In defense of being deliberately picky

    In a letter to a friend, the poet Philip Larkin wrote:

Education should consist of helping a child to know its faculty – its ability, rather. Each man (generally) has one talent. Education should help him find it – should make the child say ‘of course’ as it recognises with delight what it has always potentially known. (quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 207)

   Is there truth in any part of this? Is there a one-person, one-talent relation? Should a career be chosen on grounds of great potential talent for it? If you have a great talent for making good investment decisions, should that set your course?

    Talent is means: is Larkin holding means above ends? What are the good ends of work? Shouldn’t education consist also of helping a child discover good ends and, particularly, a strong personal pull from one of them? Might lesser talent in service of such an end be preferable to greater talent in service of another end? What would Florence Nightingale think of Larkin’s idea?

    On the big questions of living, there are few categorical bests – categorical across all people. For Larkin and society, it was (I feel) best that he followed his one talent, writing poetry. For another and society, it’s best to be captured by one good end and then try one’s hardest to develop the means for it.
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    This post contains an illustration of a method for discovering ideas: take a quotation and question it to death. Sometimes the questions lead to insightful ideas (question them relentlessly too).

    It’s hard to get ideas from a dead stop. It’s much easier when you make a preliminary move. The parallel in golf is the waggle that prompts the backswing.

Comments

[Molly Hysell]

Encouraging a single minded focus of developing one’s talent may merely lead to self-centeredness.

I would prefer a more inclusive approach to education - more toward encouraging awareness of being part of the greater whole, rather than an approach that singles people out.

Talent and its conclusion, achievement, are both overrated. Both words make me uncomfortable.