Why Should You Have an Education?

The great Irish playwright and dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, said "Youth is wasted on the young". Shaw was a pretty switched-on guy (he also wrote the original works upon which "My Fair Lady" and "Guys and Dolls" were based) - if he'd extended his statement to include Education, he'd have been spot on.

It's said that, when you look back on your life, you only remember the "good times". If that's true, I must have really hated school and it and the education it was intended to give me was definitely wasted.

I was skeptical from the very outset, at the age of five. The adults used to say "You should relish your school days, they're the best days of your life." My reaction was one of abject horror. "If this is the best", I thought to myself, "The rest must be really terrible".

When I look back now, I remember the ride home from school on the bus, sneaking out at lunch time for an illicit cigarette, and meeting up with the girls from the neighboring school (mine was boys only) at any opportunity.

Education? Well, like most teenage boys, I couldn't see the point. I really couldn't work out what I could ever want with World Geography, Algebra and Geometry. It was only when I got to work (the original Pan-Am) that all this stuff started to get useful.

Suddenly, I realized that the flight planning I was being taught to do need all those subjects. To me, the shortest route from Los Angeles to London was obviously straight across the map - in a straight line via Boston roughly, across the Atlantic and Ireland. Wrong!

The shortest distance between two points on our planet is along a "Great Circle" and the one upon which both LAX and LHR (that's London - HeathRow) fall, goes almost due north over California, Canada and the arctic, down over Iceland and crosses the coast of the UK over Northern Scotland. In fact, we used to call our West Coast - Europe services "the Polar Flights".