As someone who is close to the front line in the war on the poor I am constantly aware of how poorly informed the majority of the public are. I hear regular cries of, ‘When will the Sheeple wake up?’ I dislike name calling at the best of times, but I think this name is particularly ill used. I know intimately what it has cost me to wake up to what is going on. I am a working class man who was poorly educated and instilled with very low expectations in life. It’s important to understand that education then and now is segregated, in my day it was Secondary Modern and Grammar schools. The purpose of Secondary Modern Schools was to provide a moderately literate work force, what was known as factory fodder, Grammar Schools were the almost exclusive entry level for university.
I was extremely fortunate, thanks to a growing economy, the Hippy era and a very low threshold of tolerance for doing what I am told, to have been able to free myself from factory life which I detested and to do the working class equivalent of dropping out. I could move around jobs as I saw fit, when I’d had enough of one I could be in a new job the next day, or loaf for a bit if I had some financial slack. In my search for whatever it was I wanted to do in life, I eventually took a holiday job teaching canoeing even though I was entirely unskilled. Over several years of summers on the river and doing whatever I needed to survive the winters, including staying on with the holiday company and learning canoe building, I found a full time job in outdoor pursuits which eventually led to going to University as a mature student at the age of 33.
The single most intoxicating gift of university life for me was the gift of learning, there was no regurgitation of facts and figures, I was taught how to learn and to research for myself. My tutors were accessible and encouraging, they understood the troubles working class students would have with learning and invested their time, energy and enthusiasm in us. I began to understand things like politics and to grapple with ideas and concepts for their own sake. I was the first person in my family to go to university and my gratitude for that opportunity is enormous.
Learning to learn is hard and in the early days is confusing, painful and frustrating. It is a difficult emergence, where I had opinions, my tutors were not interested, where I thought I knew something they expected me to prove it. The confrontation with my own ignorance was at first shaming and embarrassing, but over time that changed into something joyful and an acceptance that learning was a vast world of possibility to greedily suckle on knowledge, grapple with it, and turn it into the personal wealth that knowledge truly is.
Today, someone calling me or anyone a Sheeple is offensive to me because I know what it takes to learn and to grow. I also know that schooling often leaves people afraid of learning, as I was, and afraid to show or even acknowledge their ignorance. I also learnt that there is no shame in being called ignorant, a simple response of, ‘Yes I am.’ is liberating and does much to silence those who seek to shame the ignorant. I am no longer completely ignorant and yet there are vast worlds of knowledge that I could never embrace even if I had several lifetimes in which to do so. Today, I have been enabled to embrace the hunger to learn and I think that hunger is the most exquisite hunger a human being can ever embrace.
Keith Lindsay Cameron
