The Old Bordenian Association

This is a guest post by Old Bordenian Graham Barnes, who attended Borden Grammar School between 1937 and 1944.

Recently there was yet another call for a higher ‘usefulness’ content in the school curriculum.   I say ‘yet another’ because this has been going on since my boyhood – and that’s a very long time ago indeed.  This time, the suggestion was that 10-year olds should be taught, amongst other skills, how to repair a motorbike, if you please!

In my day, Latin was always a prime target for the utilitarians.  “Of what use is Latin?”, the cry went up.  “It’s a dead language, and of no value at all, unless you are going to be a doctor”.  I was always puzzled by that proviso.  When did a medical practitioner last tell you that you had a sexually-transmitted disease in Latin?  And if he were to commit this information to paper, you wouldn’t be able to decipher his hand-writing anyway.

No, the truth is that the vocational value of most academic knowledge you acquire at grammar schools is non-existent – for the simple reason that most of it, slowly or rapidly, is forgotten once GCSEs and A-Levels are over.  Quite right, too!  Who on earth wants to remember that “Geologically speaking, S. E. England is an elongated dome or anticlinorium”.  Well I do, actually.  It is my stock answer whenever Jehovah’s Witnesses call at the front door.  By the time I have repeated this a few times, like a mantra, they become convinced that I am bonkers.  They are absolutely right, of course.  Bad example.

I found plenty of better examples when rummaging through an old travelling trunk the other day, I came across several of my School note books, all of them crammed with forgotten information.  My 2A History note book, for instance, tells me that in 844 A.D. Kenneth McAlpine, King of the Scots, conquered the Picts.  Well I never!  I always thought, as a builder of roads, he had more to do with picks than Picts.  I shall now cling on to that revelation for the rest of my life – if for no other reason than that I need another mantra to cope with the incessant calls I get from a Call Centre in Bombay (whoops!  Mumbai, I mean).

My Chemistry note book for 1941 is a King Solomon’s Mine of unmemorable information – gems such as Avogadro’s Hypothesis and Gay-Lussac’s Law, not to mention Birklandt and Eyde’s Process and equations like PbO2 + 4HCl = PbCl2 + 2H2O + Cl2.  It has details, too, of stunningly valueless pieces of apparatus such as Siemen’s Ozonizing Tube, and how to calculate the weight of hydrogen evolved when 1g of zinc is dissolved in hydrochloric acid.

I conclude from all this that memory is a very quirky, as well as a selective, facility.  We remember what we choose to remember, plus a great many inconsequential facts that defy logical classification ; at the same time, we forget not only what doesn’t interest us in the slightest, but items we probably ought to remember as well.  And this is very secondary indeed to the development of our awareness, curiosity, creativity and powers of application which the Staff at BGS did so much to stimulate.  We didn’t come to Borden to strive onwards, for goodness’ sake ; we came to nitere porro.  And don’t you forget it!