John Henry Newman (almost a Saint)
So John Henry Newman is to be beatified. The Pope has decreed it.
I read lots of Newman when I was an undergraduate, and liked his elegant thinking. My favourite story about him, though? I tell it at least once a year to overwrought students around revision time. JHN was intensely clever, but as an undergraduate at Oxford he worked and worked and worked, too hard for his own good, and in the end he got a Third Class degree. Happily this was 1821, and his tutors recognised that the result was not a true measure of his worth. Only a year later he was made a Fellow, and never looked back. Two salutary lessons from this:
1) if you are a student, don't work all day and all night. It is possible to work too hard and end up just dull, even for the stellar intellect. A balance of work and rest and sleep is important.
2) a system (such as the one we have right now) where you can only get on if you tick every box correctly means that brilliant mavericks slip throught the system. We should create space for people who we can recognise (through daily experience) as something special not to lose their place in the world just because of one spectacular failure. We should have enough flex in the system to give them space. Right now the system doesn't have enough of that flexibility. and that's not a good thing.
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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