Exam & Friendship

We walk on a tightrope with little hollowed out circles hang above our heads.  It may not be noticed during lectures & forgotten about during socials but they hang as an ominous canopy in quiet judgment.

They demand from us a jump, a jump high enough to get through, to get on, to higher more prestigious hoops.  Not to jump is to be condemned to the first step onto the path of death.

We tell each other “Good luck!  Hope you do well!” as we walk the tightrope & jump through hoops.  What we mean is “Hope you survive!  Hope you get through this with all your senses intact & unimpaired!”  We know how sharply these exams define us.  We joke with each other about them to hide the worry of failure that we put so much time avoiding.  Our companionship is briefly stronger during these times- perhaps that is the reason of them for what strength would it be without these shared trials?  What is, in the end, more important that to do well in life in which ‘doing well’ is understood in the easiest terms possible?  Perhaps I wish to do not quite so well, but to do good; then what is it I should do?  Less exams as a beginning I would think.

Within the set up of education we do try to make friends.  We joke & talk with each other within our seminars but afterwards we separate quickly busy with the establishment of our own lives.  Little time is spent together.  Often we work alone.  Is it not like that in an exam?  We each face the same task but we each face it alone & are discouraged from helping each other.  Is it not like that in life?  A constant competition…does the organised life have to be so artificial & disingenuous?

The hoops lie because to jump through them is not to escape death because that path is everywhere & the hoops are not really there.  What we jump through are assurances, confidences, threats that undermine, undermine, undermine, the genuine being of humans.  The hoops have no care for friendship or love; they hold contempt for the organic reality & for living.

The hoops judge me but I find their judgment invalid since they are not human & do not have to suffer the confusion of life.

The way we judge each other is very different from the way exams are marked.

Doris Lessing left school at the age of fourteen.  ‘There was a time I was sorry about this’ she writes in the preface of The Golden Notebook ‘now I am grateful for a lucky escape…I looked at innumerable examination papers- and couldn’t believe my eyes; sat in on classes for teaching literature, and couldn’t believe my ears…why are they so parochial, so personal, so small-minded?  Why do they always atomize, and belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole?’

Talking about his surprise of scientific literature regarding the nature of life in Gaia

James Lovelock writes: ‘This seeming conspiracy of silence may have been due in part to the division of science into separate disciplines, with each specialist assuming that someone else has done the job.’

Allan Bloom describes ‘The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found castaway treasures that made them rich’ in his book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.

George Monbiot advises that ‘People who sell their souls for the promise of a secure job and a secure salary are spat out as soon as they become dispensable. The more loyal to an institution you are, the more exploitable, and ultimately expendable, you become.’

Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons declares: ‘it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…But for Wales-!’

Fernando Arrabal asks at last year’s Prague Writers’ Festival, “Who will defend poetry?”

Fires are started to burn tar on the road by the constructing concrete carpark.

G. K. Chesterton states: ‘Those who bare it do not grin.’

The President of the English Literature Society is thinking of changing his English Literature course to Physics.

Will Slocome is resigning at the end of this year.

I have taken exams & have been examined for most of my educated life & I do not believe they have made me a better person.  For most of my life I have attained middle Cs in terms of grades.  This I think offers some hope for me.  If I had achieved straight As I would not know I should be in utter despair.  Exams separate people into classes.  In secondary public school the top set are not only people who can do but also will.  They tend to be introspective perfectionists.  The people at the bottom set are the people who cannot do & won’t do.  They tend to be emotional uncivilized.  The reasons for why this happens is clear; the people attending to their studies cannot be disturbed by the people who are not.  The top set cannot help the bottom, even if they want to, because it is not in their interest to set themselves back for the sake of those who cannot conduct themselves.

The exams do not mark emotion, they take no notice of morality, they overlook whole areas of human life & deem them unimportant.  For people who wish to use both their head & their heart, for those who can do but won’t or those who can’t do but will, the emotional & critical, are put into a difficult position.  Between two sets forced to decide between the two.  Hesitant about being separated.

Another set of protestors is heading for London this weekend.  Do I join them & be part of the kitsch?  Their sentiments are strong & although I would like to take some action is there not anything more mature than walking with the crowd?  Michael Sandel calls for a return to the idea of civic duty & who, when watching the members of the Houses of Commons stir themselves up into a attitude of desperate exasperation, could disagree? 

“A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do.  A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed.”  Am I to also leave?