The past will seem like another country
Kester Brewin’s poignant blog post on the imaginable end of arts degrees as we know them brought me up short.
In my local University of Gloucestershire, this is a process that has been happening for some years already. It’s ironic that, after years of battling for hallowed ‘university’ status, the institution now offers far less of the vital ‘waste-of-time’ studies Brewin identifies than it did as a college of HE. There has been an inexorable drift to degrees perceived as having direct vocational ends attached – leisure management, marketing, business studies, and so on.
Like Brewin, I too ‘went up’ to University. I went to ‘read’ English. Sadly, I ‘came down’ all-too soon with a combination of physical, emotional and mental issues I won’t bore you with here. And so the gift of the chance to take time to waste time was in some ways wasted. It’s a chance I still wish I could have made more of.
Lacking the necessary confidence and strength for a good while, I subsequently completed my degree studies in humanities at the College of Higher Education in my home town (the one that is now the University of Gloucestershire). I still made sure I ‘left home’ though – moving in with friends in rented accommodation in another part of town.
But I did, like Brewin, still study for free and I even got a (reduced) grant to live off, which was supplemented by local authority housing benefit. I, too, remember ‘signing on’ for at least one of my summer breaks.
What is so distasteful – among many things that are sickening about these announcements – is that these recommendations are being made by people who themselves benefitted from waste-of-time degrees in their youth. These are people who were trained to think. Not just to do a particular sort of work.
So why set in train a set of events which will further accelerate the reduction of education to a means-to-an-end, commercial and utilitarian exercise? It demonstrates a seriously low-grade vision of what it means to be human.
And what will I tell my boys when they come of age? The past will seem like another country when I describe it to them. I playfully imagined in a blog post once that they might well follow the noble pursuits of training for trades and staying local because of environmental constrictions. I never imagined that it might be government policy, no less, that would cut them off from the opportunities I enjoyed in my youth.
