This year's crop of record breaking A level results produces a mixed reaction from people. Some say it shows that our school system is working well and enabling more and more young people to achieve better and better grades. Others doubt the quality of the criteria used to make the grades, and are easily started on a 'back in my day things were tougher…' monologue that achieves very little.
So let me say from the outset – "Well done!" to every young man and young woman who has achieved or exceeded their expectations this year. If you worked hard, then you've earned it and you should enjoy the fruits of your labours. And commiserations to those who did not do so well – for those people, the following may be of some real help.
There is a saying, that 'if you educate a devil, you'll get an educated devil'. By which I take it to mean that education in and of itself will not bring abut the reformation of our character for good.
Simply learning facts and passing exams is not what real education is about. To quote the historian G.M. Trevelyan: "Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading".
That sums it up. We have knowledge, but we can lack wisdom to know what to do with it. Knowledge is stored in the head, but wisdom comes from the heart. Not the physical organ that keeps the blood flowing, but that part of us where we have our values, our ethics, our sense of identity and purpose, and for those with a faith that part of us where we commune with God.
But many people today often seem to have no heart, no vision, no self-worth and no value of the worth of others. The increase in A and A* grades does not seem to have made any difference to this malaise. Knowledge alone cannot restore a human life to its full potential – there has to be something more.
Our young people seem to have everything they could want in terms of entertainment and knowledge at their fingertips through the internet. Yet so many people live desperately unhappy, unfulfilled lives. It looks like many of the ills of our society are a symptom of a directionless generation (not just young people) that is trying to consume life with no sense of purpose or value.
It's a problem with our whole culture. We place a high importance on getting knowledge, but less value on the matters of the heart that help us to use that knowledge wisely.
'Knowledge built on wisdom' is a phrase I heard once, and I think it puts things in the right order. We live life best when we live from the heart, not the head. We love our wives and children, our friends and neighbours, and we are loved ourselves, from the heart (it's certainly not a rational choice sometimes!)
Courage, hope, the over-riding desire to lay your life down to protect or help someone else – all these things spring up from our hearts. If we made those choices rationally we'd either spend so long deliberating that we'd be too late to act, or we'd logically conclude that it was not the 'rational' thing to do.
Education is a much-needed part of the process of learning to live well, and in places where the opportunity for education is restricted, there are many detrimental effects. But let's put the accumulation of knowledge in its proper place – it should be secondary, and serve a life lived from the heart.
The Good Book has some advice on this, telling us to 'guard our heart, for it is the wellspring of life'. And Jesus said "I have come to give you life [notice he says life, not knowledge] in all its fullness". Now that's wisdom.
