Lifelong Education or Death

For five years now I’ve been director of teaching for my department (first at PGT level, now at UG level).

Every day I observe how broken our model seems. The thing I see the most is the amount of pressure we put on very young adults and the damage it causes. They’re in their early 20s, and they’ve made a huge financial and emotional stake on the education they’ll receive for four years, which is set to determine their whole future.

It’s a system designed in pure ignorance of what life is like for the majority of people. The philosophy behind it is absurd: that life should follow a ballistic trajectory determined by a single launch point. If your early 20s happens to be a difficult time in your life (if you can even imagine something so far-fetched), or if you don’t know at that age what your main strengths and interests will be for the rest of your life (wild thought, I know), then that’s just too bad. This is your chance at higher education. Fail, underperform, take a leave of absence and lose your visa, defer assessment and fall into a death spiral of deadline crunches—any of that and you’re finished. At least that’s how it feels, and the feeling has a lot of validity. Second chances will come, if at all, at an enormous cost. Students know this, and the pressure crushes them.

The system is eating young and vulnerable people alive. It monstrously disadvantages students with less money, with health problems or disabilities, with unstable family lives, who are undergoing identity crises, who come from non-traditional backgrounds, etc. And it’s enormously wasteful. I know so many people who studied the wrong thing too early and either did badly or dropped out as a result, because they were told (with some justification) that unless they went straight to uni after school they’d never get a decent job. I also know people who did wait before starting, and the number of bureaucratic, financial, and other obstacles thrown in their way now boggles the mind. It really seems like the system is punishing them for not being like the other 18-year-olds and rushing straight into uni. I will never understand why that’s something somebody should be punished for, but that’s how our system works. None of our mature students say to me: “wow, you guys have made this so easy”.

As a result, we don’t have many mature students. This deprives our “traditional” students of the many benefits of interacting with other learners at various stages of life. If you’ve taken a language or painting class, or something else where you see all ages and abilities, then you likely have plenty of amusing and touching stories about the interactions that ensued. Imagine if university was like that, rather than being a strange neotenous extension of high school. Amusing and touching interactions are memorable, and memorable interactions are how humans learn. Awkward, performative competition among insecure near-adolescents is decidedly not how humans learn. If it was, school would work a treat, and we wouldn’t need uni at all.

We remember our language and painting classes because interactions among different age groups are so rare in our society. The weirdest and most dysfunctional thing about Western culture, in my view, is the way we separate out the different age groups. Very young people get housed in a special facility. Young people go into a different facility. The elderly have their own special facility. In between, people work—some of them in the facilities that house the other age-groups, but as employees they have to be kept quite separate from the inmates—sorry: residents, sorry: patients, sorry: students. Everybody is imprisoned in their age group. It’s amusing to me when Western conservatives speak out in defence of “the family”. What family? All that happens is that people from different age groups come out of their facilities to sleep in the same house before segregrating again in the morning. Anything that provides relief from the monotony of your age group is an extraordinary experience that will stick in your mind forever; that could be the fuel that powers higher education.

In short, there are a thousand reasons why higher education shouldn’t be so front-loaded as to make 20-year-olds carry the weight of their entire adult life on their shoulders. This is so obvious that our continuation in the current model is an embarrassment to us all. Every day I am, frankly, ashamed to be part of something so badly thought out, but it’s how I earn my living, and I don’t have the power to change it.

There is a perfectly workable alternative, developed carefully and thoughtfully by people like Richard Pettigrew.