问答题
.When I was growing up it was very clear what the point of life and education was: to discover what you were good at and do your best to shine. Nothing else earned you admiration or praise. The ruthless discarding of any area where you weren't talented was what everyone expected you to do. Time spent on activities where you were mediocre was time wasted. I went along with this without much thought because, like most people, I wanted little more than praise. I abandoned drawing at the age of 7 on the day I saw how much more thrilled my parents were by my younger sister's talented painting than they were by my stickmen. I gave up ballet at 9 because I was the best in class at remembering the steps and the worst at executing them. I learnt the piano briefly at 12 but was embarrassed by my friends who were already playing the Beatles and Beethoven, so I stopped that too, ashamed of being so incompetent at such an advanced age.
Schools reinforced these messages at every stage. They weren't interested in giving you what you were interested; they wanted you to burnish their reputation. I longed to play tennis but since I was a county-level runner, I was made to do that instead. My best friend, a brilliant debater, was pushed into that rather than being allowed to act. Children who really wanted to sing in choirs, play football, take art at O level were rejected because they weren't in the super-talented groups. The same was true of subjects, science buffs weren't allowed to take history A level on the side, even if they loved the subject, because their essay-writing was considered too poor. Achievement was everything.
At the time, this focus on expertise and on doing what others found impressive, made sense to me. I thought it best to stick to the particular function that one could perform well, leaving it to others to do everything else. But the older I get the more appalling and short-sighted I find it is as a model for how to live. And with the focus on league tables, this limiting drive to be outstanding has grown ever more intense. Educating children for expertise suits the economy. We need the people who do the jobs to be as good as possible at them. But what we lose when we let the ethos of success dominate is the fulfilment of doing things that absorb us even if we're relatively bad at them.
The greatest joy of my life now that I'm in my fifties is discovering that I can learn the piano four decades after I gave it up. It's an entirely private pleasure that nobody else is ever going to applaud. Unlike my professional life, in this area no one else's opinion or standards matter. I wake up with an anticipation about creating beautiful sounds. I can get absorbed in repeating one lovely phrase after another, hearing them hang in the air, finding that I'm developing a skill I never supposed I was capable of. Best of all, I know that this is now part of my future; something that is going to absorb and delight me.
Many of my friends are similarly, belatedly finding that the abilities that have underpinned their careers for the past three decades are not what give their lives meaning and purpose now. They can do what they do. It is routine. Some of them are thoroughly fed up with work, and bored. It is instead the discovery and cautious exploration of neglected enthusiasms and abandoned skills that are suddenly energising them. So a broadcaster who has taken to painting says, almost grimly, that this is what gets him out of bed in the morning. His work is now his trade; it's making the art that matters. An academic skis once a month in winter. It's the freedom to create, be absorbed and fail without it mattering that is liberating them all.
If there is one regret we share, though, it is of the wasted years in which we didn't have these pleasures, and the skills we didn't develop because of the cult of success that we took on. Schools are making the same mistake now, driving children into the exams or teams in which they will excel rather than allowing them to choose some areas to experiment with and enjoy. Perhaps we need a new official framework, where only three quarters of exams count for jobs or universities, and where risk and effort is encouraged. We cannot escape the cult of the professional, but if we're to make our lives happy and fulfilling, we must re-establish the cult of the amateur too.