Great Content from a Friend in High Places

Nothing like a great read in the afternoon...

I received a wonderful piece of prose from an old friend today and I enjoyed it tremendously. This to me is a fine example of content that works. If you are going to create prose for your website or blog this is a great benchmark to strive for. The piece is informative, provocative and fun to read. When was the last time you got a chance to read something of this caliber on a blog or website?

Remember the golden rule of content:
It has to be well written and it can't be about you... that is, if you want people to come back for some more.


Mediocrity: The Old Enemy
Roger Beaumont
Editor and English Language Consultant, Centre for Bhutanese Studies, Thimphu, Bhutan

JA Smith, professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University, opened a lecture course in 1914, just before the First World War, with:

“Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this – if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rubbish. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”

After the Second World War, Mr Fawcett, my housemaster at Charney Hall prep school in England’s Lake District, might have returned to his fellowship at Oxford, but instead he took the momentous decision to become a school teacher. Having seen so much destruction wreaked upon civilisation, he thought that he could more directly help to rebuild the world by influencing young people in their most formative years.

With his enthusiasm and patience, his care for the individual, his insatiable curiosity, and his breadth of interest and knowledge, he was, like all the best teachers, a walking – often running – advertisement for education. He had the gift of being frequently, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “surprised by joy”. He paid us the intimidating compliment of treating our ideas as equal to his own.

If a pupil turned in a shoddy piece of work, the look of cosmic dismay on Mr Fawcett’s usually benign face made the errant boy feel that his lapse had short-changed not just the tutor or the school, but the whole of civilisation.

Only one thing consoled me about taking exams: they couldn’t possibly ask me everything I didn’t know.

Meanwhile, Hugh Duncan, the headmaster, was a tall, frightening, impressive figure, and not always friendly. He was an old-fashioned disciplinarian and a stickler for courtesy, dress standards and manners. I was often, no, always, shaking with fear before he entered the room, knowing what was to come; my mistakes and his expsoure of them. He taught us maths in a dingy classroom that had the sort of atmosphere that attracts unmanned probes from Nasa. I had enough trouble with figures, so when they started introducing letters with Algebra, I was utterly shipwrecked. I still think Algebra is the most soddingly, useless subject ever devised, and probably invented by a Greek dyslexic bent on revenge.

On the last day of term in our final year, the headmaster amazed us with a lesson we never forgot. It was on “Maths and its Principles”, for which he used a famous anecdote by the writer George Bernard Shaw.

“Would you sleep with me for 20,000 pounds?” Shaw once asked a woman. She thought about it and acknowledged that, theoretically, she would. “Good,” said Shaw, “So, would you sleep with me for sixpence?”

The lady became indignant. “What sort of woman do you think I am?” she exploded. “We’ve established what sort of woman you are,” Shaw pointed out, “we’re merely haggling over the price.”

And we grinned, like the dirty minded little schoolboys we were.

Mr Duncan drove a Rover, in which he proceeded with magisterial slowness. To me, at 12 years old, it symbolised authority, status, dependability, all of which I lacked. The school minibus, an ancient Bedford, struggled with the Lakeland gradients and did not always win. At the wheel would be the serene figure of Mr Fawcett, though it was hard to say if more smoke poured from his pipe or through the Bedford’s floorboards. Going downhill was a different matter. As it picked up speed, we, scrunched up in the back seats, swayed like sea anemones.

Believing that boys should be neither cosseted nor cowed, Duncan ran the school on robust, rural lines. Long walks, cold dormitories and loud hymn-singing were an integral part of our education, along with cricket nets and Latin prose. Despite a brisk code of discipline, he took a laissez-faire approach outside the classroom. Every November 5, (Bonfire Night) the smallest boy in the school was sent to crawl through a tunnel and meet a pile of combustibles to set light the very core of the bonfire. Nobody, so far as anyone can recall, ever failed to crawl out again. Thank fuck my name never came up.

On Sunday mornings the entire school walked to church and back, while in the afternoons the pupils were sent up to the fells (hills) behind the school. Older boys were allowed to roam unsupervised. Few failed to relish the freedom, and many developed a lifelong taste for hill walking. And I have it and love it.

What central heating there was in the school buildings was not always effective, or even switched on. Boys were permitted to capture owls and keep them in the carpenters shop, provided we also caught enough sparrows for them to feed on. Wicked.

A total dweeb (idiot, prat) called Atkinson, cruelly described as “useless as an Abo’s tit”, was given the task of rearing a lamb to which he developed some emotional attachment. The animal – called ''Lottie'' if memory serves – disappeared shortly before the school’s Christmas feast, and Atkinson realised the significance only when he was the first to go up for second helpings.

At that tiny, extraordinay, school it was instilled into us that the more we knew the more we could “bring to the table” and, to never, ever, take power or wealth into consideration when assessing someone’s worth. Some of the most brutal and vicious people this world has ever seen were – and are – powerful and rich. We were advised to stay well clear of anything that diminishes life and robs it of its diversity. Our differences should be “grounds for celebration and new learning, not for mistrust and genocide”.

But the real enemy, we were taught, was mediocrity, because “mediocrity is the hairball coughed up on the carpet of creation” as Tom Robbins so neatly put it. With discipline there was a chance of being creative; without it, there was no chance at all.

It has been written that education is what survives when what was learned has been forgotten. Spot on. These days, people no longer want to learn, they just want to know. But it doesn’t work like that. If people buy into this, they can only immature with age.

We are all formed early, and Atkinson, the prat who fattened the school lamb, is now raising emus outside Darwin and making more money than all of us.