Right, it is time to write, right?

When I was at school I spent a lot of time practising my handwriting, there were lots of competitions and prizes for those who had the best hand. Subsequently I have quite an artistic script and so have many other people of my age. On the other hand, literally, young people that I have been teaching over the last twenty to thirty years do not have such developed handwriting, many of them have rather small and childish looking writing in my opinion and yet they may be in their early thirties.

I became interested in graphology when I was in my teens because my art teacher at the time was really good at being able to read a person’s characteristics from their handwriting and I became interested in the skill. This was and is a rather uncannily accurate way of determining a personality type so much so that graphologists were and are often employed by the police while trying to build a profile. The question that I would like to pose here is what does this say about the psychological make up of people today with such incredibly childish handwriting?

Now before we dismiss this as a crazy idea there is another strain to this that being, how much does the educational system affect personal development of one’s character? The particular aspect that I would like to focus on is one’s ability to be independent and really think for oneself in a sort of ‘the buck stops here’ kind of way and the ability to make a decision without reference to an expert or just the strong belief that you are expert enough to decide on a course of action.

I am not suggesting that we do not refer to other people and their knowledge, what I am suggesting is that we have more knowledge and more control of our lives than society makes us believe we have. In fact the whole of the education system is based on the premise that you know nothing and someone else in this case the teacher is the expert. The fact that the child by the time of arriving at school has learnt to speak a language fluently and to recognise words and possibly write their own name, be able to control their physical actions and to be able to read social situations expertly (which is something that many parents do not believe their children can do), and yet we still consider them to be in need of an expert guidance in learning as if they know nothing.

Never again will a child be so expert at learning another language, not because of some physical change but because they will be learning a language in the classroom. If that child was to move to another country within six months or so they would be fluent in the new language. My father was a good example of this, leaving school at fifteen and then joining the army. By the end of the war he could speak fluent Arabic and Swahili and was passible in Italian and German. 

We need to engender a form of self-reliance in ourselves and in people that we teach otherwise how will they ever learn to believe in their own artistic and musical abilities? These abilities are not technical which of course are the primary and in some cases sole focus of music education, what really makes a musician stand out is their ability to communicate, which is artistic.

Children have an ability to communicate which has nothing to do with school and in my experience of teaching adults is that they seem to have lost that ability to communicate through music which is basically the same innate ability as language

So have faith you are your own star or at least star dust and you need to say what you have to say ….

Vic

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