What They Forgot To Teach You At School

Alain de Botton, Alain Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781912891788
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

A collection of the essential emotional lessons we need in order to thrive.

We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Founding Fathers, and the tenses of foreign languages.

But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one's psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?

The School of Life is an organization dedicated to teaching a range of emotional lessons that we need in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives – and that schools routinely forget to teach us. This book is a collection of our most essential lessons, delivered with directness and humanity, covering topics from love to career, childhood trauma to loneliness.

To read this book is to be invited to lead kinder, richer, and more authentic lives – and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish. This is homework to help us make the most of the rest of our lives.

• EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE essential skills and lessons to help you thrive at work, at home, and in relationships.
• GIFT beautifully packaged in premium gift format.
• A HELPFUL GUIDE to what really matters, written with directness and humanity.
• A PRIMER ON LIVING WELL philosophical concepts simplified and applied to modern life.

1.
A Suspicion of School

We could hardly expect it to do anything else, but one thing that school has an unparalleled genius for is subtly but powerfully enforcing the message of how important a role it should play in any well-lived life. In small ways and large, it teaches us that those who most faithfully follow its dictates will prosper – and, correspondingly, that those who insist on doubting, rebelling, cursing and defying it will founder. From a hugely impressionable age, we have it impressed on us that school is the ultimate arbiter of who will succeed and who must go astray.

When worried parents try to tame their fears as to what will ultimately become of the precious and vulnerable little person they have succeeded in putting on the earth, performance at school is (understandably) clung to as the one reliable marker that things are going to be well. The infinite worries – about the child’s health, money, status, love, friendship, reputation – promise to be tamed if only the young one can be coaxed into doing their homework on time. Parental nagging is the result of existential terror settling on the one element that, at a given point, suggests it has a power to guarantee the future: the end of term result. What inner robustness one would need to possess not to delight when the history teacher explains that an offspring has shown a real aptitude in the civil war quiz, or not to panic when the head of maths reveals a sloppiness when finishing distribution graphs. The machinery of school, with its buildings, rituals and teachers, isn’t just imparting a few state-governed certificates to us; it also claims to hold in its hands the essential curriculum of life.

It can take a very long time until a more complex moral emerges: that those who do best at school do not, over the long term, necessarily do well in life. And vice versa. The former stars who once knew exactly how to score highly in papers may now be questioning the path they took – has it led to happiness or even recognition in the outside world? They may be listless and unanchored, unable to form the right sort of friendships, or intemperate and lonely within relationships. The path that seemed assured of success has run into trouble. We shouldn’t – by now – be overly surprised: school curricula are not necessarily designed by people who have much engagement with, experience of, or talent at, the intricacies of the world beyond. School curricula are not engineered on the basis of close study of the determining ingredients of fulfilled adult lives. Historically speaking, they were intellectually influenced by a range of slightly random forces as these evolved over hundreds of years – shaped by, among other things, the curricula of medieval monasteries, the ideas about fact-based learning of some nineteenth-century German educationalists and the emphasis on grammar and logic of the ancient Greeks. As a mass phenomenon, education has only been going for a couple of hundred years. It’s been an enormous effort simply to find a well-lit room, a seat, a moderately competent teacher and an exercise book for everyone at large. We’re still at the dawn of figuring out what truly works.

This helps to explain some of the questionable habits of mind that, despite themselves, schools may end up inculcating. They can suggest that the most important things are already known; that what is is all that could be. They can’t help but warn us about the dangers of originality. They have a set number of topics they want to talk us through, and must – to a greater or lesser extent – distract us from wandering too far away from their own ideas. They teach us to redeploy concepts rather than originate them. They teach us to deliver on, rather than change, expectations.

Along the way, they teach us to respect people in authority rather than imagine that – in a rather inspiring sense – in a great many fields, no one actually knows exactly what’s going on. They want us to put up our hands and wait to be picked. They want us to keep asking other people for permission. They teach us everything other than the two skills that in many ways decisively determine the quality of adult life: knowing how to choose the right job for ourselves and knowing how to form satisfactory relationships. They’ll instruct us in cell division and how to measure the circumference of a circle long before they come to those core (and surprisingly teachable) subjects: Work and Love.

It isn’t – of course – that all we need to do to succeed at life is angrily fail at school. There is nothing automatically wise about the rebel either, someone who swears at the teachers, dyes their hair, smokes in the toilets and then, after years of sullen resistance, ends up in a modest job in a declining town. A good life requires us to do two relatively tricky things: know how to go along with the rules sufficiently well so as not to get mired in needless fights with authority; and simultaneously never to believe too blindly or too passively in the long-term validity of everything we’re asked to study. We need to be outwardly obedient and inwardly discerning.

What we most need to do is to remember properly to leave school. Technically, most of us quit at eighteen – an event that tends to be vividly etched in memory and surrounded by considerable ceremony and emotion. Yet many of us in fact don’t manage to leave at that point at all. In a deep part of our minds, we may linger long into adulthood, not in a classroom precisely, but in terms of how our minds work, caged within the confines of a school-based worldview – generating immense and unnecessary degrees of unhappiness and compromise in the process.

First and foremost, a school worldview inspires a belief that those in authority know what they are doing and that one’s task is to obey. There’s a feeling too that all work should – when it’s going well – feel substantially irksome, dull and somewhat pointless, as homework once did. Schools teach us to forget, or ignore, the clues offered to us by our own boredom. They can teach us dangerous degrees of patience.

All the while, school teaches us that authority is benign, that ‘they’ (those who know, the machine, the big people) want what is good for us and speak on behalf of our long-term interests: ‘We’ll look after you. If you follow our rules, you will thrive. The exam (and all its successors) are fundamentally accurate. They, those who know, have worked out the ultimate test of your value. You are what you score.’

To be in thrall to such ways of thinking doesn’t require us to be sitting in a geography class. We might be in an office selling garden furniture to the Belgian market and thinking like this; we might have children of our own and by all appearances be an adult, and yet still be living within as though there were ‘exams’ to pass and cups to be won.

What would it mean to break the mould? What would it mean finally to leave school? To know some of the following: that there is no guarantee of a path to fulfilment laid out by authority figures. ‘They’ don’t know. No one knows (thankfully). The safe path may be entirely dangerous to our flourishing.

Our boredom is a vital tool. It is telling us what is slowly killing us – and reminding us that time is short. Authority is not by definition benign. The teachers and their substitutes have no real plan for us – except in so far as it suits their own advancement. It looks like they want our supreme good but in reality they want us to play their game for their own benefit. At the end, they have no proper prize to offer us. They’ll give us a colourful card and send us to the golf course and the grave and may have wasted our lives.

We shouldn’t be tough on ourselves for lingering so long. School is an immensely impressive system. We start there when we are not much bigger than a chair. For more than a decade, it’s all we know, it is the outside world – and is what those who love us most tell us we should respect. It speaks with immense confidence not just about itself, but about life in general. It is sold to us as a preparation for the whole of existence. But of course, the main thing it does is to prepare us for yet more school; it is an education in how to thrive within its own profoundly peculiar rules – with only a tenuous connection to the world beyond.

Knowing all this, we might do a very strange-sounding thing: finally work up the courage to leave our inner school, be that at age twenty-eight, thirty-five or sixty-two, and start to study what we need to honour our own potential and happiness, those truly core subjects we may have been in flight from for too long.

2.
You Don’t Need Permission

When we first arrive on the earth, nothing is more alien to our minds than the idea of needing permission to do something. We simply attempt to do whatever we want immediately: when the carpet looks interesting, we give it a lick. When the cat annoys us, we yank its tail. When there’s an intriguing plug socket, we push our fingers into it. When we wonder what something might sound like as it hits the floor, we give it a shove. We try to get everything right now or we scream.

Soon enough, a lot of contrary messages come our way. Wanting to do something isn’t enough. You must always ask, not just take. The thing you want is probably owned by someone else, and they have to give you their approval. A lot of what you crave may hurt others. You need to act a bit less and think a bit more. In fact, a great deal of what you want is just a terrible idea. The smile that comes back indulgently but firmly on a hundred thousand occasions says as much: no, that’s someone else’s; no, we don’t do that sort of thing here; no, that would be unkind… Unfortunately, it seems as though the most exciting new ideas continuously defy the rules of existence: apparently, you can’t just strap a radio to the hamster, you can’t eat only cake for lunch, you can’t bury your brother in sand, you can’t drill a hole in someone’s head to hear their thoughts. We also learn a few sobering things about timing. It has to happen after homework. Next year. When you’re an adult. There’s seemingly no situation that doesn’t require a waiting time infinitely longer than one would like.

So, we grow up with a host of background ideas about what we’re permitted to do, what the status of our longings is and where kindness and goodness might lie. We learn that we need to check in constantly with a parent to make sure that we have their nod to ride our bike to the shops. We need to ask before we switch subjects at school. We have to put our hand up before we say anything in class and have to get a permission slip to go to the doctor. At university, we need to get our thesis topic approved; at work, we need to check with the HR team that it’s OK to take the afternoon off for an appointment. Even in our personal life, prohibitions abound. We can’t end a relationship just like that, especially when there’s a holiday planned. Now we are living in a certain country, it would be very strange and costly to move to another. Things are not very satisfactory, but who are we to change them, given how silly we probably are?

We’re no longer the infant who just popped everything interesting into its mouth and smiled. Now we look around and wonder: is this OK? And generally we cease to wonder very much. We simply assume it’s probably not. Even in the absence of active prohibition, we stifle our impulses. We internalise those millions of no’s. Being a good adult becomes synonymous with waging a war on our wants. We get very good at being patient. We develop guilt about our desires. We are aware of how much our needs might hurt others. We look for approval from teachers, bosses, governments – and perhaps gods. We imagine that most of what already exists defines what is sensible and plausible; if it hasn’t happened by now, there must be very good reasons why it shouldn’t in the future. We’re careful not to hurry, even if we do have a goal in mind. Far better to wait a decade or two rather than risk any sort of rash move…

It’s an attitude that serves us well in some areas. We know how to save ourselves from some of our more counterproductive desires. The irony – and eventual quiet tragedy – is that the older we get, the less our wants are in fact liable to be foolish, vain, nasty or impatient. We may well want some pretty sensible and, for us, pretty essential things. Yet we wage war on ourselves with some of the same harshness, intemperance and mockery that might once have been deployed on us when – many years before – we were desperate to drink the whole chocolate fountain at the mall. Precisely as our wants get more legitimate, our arguments against them burn on with the punitive energy of early childhood. So, we may want to start a business, leave a relationship, shift city, imagine another way of living, structure things very differently at home or rearrange how we spend the weekends – and move not a millimetre.

It can take so long for us to learn that the appropriate rules of engagement with our desires might look rather different from what we were brought up to believe.

1. The desired thing may not be so silly

Our wants aren’t necessarily daft. We can have very big and still very legitimate dreams.

2. What we want might not have an owner

We could just reach for it. The prize might belong to whoever dares to step forward and claim it. It may come down to the courage to imagine that it could be ours.

3. Just because it’s not done doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done

The reason why certain ideas haven’t happened isn’t necessarily because they are implausible, but because there is a strong and always surprising lack of originality in human conduct. We are creatures of tradition. That it doesn’t exist isn’t a sign that it can’t or shouldn’t, just that everyone is as much waiting for permission as we are.

4. Maybe we aren’t well served by waiting yet longer

We are dealing with a finite currency of time. Our wants don’t miraculously get better by being put off. It might be more than sensible to want this immediately: to decide we can write a book at twenty-four or own a business at seventeen or walk out on a relationship at fifty-two. We don’t have forever. We could try to do this before sundown.

We need, in short, a new philosophy of wanting. We need to take a highly surprising message to the sensible eleven-year-old boy or girl who is inside us, still monitoring our impulsive selves with strictness but little imagination: that the time for permission is over.

Our resigned mental structure is a feature of religion and politics as much as of school indoctrination or individual psychology. For most of human history it was customary to believe that permission had to be sought via sacrifices, special rituals and prayers from the superior beings and forces that governed the cosmos. The foundational myth of Rome tells us how the citizens were originally unable to decide where to build their city and were reluctant to start construction until they had received a sign from the gods – which eventually arrive...