'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

The Mix

When I am in the UK, I swim in my old school’s pool on weekends. They now have an entirely new sports facility. This includes a twenty-five meter indoor heated pool, a state of the art gym, and a sports hall.

While I was drying off after my swim last Sunday, I talked to the young man who was on pool duty that day.

“How are you doing this year?” I asked him.

He looked at me blankly.

“In competition.” I waved at the pool.

“Oh,” he said. “We swam against Mill Hill and thrashed them.”

I wouldn’t have expected Mill Hill to be mentioned. They were never a force in swimming. “How about Highgate?” I asked. They had always been the schools main rivals.

“No. We have only swum against Mill Hill this year. It’s the exams.”

I dried off and left, but inwardly I was in shock. As a school boy, I had swum in an unheated, outdoor pool half the size of this magnificent new construction. I had competed with close to ten other schools in the course of a summer, and in my case had gone on to swim in the Olympic Trials. Now, just when the cry is to find new sporting talent for the 2012 Olympics in London and they have this fabulous new facility, they don’t have the time to compete because of, well because of ‘exams’!

Swimming changed my life. Because of my success in competition, I became ‘someone’ at school and gained greatly in confidence. In the blink of an eye I was a far better student, who to everybody’s surprise passed the necessary exams to go to University; not that I took that option.

The school has spent millions on this new complex but it does not even serve the purpose that the open air, ice cold mini pool did.

Anyone who thinks that exams prepare you for life is living in a dream world as much as anyone who thinks that swimming does. Life is a mix and only a taste of that mix can prepare you for it. The mix tells you what you are best and worst at, and what you like or don’t like. It gives you the chance to work out what you are happy to do that you can be paid for.

We are now in the maw of a system run by ‘qualified’ people. Being so ‘qualified’ they naturally think that qualifications are what counts in life. I have written five novels and almost ninety articles for Netlistings. I have been an artist’s manager and have made a lot of money in real estate, but I am sadly unqualified in their eyes.

Given the use that my old schools swimming pool is being put to, these ‘authorities’ are equally unqualified in mine. The system is not fit for purpose and is leading our young people down a cull-de-sac, rather than onto an open road of learning.

This academic disease is systemic and emanates from those who have targets to meet, who are justified by statistics, and who don’t have a thought for the broad based, self reliant person they should be dedicated to producing. It can be shaken or stirred, but it is all in the mix. We are nothing without it.     

 

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