Students and the slow death of the spirit

I just wrote two As- level exams. So I’m feeling pretty brainless, as one might expect. There’s something about the ritual of the invigilators awkwardly pacing back and forth like hopelessly crumpled, middle-aged Stasi officers in a dirty strip-lit sports hall that inspires not so much melancholia as utter deadness. I sometimes feel relief, or joy at the loss of a burden, but lurking beneath it is always an odd sense of pointlessness. Or rather, the fear of pointlessness. The fear that one day I will stop being excited by the universe and will grow into a dull and functional human being, who all the same denies his functionality and thinks himself meaningless. That is to say, no one is pointless. But to think you are makes you boring. And there are certainly a lot of boring people.

The true relief may arrive on the day of the last exam; and the greater relief on results day. I remember that day’s bliss- a long coffee at my favourite cafe, a barbeque, ambling round the countryside for a game of Frisbee, and whisky as dusk drew on. But then, I had a clear notion of what to replace exams with: friends. I had found my rehabilitation.

The truth is, no real happiness exists from knowing that something boring is over. I said during my GCSEs that I would never be relieved when it was finished because I’d still be pissed off about having done it in the first place, and I stubbornly tried to keep my word. As it happens I am in no way more a believer in GCSEs now that the hurdle is jumped- the further I am from them the more stupid they seem. But I don’t want to argue about that here.

I just want to focus on something- Exams create short-term thinking. I was astonished on the day of the final GCSE to find the ground still beneath my feet, the wind still blowing and the birds still in the trees. Retrospectively, I understand that I was still a human being with my own decisions to make and my own future to direct; with much more still to learn and to see. During the exam-period, of course, I was mostly only thinking about the next hurdle to jump, counting each one down, and analysing my progress along the way. When the burden of exams is removed, I think about my entire life, not the next state-sanctioned objective. Because anyone with common sense knows that you never figure out what you want to be by stumbling through successive hoops.

And so exams, and a school-system based on exams, condition people into a tendency for objective-oriented short term thinking. It also sublimates people’s consideration of their own identity and the setting of their own goals into a centralised system which is far too brutish to handle the nuances that exist in real self-determination. And so I urge any students to try to look at the big picture after taking exams. Ask what you want to do, what you want to learn, and how you might go about that most effectively. I’m no sage on the best way to think- but it has to be better to retain your own goals against everything, and to stay self-assured about your passions; than to let an outside body dictate a predetermined future to you. Of course we should think short term- if we weren’t pragmatic we wouldn’t get anywhere.

A mixture of both attitudes is necessary- the ideal life is to pursue a short term completely in key with long term notions, but for many exams are anathemas to this because we don’t know what we want yet. So don’t forget yourself amidst all this hurdle jumping. Have confidence, and keep trying to figure it all out.