An interview with top philosopher Alain de Botton

It seems today that we are a nation of vast qualification. It is no longer a phenomenal feat for a young teen to walk away from their year 11 with 10 GCSEs, or for an idle student to achieve an A at A level. In fact, this year’s results gave one in seven students three As – the entrance requirements of the UK’s most esteemed and prestigious universities.

So does this mean that we are also now a nation of vast intellect and that our academic decoration is a reflection of our advance from the old school, or have things just got a little bit easier? Could obtaining qualifications have become almost as easy as just saying ‘please’?

Alain de Botton, a writer credited with creating a ‘philosophy of everyday life’, thinks the latter. He is a critic of modern education’s approach, where “people are taught knowledge without being taught how to use it.

“It’s obvious that there are two ways to get people to do well at exams; teach them better – or make the exam easy. Everyone either fears or knows that the latter approach has been taken… Having suffered mightily to get As at O and A level, in an era when very few got them, I’m naturally ready to join the group who say: ‘it’s become too easy’.”

The philosopher Montaigne, writing during the 16th century, said that the education system does not aim to make us good and wise, but learned: “We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’”

De Botton reflects Montaigne’s views and exudes a passion for learning not only facts that can be regurgitated to appear intelligent, but also thoughts and ideas to assist with life’s endless decisions.

“The true ‘aristocrats of the spirit’ (Nietzsche’s phrase) have always been hard to find with the butterfly net of exams.

“It does seem as if you can no longer pick out the elite just by looking at grades. My feeling is that it should be relatively easy to get into university, but very hard to get a good degree.

“That way, employers could still look very seriously at the degree grade to get an indication of the strength of a candidate… More and more people now have to get an MA or Phd to separate themselves from others. This is the American way.”

We certainly have come a long way from our grandparent’s generation (even our parent’s, for that matter) and as our exam results just keep on getting better, fewer people are looking to start work at 16 and more are opting for further education. But is this beneficial? Can we really learn more in a library than we can learn ‘on the job’?

“So much depends on what the university is like: a good university course is wonderful, but obviously a poor one doesn’t compare with a placement in a business.

“There are many voices that seem to say that as university isn’t very good for many people, we should give up on the idea and send everyone back out to work. That’s short-term thinking: rather than abandoning university, we should strive to make universities excellent. Most of us are going to spend most of our lives in a paid job. Surely there’s something wonderful in being able to spend a few more years reading books and making friends in a convivial environment.

“There are few places in the modern world where people get protection from the pressures of making money and can spend time reading and thinking. Universities are these places, they receive massive subsidies from us, the taxpayers – and should be idyllic refuges from the harsh winds blowing up and down the country. But modern universities have entirely betrayed any such ideals. Outside of the sciences, they have rendered themselves irrelevant to the concerns of most people.”

A few years ago, de Botton turned his criticisms into a constructive attempt at putting his ideas into practice.

“Because the situation so plainly deserves to change, a few years ago, I came together with a group of similarly disaffected academics, artists and writers and decided to start a new kind of university that we called plainly: The School of Life.”

The School of Life opened its doors in October 2008. Instead of offering traditional courses in Economics or Classics or History, they teach courses on death, marriage, choosing a career and child rearing, to name but a few. They also organise talks and holidays and meals out where, as well as providing food and copious amounts of wine, the school has constructed a ‘conversation menu’ to assist total strangers in engaging in thought-provoking discussion.

The school is based on Marchmont Street in a small shop and teaching space flanked by an internet café and hairdressers. It’s also only a stone’s throw away from the intercollegiate halls of Hughes Parry, Canterbury and Commonwealth.

The School’s shop is on the ground floor. It’s a modest bookshop but upon closer inspection one realises that the books are not organised into usual sections, such as ‘crime-fiction’, ‘romance’ or ‘history’, but instead according to how they relate to a particular problem. There is a section entitled ‘For Those Who Worry at Night’, for example.

As he is a philosopher, de Botton might often be grouped in with those people to whom we refer to as ‘thinkers’, but the School of Life is certainly active testament to de Botton’s view of how education should be approached. Not just a ‘thinker’ then, but also someone who ‘does’.

“It’s always tempting to stick at standing on the sidelines complaining about a problem, but it’s perhaps one better to try to make a change yourself.”

The School of Life is a comforting change to the structured education system employed more widely. It is a beacon of encouragement for those who might not have found solace through their time at school or university and who all the while simply wished to educate themselves on topics that are applicable to their daily lives.

Intelligence can be seen as the potential of one’s mind. Knowledge can be seen as the information held within the mind, while wisdom is the ability to apply one’s knowledge. Therefore we can see that those who are knowledgeable are not necessarily intelligent and wise. It is the aim of exams to make us knowledgeable but it is the aim of The School of Life to make us wise.

De Botton would like to see The School of Life adopted nationwide. Perhaps this is an unlikely prospect, but such optimism seems to embody the purpose of de Botton’s work.

“The School of Life is our modest attempt to alter the way that learning gets done in this country – and to remind us that culture, if handled rightly, should actually feel entirely relevant and exciting and always make life more manageable and interesting.”

For more information about The School of Life, visit: www.theschooloflife.com

Alain’s new book ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’ was released in April and is on sale nationwide.