People have always harboured doubts about the value of a university
education. I'm pretty sure that Henry David Thoreau said that a degree from
Harvard College wasn't worth a five-dollar bill.
I have just been reading 'Barnaby Rudge' by Charles Dickens which is about the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in London in 1780. Young Edward (Ned Chester), a character in the book, says to his father, "I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated and am fit for nothing..." Yet, that didn't stop Dickens, sending his eldest son Charlie, to Eton College. In those days you went to university to be turned into a gentleman and you would probably study the classics and read ancient Greek and Latin, both dead languages. After university many graduates went into the church or the army. Many classic scholars went on to run the country and became British Prime Ministers.
Part of the problem, I think, arises from this utilitarian point of view that sees a university education as being of no value, if it doesn't lead to a well-paid job. Cardinal Newman, seemed to think that education had value as an entity in itself, and I would tend to agree with that position.
I remember a conversation I had with a friend of mine in the early 1980s. He told me that on the train from Oxford, he had got into a conversation with a young lad who had a multi-coloured Mohican hairstyle. It turned out that he was a student at Oriel College Oxford and was studying English literature. My college friend asked him what practical value there was in a degree in English literature. The young punk replied that there was no practical value in it whatsoever, but "one did get to read some jolly good books." I simply laughed and said to my friend, that I thought it was better doing that than working in a pickle factory.
If the only intellectual concept you've got in your armoury is a hammer, then I suspect that everything in the world is going to resemble a nail to you. Is education really about teaching somebody how to knock a nail into plank of wood even if it leads to a job? I suspect that most of the MPs in the British House of Commons today, if they're not qualified lawyers, are probably arts graduates with "Micky Mouse" degrees.
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I had a good laugh with this one Derek.
"Part of the problem, I think, arises from this utilitarian point of view that sees a university education as being of no value, if it doesn't lead to a well-paid job. Cardinal Newman, seemed to think that education had value as an entity in itself, and I would tend to agree with that position." EXACTLY! I WHOLEHEARTEDLY AGREE.
Anyone remember the phrase, EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION. ie Education for it’s own sake. Not education for bloody paid work! Education is Power. It need not come from a University Education at all. The powers that be, however, only operate on a bureaucratic examination system for determining capability. Colin Wilson is a good example of someone who was largely self educated by reading tomes in a public library and writing The Outsider in 1956. Try doing that these days. Ashton library is a pathetic excuse for a library. It exists simply because the council are legally bound to operate such a service. Only 8 public libraries remain of the roughly 22 that I remember and I dare say there were even more before my time.
I went to university to study what I loved to do as a child – Entomology, and to avoid getting a job. I never wanted a job of work as a child and I did as much as I possibly could to avoid ever having one and in that I was successful. A full life on the dole was my life-pathway! The degree itself was taught in an antithetical manner as far as I was concerned. I studied Biology to degree level which was increasingly a course on death, not Life, with it's statistical analysis and animal experimentation. I was at HEART a naturalist, not a cruel experimental scientist, ie a disembodied BRAIN, and my love of living things was what later in life led me, in part, into the field of environmental politics.
Love, Light & Laughter
Steve Starlord
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