Crossing Lines & Joining Dots

Everyone knows I am a talker.

When I was a child, polite people often told me I had 'the gift of the gab' and those less patient simply told me to shut up. On one memorable occasion, aged around six, as my mother and I walked home from school and I was discoursing on the possibility of a rocket-propelled rail transport network, I remember her clutching at her hair and imploring me to simply stop. I did, for at least the next few minutes, but the torrent of words has flowed more or less without interruption ever since.

A career in teaching and in writing books has not, as yet, staunched this verbal haemorrhage and thus, I've recently turned to the medium of the podcast as a further outlet. The show is called 'Lines and Dots' (you can listen on Spotify, iTunes or Amazon) and the format is very simple. Each week, my friend Chris and I take a theme - thus far we've covered: "Good and Evil", "The Individual and the State" and "Devotion" - and we each pick a text and a piece of music to discuss, looking for common ground and links throughout history (with much laughter and pretentious waffle thrown in for good measure).

It was as we were recording this week's episode, however, that I was struck by an interesting thought (well, I considered it interesting, but I thought rocket-powered locomotives were a scintillating prospect, so what do I know?) about the modern experience of childhood in the UK - and perhaps the wider world.

We were speaking in some depth about the song 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' and considering the various uses to which it has been put and the biblical imagery that it contains, when it suddenly occurred to me that the ability of people in generations younger than mine (and I am speaking broadly here) I'm well aware that there will be many exceptions - to decode that imagery, would be practically nil.

When we grew up, many of us went to Sunday school. Many of us continued to attend church into our teens and a good number of us would have attended denominational schools or other institutions where the Religious Studies curriculum included a good portion of biblical knowledge. Ensuing generations did less or none of this and it is fascinating that this leaves them without that particular palette of contextual knowledge to draw on.

I was giving a lesson recently and I pointed out that the particular narrative we were exploring had echoes of 'The Prodigal Son' - and I was met with blank faces. It's nobody's fault - society is just changing.

This isn't - and let me be clear - a criticism; it's just an observation. I don't want to get all Tom Stoppard about it and complain that modern audiences are 'too thick to get my jokes' - but there's an important point to be made here about the way that knowledge and ways of acquiring knowledge are perceived. Understanding culture - both contemporary and historical, requires broad awareness across a range of subject disciplines and, if we are honest, so does intelligent, interesting and enjoyable conversation!

We have become a very mercantile society in which education is seen, rightly or wrongly, as currency. Currency is only valuable as part of a transaction. We don't go to the bank and take out twenty pounds just to look at it and think about how beautiful it is. We use money to do things.

A dangerous scenario is emerging in which people, confronted with a global onslaught of knowledge, choose to retain and make use of only that which serves a purpose. It is the example of the kid in class putting up their hand to ask 'is this going to be on the exam' writ large. Only knowledge perceived as useful is worth acquiring or keeping - anything else is discarded as so much ephemera.

Some institutions are encouraging this sort of thing - narrowing down curricula and encouraging pupils towards those subjects which they deem to be facilitating - linking everything toward the job they might ultimately end up doing or the university course to which they aspire to gain admission.

One could be forgiven for considering that the Oswestry Motto 'we learn not for school but for life' would seem to indicate affiliation with that doctrine; but nothing could be further from the truth. The connotation is not that learning takes place only for the subsequent workplace benefits, but that everything that happens in school is meaningful enough to contribute to the wider experience of life in the future. All of it.

At Oswestry, at the Summer School and - I am sure - at a whole host of other institutions around the UK, teachers continue to work hard to show pupils that creative spark and inspiration - the sort of creative spark and inspiration that is likely to lead to solutions for some of the troubling global crises we currently face - derives not from confining your knowledge to an individual field - but by joining dots and crossing lines, challenging accepted orthodoxy against a broad awareness of human culture.

It is also true to say that, in investing in accruing a vast quantity of knowledge covering a range of periods, geographies, ethnicities and disciplines, there is the chance that we - all of us, children and adults - can not only better celebrate diversity, but come to see the beautiful unities that exist within our race.

Education then, isn't about accruing currency as it is (he says, extending the metaphor well beyond its elastic limit) about accruing priceless jewels. Some can be worn right away and - let's be clear - can demonstrate value. Others are more mysterious or unusual and can sit in the box awaiting the right setting. Others will fall down the back of the sofa, but one day you'll rummage around down there looking for something else, and come across a piece of knowledge and understanding that sets you off on a real academic adventure.