Never too late to learn...
I'm writing this on the second day of my holiday, with my back and shoulders aching... but with a profound
sense of achievement having taken my first steps - well, not steps for once - in the swimming pool. Totally
shown up by the children, who are all happily doing lengths in a variety of strokes, while I inch along
occasionally getting chlorine up my nose and looking very ungainly, but after 40 years it's a grand
achievement. Having fallen in the Nene when I was about 4 and having to be fished out, I've been pretty phobic
about getting my face under water ever since, and that excuse has served me well for a very long time. But
after much cajoling I thought I'd better live up to my lofty principles and just throw myself in the hard way.
Surprise - you don't sink like a stone. Surprise again - you can actually go forwards...
In a way, though, it's a bit scary. I don't mean getting in a pool of water, although that chlorine in the
nose stings something chronic. I don't even mean pushing away from the secure bit of stone at the edge that
you can hang on to, and trusting to the laws of buoyancy. Doing something for the first time at this age
challenges your identity. I've been accustomed to the idea of failure in this little sphere, so much that it
has become part of me. And now I have to grab hold of that bit of me which says I am a non-swimmer
and tear it up. I've had to prise apart the feelings of I can't and I don't want to try which
continually reinforce each other. Or rather, one hides behind the other. Prove one wrong, and the other is
suddenly exposed to the light - and once exposed it withers quickly.
What saddens me is how this fear is endemic amongst those of us who went through
the state secondary education system in the past, and how fragile the subsequent
change has been. In my day the message we took away from school - certainly at
secondary level - was that it was firstly about controlling the most unruly;
secondly about getting a respectable score in exam results from the bright ones.
Rightly or wrongly, what we heard was:
- there was no point trying something unless you were going to do really well at it
- there was certainly no point in trying something for its own sake
- there was no pleasure to be had in learning
There were people I remembered as bright lights in those formative years who really
wanted to enthuse everyone about their subjects, but they seemed to be fighting a
tremendous current. I remember as a 16-year-old being resentful when prizes at
school were handed out to children in the B-stream - or, heaven forbid, the C-stream -
on the basis of heroic efforts to pull themselves up to an "average", and when my
wise head of 6th form cautioned me that raw talent would be its own reward in
good time. Time has mellowed that memory, thankfully. If learning is simply a means
to an end for the select few, then what for the rest of us? Perhaps the system was
intended to be nothing more than a mechanism to turn out docile workers with their
sights set low. Sadly there still exists a strong undercurrent in this direction,
which derides every effort to make learning enjoyable and accessible to all as
"political correctness" in order to discredit it, and a media-driven culture which
derides the plucky individual as a "nerd" or "saddo". Most of all, it's scandalous
that the powers that be see adult education as an expendable item when the budget
rolls round.
Of course I don't believe the Hollywood fantasy that everyone has the talent to become an Oxbridge graduate with
enough effort. But I do believe that everyone has talents beyond what they believe, and if given the right
motivation - personal satisfaction and acclaim from their peers - then we can all revolutionise our lives.
It's ironic that I should have this rare bastion of fear, having been a shameless supporter of friends and
family in similar circumstances and being proved right so often - Anna getting both a 1st in her social sciences
degree and a yellow belt at karate at 41, and in turn inspiring her friends and her mother to try (and succeed
at) degrees after years of eating themselves up with feelings of inadequacy and wasted time.
Most of all, though, it's a delight to watch my own diving in to everything they do wholeheartedly, with a sense
that all the world has to offer is there if only you choose to take hold of it. Doing a length in 30 seconds may
not do much for their career but it's fun, so who cares what anyone else thinks? And I'm delighted that
as they watch their parent following along slowly behind, taking the odd mouthful of water on board along the way,
they don't have that horrible embarrassed oh, how lame look, they are positively cheering me along...
Addendum: August 2008. A year passed after I wrote this and, with life as it is, didn't get round to practising my
new found skill until it came round to holiday time again. I was a little bit apprehensive at first; unnecessarily,
as it all came back quite naturally. Just like riding a bike - which is another thing I don't practice much right now,
but that's another story...