Grammar education not a guarantee of success

During my 57 years, each day after having filled my fridge I endeavour to improve my education because I know knowledge is wealth in its purest form.

As a States house kid I was doing cartwheels around my estate for weeks (in my mind at least) so pleased was I to pass to Grammar School, where I might take the advantage in my pursuit of knowledge.

Although, it’s a curiosity for me that despite there being fully nine of us from the colleges and Grammar lining up at L’Aumone Estate for the school bus each morning in the early ’70s that these days such scenes are not repeated.

A couple of years ago I stopped back at L’Aumone to buy some petrol. I was served at the till by the brightest (academically at least) of my former Grammar classmates (since having moved on). Conversely, about the same time I had an appointment with an advocate who had been educated at Beaucamps school. This example is far from the exception and I can give many others.

Having the ability to absorb and retain facts and recounting them reliably is usually the single most important quality that distinguishes a child as suitable for a ‘better education’. But ‘the ability to cram’, while desirable, is far from the only factor relevant to an individual’s educational/career path.

The Grammar School of the ’70s had perhaps three outstanding teachers, one being John Maiden, who taught history and economics. He was a great teacher and a wonderful human being. I knew him well as I helped him in his garden after school. He had a great mind and excellent people skills, but perhaps his most defining quality was that he was ‘endlessly curious’ – a brain the size of an Amazon warehouse can only be so useful if its host has neither people skills nor curiosity.

A curious child is forever driven in their thirst for knowledge regardless of which school they attend. They are driven in their unending thirst and crucially they attract nurture to them because of their willingness to learn. Access to books and the internet is food and drink to such children. Regardless of schools attended, such children will always be successful, but probably, and maybe to their parents’ consternation, not by their own definition of success.

Curiosity, imagination, people skills, wit, initiative, charisma, humility, the ability to know when we do not know, are all strands that combine to make an individual intelligent or not. With so many variables, every individual’s intelligence is surely unique. It’s a peculiar term, ‘the grey matter’, as it refers to the human mind – perhaps meaning is found in that nothing is so amenable to an endless and varying range of colour as grey matter?

I was delighted to get to the Grammar School, and more so because I was a States house kid. I think even at 11 I somehow knew I was upwardly mobile and I have enjoyed many opportunities in life my parents never had.

But over time I have seen that surprisingly few members of my former year took any lasting benefit from their Grammar education, whereas a good number of those at the same age who failed to reach Grammar are heading up local companies.

I do not pretend to know whether keeping the Grammar is best for the island from this point on, but I sincerely hope that any replacement for it is ‘progressive’. Those wishing to finish with Grammar school education should be called on to demonstrate convincingly an improved system of education for our children. I think the worst thing would be to discontinue the Grammar only to bring it back in 10 or 15 years’ time, as has happened elsewhere. Our children’s education should not be subject to that degree of disruption.

A. P. LE PAGE,

Flat D, Alma House,

St Peter Port, GY1 2BJ.