Bonjour allhonours.ie! Comment allez-vous? Moi, je vais trés bien! Well…sort of! Let me explain.

Two weeks ago, after posting my last blog, my laptop started acting funny. It didn’t get up and do a tap-dance or sing “At last, my love has come along”, but all the same it was very different. I assured my brain that it was nothing to worry about and that it was simply having a “bad day”. Come Monday morning, there was a definite change. My poor laptop – aptly named WALL-E – decided it simply wasn’t going to get up for school and remained dormant under its covers of  black and silver. I popped on Sky News that evening, and lo-and-behold, there was a woman speaking about computers being visited by the “Black Screen of Death”.

Basically, there are certain computers that have Windows7 or Vista installed into their programmes, much like us with the neo-cortex in our brains. My poor WALL-E just happened to use his ‘brain’ and allow this ‘visitor’ entry into his home. Now I have a ’squatter’ who refuses to leave the confines of my link to the outside world and thus, I am confined to reading books to stimulate some sort of imagination during the evenings.  Now this isn’t all bad. I’ve been able to quickly read through the poetry of T.S.Eliot, Derek Walcott, W.B.Yeats and Adrienne Rich.

However, any communication with civilisation has been discontinued but, contrary to my preconcepted opinion of a world without technology, I’m rather enjoying the lack of internet modem. I’ve recently begun listening to Mozart (we’ll get to that in a minute) and am considering that the worst possible thing to happen to the human race was, and continues to be, the Age of Industrilisation and Technology. We have become a race that depends majorly on outside sources obtainable by the click of a button. Rté alone must spend so much on research using the internet and sources that were not so easily attainable in years of yore. And schools are instilling courses and techniques that employ the use of logical thinking, providing very little imagination and creativity to be required by their students, which, in the long run, makes it inevitably harder to learn. How many of us can truly envision living in a concentration camp? Or imagine the animals (such as lions, tigers and bears – Oh my!)  in each feeding stage of a Food Chain? Most of us learn off definitions by the tens and twenties but how many of us actually ask the obvious question: what does this mean to me?

The obvious answer would be that, in the long run, we see ourselves in the college of our choice. Ironically, that would be the WRONG answer. Wouldn’t it? Why be committed to something that doesn’t involve you? Why learn something by heart if it isn’t actually moving your heart? Where are the modern-day Yeats and Chapmans, the commonplace da Vincis and Deanes, the instrinsically gifted Einsteins and Bachs, and the people that thought logically and creatively at the same time? I know that we are taught from an early age to forget imagination and to start thinking systematically but must we forget that age where there were endless possibilities, multiple answers for one simple question? When the sun was a big yellow face in the sky, when the boogie-man still existed, when we could be a singer one day and a mutant ninja turtle the next? People will probably look at this and think, “But that is when you’re a child. We’re adults now.” Why did it have to change? Why did society make us believe that dreams, the majority of the time, remain as dreams? Why can’t we believe in big purple dinosaurs and bears living in big blue houses? Why do we view things in an analytical and precise fashion when so little of life is precise, and so much of life is unpredictable?

I ask these questions because I’ve been frustrated for a long time with the education system in this and most other European countries. I think creatively and my imagination is second to none because its mine. I believe everyone is the same. We all have independent personalities, thoughts and opinions. Look at the bloggers of this website. We are all dealing with the same anxieties and strains, not to mention living the average Irish lifestyle. Yet we each write about these similar issues with unique ingenuity, intelligence and opinion that is unparalleled by the previous, or subsequent blogger. However, when it comes to the Leaving Cert examinations we are asked to learn what other people have written, think how other people have thought and let our own innate abilities lie dormant. How many of your English teachers have compared your writing talents to Chaucer and Friel; French teachers that have told you that you’ve defied logic by accepting a language so naturally; Maths teachers that have told you you’re a prodigy in theorems  and functions? Any of you? And why not? Why should we believe we’re any less than “the greats”? Surely they themselves started out as we do: people with dreams, ambition, determination. Yet they are “the greats” for one reason and one reason only: not because they were born genius, but because they refused to believe that the only genius that existed was before them, and thus, they became genius themselves.

This blog has been inspired by a book I read quite recently. “Accelerated Learning” by Colin Rose. If you read one book during this most strenuous time, let it be this one. I have learned possibly as much as I did throughout my entire academic career. It expresses ideas that each of us can bring a new light to. It teaches us that we are all different, and furthermore, should embrace that difference; not supress it.

I think it is time we started thinking like “the greats”. Yes Keats, Einstein and Dante are wonderful but so are Ally, Sophie and Katie. So is anyone else that refuses to allow society condition the richness in which their lives are lived. We are not robots, we are remarkable human beings, able to embrace any culture, language, art, literature, music and science. All we must do is believe we’re great and eventually, it is inevitable that this is what we shall become.

Happy Blogging,

Ian