Headmaster's Bulletin (39)

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”

We sometimes lament our pupils’ lack of knowledge, especially general knowledge, and we wonder whether it is right that some subjects have become more skills-based and therefore less of a test of memory. You may have read about the Harvard professor who earlier this week suggested that we allow students to access Google and discuss solutions with their friends in examinations! I’m not sure how effective or practical this would be when it came to assessing an individual’s progress, yet I suppose it’s true to say that nowadays knowledge is at out finger-tips, and so there is far less of an incentive to commit it to memory.

At the same time, I know as a linguist that there is no real short-cut to memorising grammar and vocabulary if you want to speak fluently! And I therefore lament to an extent the demise of the ‘oral tradition’ of handing stories down verbally between generations or the ability, for example, to declaim poetry without a text. Yet, given a meaningful context, our young people are still very good at remembering: this might involve hundreds of lines of a play, a Mozart concerto or the meaningless lyrics of a pop song!

Back to the initial quotation! Some of you will know that it was Einstein who said this, and we can probably interpret it in various ways. I don’t think it means that our mission as teachers is in vain! Quite the opposite, for education is about training the mind to reason and to apply knowledge – whether or not we recall that knowledge in years to come; it is also about self-discipline and the acquisition of a set of values which will define how we live our lives long after much of the knowledge itself is forgotten.

I leave you with another quotation, in all likelihood falsely attributed to Einstein!

“Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”