What they SHOULD teach you at school – Lesson 1: Filters

In order to successfully navigate through life, you will need to obtain a toolkit of ‘filters’ to use in various situations.  Let me take you through a few of the more commonly used ones.

The teacher filter

A large amount of what teachers say can be ignored on the grounds of being irrelevant, repetitious or dull.

You learn to pay attention when they start raising their voices, speaking directly to you and/or flaring their nostrils, but otherwise you’d be wasting your eardrums by hanging on every word.  Once you grow up and realise that teachers are just your mates from school but grown-up, you question anything that a teacher says unless they are reading it straight out of a textbook.  And even then, that book was written by some other grown-up child, so you see the best thing to do is filter out most of that white teacher noise.

The parent filter

Very similar to ‘the teacher filter’ (see above), but with the exception that parents tend to refer less to textbooks than teachers do and more to their own life experiences (which basically means they didn’t go to university and don’t know any good books).  Boring life experiences which they over-dramatise and like to repeat until you feel like shouting at them in the face, ‘You’ve told me this one a million times before and it wasn’t interesting or inspiring the first time!’  Hence the filter.

The kid filter

Because I’m now growing a child I feel that I’m allowed to say (still probably not) that children are generally quite annoying.  Asking silly questions, speaking too much or not enough, demanding to be entertained and behaving mostly in an ungrateful way.  It took me the longest of all to learn how to apply this filter and to not feel like a bad person just because I (understandably) wanted to block out the noisy, irritating noises that come only from littler people.

The bullshit filter

Probably the most important of all the filters to acquire.  The ability to block out or at least recognise bullshit when you hear or see it. It’s everywhere. People speaking untruths. In meetings, within advertising, in all aspects of customer service, on the news, spurting from the mouths of friends and foes alike, loved ones and non-loved relatives.  People talk a lot. And they talk a lot of shit.

To be able to filter bullshit out is surely a lesson worth teaching at school in order to free up more time to actually do something worthwhile with our lives that we could then go on to tell our kids, pupils or write in some textbook.

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