A brick has several useful qualities.
It is predictable. It fits where it is placed. It supports the structure without asking too many questions about what is being built.
These are excellent qualities in a brick.
I am less convinced that they should be our highest ambitions for a human being.
Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall has stayed with me partly because I have never been comfortable with the idea that people should emerge from education, work and life in a conveniently standard shape.
I have spent much of my life resisting that shape.
I have also spent a considerable amount of time inside the machinery that produces it.
An Unlikely Choice of Education
My secondary education lasted four years.
During the first year, I was already close to leaving. School felt restrictive. I wanted more room to think, move and discover things for myself.
I stayed and finished.
Then I spent nearly two years travelling, much of the time alone. I encountered places, people and ways of living that had very little interest in whether I could reproduce the correct answer in an examination.
After that, for reasons I still find slightly mysterious, I enrolled in six years of medical school.
Having spent two years enjoying freedom, I apparently decided that what I needed was a much longer period of confinement.
Learning the Answers
The medical education I received is one example of what I am criticising. I hope much has changed since then.
What frustrated me was how little intellectual independence seemed necessary to do well.
I would have welcomed clear objectives, demanding questions and the responsibility to read widely, examine evidence and develop an understanding of the subject.
Too often, the task seemed simpler: absorb what the lecturer had said and reproduce it when required.
There was an enormous amount to consume. Whether we had learned to question it was less obvious.
During the final three years, I largely stopped attending lectures. Two female friends who attended faithfully and took thorough notes allowed me to photocopy them.
My marks improved.
The photocopier had apparently become an important part of my academic development.
That was useful for me.
It was not a particularly reassuring verdict on the way we were being taught.
I had become better at supplying what the examinations required. That is a skill, but it should not be confused with the whole of learning medicine.
I Still Collected the Certificate
It would be convenient to present myself as the independent thinker who refused to submit.
And yet, I stayed and qualified.
I passed the examinations, accepted the qualification and became a doctor.
Whatever I thought of the feeding system, I still emerged as one of its successfully fed products.
That contradiction matters.
Most of us cannot simply walk away from every institution we disagree with. We need qualifications, work and an income. Sometimes we learn the rules because otherwise we will never be allowed to do the work that interests us.
But there is a difference between learning how to pass through a system and deciding that the system must therefore be right.
My medical education gave me knowledge I needed. Yet much of my real understanding of medicine developed afterwards, when patients did not arrive arranged into examination questions.
They brought uncertainty, conflicting symptoms, personal histories and problems that refused to remain inside the boundaries of a single subject.
Remembering an answer and making a sound judgement are not the same achievement.
How Many Qualifications Before We Begin?
I am uneasy when education becomes an ever-lengthening queue for permission to work.
Further study can be valuable. Research can be valuable. A doctorate can represent years of serious and demanding intellectual work.
But when another qualification is pursued mainly because it appears necessary to obtain a position, we should be willing to ask what purpose it is serving.
Is the person becoming better equipped for the work?
Or merely more eligible to be considered for it?
If a research degree becomes an entrance requirement for a clinical career, but research then plays little part in that career, the relationship between the qualification and the job deserves scrutiny.
A university should offer more than somewhere to remain while collecting the next document.
Young people deserve a clearer answer than being repeatedly told that one more course may finally make them employable.
Dressing the Part
The mould does not disappear when we leave education.
We learn how a successful member of our profession is supposed to look, speak and behave.
Doctors, for example, seem remarkably reluctant to be photographed without a stethoscope draped around their shoulders.
Even for a carefully arranged portrait, with no patient in sight, the instrument must be present.
Is it there to reassure the audience that the man is a doctor?
Or does he need reminding himself?
I would have thought the qualification could survive having the stethoscope left in a drawer while the photograph was taken.
In hospitals, members of the surgical team may arrive in the dining room still wearing their caps, with masks hanging around their necks. Fresh ones may then be put on when they return to the operating theatre.
For the duration of lunch, however, nobody has been allowed to forget which department they came from.
Young lawyers have a different uniform. The suit, the tie and the carefully arranged pocket square can be so consistent that one wonders whether the complete outfit is handed over with the degree.
Are we supposed to recognise legal ability in the fold of the handkerchief?
Would the advice become less reliable if the man took off his tie?
There is something amusing about all this. What is less amusing is how readily we allow these signals to influence our judgement of the person wearing them.
Professionalism ought to include qualities that remain when the costume comes off.
The same applies to qualifications. A business degree may help someone understand finance, organisation and markets. It does not, by itself, create the judgement or initiative required to build a business.
A title tells me something about what a person has completed.
I still want to know what he can do.
The Boxes We Enter Willingly
It is easy to complain about being put into a box.
It is less comfortable to admit how readily we sometimes climb into one ourselves.
A professional identity offers belonging. It tells us where we stand and gives other people a quick explanation of who we are.
That can be reassuring.
Eventually, however, we may begin to protect the role more carefully than we examine the person inside it.
We defend an opinion because people in our profession are expected to hold it. We dismiss a question because it comes from outside the accepted circle. We become irritated when someone fails to show the respect we believe the title deserves.
At that point, the qualification may be doing more than describing our training.
It may be doing our thinking for us.
I am a doctor. That matters to me. I have spent much of my life learning and practising medicine.
But I do not want the word to account for everything I am allowed to think, attempt or become.
The Box Marked Older Man
Age brings another set of instructions.
After years of being told to qualify, establish ourselves and fulfil our responsibilities, we begin to receive suggestions that we should become less troublesome.
Be sensible. Be grateful. Enjoy what you have.
These can be perfectly reasonable sentiments.
They can also become a polite way of telling someone that his contribution is complete.
An older man who begins something ambitious may find that the first question concerns his age rather than his idea.
Experience should give us more scope to exercise judgement, not less permission to act.
Yet it is surprisingly easy to accept the new role. We have had decades of practice at adjusting ourselves to what is expected.
First we learned how a good student should behave. Then a reliable employee, a responsible father and a respectable professional.
Now we are offered the part of the agreeable older gentleman.
There may even be a suitable cardigan.
Before accepting, it is worth reading the script.
Does it contain anything we actually want to do?
A quiet life may be exactly what a man wants. So may a new business, a course of study, a journey or time spent making things with his hands.
The important question is whether he has chosen it.
Getting older should not mean spending the remainder of our life obeying instructions that nobody has even bothered to give us directly.
We Are Still Allowed to Learn
A changing world can make an older man feel that he has become a visitor in a society he helped build.
The language changes. The tools change. Familiar ways of doing things disappear, sometimes replaced by something that requires three passwords and a telephone that must first be persuaded to recognise its owner.
It is tempting to conclude that all this belongs to younger people.
That conclusion can become another wall.
Artificial intelligence raises questions about work and education, but it also gives us reason to reconsider what we might still attempt ourselves.
Could it help us explore a subject, develop an idea, work in another language or make progress with a project we have never known how to begin?
Those are worthwhile questions for an older person as well as a young one.
We do not have to master every new tool. We can choose those that serve something we want to do.
And we should keep our judgement involved. A fluent answer still deserves examination. Handing our thinking over to a machine would be a rather disappointing way to celebrate our escape from unquestioning obedience.
The opportunity is to use what is available to widen our choices.
A man who has spent forty years becoming good at one thing is still allowed to become a beginner at something else.
He does not need to apologise for it.
Independence Requires More Than Objection
None of this means that every rule is foolish or that every unconventional opinion is wise.
I would not want an imaginative surgeon who regarded anatomy as an unnecessary restriction on his freedom.
Knowledge matters. Standards matter. So does the discipline required to become good at something.
My objection is to treating conformity as evidence of competence.
But independence also demands something of the person claiming it.
Disagreeing is easy. Understanding the subject well enough to offer a better argument takes work.
We need to understand how something works before we can explain where it fails and why another approach would be better. Changing a method merely to put our own name on it is no great achievement.
And if I automatically oppose whatever other people want, they are still determining my direction. I am merely travelling the opposite way.
A free mind should be capable of agreeing, changing its position and admitting a mistake.
Otherwise, rebellion becomes another uniform.
After Years of Playing the Part
By the second half of life, we may have spent decades becoming recognisable to other people.
The dependable employee. The successful professional. The sensible father. The man who knows his place and does not cause unnecessary difficulty.
Some of those descriptions may be deserved. Some may even describe qualities we value.
But do they leave room for everything else?
For the interest we never pursued because it did not fit the career?
For an opinion we learned to keep quiet?
For work we would like to begin, although nobody expects it from us?
It is worth asking how many decisions we still make because someone, years ago, taught us what a person like us should do.
That someone may no longer be alive.
We may still be following the instructions.
At some point, we have to decide whether this is how we intend to spend the years ahead.
Whose permission are we still waiting for?
The former employer’s? The neighbours’? A committee of people who have never shown much interest in what we actually want?
We are allowed to revise the description.
We can keep what we value, abandon what no longer serves us and make room for something we have chosen ourselves.
The people around us may need time to adjust.
They will have their own lives in which to do so.
What Are We Helping to Build?
A wall needs its bricks.
A society also needs cooperation, reliable work and people willing to carry responsibilities that are not always exciting.
I have no wish to live in a world where everyone declares himself exceptional and leaves the necessary work to somebody else.
But cooperation should leave room for thought. Belonging should leave room for difference. Expertise should withstand questions.
I want to know whether the work I do is useful, whether the judgement I exercise is my own and whether I can still change direction when I have good reason.
Those questions matter more to me than looking the part.
After all these years, I am still unwilling to accept that the highest purpose of an education is to produce someone who fits.
I would rather it helped produce someone who can think—and has the courage to do something with the thought.