For many years I’ve thought that while Oscar Wilde’s pronouncements on education are very humorous, not to say cynical, they also contain an element of truth. Quite a large element, unfortunately.
Here are a few of my favourite quotes, with some words of commentary from myself.
The photo is from the British Library’s collection and is designated as having no known copyright restrictions.
“LADY BRACKNELL: ... I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. ”
This reminds me of a comment by G.B.Shaw:
“The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.”
There’s an element of truth to that when it comes to people who were failures by the standards of their school, but who went on to succeed in life.
I did find it annoying, and frustrating, though when a parent would sometimes tell me that they left school at 15 with no qualifications whatsoever, but that “it didn’t do me any harm”.
I always wanted to say, “How do you know?”
“Well, I can tell you anything that is in an English Blue Book, Harry, although those fellows nowadays write a lot of nonsense. When I was in the Diplomatic, things were much better. But I hear they let them in now by examination. What can you expect? Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”
This strikes me as an example of what the Oulipians, rather tongue-in-cheek, refer to as “anticipatory plagiarism”, insofar as it brings to mind Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s description of the Intellectual-Yet-Idiot (IYI) in his book “Skin in the Game”:
“But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut on Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence, hence fall into circularities — their main skill is a capacity to pass exams written by people like them, or to write papers read by people like them. ”
Taleb has plenty to say about the phenomenon and the huge influence of the IYI class, none of it complimentary. See also the comment about exam questions, below.
“Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. ”
If you regard this observation in the context of, say, driving a car or wiring a plug, then clearly it’s bonkers. But these days, in Britain at least, kids are subjected to courses on how to treat other people with kindness. Surely that sort of thing is best taught by example, or by one’s inner moral compass?
“In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.”
I discovered the truth of this when teaching Economics ‘A’ (Advanced) Level. Despite all the checks that exam questions are put through, there were always some multiple choice questions where the skill was not so much identifying the correct answer, but identifying the answer that the examiners had most probably designated as correct. The process went something like this, the “options” being the statements from which the student had to select the correct one:
Option A: Obviously wrong.
Option C: Looks ok at first glance, but they’ve mixed up two concepts, so it’s wrong.
Option E: (All of the above), is obviously wrong given the decisions for options A and C.
Option B: Is correct, if you make the assumptions that X, Y and Z are all in place.
Option D: Correct according to the standard Economics textbook.
Therefore to obtain the correct answer one had to refrain from overthinking it. That meant, rather than selecting Option B, which is almost certainly what would be the situation in the real world, one had to select Option D, which fitted in with the standard view of the world presented by economists.
These sorts of questions definitely exemplified Wilde’s maxim: if you were too wise, you’d fail.
