Failing at School (does it matter?)

The following is an exert from my book, "The Importance of Suffering: the value and meaning of emotional discontent" (to be published by Routledge 2012). Those of you who did not do too well at school should consider the following - you are in excellent company:

 Emile Zola, the great French novelist, at school received a zero in literature and also failed in German and rhetoric. D.H. Lawrence, whose novels rank high in English literature, came thirteenth in his class of 21 students and at graduation was placed below average. Sergi Rachmaninoff’s grades at the music conservatory were so low that he altered his report card to hide his failings from his mother. Puccini fared even worse than Rachmaninoff, as he consistently failed his school examinations. The same can be said for John Lennon who did not pass one final school exam, and only barely got accepted into Art College. Marcel Proust as an adult continually complained that his school teachers thought his compositions odd and disorganised, and graded them accordingly. Stephan Crane, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald all experienced failure at college because they did not like the content of their courses. And when Cézanne eagerly applied to the Beaux Arts he was flatly turned down.

 Many other creative individuals’ temperaments were highly misunderstood by teachers who privileged types of personality that honoured the common standard. James Lovelock, one of the greatest scientists of the modern age, was frequently hit with a cane at school. And when he won his school’s general knowledge competition, this infuriated his teachers so much that he was called a freak rather than intelligent. Albert Einstein’s teachers complained to his father that he was mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams. At school Pablo Picasso would stubbornly refuse to do anything but paint, and at the age of 12 was finally removed, as it seemed there was nothing else to be done. Nietzsche continually provoked his teachers’ annoyance by asking questions they could not answer. Hugh Walpole wrote long historical novels as a schoolboy, which nobody wanted to read. Carl Jung was branded a ‘dreamy child’, and when writing on a topic that fascinated him, produced an essay so utterly brilliant that his teacher did not believe it was his own. He was then punished severely for plagiarism.

 Among famous military men and politicians we also find our casualties. Gamal Abdel Nasser spent two years in grade two, failed grade three, and was twelve before he passed his primary school examinations. Thomas Edison was always at the bottom of the class and felt his teachers could not sympathise with him and thought he was stupid. Lord Randolph Churchill was a problem student at Eton and failed his Oxford examinations. His son, Winston Churchill, one of the greatest orators of the twentieth century, when at school at Harrow was thought so poor in English grammar, spelling and composition that he had to forgo his Latin and Greek classes to attend remedial English classes.

 More generally, Thomas Mann, Ernest Jones, Leon Trotsky, Pear Buck, Isadora Duncan, Willa Cather, Sigrid Undset, Susan B. Anthony – all intensely disliked school; whereas as William Randolph Hearst, Paderewski, Brendan Behan, William Osler, Sarah Bernhardt, and Orville Wright were so unruly that they were all expelled.

 There is no need to labour the point by accruing further examples (and there are many more), for what is important is that these illustrations belie a powerful idea that incompetence at school is not only an index of personal failure or obtuseness, but a portent of grave things to come. What these illustrations teach is that failure at school may be rather due to rigid criteria of adjudication, lack of insight into creative temperaments, over-valuation of the judgements of school-tests, or just bad luck with one’s allotted teacher, than to any inherent failing within pupils themselves. The unfavourable judgements these children received we now realise in the light of their adult successes to have been misplaced and short-sighted. But teachers do not possess the benefit of hindsight; and their present judgements cannot be challenged by outcomes that do not yet exist. Furthermore, limited time and resources, as well as today’s huge governmental pressure to obtain high results, do not give teachers the time to make critical distinctions between children who fall below the norm and children who surpass it.

The Pultizer Prize winning psychologist, James Hillman, to whom I am grateful for many of these examples, has argued that it is precisely because creative children are forced to adapt to the norm, that they become maladjusted. He takes the view that creative people often ‘do not allow compromises with standard norms’ even if ostracism and unhappiness is the result. In this sense their maladjustment acts ‘as a kind of preventative medicine, holding…[them] back from a false route.’ He proceeds to remind us, ‘that school for teachers was once called ‘normal’ school, the goddess of school is the Roman Minerva, the great normalizer, the great weaver into the social fabric.’