(i want to continue pursuing the issue of Gross National Happiness, but to avoid being boring, am interspersing the postings on it with other comments).
Few people make wildly successful livings at music or sport (for instance) but both, when you are growing up, contribute to your education and knowledge, give you more confidence, and make you a more rounded and interesting person to others. You don’t have to go into them professionally, but they help to see that the world is full of a thousand interesting activities that can be pursued to make the whole man or woman, and make for a full and happy personal life.
Many people seem to think that schools and universities have to train you for a job. Actually, while a job is important, it is even more important to be able to absorb knowledge, know how to use it, to enjoy learning and be able to think for yourself, without being told what to think, and defend what you think and believe in in good English. Training is something that comes after an education!
To The Guardian
How depressing to read that Nick Gibb, the British education minister, thinks the best reason to study maths and science is because the subjects have “the highest earnings potential”. When I was a secondary school teacher, I taught physics, and my A-level students studied it for many reasons: its excitement and topicality; the intellectual stimulation; the sheer beauty of some of the underlying mathematics; its usefulness to humanity; and the fun of getting to grips with how the world works.
What never crossed my mind – and I doubt it crossed my pupils’ minds either – was that the main reason for studying it was a selfish financial one. That one ministerial comment sums up so much of what has gone wrong – and not only with our education system.
Albert Beale, London