Choice Quotes from Charles Handy

On my last trip to Malaybalay, Bukidnon, I picked up a book from the pile on my table, for me to read on the plane. But it was an early morning flight and I slept all the way to Cagayan de Oro. But on the flight back, I was wide awake and managed to leaf through Charles Handy’s The Elephant and the Flea.

Written for his 70th birthday in 2002, the book is still an interesting read, many years after I bought and read it. In fact, it speaks to me more now than I remember it doing then. Most probably it’s because I have gone through the experience of many years that invest his thoughts with greater resonance.

I scribbled in my notebook a couple of his quotes on education. “What you learn through fear seldom sticks. You want to forget the lessons along with the memories of the unpleasantness.”

He contrasts his attitudes and memories about formal basic schooling with those of his wife, Elizabeth.

For Charles, school was “unfair, punitive, and unpleasant. The best way to survive was to find out what the rules were, to keep your head down, and pass the tests that the authorities set you as best you could.” He said it was not the best way for the independent life, and his chapter title is appropriately “Schools for an Old World.”

For Elizabeth, “rules are there to be challenged. Those in authority often got it wrong. You had to stand up for yourself in this world, because no one else might.” No wonder she went through 11 “mostly incompetent” schools before she was sixteen.

Reading his memories of his school days, I recall the minister of education, I think from Uruguay, who asked aloud at a conference in Manchester: When we campaign for universal primary education as part of “Education for All 2015” are we saying that it’s simply a matter of insuring that everyone goes to the formal school system? Don’t we have any serious reservations about the system as such? Should we not seek changes in the formal school system?

Charles Handy would heartily agree. One of his paragraphs should speak to those of us in the Global Campaign for Education: “I remain convinced that we should use our schools as safe areas for experimenting with life, for discovering our talents – we all have some even if they don’t show up in examinations – for taking on responsibility for tasks and for other people, for learning how to learn what and when we need to, and for exploring our values and beliefs about life and society. For me, that is a more exciting curriculum than one packed full of facts.”