Jonathan Miller - Not the brightest child at school (7/48)

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Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was a British theatre and opera director whose work includes a West End production of "The Merchant of Venice" which starred Laurence Olivier and a modern, Mafia-themed version of "Rigoletto". [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2008]
TRANSCRIPT: I think perhaps in some ways I was slightly backward in many ways, educationally, partly because I was going from one school to another and couldn’t settle down and I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on at school. Certainly in all the schools I went to I never felt that I was one of the bright ones admired by my teachers. The last school I went to just before the end of the war, I went to a Rudolf Steiner school in… north of Watford, a place called Kings Langley, when I was taught by, amongst others, by two of Ivy Compton-Burnett's sisters and taught the sort of loony stuff that you get taught at Rudolf Steiner schools. I mean, I never learned anything at all and by the time I went to a real prep school just before we returned to London in 1945 I was really quite seriously educationally disabled by learning not much more than how Manu led his peoples out of Atlantis, which was one of the things that I was taught, and eurhythmics and so forth.
But I couldn’t understand maths and I couldn’t understand other languages and I couldn’t write an essay, and I think I was in many respects a difficult, backward child. It wasn’t until I came to a London prep school in ’45…‘46, that I began to recover some of my capabilities, though never outstanding at all. I don’t think I was regarded as a precocious child. And I got what was called my Common Entrance and scraped into St Paul's under the Common Entrance and went and did classics and found that within the first year that I wasn’t particularly interested in doing that… that I had begun to develop a sort of interest in biology, partly because my father, I think, had given me an old brass microscope and I got interested in that. And I got interested in chemistry when I was about 14. So that I began to develop capabilities at that time, though relatively modest ones, and I don’t think I was regarded in, when I finally moved to the science side, I don’t think I was regarded as a particularly good student.
[CS] By others?
Or by my teachers.
[CS] Or by your teachers. But did… I find it a little hard to believe that you weren’t aware quite early on that you were rather unusual?
No, I had no feeling at all, I just, I felt I was unusual in the sense that I was ill at ease and backward and irritated my teachers because I couldn’t understand how to write an essay, or let alone do a précis, as it was called, I didn’t know what was involved. And I didn’t learn languages properly, I mean, I could just about learn how to decline and conjugate and do all the things that were required of someone doing classics, but that was just dull, automatic rote stuff. But I couldn’t compile pieces of Latin verse, which were expected of someone doing classics, and I felt rather sort of ill at ease. I was just simply a school boy, that’s all, and in no sense a bright school boy.