Sir Tony Robinson did not understand the point of education until he was in his mid-twenties.
As a result, the actor and television presenter, best known for playing Baldrick, the hapless hatcher of cunning plans, in the BBC comedy Blackadder, is a passionate advocate for adult education.
“I know that I wasn’t ready for disciplined education until I was well into my twenties,” he says. “And I’ve always been a fierce proponent of adult education, precisely because I know how much I’ve flourished as an adult by being confronted with puzzles to solve.” He pauses. “I don’t mean Sudoku.”
Sir Tony will be speaking about his own education, and his love of history and discovery, as part of the annual educational-technology Bett Show, to be held in London this week.
As a child, he says, he always derived a thrill from discovering new things and increasing his understanding of the world. But he hated the formal restrictions of school. He would bunk off and instead go to his local library to read.
Heidegger and Wittgenstein
“I read a lot of Robert Graves and Graham Greene when I was 14. I read Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Out of that, I started reading Heidegger, and I had a go at Wittgenstein.
“I don’t remember a thing about them, but they taught me that you don’t need to be intimidated by words. You can work it out.”
School, he assumed, was nothing but an obstruction between the person he was and the person he wanted to be. It was only when he was in his mid-twenties that he realised that education was, in fact, the link between these two versions of himself: it would enable him to discipline and organise his thoughts.
“And that was my big discovery,” he says. “That was my road-to-Damascus moment. I hadn’t got that that was what education was.
“I think what I learned at school was how to cope with organisation and dealing with power. I think it’s a valid lesson. It’s something that everyone has to learn. Do I think it’s worth sacrificing a dozen years of a life that will inevitably be a limited number of years? I very much doubt it.”
Liberating the imagination
But, he says, he is not alone in struggling with education during the years designated to it. Plenty of pupils - for example those who act as carers for their parents - are not able to make the most of their schooling. And, he adds, “A lot of kids like me, who are just lazy or naughty or messed up, find school an imposition in their life, but wouldn’t feel that in their twenties, thirties and forties.”
He entirely understands, therefore, why Harold Wilson, prime minister for two terms during the 1960s and 1970s, described the creation of the Open University as the proudest moment of his career.
“The Open University liberated the imaginations of so many people,” Sir Tony says. “They approached it with a sense of excitement and adventure. It frustrates me that adult education has always been a bit of an add-on.”
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