In the middle of my latest mental health assessment, I found myself talking about my schooldays. I can’t quite remember how it came about, although I suppose since my ‘issues’ began by the second year of senior school, they were presumably relevant when for the best part of two years I was seeing a psychiatrist every Tuesday afternoon when my classmates were learning stuff. Having touched on the subject, I then doubled-down by announcing that I learned absolutely nothing at school, literally nothing at all. But I didn’t just spurt these words out: I’ve been thinking about this for many years and it’s something I genuinely believe.
As I’ve said perhaps a hundred million times – and don’t interject, humorously, with “and that’s no exaggeration” – I was rubbish at school and my only meaningful qualification was an English O Level. I’m not sure that even counts as an academic subject because to me it was all about painting pictures with words. There were no textbooks to study, no homework to pore over night after night. Instead, I just allowed what passes for my brain to kind of do its thing. The subjects that mattered back then and still matter today just wafted over me. I never understood a thing.
The evidence was clear. When I started school, I could add things up easily enough. I could take things away, too, and, on a good day, get by with basic multiplication. But serious multiplication tasks and even simple division exercises were beyond me and still are. The advent of calculators made no real difference.
My mum had to buy something called a slide rule at school. To this day, I have no idea what it does. Fractions? No, they baffle me. I learned maths in some form for, I don’t know, maybe a decade. I knew no more when I left school than when I started.
It was the same with sciences. Biology, chemistry and physics were a mystery, as were languages and even English Literature. As for woodwork, the teacher, who hated my guts, gleefully informed me that I had recorded the worst result ever at the school in my CSE paper. Whether that was true or not – and I suspect it may have been – my complete inability to understand woodworking was undeniable. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that school for me was a complete waste of time. All of it.
How then, queried my mental health assessor, did I get through a working life if I never learned anything? Had I just muddled through, a bluffer, an imposter? The answers just had to be yes. Not to try to fool anyone in a dishonest way, but to avoid being found out, to ensure that I could at least make an honest living when I clearly had major issues understanding anything.
It’s quite a big statement, concluding as I have done, that school was a waste of my time and I know I have probably learned one or two things that have seen me muddle through into later life without being completely found out, but academically, it was all wasted on me.
While I have learned at least the very basics of some subjects, thanks to that much derided group of people, experts, I would never get near being able to take an examination, like a GSCE and certainly not an A level. I don’t think I am totally thick, despite the impressive evidence that suggests I am, because to all intents and purposes I’m an autodidact, self-taught in almost everything. That is what the smart arses of the world might call my superpower. I don’t reckon I’m alone in this (self) diagnosis.
I’ve long felt the main purpose of school was to teach us to prepare for examinations. Not to learn anything for the long term but to gain qualifications by remembering stuff in one-off set-piece occasions. As I learned nothing at school, the whole experience was, for me anyway, a total waste of time. (It is worth pointing out in order to support my case that my one meaningful O Level came about as a result of improvisation on the day. It was my imagination that got me my one O Level, not any great skills.)
People, of course, do learn at school. It’s just that I didn’t and like many of you, I only learned, or maybe just picked up on stuff that appealed to me, which wasn’t maths, science or as we used to call it as Briz school, “fucking Latin”.
How the hell did I make it? How come I never got found out? I must have done something right, although I suspect every teacher I had (except my English Language teacher Mrs Defonseca) and every manager who had the misfortune to manage me asked themselves the very same two questions.
The school of life was my main school and it turned out I was the head teacher. Totally bonkers, but I can’t think of another explanation.
