Learning

Newcastle University is advertising for a Director of Academic Advising, which will offer guidance that is ‘inclusive, compassionate, and genuinely personalised to [student] goals’. Plato would have been appalled. Should not students be meeting the university’s goals? In 361 BC Dionysius II, tyrant of Sicily, invited Plato to come to Sicily to educate him on the matter of ruling a country. Plato agreed, but had grave doubts whether Dionysius would respond well to his method, which was to ‘demonstrate the nature of the subject as a whole, and all the stages that must be gone through, and how much effort is needed’ in order to acquire ‘the daily routine which will best foster his powers of learning and remembering and conducting sober debate within his own mind’.

There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon? A mistress? Lacking the wealth, stamina or sheer Italian-ness for any of the above, I’ve plumped for that most gentile of sports to feel alive again: tennis. The problem with a new hobby, of course, is that you immediately feel more infantile than raffishly young. Picking up fresh skills means relearning how to learn, decades after university, when you actually had the appetite for self-improvement. Sure, tennis is, as studies have found, one of the most effective activities for staying healthy. But it’s also infuriatingly finicky. Technique-wise, I can fire off a decent groundstroke (forehand and backhand), thanks to lessons as a mopey teen.