Open Writing

In conversation this week with a Chinese visitor to Cambridge, I was humbled by the way he spoke about his life and success. Now the chairman of a national branch of an extremely well known international company, he admitted his education had not been gleaned as easily as it is for today’s youth.

The Chinese culture, rather like our own in the past, resourced the eldest son’s career path first and then each male child in turn until the money ran out. The third son of a family of twelve, the money had run out before it got to him, but he had had the thirst for knowledge and worked his way to the top by sheer determination.

As we strolled along the path over the River Cam on our way to the traditional tour of the colleges, he commented on the number of Chinese students passing by, all quietly going about their day.

“I bet you never get any trouble from them, do you?” he said. “The Chinese revere their teachers, as they do their elders. They see teachers as the font of all knowledge and knowledge is everything.”

Gosh, what a profound statement. It surely hits the nail on the head. There is a quote in our own culture that runs something like, “It is the province of knowledge to speak and the privilege of wisdom to listen.'' A truism if ever there was one.

Looking back, my own generation were so fortunate to have a free education and to go on to higher levels if we had the wish to do so. However, with the post-war need for a willing workforce and the chance to earn immediate money, the temptation to leave school as soon as possible was a bite of the apple waiting to happen. Few had the wisdom to listen to those teachers who tried to persuade otherwise.

Some of us eventually bucked up our ideas up and gained knowledge where we could. Evening classes, day release, training courses, summer schools and distance learning all played a part in helping us along the way. A lucky few, including me, managed the blessing of Sir Winston Churchill’s forward thinking and the award of a Travelling Fellowship, for which I will be forever grateful. The scheme set up in his name, says it changes a person’s life. It certainly changed mine and I would urge anyone who has the need within them to fulfil some research project, to look at the website and consider applying. http://www.wcmt.org.uk/

When it came to our children, we, as parents of the sixties and seventies, were determined that our offspring would go to university – sometimes whether they wanted to or not! Remember the famous line of Neil Kinnock’s? I think it was about 1987 when he said he was “the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to go up to University.” Baby boomer parents saw it as a necessity, a rite of passage for children to get a college education.

The result was an explosion of higher education establishments throughout the land, rather like mushrooms in a cow pasture on an autumn morning. These establishments catered for courses hitherto undreamt of, many paving the way to careers previously covered by apprenticeships or working through the layers of the promotional ladder.

Once upon a time, as the story goes, you would have needed A, B or at the very least, C grades to get into university, now it appears, if you have the will, the way can be found. And that is no bad thing, so long as that will is for gaining knowledge and not a means of putting off the day when earning a crust beckons.

We read so much in our newspapers about the falling standards in schools, the bad behaviour of pupils and the increase in truancy, that we are left with the impression that education is not top of the wish list for many of today’s youth. The number of teachers leaving the profession does point to a general dissatisfaction in the education world. But realistically, everything goes in cycles. We are currently emerging, tender green shoots barely visible above the winter soil, from a deep recession that has rammed home the fragility of taking a comfortable lifestyle fuelled by instant money for granted. Questions have been asked in all quarters in the manner following any crisis. What, where, why and how did it happen? The answers have not yet been fully forthcoming. Did someone have the knowledge to speak and should someone have had the wisdom to listen to warnings about our financial institutions?

What has emerged along with the first green shoots is that knowledge is paramount; it gives you a head start to getting wherever you want to go. No doubt Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher from BC would be able to put such sentiments into a more meaningful saying. The only one I could find that comes anywhere near is: “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

What a lot we have to learn!

© Mary Pilfold-Allan
October 2009