A university education is not just a qualification, a gateway to a particular level of job, or a vocational training. It is the prerequisite for a happy and intellectually sustaining life. That's why there are so many mature students, provision for study later in life for those who missed out at the end of their school days, requirements on, say, music students to study for a degree as well as a performance diploma. If you want a grown-up mind - no, a mind equipped to grow up - then you need a university education.
An education that imparts the ambivalence of things; the complexities of reaching a judgment - that teaches the scariness of judging at all, the difficulty of deciding what is true; the the sheer scale of fields of knowledge - not just the large, but the importance of the detail; that imparts ideas of beauty, of coherence, symmetry, and of juxtaposition and disjunction; notions of time and of continuity, and choosing the weighting to give to them; ideas on ideas. And all this through whatever discipline most accessible to the student, expressed through the student's choice of study.
We don't go to university to get a job. We go to university to get a life.
Everyone capable of coping with the course of study should have a free undergraduate education, just as they have free primary and secondary schooling. Post-graduate work begins the training that specialises and qualifies for undertakings in any particular field (except for disciplines that require very early training, again the musicians are the example, they have to do everything at once or not at all) and it is then that people should start to pay the cost of their training individually. After all, we are only 21 when we graduate, and even that could be reduced to 20 if schools recognised that universities admit from 17, not the 18 that school examination systems impose.
Have the last 13 years so impoverished us that we can no longer educate our children for the first 20 years of their lives, until they have been offered the last two and a half years that enables them to think rather than just learn?
The Browne Report is an act of vandalism. Another attack on the principle of universal response to our society's nature, another indictment of the terrible extent of the other Brown's incompetence and the scorched earth he and his Party left in his defeat.
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6 comments:
I fear the damage is done for many by the time they get to "University". In quotes as the Universitisation of all higher education has been a disaster.
Add that to the disaster of Labour's "one size fits all" dogma, and we have a generation of illiterates out there. I would hazard, that were all to be righted overnight, it would be two generations before the country sees the benefit.
My solution. Use the Steiner system. His "dogma" - the purpose of education is to produce free and responsible adults. Start form that and you can't go far wrong. Placing the child's eternal soul at the centre of the act of education is also to be recommended.
As it stands - FUBAR. State AND much private education. Bryanston offered little to Calfy, a young pupil who a teacher of forty years ago would have been delighted to educate.
The removal of a university education from the children of working class parents is almost assured now, Elby.
What responsible parent would encourage their child to take on debt on this scale at the age of 18 or 19? Can you imagine the complexity and intrusiveness of the forms to be filled in when applying for debt enslavement to the state? When our children went off to college we fiercely discouraged them from taking the student 'loan', even at 0% nominal interest. But we could pay for their support; and then they won prizes.
I would never have got taking on such a loan as is in the offing now past my father. He only signed off on the forms after serious warning that there was no money to make up the full grant, and on hearing that my then employer would always employ me during vacations.
£21,000 (at best) in fees alone, plus maintenance debt! Wages and seniority in any potential job foregone for up to 3 years. A constant drain on, not a contribution to, the household?
These proposals don't only fail to understand what is an undergraduate degree course, they fail utterly to understand working class concerns and priorities.
My lad and his slightly younger cousin recently had birthdays in their early 30s. One has another 15 months and the other just over 2 years remaining of payments on their student loans. Both have been regularly employed since leaving their respective universities, but neither has contemplated buying themselves somewhere to live, nor marriage - they simply cannot afford it on what is left of their salaries after the loan deductions.
There needs to be far more publicity of the financial pitfalls of tertiary education to would be attendees before they take the plunge, particularly as it is fairly obvious that a large number of them are not now, nor will ever be, suitable candidates. There is an urgent need to get back to university (coupled where absolutely necessary with very low interest loans to help out; otherwise funded by self/parents/sugar daddies etc) only for the very brightest youngsters who will not be held back by the lowest common denominator factor. Mature students who wish to go in later life should be intelligent (or wealthy) enough to know what they are doing and should thus be able to support themselves throughout their year or two of study. So-called 'Mickey Mouse' subjects should also be excised from university curricula. Similarly banks should be discouraged giving credit cards to poverty stricken students; cash or go without.
I believe Blue Eyes noted that he had only recently paid off his university loan after years in employment. This is so obviously an enormous burden to take up, what is Browne thinking of when he says that debt will not discourage working class people. If it doesn't after what we are going through now then there are none so blind...
I fear the truth is, Nomad, that working people's children are now even further removed from a university education than since the pre-Robbins days 45 years ago; and, worse, there has been a wholly politically-motivated degree entry requirement set for A- and GCSE-level jobs.
We have to point at the Bastard Blair and Labour's lie about tuition fees. Of my four children, all chose not to go the Uni route, and are now self-supporting and not in debt. The eldest went to the Royal Academy of Music as a mature student (he studied Baroque Flute, more because he wanted to than in the hope of a career as a professional musician), and all were in employment not long after leaving school.
You are right HG, the Universities, most especially those that are worthy of the name, are now shut to the working classes, and indeed, truth be known, much of the middle classes, impoverished as we are by decades of carrying the country's tax burden.
What a mess.
Mr Tyler at BoM thinks
"Lord Browne's excellent report cuts straight through the BS."
whereas you describe it as "vandalism".
Do I detect in the wind an after school punch up in the playground?
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