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What We May Be
‘We know what we are but know not what we may be,’ Shakespeare famously opined, and a truer sentence has never been spoken – although, to be fair, he did put it in the mouth of mad woman who also said the owl was a baker’s daughter.
But what he meant, I think, is that the uncertainty of the future is not merely the unknowability of future events that may happen to us. Much more, it is the fact that we ourselves will change, and who we may be in the future could potentially - will very probably - bear only very limited resemblance to who we are now.
There is a story of the infamously absent-minded author G. K. Chesterton that he once sent a telegram to his wife from a railway station, which read, ‘Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?’
It is one potential criticism of the modern education system that it encourages children to spend a lot of time desperately trying to assess where they are, and much less time considering in any sort of real depth where they want to get to.
And by ‘where they want to get to’, I don’t mean the Tuck Shop, although that is in fact a very important place to get to, especially at five past eleven, when breakfast seems like something that happened during the reign of Rameses II.
The ‘destination’ in education is, and can only be, a person – and that person is you, the future you.
Of course, in one important way, children these days are encouraged to spend a lot of time thinking about their future selves: that is, their future career selves. This aspect must not be neglected, and a good school must invest in supporting its pupils as they confront the mysterious question of ‘what they want to be when they grow up’. Otherwise, mistakes are made, like the little boy who told his Mum that he wanted to be an English teacher when he grew up; to which she replied, ‘Don’t be silly, dear – you can’t do both!’
However, it has always struck me as rather odd, not that children should spend so much time thinking about who they want to be when they are at work, but that they should spend so little time thinking about who they want to be in what we strangely call their ‘own time’.
The ‘Food for Thought’ programme at Denstone has been designed to foster pupils’ intellectual ambitions. There are many strands to that general goal and, going forward, this blog will have reason to mention each of them in due course.
But the very beginning of it all is to confront our children with the question, who do you want to be, rather than what do you want to be? Who do you want to be, not just at work, but when you get home from work?
Can your future ‘you’ read books? I don’t mean, can you read. I mean, at the end of a long day, in practice, do you have the strength of mind and will to turn the telly off, and settle for an hour or so of quiet reading?
What sort of books do you want your future ‘you’ to enjoy reading? Can that ‘you’ love the great novels of our finest authors, whilst also being able, of course, to flick through the latest best-seller by the pool?
What sort of music do you want your future ‘you’ to love and know about? Does that ‘you’ have the choice of sipping your gin and tonic to a Beethoven piano sonata, as well as nodding along to a favourite song? Or are you limited to the latest hit release, however catchy or otherwise it may be, which you only listen to in order to pass time in the car – the rest of your musical life being a vast bleak heath of silence punctuated occasionally by the tinny instrumentalisations of the shopping centre elevator?
When your future ‘you’ turns on the laptop, is it to have a go at a coding challenge? Does your future ‘you’ read with interest about the latest complexities that the latest space telescope has discovered about the Big Bang Theory – or is that just the name of a dated sitcom your parents used to watch?
When your future ‘you’ takes his or her children to another country on holiday, do you want that ‘you’ to know more than just a bit of the language – to really understand something of the culture and history of the place, to be at home in the world?
Oscar Wilde (apocryphally) said, ‘It’s what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.’ That’s true – but I’d go further. It’s what you think when you don’t have to that makes that determination. Or rather, it’s that you choose to think at all. That you choose books that make you think, films that make you think – and thinking is hard! That you choose music that you have think about, savour, listen to a few times before you understand it. That you choose number puzzles, riddles, cryptic crosswords, just some of the time, instead of the endless tap-and-scroll of social media.
In short, do you want to be a polymath of leisure? Someone who can dip their finger in all the cultural and intellectual pies on offer?
Of course, we all experience one sort of occasion when someone tries to find out who we are when it’s too late for us to help it: in the exam hall. And children who are motivated by their own interests, and whose interests are both broad and ambitious, tend to perform better in exams. But in my opinion, that is a (very useful) side-effect of what is a more central endeavor to build of ourselves people who are able to experience, throughout the years of our lives, the joy of digging up and rooting out all the treasures of knowledge and beauty the world holds for us.
We all make today choices about who we will be in ten years’ time. As teachers and as parents, we can all ask our children: what one choice will you make today that sets you off in the direction of the person you want to end up as?
Or will our metaphorical telegram today just read once again, ‘Am on my phone. Where ought I to be?’
