'Extracurricular actvities'

Interest which don't fall within the category of schoolwork and academic learning are called 'extracurricular activities'. In this post I will - briefly - go through this term and its connotations, expressing my views on it.

Many students put a lot of effort and energy into their school/college/university work, but what do they do in their leisure - their extracurricular - activities? I often find that academic learning, instead of encouraging students to branch out across a wide range of interests, limits them.

I'm not criticising the quality of the education; I have come to find over the years that, in comparison with other countries, education in Britain is fairly ok. What often happens is that school exhausts students so much that in their spare time all they have time to do is 'clubbing' or wasting their time doing nothing. Alternatively, they put no effort into their academic and, again, spend their time doing nothing.

To most people it is an alien concept to shun academic education in favour of one's own independent learning. I flunked my GCSEs pretty much out of boredom and lack of interest yet, at the time, I had a fervent interest in modern classical music and the arts. When lecturers in a subsequent course saw my academic work, they seemed pretty startled - how was it possible for someone to flunk their GCSEs to produce material like this?

I met a fellow last November to drink some coffee, and he described the work he had to do at school as so boring. He told me that he is currently writing an opera. For people entranced by the wonders of academia, and for people not acquainted with autodidactism and independent learning, it may seem incomprehensible how a dropout is capable - or even inclined to - writing an opera.

He also told me "I learnt more after I left school," which I also sympathise with. School really flustered me, both with its social codes in the playground and the classroom as with its stale and formulaic academic work. Once I left school I made a conscious effort to read books, articulate myself better and write fiction. All of these activities were sparked off after attending classes was no longer compulsory.

What I found particularly exciting about doing A2 coursework was the opportunity to study, research and write about subjects that I had investigated/read up on in my own time. In English literature I wrote a comparative essay on William Burroughs and applied ideas of aesthetics to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, in Film Studies I undertook a research project on Jean-Luc Godard and in English Language I wrote a research on the linguistic features of William Faulkner. I had read up, and watched, all these subjects as part of my 'extracurricular activities', and I found the chance to intermingle it with my own academic work illuminating, bringing to it a vitality and vigour which I assume was lacking in a lot of the other students' work.

For a lot of students their only contact with intellectual subjects comes through academia, but I think that an excellent way of remedying this is to provide youngsters with alternatives that do not fall into this category: to perhaps make them think and question the status-quo outside the classroom.