One presumably hot afternoon in Greece, about 2500 years ago, a man stood trial for his life. Aware that the death penalty awaited, the defendant, on trial for corrupting Greek youth, remarked that since the unexamined life was not worth living, he’d rather die than live a life he couldn’t examine. Cue a cup of hemlock, and exit Socrates, for he it was who made this celebrated claim.
What did he mean by the unexamined life? A series of raids on ignorance, an unceasing attempt to lift the veil of mystery in which our lives are shrouded. Or something like that. I think it’s a safe bet that he wasn’t referring to the annual examination ritual, beloved of the Western world, in which our young people are corralled into stuffily overheated sports halls, crouched like sacrificial soldiers behind tiny desks, armed only with a water bottle and a pen, and expected to discourse fluently, without hesitation or repetition on anything from plate tectonics to Hamlet, or to solve the most complex algebraic equations. A ritual which has always embraced social distancing, complying with covid requirements long before there was a covid, its victims spaced out like pieces on a gigantic chess board, forbidden to move without good reason, and then only accompanied by a guard. And all under the watchful, pitiless gaze of Time, ticking relentlessly, inexorably.
And yet, this is a ritual whose tyranny has been temporarily overthrown, a despotic dictatorship briefly held in check. For the second consecutive year, our sports halls will be uncrowded by people desperately trying to remember that killer Shakespeare quotation, chemical formula, Spanish verb conjugation, or argument in favour of the free market. King Covid has, for a while, defeated Emperor Examination. And, amidst all the darkness of the last year, this is perhaps one thin ray of light. Having been without formal examinations for two years, who in their right minds would go back to them? If we’re to be true to the Socratic ideal of examining life, and to become wiser, more insightful human beings, then surely it’s time to recognise public examinations as what they are; little more than the weighing of the village pig. And from a selfish point of view, I quite like the idea of an August unhaunted by the grim spectre of results day, which slips into the halcyon calm of summer with its ghostly crashing cymbals of unsympathetic data.
It would also bring to an end the most soul-destroying part of a teacher’s life, the crushing tedium of exam invigilation. Hours scanning seas of faces, attempting a hand not drowning or waving, but requesting a pencil, or a trip to empty an uncooperative bladder. I’ve seen excellent comedy sketches in which bored invigilators perform elaborate dance routines behind the backs of their students, cartwheeling, pirouetting, enacting Marcel Marceau mimes about the futility of life. The reality is of course quite different, daydreams held on the shortest of leashes as we await the next pen emergency, and wait to be relieved.
Stuck to the wall over my computer at college is a small drawing, in ink, made about 1990, showing with great skill, the perspective lines of students at examination desks, leading inexorably to where a smug invigilator sits, bored. The invigilator was me, the student a young man who felt he’d written quite enough about Ted Hughes’s animal poems, and preferred to draw- and it’s brilliant. Every year I look at it, and ponder the mystery of the exam- what is it for, why do we do it, and do we have to do it? (The answers to these questions are Don’t know/ Don’t know/No.)
I think the other reason I’ve kept the drawing is that it captures something of the poignancy of the end of course exam, and this is the only thing I’d miss. This never to be repeated fragile coalescence of people, their minds operating at bewildering speed, about to forget it all, to depart in contrasting directions, never to sit together again. I’ve always found it moving, so much so that it even pushed me to poetry recently. Here it is- it’s called Vanishing Point, because…well I’m sure you’ll see why. But I’d happily trade the poem for an end to examinations…
Midsummer heat, the air still; heads are bowed
Beneath the clock which watches on, ticks on,
Sifting the minutes measured and allowed
To explore Hamlet and coastal erosion;
For a little while longer it all makes sense.
Half past three; and seventy writing hands
Stop short; and upon the slow, stewed silence
Time breaks, a cool wave on hot sands.
My eye’s drawn down rows of desks which unfurl
To their vanishing point, where sits a girl;
Her pen laid down, a weapon new outgrown,
She’s turned to stare, as though somewhere
Is revealed to her shadowed gaze, alone,
The future, writ in the slow-clearing air.
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