Learning never stops.  The last lesson we learn is how to die, or what death is.  Of course, that’s useless knowledge by the time we get it, and nobody wants to even think about that subject.  We have plenty of better ones on our ‘curriculum’. Yet life is a perpetual learning curve.

After a lifetime of teaching, I am convinced we learn quickest that which enthuses us. Yet why does something grip our mind but not other things?  Because we are gloriously diverse, I suppose, but that hardly answers the central question: what is it, exactly, that makes us diverse, not just in our looks, our bodies, but also in our inclinations, our propensities, our likes and dislikes?

That is the realm of brain scientists and geneticists and lies beyond most of us; what we have to contend with is ‘who am I and what do I like or detest?’ Another question is:  am I at liberty to be what I wish to be, to do what I wish to do?

The important thing for us is to accept the idea that some of us are soldier ants, some are worker ants, and a few are queens (is that what entomologists call the leading ants, or am I mixing it all up with bees?).

The trouble is, we are very unhappy if we are taught what soldier ants have to know when we feel we are worker ants.  Mismatches, be they in relationships or clothes, make us unhappy.  But what sort of ant am I?  I really have to find that out rather early if I wish to avoid painful mismatches.

Around the age of 13 or 14, people start asking us what we would like to be when we grow up;  some of us are very forthcoming and accurate, some come up with romantic nonsense like ballerina or astronaut (although for some this proves to be correct), and some give the safest answer: “I don’t know.”

But I believe that each of us has comfort and discomfort times at school, and that these are generated by the particular subject we are subjected to at a given time.  I also believe that these emotions, or reactions, to specific subjects, are very important auguries, or predictors, of the paths we take later on.

My discomfort area was mathematics. I dreaded each lesson in anticipation, and suffered every minute of it when it was time. The idea of Monday mornings with mathematics as a first on the timetable still sends shivers down my spine.

The only reason for my presence in class was for the teacher to have a comical break and call me to the blackboard, for the general merriment of the assembled souls.  I simply had no clue.  I failed my maths ‘O’ level twice before Their Lordships decided they weren’t going to face my gibberish any longer and kicked me out with a ‘pass’.

Even at my age, I still say a prayer for the needs of whoever invented the calculator.  I am still very unclear about the mysteries of the nine times table.

A law degree has become debased currency nowadays. No matter the antics of law course graduands, they’re becoming ten-a-penny

All well and good, but I simply needed maths if I were to proceed in my studies.  Some other Lord had decided that you cannot exist, academically, if you were innumerate.  It reminds me of a poem by E.E. Cummings (the creator of Winnie the Pooh) entitled When Serpents Bargain.  His theme is that man goes against nature because it is his perverse nature to do so, and he is therefore an ‘unnatural’ creature.

Do read it for fun, if you find the time.  We force people to obtain qualifications in areas which defeat them in order to give them the licence to proceed and study what they really like.  If you want your steak, you have to have to have aljotta first, even if you hate fish.  They don’t care if having aljotta makes you so sick that you give up eating your steak.

There’s the dignity dimension, too.  If you become –no, wait, became – a lawyer, you walked the floors of heaven.  If you just became a technician you were socially a nonentity.  But a law degree has become debased currency nowadays.  No matter the antics of law course graduands, they’re becoming ten-a-penny.  The only time some lawyers get to see the law courts is when they get sued.

In a sense, a law degree makes you a kind of technician nowadays.  Meanwhile, because of the scarcity of mechanical or electrical technicians, some technical people are on a roll because they are few in number. There is a reason for this.

We Maltese do not follow our hearts and inclinations –we follow our purses (or our parents’ dreams).  The Maltese expression is timxi mad-daqqa.  I remember the Dockyard daqqa, the Air Force daqqa, the accountant daqqa, the lawyer daqqa.  The result is that you get half-baked products, sometimes.  But you go where the money is, not where your abilities or your heart lie.

I remember a woman coming to my house at the end of a private lesson session, telling me “My son must become a lawyer”.  She placed an envelope in my hands, bolstered with quite a lot of money in notes (this in the days of real money, of Liri, and a simple glance told me they were tenners).  She thought I had some sort of influence on Matsec results, poor woman.

I sent her away, money and all, threatening her with police action if she ever tried that again.  I had quite a struggle to get her son through his English ‘A’ level, for it was straining at a gnat.  Still, he did become a lawyer, because where there is mummy’s will, there is a way.  But did she care whether he wanted to become a lawyer?

With my inability to grapple with the nine times table, my father would have disbursed a fortune, which he did not have if the daqqa had been a mathematical one, and, yet, still got nowhere with me.

Good job he didn’t.  I’ve enjoyed every minute of teaching literature, even though my bank manager doesn’t think much of my financial status.

We must let people follow their hearts in education, offer them choices, and, most importantly, make all choices equal in social estimation.  Giotto was a shepherd before a passer-by recognised his genius.  Now that person, that is, the one who recognised his talent, was a special person, a gifted one. We are all kings, and we all come bearing gifts.

Teachers don’t just teach; they come to know the budding personality, with its likes and dislikes, its particular talents.

The good teacher is a kind of shepherd and, thus, he makes it a point to guide his sheep to the greenest pasture.  He doesn’t necessarily teach them how to graze or to masticate.  Neither does he cut the grass for them, for theirs is the meadow and theirs the kingdom yet to come.

As another, greater poet, Milton, said, “reason is also choice”.  Not my choice, or yours, or any lordship’s, but that of the child, who is the Father of the Man.

Charles Caruana Carabez sits on the National Commission for Further and Higher Education.

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