Education for better lives By: Ramon del Rosario Jr.

 - @inquirerdotnet

We all want an education system that helps every Filipino to succeed in the 21st century. We at Philippine Business
for Education (PBEd) believe that we can achieve high-quality education by improving teacher training and
certification, encouraging industry-academe partnerships, decentralizing education delivery, and participating in
international testing. The fact is that we still have a long way to go: Our kids are not learning and our youth not
earning. Our education system has improved, but two major problems in student achievement and graduate
employment remain.

We see this in national achievement test scores that are consistently below Philippine Development Plan targets. Only
2 percent of high school graduates are ready for college, as seen in the results of the college entrance exams of a
network of universities that cater to low-income students. Additionally, the dismal performance of graduates in
licensure exams shows the poor quality of learning across the system.

Joblessness remains intractable, particularly for the 1.2 million youth that comprise half of the unemployed in
2016. Importantly, education has not delivered on its promise of success for the 2 million unemployed Filipinos
who have at least a high school diploma, a quarter of whom also have a college degree, according to the Philippine
Statistics Authority. PBEd offers four solutions in the areas of teaching, partnerships, governance, and
accountability to address this dual problem of low student learning and readiness for the global economy.

We must develop better teachers by improving the teacher qualification and screening process. Teachers in the
Philippines need much help. When surveyed by the World Bank in 2014, the average Philippine teacher could only
answer fewer than half of the questions correctly when tested for knowledge in math, science and English. This
indicates that the screening mechanism, the board licensure exam for professional teachers which is essentially a
knowledge exam, is not very reliable. Worse, PBEd monitoring shows that a number of teacher education
institutions (TEIs) with consistent passing rates of less than 10 percent continue to operate. Perhaps we should
explore a qualification process where only the best and brightest can enroll in TEIs, only competent schools are
allowed to offer teacher education, and licensure exams are radically improved or eliminated.

We must engage industry in education. We were second to the last among middle-income countries in industry-
academe links in a 2012 World Bank Study. There have been efforts to address this, but the response should be
institutional and sustainable. If the goal is to ensure curricular relevance for job-readiness and entrepreneurship,
then the private sector needs to be an equal partner.

We must look into decentralizing education. The sheer size of the system and the Philippines’ archipelagic nature
make education delivery prone to inefficiencies and wastage. In 2013 alone, 23 percent of the operating budget
got lost along the way as funds moved from the central office to the schools, while 30 percent of construction
funds went to schools that had excess classrooms, according to an AusAID-funded study. Conversely, school-based
management (a form of decentralization) has been shown to raise achievement test scores in many countries
worldwide.

We must invest in accountability measures to help us know whether we are on the right track in terms of student
learning and postgraduation outcomes. The last time we took part in international testing was 14 years ago, with
dismal results. But while seemingly discouraging at first, the results of our participation shed light on the need for a
move to the K-to-12 basic education system and calls for more and better classrooms and teachers.
Over the years, our country has made great strides in increasing resources for education. This has led to more
children going to and staying in school. But it all means nothing if our youth continue to earn diplomas and little
else to show for their success. We therefore need to improve teacher development, encourage industry-academe
partnerships, explore decentralizing education delivery, and invest in accountability metrics. Together, let us work
for a high-quality educational system for all Filipinos, because education that does not lead to better lives is no
education at all.
The Marks of an Educated Man

Alan Simpson (1972-), president of Vassar College, was born in England but became a naturalized citizen of the
United States in 1954. He was educated at Oxford University and Harvard University and was a professor of history
at the University of Chicago from 1946-1964. His books include Puritanism in Old and New England (1961) and
Readings in the Formulation of American Policy (1949), of which he was co-editor.

Simpson’s description of an educated man goes back to the Renaissance ideal that placed equal stress on the
mental, moral, and physical excellence of human beings.

Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths and healing graces that distinguish a good education
from a bad one or a full education from a half-empty one are contained in that word. Whatever ups and downs
that term “liberal” suffers in the political vocabulary, it soars above all controversy in the educational world. In the
blackest pits of pedagogy the squirming victim has only to ask, “What’s liberal about this?” to shame his
persecutors. In times past a liberal education set off a free man from a slave or a gentleman from laborers and
artisans. It now distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training, which is merely practical,
or professional, or from the trivialities which are no training at all. Such an education involves a combination of
knowledge, skills, and standards.

So far as knowledge is concerned, the record is ambiguous. It is sufficiently confused for the fact-filled freak who
excels in quiz shows to have passed himself off in some company as an educated man. More respectable is the
notion that there are some things which every educated man ought to know; but many highly educated men
would cheerfully admit to a vast ignorance, and the framers of curriculums have differed greatly in the knowledge
they prescribe. If there have been times when all the students at school or college studied the same things, as if it
were obvious that without exposure to a common body of knowledge they would not be educated at all, there
have been other times when specialization ran so wild that it might almost seem as if educated men had
abandoned the thought of never talking to each other once their education was completed.

If knowledge is one of our marks, we can hardly be dogmatic about the kind or the amount. A single fertile field
tilled with care and imagination can probably develop all the instincts of an educated man. However, if the framer
of a curriculum wants to minimize his risks, he can invoke an ancient doctrine which holds that an educated man
ought to know a little about everything and a lot about something.

The “little about everything” is best interpreted these days by those who have given most thought to the sort of
general education an informed individual ought to have. More is required than a sampling of the introductory
courses which specialists offer in their own disciplines. Courses are needed in each of the major divisions of
knowledge – the humanities, the natural sciences, and social sciences- which are organized with the breadth of
view and the imaginative power of competent staffs who understand the needs of interested amateurs. But, over
and above this exciting smattering of knowledge, students should bite deeply into at least on subject and taste its
full flavor. It is not enough to be dilettantes in everything without striving also to be craftsmen in something.

If there is some ambiguity about the knowledge an educated man should have, there is none at all about the skills.
The first is simply the training of the mind in the capacity to think clearly. This has always been the business of
education, but the way it is done varies enormously. Marshalling the notes of a lecture in one experience; the
opportunity to argue with a teacher is another. Thinking within an accepted tradition is one thing; to challenge the
tradition itself is another. The best results are achieved when the idea of the examined life is held firmly before the
mind and when the examination is conducted with the zest, rigor, and freedom which really stretches everyone’
capacities.

The vital aid to clear thought is the habit of approaching everything we hear and everything we are taught to
believe with a certain skepticism. The method of using doubt as an examiner is a familiar one among scholars and
scientists, but it is also the best protection which a citizen has against the cant and humbug that surround us.
To be able to listen to a phony argument and to see its dishonesty is surely one of the marks of an educated man.
We may not need to be educated to possess some of this quality. A shrewd peasant was always well enough
protected against imposters in the market place, and we have all sorts of businessmen who have made themselves
excellent judges of phoniness without the benefit of a high school diploma; but this kind of shrewdness goes along
without a great deal of credulity. Outside the limited field within which experience has taught the peasant or the
illiterate businessman his lessons, he is often hopelessly gullible.The educated man, by contrast, has tried to
develop a critical faculty for general use, and he likes to think that he is fortified against imposture in all its forms.

It does not matter for our purposes whether to imposter is a deliberate liar or not. Some are, but the commonest
enemies of mankind are the unconscious frauds. Most salesmen under the intoxication of their own exuberance
seem to believe in what they say. Most experts whose expertise is only a pretentious sham behave as if they had
been solemnly inducted into some kind of priesthood. Very few demagogues are so cynical as to remain
undeceived by their own rhetoric, and some of the worst tyrants in history have been fatally sincere. We can leave
the disentanglement of motives to the students of fraud and error, but we cannot afford to be taken in by the
shams.

We are, of course, surrounded by shams. Until recently the schools were full of them- the notion that education
can be had without tears, that puffed rice is a better intellectual diet than oatmeal, that adjustment to the group is
more important than knowing where the group is going, and that democracy has made it a sin to separate the
sheep from the goats. Mercifully, these are much less evident now than they were before Sputnik startled us into
our wits.

In front of the professor are the shams of the learned fraternity. There is the sham science of the social scientist
who first invented a speech for fuddling thought and then proceeded totell us in his lock jawed way what we
already knew. There is the sham humanism of the humanist who wonders why civilization that once feasted at his
table is repelled by the shredded and desiccated dishes that often lie on it today. There is the sham message of the
physical scientist who feels that his mastery of nature has made him an expert in politics and morals, and there are
all the other brands of hokum which have furnished material for satire since the first quacks established
themselves in the first cloisters.

If this is true of universities with their solemn vows and limited temptations, how much truer is it for the naughty
world outside, where the prizes are far more dazzling and the only protection against humbug is the skepticism of
the ordinary voter, customer, reader, listener, and viewer? Of course, the follies of human nature are not going to
be exorcised by anything that the educator can do, and I am not sure that they would want to exorcise them if he
could. There is something irresistibly funny about the old Adam, and life would be duller without his antics. But
they ought to be kept within bounds. We are none the better for not recognizing a clown when we see one.

The other basic skill is simply the art of self-expression in speech and on paper. A man is educated who has
mastered the elements of clean forcible prose and picked up some relish for style.

It is a curious fact that we style everything in this country- our cars, our homes, our clothes- except our minds.
They still chug along like a Model T- rugged, persevering, but far from graceful.

No doubt this appeal for style, like the appeal for clear thinking, can be carried too far. There was once an
American who said that the only important thing in life was “to set a chime of words ringing in a few fastidious
minds.” As far as can be learned, he left this country in a huff to tinkle his little bell in a foreign land. Most of us
would think that he lacked a sense of proportion. After all, the political history of this country is full of good
judgment expressed in bad prose, and the business history has smashed through to some of its grandest triumphs
across acres of broken syntax. But we can discard some of these frontier manners without becoming absurdly
precious.
The road ahead bristles with obstacles. There is the reluctance of many people to use one word where they can get
away with a half dozen or a word of one syllable if they can find a longer one. No one has ever told them about the
first rule of English composition: every slaughtered syllable is a good deed. The most persuasive teachers of this
maxim are undoubtedly the commercial firms that offer a thousand dollars for the completion of a slogan in
twenty-five words. They are the only people who are putting id = a handsome premium on economy of statement.

There is the decay of the habit of memorizing good prose and good poetry in the years when tastes are being
formed. It is very difficult to write a bad sentence if the Bible has been a steady companion and very easy to
imagine a well turned phrase if the ear has been tuned on enough poetry.
There is the monstrous proliferation of gobbledy-gook in government, business, and the professions. Take this
horrible example of verbal smog.

It is inherent to motivational phenomena that there is a drive for more gratification than is realistically possible, on
any level or in any type of personality organization. Likewise it is inherent to the world of objects that not all
potentially desirable opportunities can be realized within a human life span. Therefore, any personality must
involve an organization that allocates opportunities for gratification that systematizes precedence relative to the
limited possibilities. The possibilities of gratification, simultaneously or sequentially, of all need-dispositions are
severely limited by the structure of the object system and by the intra systemic incompatibility of the
consequences of gratifying them all.

What this smothered soul is trying to say is simply, “We must pick and choose, because we cannot have everything
we want.”

Finally, there is the universal employment of the objective test as part of the price which has to be paid for mass
education. Nothing but the difficulty of finding enough readers to mark essays can condone a system which
reduces a literate student to the ignoble necessity of “blackening the answer space” when he might be giving his
mind and pen free play. Though we have managed to get some benefits for these examinations, the simple fact
remains that the shapely prose of the Declaration of Independence or the “Gettysburg Address” was never learned
under an educational system which employed objective tests. It was mastered by people who took writing
seriously, who had good models in front of them, good critics to judge them, and an endless capacity for taking
pains. Without that sort of discipline, the arts of self-expression will remain as mutilated as they are now.

The standards which mark an educated man can be expressed in terms of three tests:

The first is a matter of sophistication. Emerson put it nicely when he talked about getting rid of “the nonsense of
our wigwams.” The wigwam may be an uncultivated home, a suburban conformity, a crass patriotism, or a
cramped dogma. Some of this nonsense withers in the class room. More of it rubs off by simple mixing with
people, provided they are drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and exposed within a good college to a
civilized tradition. An educated an can be judged by the quality of his prejudices. There is a refined nonsense which
survives the raw nonsense which Emersion was talking about.

The second test is a matter of moral values. Though we all know individuals who have contrived to be both highly
educated and highly immoral, and though we have all heard of periods in history when the subtlest resources of
wit and sophistication were employed to make a mockery of simple values,we do not really believe that a college is
dong its job when it is simply multiplying the number of educated scoundrels, hucksters, and triflers.

The health of society depends on simple virtues like honesty, decency, courage, and public spirit. There are forces
in human nature which constantly tend to corrupt them, and every age has its own vices. The worst feature of ours
is probably the obsession with violence. Up to some such time as 1914, it was possible to believe in a kind of moral
progress. The quality which distinguished the Victorian from the Elizabethan was a sensitivity to suffering and a
revulsion from cruelty which greatly enlarged the idea of human dignity. Since 1914 we have steadily brutalized
ourselves. The horrors of modern war, the bestialities of modern political creeds, the uncontrollable vices of
modern cities, the favorite themes of modern novelists- all have conspired to degrade us. Some of the corruption
is blatant. The authors of the best sellers, after exhausting all the possibilities of sex in its normal and abnormal
forms and all the variation of alcoholism and drug addiction, are about to invade the recesses of the hospitals. A
clinical study of a hero undergoing the irrigation of his colon is about all there is left to gratify a morbid appetite.

Some of the corruption is insidious. A national columnist recently wrote an article in praise of cockfighting. He had
visited a cockfight in the company of Ernest Hemingway. After pointing out that Hemingway had made bullfighting
respectable, he proceeded to describe the terrible beauty of fierce indomitable birds trained to kill each other for
the excitement of the spectators. Needless to say, there used to be a terrible beauty about Christians defending
themselves against lions or about heretics being burned at the stake, and there are still parts of the world where a
public execution is regarded as a richly satisfying feast. But for three or four centuries the West taught itself to
resist these excitements in the interest of a moral idea.
Educators are needlessly squeamish about their duty to uphold moral values and needlessly perplexed about how
to implant them. The corruptions of our times are sufficient warning that we cannot afford to abandon the duty to
the home and the churches, and the capacity which many institutions have shown to do their duty in a liberal spirit
is a sufficient guaranty against bigotry.

Finally, there is the test imposed by the unique challenge of our own times. We are not unique in suffering from
moral confusions- these crises are a familiar story- but we are unique in the tremendous acceleration of the rate of
social change and in the tremendous risk of a catastrophic end to all our hopes. We cannot afford educated men
who have every grace except the gift for survival. An indispensable mark of the modern educated man is the kind
of versatile, flexible mind that can deal with new and explosive conditions.

With this reserve, there is little in this profile which has not been familiar for centuries. Unfortunately, the
description which one sufficed to suggest its personality has been debased in journalistic currency. The “well-
rounded man” has become the organization man, or the man who is so well rounded that he rolls wherever he is
pushed. The humanists who invented the idea and preached it for centuries would recoil in contempt from any
such notion. They understood the possibilities of the whole man and wanted an educational system which would
give the many sides of his nature some chance to develop in harmony. They thought it a good idea to mix the
wisdom of the world with the learning of the cloister, to develop the body as well as the mind, to pay a great deal
of attention to character, and to the spacious idea which offered every hospitality to creative energy. Anyone who
is seriously interested in liberal education must begin by rediscovering it.

Alan Simpson Quotes

"[The word liberal ] distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely
practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all."

"A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom
to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated
homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards."

"An educated man ... is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in
speech or on paper, some style."

"Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education
from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word."
Aguirre, Meriel Aina J.

Thinking as a Hobby
By William Golding

While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking;
and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger
conclusion – namely, that I myself could not think at all.

I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with. I remember how
incomprehensible they appeared to me at first, but not, of course, how I appeared to
them. It was the headmaster of my grammar school who first brought the subject of
thinking before me – though neither in the way, nor with the result he intended. He had
some statuettes in his study. They stood on a high cupboard behind his desk. One was
a lady wearing nothing but a bath towel. She seemed frozen in an eternal panic lest the
bath towel slip down any farther, and since she had no arms, she was in an unfortunate
position to pull the towel up again. Next to her, crouched the statuette of a leopard,
ready to spring down at the top drawer of a filing cabinet labeled A-AH. My innocence
interpreted this as the victim’s last, despairing cry.

Beyond the leopard was a naked, muscular gentleman, who sat, looking down, with his
chin on his fist and his elbow on his knee. He seemed utterly miserable. Some time
later, I learned about these statuettes. The headmaster had placed them where they
would face delinquent children, because they symbolized to him the whole of life. The
naked lady was the Venus of Milo. She was Love. She was not worried about the towel.
She was just busy being beautiful. The leopard was Nature, and he was being natural.
The naked, muscular gentleman was not miserable. He was Rodin’s Thinker, an image
of pure thought.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like. I had better explain
that I was a frequent visitor to the headmaster’s study, because of the latest thing I had
done or left undone. As we now say, I was not integrated. I was, if anything,
disintegrated; and I was puzzled. Grownups never made sense. Whenever I found
myself in a penal position before the headmaster’s desk, with the statuettes glimmering
whitely above him, I would sink my head, clasp my hands behind my back, and writhe
one shoe over the other. The headmaster would look opaquely at me through flashing
spectacles. “What are we going to do with you?”

Well, what were they going to do with me? I would writhe my shoe some more and stare
down at the worn rug. “Look up, boy! Can’t you look up?” Then I would look at the
cupboard, where the naked lady was frozen in her panic and the muscular gentleman
contemplated the hindquarters of the leopard in endless gloom. I had nothing to say to
the headmaster. His spectacles caught the light so that you could see nothing human
behind them. There was no possibility of communication. bility of communication. “Don’t
you ever think at all?” No, I didn’t think, wasn’t thinking, couldn’t think – I was simply
waiting in anguish for the interview to stop. “Then you’d better learn – hadn’t you?” On
one occasion the headmaster leaped to his feet, reached up and plonked Rodin’s
masterpiece on the desk before me. “That’s what a man looks like when he’s really
thinking.” I surveyed the gentleman without interest or comprehension. “Go back to your
class. “Clearly there was something missing in me. Nature had endowed the rest of the
human race with a sixth sense and left me out. This must be so, I mused, on my way
back to the class, since whether I had broken a window, or failed to remember Boyle’s
Law, or been late for school, my teachers produced me one, adult answer: “Why can’t
you think?” As I saw the case, I had broken the window because I had tried to hit Jack
Arney with a cricket ball and missed him; I could not remember Boyle’s Law because I
had never bothered to learn it; and I was late for school because I preferred looking
over the bridge into the river. In fact, I was wicked. Were my teachers, perhaps, so good
that they could not understand the depths of my depravity? Were they clear,
untormented people who could direct their every action by this mysterious business of
thinking? The whole thing was incomprehensible. In my earlier years, I found even the
statuette of the Thinker confusing. I did not believe any of my teachers were naked,
ever. Like someone born deaf, but bitterly determined to find out about sound, I watched
my teachers to find out about thought. There was Mr. Houghton. He was always telling
me to think. With a modest satisfaction, he would tell that he had thought a bit himself.
Then why did he spend so much time drinking? Or was there more sense in drinking
than there appeared to be? But if not, and if drinking were in fact ruinous to health – and
Mr. Houghton was ruined, there was no doubt about that – why was he always . talking
about the clean life and the virtues of fresh air? He would spread his arms wide with the
action of a man who habitually spent his time striding along mountain ridges. “Open air
does me good, boys – I know it!” Sometimes, exalted by his own oratory, he would leap
from his desk and hustle us outside into a hideous wind.

“Now, boys! Deep breaths! Feel it right down inside you – huge droughts of God’s good
air!” He would stand before us, rejoicing in his perfect health, an open-air man. He
would put his hands on his waist and take a tremendous breath. You could hear the
wind trapped in the cavern of his chest and struggling with all the unnatural
impediments. His body would reel with shock and his ruined face go white at the
unaccustomed visitation. He would stagger back to his desk and collapse there, useless
for the rest of the morning. Mr. Houghton was given to high-minded monologues about
the good life, sexless and full of duty. Yet in the middle of one of these monologues, if a
girl passed the window, tapping along on her neat little feet, he would interrupt his
discourse, his neck would turn of itself and he would watch her out of sight. In this
instance, he seemed to me ruled not by thought but by an invisible and irresistible
spring in his nape. His neck was an object of great interest to me. Normally it bulged a
bit over his collar. But Mr. Houghton had fought in the First World War alongside both
Americans and French, and had come – by who knows what illogic? – to a settled
detestation of both countries. If either country happened to be prominent in current
affairs, no argument could make Mr. Houghton think well of it. He would bang the desk,
his neck would bulge still further and go red. “You can say what you like,” he would cry,
“but I’ve thought about this – and I know what I think!” Mr. Houghton thought with his
neck

There was Miss. Parsons. She assured us that her dearest wish was our welfare, but I
knew even then, with the mysterious clairvoyance of childhood, that what she wanted
most was the husband she never got. There was Mr. Hands – and so on. I have dealt at
length with my teachers because this was my introduction to the nature of what is
commonly called thought. Through them I discovered that thought is often full of
unconscious prejudice, ignorance, and hypocrisy. It will lecture on disinterested purity
while its neck is being remorselessly twisted toward a skirt. Technically, it is about as
proficient as most businessmen’s golf, as honest as most politician’s intentions, or – to
come near my own preoccupation – as coherent as most books that get written. It is
what I came to call grade-three thinking, though more properly, it is feeling, rather than
thought. True, often there is a kind of innocence in prejudices, but in those days I
viewed grade-three thinking with an intolerant contempt and an incautious mockery. I
delighted to confront a pious lady who hated the Germans with the proposition that we
should love our enemies. She taught me a great truth in dealing with grade-three
thinkers; because of her, I no longer dismiss lightly a mental process which for nine-
tenths of the population is the nearest they will ever get to thought. They have immense
solidarity. We had better respect them, for we are outnumbered and surrounded. A
crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at
the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in
their beliefs.

Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way
on the side of a hill. Grade-two thinking is the detection of contradictions. I reached
grade two when I trapped the poor, pious lady. Grade-two thinkers do not stampede
easily, though often they fall into the other fault and lag behind. Grade-two thinking is a
withdrawal, with eyes and ears open. It became my hobby and brought satisfaction and
loneliness in either hand. For grade-two thinking destroys without having the power to
create. It set me watching the crowds cheering His Majesty the King and asking myself
what all the fuss was about, without giving me anything positive to put in the place of
that heady patriotism. But there were compensations. To hear people justify their habit
of hunting foxes and tearing them to pieces by claiming that the foxes like it. To her our
Prime Minister talk about the great benefit we conferred on India by jailing people like
Pandit Nehru and Gandhi. To hear American politicians talk about peace in one
sentence and refuse to join the League of Nations in the next. Yes, there were moments
of delight. But I was growing toward adolescence and had to admit that Mr. Houghton
was not the only one with an irresistible spring in his neck. I, too, felt the compulsive
hand of nature and began to find that pointing out contradiction could be costly as well
as fun

There was Ruth, for example, a serious and attractive girl. I was an atheist at the time.
Grade-two thinking is a menace to religion and knocks down sects like skittles. I put
myself in a position to be converted by her with an hypocrisy worthy of grade three. She
was a Methodist – or at least, her parents were, and Ruth had to follow suit. But, alas,
instead of relying on the Holy Spirit to convert me, Ruth was foolish enough to open her
pretty mouth in argument. She claimed that the Bible (King James Version) was literally
inspired. I countered by saying that the Catholics believed in the literal inspiration of
Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and the two books were different. Argument flagged. At last she
remarked that there were an awful lot of Methodists and they couldn’t be wrong, could
they – not all those millions? That was too easy, said I restively (for the nearer you were
to Ruth, the nicer she was to be near to) since there were more Roman Catholics than
Methodists anyway; and they couldn’t be wrong, could they – not all those hundreds of
millions? An awful flicker of doubt appeared in her eyes. I slid my armround her waist
and murmured breathlessly that if we were counting heads, the Buddhists were the
boys for my money. But Ruth has really wanted to do me good, because I was so nice.
The combination of my arm and those countless Buddhists was too much for her. That
night her father visited my father and left, red-cheeked and indignant. I was given the
third degree to find out what had happened. It was lucky we were both of us only
fourteen. I lost Ruth and gained an undeserved reputation as a potential libertine. So
grade-two thinking could be dangerous.

It was in this knowledge, at the age of fifteen, that I remember making a comment from
the heights of grade two, on the limitations of grade three. One evening I found myself
alone in the school hall, preparing it for a party. The door of the headmaster’s study was
open. I went in. The headmaster had ceased to thump Rodin’s Thinker down on the
desk as an example to the young. Perhaps he had not found any more candidates, but
the statuettes were still there, glimmering and gathering dust on top of the cupboard. I
stood on a chair and rearranged them. I stood Venus in her bath towel on the filing
cabinet, so that now the top drawer caught its breath in a gasp of sexy excitement. “A-
ah!” The portentous Thinker I placed on the edge of the cupboard so that he looked
down at the bath towel and waited for it to slip. Grade-two thinking, though it filled life
with fun and excitement, did not make for content. To find out the deficiencies of our
elders bolsters the young ego but does not make for personal security. I found that
grade two was not only the power to point out contradictions. It took the swimmer some
distance from the shore and left him there, out of his depth. I decided that Pontius Pilate
was a typical grade-two thinker. “What is truth?” he said, a very common grade two
thought, but one that is used always as the end of an argument instead of the
beginning.

There is still a higher grade of thought which says, “What is truth?” and sets out to find
it. But these grade-one thinkers were few and far between. They did not visit my
grammar school in the flesh though they were there in books. I aspired to them partly
because I was ambitious and partly because I now saw my hobby as an unsatisfactory
thing if it went no further. If you set out to climb a mountain, however high you climb,
you have failed if you cannot reach the top.

I did meet an undeniably grade one thinker in my first year at Oxford. I was looking
overa small bridge in Magdalen Deer Park, and a tiny mustached and hatted figure
came and stood by my side. He was a German who had just fled from the Nazis to
Oxford as a temporary refuge. His name was Einstein. But Professor Einstein knew no
English at that time and I knew only two words of German. I beamed at him, trying
wordlessly to convey by my bearing all the affection and respect that the English felt for
him. It is possible – and I have to make the admission – that I felt here were two grade-
one thinkers standing side by side; yet I doubt if my face conveyed more than a
formless awe. I would have given my Greek and Latin and French and a good slice of
my English for enough German to communicate. But we were divided; he was as
inscrutable as my headmaster. For perhaps five minutes we stood together on the
bridge, undeniable grade-one thinker and breathless aspirant

With true greatness, Professor Einstein realized that any contact was better than none.
He pointed to a trout wavering in midstream. He spoke: “Fisch.” My brain reeled. Here I
was, mingling with the great, and yet helpless as the veriest grade-three thinker.
Desperately I sought for some sign by which I might convey that I, too, revered pure
reason. I nodded vehemently. In a brilliant flash I used up half of my German
vocabulary. “Fisch. Ja. Ja.” For perhaps another five minutes we stood side by side.
Then Professor Einstein, his whole figure still conveying good will and amiability, drifted
away out of sight.

I, too, would be a grade-one thinker. I was irrelevant at the best of times. Political and
religious systems, social customs, loyalties and traditions, they all came tumbling down
like so many rotten apples off a tree. This was a fine hobby and a sensible substitute for
cricket, since you could play it all the year round. I came up in the end with what must
always remain the justification for grade-one thinking, its sign, seal, and charter. I
devised a coherent system for living. It was a moral system, which was wholly logical.
Of course, as I readily admitted, conversion of the world to my way of thinking might be
difficult, since my system did away with a number of trifles, such as big business,
centralized government, armies, marriage… It was Ruth all over again. I had some very
good friends who stood by me, and still do. But my acquaintances vanished, taking the
girls with them. Young women seemed oddly contented with the world as it was. They
valued the meaningless ceremony with a ring. Young men, while willing to concede the
chaining sordidness of marriage, were hesitant about abandoning the organizations
which they hoped would give them a career. A young man on the first rung of the Royal
Navy, while perfectly agreeable to doing away with big business and marriage, got as
red-necked as Mr. Houghton when I proposed a world without any battleships in it. Had
the game gone too far? Was it a game any longer? In those prewar days, I stood to lose
a great deal, for the sake of a hobby. Now you are expecting me to describe how I saw
the folly of my ways and came back to the warm nest, where prejudices are so often
called loyalties, where pointless actions are hallowed into custom by repetition, where
we are content to say we think when all we do is feel. But you would be wrong. I
dropped my hobby and turned professional. If I were to go back to the headmaster’s
study and find the dusty statuettes still there, I would arrange them differently. I would
dust Venus and put her aside, for I have come to love her and know her for the fair thing
she is. But I would put the Thinker, sunk in his desperate thought, where there were
shadows before him – and at his back, I would put the leopard, crouched and ready to
spring.