For many years I’ve thought that while Oscar Wilde’s pronouncements on education are very humorous, not to say cynical, they also contain an element of truth. Quite a large element, unfortunately.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes, with some words of commentary from myself.

This reminds me of a comment by G.B.Shaw:

There’s an element of truth to that when it comes to people who were failures by the standards of their school, but who went on to succeed in life.

I did find it annoying, and frustrating, though when a parent would sometimes tell me that they left school at 15 with no qualifications whatsoever, but that “it didn’t do me any harm”.

I always wanted to say, “How do you know?”

This strikes me as an example of what the Oulipians, rather tongue-in-cheek, refer to as “anticipatory plagiarism”, insofar as it brings to mind Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s description of the Intellectual-Yet-Idiot (IYI) in his book “Skin in the Game”:

Taleb has plenty to say about the phenomenon and the huge influence of the IYI class, none of it complimentary. See also the comment about exam questions, below.

If you regard this observation in the context of, say, driving a car or wiring a plug, then clearly it’s bonkers. But these days, in Britain at least, kids are subjected to courses on how to treat other people with kindness. Surely that sort of thing is best taught by example, or by one’s inner moral compass?

I discovered the truth of this when teaching Economics ‘A’ (Advanced) Level. Despite all the checks that exam questions are put through, there were always some multiple choice questions where the skill was not so much identifying the correct answer, but identifying the answer that the examiners had most probably designated as correct. The process went something like this, the “options” being the statements from which the student had to select the correct one:

Option A: Obviously wrong.

Option C: Looks ok at first glance, but they’ve mixed up two concepts, so it’s wrong.

Option E: (All of the above), is obviously wrong given the decisions for options A and C.

Option B: Is correct, if you make the assumptions that X, Y and Z are all in place.

Option D: Correct according to the standard Economics textbook.

Therefore to obtain the correct answer one had to refrain from overthinking it. That meant, rather than selecting Option B, which is almost certainly what would be the situation in the real world, one had to select Option D, which fitted in with the standard view of the world presented by economists.

These sorts of questions definitely exemplified Wilde’s maxim: if you were too wise, you’d fail.