Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are well-known television personalities from their hugely popular worldwide programmes ‘Top Gear’ and in more recent years, ‘The Grand Tour’, which this past week culminated in their long-awaited trip through Zimbabwe, entitled ‘One For The Road’. They have been to some amazing places and done some extraordinary (literally and metaphorically) things — driving to the North Pole; using cars to do Winter Olympics events; driving to the source of the Nile; playing car soccer in Patagonia; driving from the Bolivian rainforests to the Chilean coast; being chased by redneck southerners in the US; being hounded by an angry Argentinian mob. They drove through an army firing range; they pulled caravans on a train track; they drove across the English channel; they made caravans out of old cheap cars. That’s crazy!
We do not need to look at the television for such strange behaviour; it happens all around us. People have admitted to cleaning their nose with their tongue; opening and sampling cat food tins in a supermarket; blowing their nose with their bare hands, studying the contents then slurping it as if it was an oyster; stealing a thousand communion wafers (and feeling blessed and cursed at the same time)! Hey, that’s crazy!
Recently this writer was reminded of a saying that “if you are still talking after I have said “That’s crazy!” twice, it is definitely time to wrap up”. Well, we have had two “That’s crazy!” so far in this article but we dare not to wrap up just yet. For here is something else that is really crazy! The word ‘crazy’ can have several meanings. In some contexts, (especially in the mind of the person who cited the previous quote) it means “Enough”! It can also mean, however, that the event or item considered is amazing, maddening, different, silly, ludicrous, unexpected, boring. We just have to work out which one is being referred to – but that’s crazy, is it not!
But actrually, that in itself is not really crazy as many words have several meanings and also several pronunciations. And what is our reaction to that? That’s crazy! We have words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently while we also have words that are spelt differently but are pronounced the same! Now that is even more crazy!
So our language is pretty crazy but the same may be true of our education! Many people will know of the statement that according to a large number of sources (sometimes only inspirational mugs and posters, granted!), Albert Einstein is said to have declared that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Yes, that is insanity; that is crazy! We might look at what we are offering in our education and then look at the world around us and we may conclude that it is proving the point; the education we continue to offer does not bring any different results – and by that, we do not refer to academic or sporting results. Look at the society that education has produced and try to argue it is working. Yet we persist in the thinking that it will work. As Paul Simon sang all those years ago, “Still crazy after all these years”!
So, yes, it is perhaps time to wrap up – and by saying that, we perhaps first need to establish that we are not suggesting we must put on more clothes to wrap up! Equally, we are not asking the reader to place things in decorative paper. No, we are saying it is time to finish this story or article quickly. We need to wrap things up with the intention provoked by a similar response that we might hear in place of “That’s crazy”, which is the colloquial ‘Shut up!” (or the more casual “Eish!” or “Wowser!”) The reader may wish the writer to shut up but the phrase also has the tone of amazement or disbelief. Many may show disbelief when we say that education is not working.
Here is the thing, then, and this is an important one for the road: we do live in a crazy world – there is no doubt or ambiguity in that statement! The language that we use is crazy. But if we go on a grand tour of education, we will find that it is crazy too – and we need to wrap this up, though not in the sense of giving it to a child again as a present. Is that crazy? So, yes, we get the hint now; we will wrap this up. But will our children get the education they need? Shut - up!