and culpability in forming this structure I have been critiquing it is paramount to its continuity that it allow the rise of only those persons to promote it that would gladly and enthusiastically salute the paradigmatic statues of their masters in what can only be described as a blatant effort to become a master someday themselves. If it were true that there is nothing more than the internal mechanism of will that determines the future for a learner then why is this principal even singing the praises of this private school when every utterance seems to make foolish the idea that private education is even beneficial to the student; if what he says is true then he is singing the praises of comprehensive education, a performance paradox I propose that an educated man should recognise.
It’s not my place to tell youngsters that they shouldn’t strive or that they cannot achieve all that they set out to do or that they cannot reach the dizzy and lofted heights because they come from the wrong lows; that has not been my intention in this essay piece. I also did not agree, when I was at school, with the negativity and scorn poured on by teachers who informed pupils that they would never amount to anything, how could they know that anyway? What I wish to highlight is the negative side-effects that such rampant and unbridled positivism, that is currently so popular amongst educators, can make manifest. If we tell our children that they will be everything they desire to be if they just wish it so then we lead them to feelings of disappointment and inadequacy when most of them inevitably fall short of being the superstar or unique special snowflake that we have coaxed them to become.
Si vales bene est ego valeo
What’s so wrong with being average or maybe even a little bit below? The world needs plasterers and brick layers as much as it need physicists and brain surgeons, in fact it needs more manual labour than mental labour or nothing will ever get done, Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal and Napoleon conquered the worlds of their time but the foot soldiers did all of the fighting for them even if they wanted secretly to be generals themselves. Reach high of course but learn to love yourself anyway if your ambition or the expectations of others exceeds your reach; we cannot all be the stuff of greatness, else greatness itself become a banality. I want my child to be happy, that’s all I wish for him, I won’t tell him how to be because I can’t, I won’t tell him what to be or how to be it, I won’t have expectations of him beyond what circumstances dictate and I won’t ever let him think that he is a disappointment to me or himself in whomever or whatever he ends up being. If his intentions are good, he is charitable with time and his possessions and he loves and is loved he is a winner in life. Fuck the mountain he never climbs and fuck all those who climb it so that they can make speeches in the effort to become his hero.
Paul S Wilson
pinkfloydpsw's Blog 