John Connell: The Blog

Sean Con­nery, in his thought­ful mem­oir Being A Scot, tells the story of find­ing him­self on a plane seated next to a com­pa­triot, a young woman. Talk­ing to her, he found that she was a lit­er­a­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh, and that she was cur­rently study­ing Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

“Do you see any par­al­lels between Roskol­nikov, in the Dos­to­evsky novel, and the char­ac­ter of Robert Wing­ham, in James Hogg’s Mem­oirs and Con­fes­sions of a Jus­ti­fied Sin­ner?” he asked her.

“Oh, I haven’t read that,” said she, “I’m in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture Depart­ment, not the Scot­tish.” Con­nery was bemused, but pre­sum­ably did not bother to ask why, given her odd per­spec­tive, she was study­ing a novel orig­i­nally writ­ten in Russian.

Con­nery had left school at 13 with lit­tle to show for his eight years in Scot­tish edu­ca­tion other than an abil­ity to read. But early in his act­ing career, a fellow-thespian had sug­gested a list of books that the young Con­nery ought to read, and he had sub­se­quently embarked on his own edu­ca­tion in fine lit­er­a­ture. His young trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, on the other hand, had suc­cess­fully com­pleted seven years of pri­mary school­ing, five or six years of sec­ondary school­ing, and by the time Con­nery met her at least a year or two at uni­ver­sity. So what was the dif­fer­ence between the famous actor with his paucity of for­mal school­ing and the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent with a decade and a half of insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion behind her?

In the lit­er­a­ture stu­dent, I believe that we can see some­thing of the schooled mind at work, in this case some­one for whom the books she read were pre­scribed by oth­ers and for whom read­ing was largely a means to an end. In Con­nery, a lover of lit­er­a­ture, we can see the inde­pen­dent mind of some­one who has taken con­trol of his own learn­ing, some­one for whom read­ing was a plea­sure in itself, and noth­ing to do with pass­ing exam­i­na­tions or gain­ing qualifications.

It is inter­est­ing to pon­der the dif­fer­ences between the truly autonomous learner and the schooled mind, to explore the nature of learn­ing in an age where, although the oppor­tu­ni­ties for self-directed learn­ing are expand­ing immensely as the ten­drils of the Inter­net extend into every facet of our lives, the endur­ing insti­tu­tions of the school and the col­lege and the uni­ver­sity (all of which I am happy to refer to col­lec­tively and con­cep­tu­ally as ‘the school’) remain stub­bornly tena­cious. This durable social con­struct, one that has been shaped and adapted con­tin­u­ously through­out his­tory to suit the needs of time and place and wealth and power, has allowed the myr­iad social, polit­i­cal and reli­gious enti­ties that have sus­tained it, and that con­tinue to sus­tain it, to retain an often insid­i­ous and reduc­tive grip on the minds of those who pass through their hands. And, despite that con­stant refrain of ‘the school is dead’ that we have heard in dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places, the school is arguably stronger in some ways today than it has ever been.

Of course, the tale of Sean Con­nery and the young lit­er­a­ture stu­dent raises more ques­tions than answers: the gulf between the autonomous learner and the schooled mind is rarely iden­ti­fi­able as a sim­ple dichotomy between the free spirit and the cap­tive will. The real­ity for most of us is that we find our­selves, through­out our lives, shift­ing back and forth along a con­tin­uum some­where between the two extremes, although we night hope that, as we grow older, we become more aware of the dan­gers of the schooled mind, and there­fore develop a greater capac­ity to break free of the con­straints placed on us by the school in our early years. Connery’s self-taught love of lit­er­a­ture was per­haps not entirely free of instru­men­tal inten­tions: as an actor, he rec­og­nized that an appre­ci­a­tion of lit­er­a­ture would be use­ful to him in his career, but it was his own recog­ni­tion, not one sug­gested by oth­ers or imposed from with­out. Equally, the young woman, we hope, would have taken up her course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture because of a love of read­ing. But between those two routes into books, and most cer­tainly in the student’s response to Connery’s ques­tion, there lies a dis­cernible dif­fer­ence between the approach that each had pre­vi­ously taken to their mutual love of lit­er­a­ture. Con­nery, con­sciously or oth­er­wise, had dis­cov­ered that there is a higher and deeper and wider sig­nif­i­cance to learn­ing than can be gleaned from sub­mit­ting to the stric­tures of the class­room. The young woman had allowed her­self to be per­suaded that, like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of ‘edu­cated’ peo­ple, she had lit­tle choice but to accept those stric­tures as seem­ingly the only avail­able path to an edu­ca­tion in the dis­ci­pline that she enjoyed.

The road taken by Con­nery was one that led not only to a knowl­edge of fine lit­er­a­ture but also, I would con­tend, to a greater chance for attain­ing a degree of self-knowledge that, if not actu­ally denied by school, has rarely if ever been an explicit aim of school­ing. The school, his­tor­i­cally, has not actively encour­aged inde­pen­dence of thought, nor has it cul­ti­vated the truly spon­ta­neous or cre­ative mind. We develop such traits despite school not because of it. School is fun­da­men­tally about train­ing the mind, devel­op­ing the intel­lect (as opposed to intel­li­gence), pass­ing on the knowl­edge deemed impor­tant by a soci­ety to those whose role it will be to per­pet­u­ate and pre­serve that soci­ety at all lev­els. As such, the school con­tin­ues what already is and what has been; its func­tion, what­ever the rhetoric, is essen­tially back­wards look­ing, seek­ing to main­tain the struc­tures and rela­tion­ships from the past and present on into the future with min­i­mal change.

But given the ubiq­uity of the school, we can­not sim­ply equate the schooled mind with atten­dance at school. To do so would be ludi­crous. If the schooled mind were to be iden­ti­fied merely by dint of some­one hav­ing attended school there would no chance of escape from the con­di­tion for most of us. But school­ing does imbue the stu­dent, the scholar, with cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics that the learner has to find the means to over­come either while at school, or more likely once school­ing is complete.

I will come back to what that schooled mind is all about, why we must not be con­tent with the intel­lec­tual frame­work that school bestows on us, and how crit­i­cal it is that we are able to over­come at least the most dele­te­ri­ous and per­ni­cious aspects of the school’s legacy on our own devel­op­ment as ratio­nal, free-thinking human beings.