Diary

11 April 2009

Alain de Botton opens his diary

When politicians of left and right think of addressing any social ill, they immediately point to education. Educate the young correctly, goes the argument, and you will be able to solve delinquency, rudeness, early teenage pregnancies and binge drinking. There’s also endless talk about needing to put more money into schools. And yet there’s surprisingly little attention given to the way in which education actually works on the mind. I was thinking about this when doing some reading about Buddhism. Buddhists desperately believe in education, seeing it as the royal road to compassion and virtue. And yet they differ from government theorists in holding to a far more exacting, demanding view of how anyone actually gets educated. It isn’t a case of sitting someone down for a lesson in civic studies once a week, or making them go to university for three years. Education is a lifelong process whereby there have to be daily, indeed hourly reminders, of how one should be behaving. A proper education for a Buddhist involves lessons, meditation and communal singing — every single morning rather than just for a brief period of your life. If we are to take education seriously, secular society needs to look at how the great religions approach education — for these religions are much more aware than secular educationalists of how quickly we forget our lessons and how many reminders need to be built into the rituals of our daily lives.

It’s a feature of modern working life that when people tell you what job they do, it takes about five more inquiries to determine what it is they’re actually up to. The world is filled with data systems analysts, marketing production managers and packaging technologists. Children’s books haven’t caught on to this degree of extreme specialisation, they are still filled with old jobs like farmers, bricklayers and doctors. But according to economists, we should feel grateful for specialisation, it’s what prosperity is made out of. The 19th-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote that a country will be rich to the extent that its workforce is specialised: it makes no sense if doctors make their own clothes or train drivers turn their hand to producing yogurt in the evenings. Far better for everyone to master a single trade. Being a generalist — or renaissance man or woman — is charming in theory, but a truly efficient economy will be one where no one can understand anyone else’s job any more.

For all the talk of old-fashioned paper-and-glue books being about to disappear to be replaced by electronic devices, it’s nice to see some segments of the market bucking the trend. The ever impressive Tyler Brûlé, editor of the magazine Monocle, is launching a new book club, where books you’ll find on the high street will be offered in collectable versions printed on exquisite paper and retailing at £50. My prediction for the book market is that we’re about to see it divide into throwaway books you download electronically and books you want to really keep which will get more expensive but, at the same time, more attractive too. It’s the trend for print media too, where we’re apparently all going to be reading more magazines and weekend papers but far fewer dailies.

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David Short

April 10th, 2009 2:48am Report this comment

I cannot see how this piece is a Diary.

But come on, tell us which company you 'worked' in.

Everybody (apart from authors, farmers, coal miners etc) knows that nobody does any work at 'work'.

That's why The Office was so true to life.

The office is a place to go and while away the time, where you get paid, between your fishing and Plato reading.

Or it was until now.

As many people have found out, and many more will soon find out.

That might even apply in the future to people lucky enough to have found employers who don't require them to be at the office, or do any 'profitable' work.

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