Whatever happened to students?
I've been away a good few weeks re-visiting my glory days by going back to my old university. Every day of my five years that I spent there would result in some form of drunken carnage that would live long in the memory. This was, after all, what university was about... For most it is the first time the umbilical cord is truly cut, the first time you can really experiment with whatever you want free from prying eyes and fears of disappointing loving family members.
This was not the case for me but, not wanting to miss out on anything, I pushed it just about as far as I could go, a continuation of the debauchery that blighted my young life. It was a great time - a stand alone point of my life where there were no real responsibilities, no-one to put ahead of my own selfish desire...
It should have been nice to revisit this. Instead what I saw was disgusting... A sea of banality and mediocrity. A university populated by middle class students so desperate to impress with faux home county voices and sensible haircuts. Even those that touched upon being different or individual did so in a way that appeared to me to be some kind of parody, like the characters in the young ones made real. It was awful.
Attempting to make the worst of a bad situation I tried to cajole and coax these greenhorns, to explain stories of a past when students actually did things. when mayhem did not equate to having your first pint at three in the afternoon. Their eyes glazed over, I don't think they understood.
I continued to try through my time there, managing to spark a few incidents but nothing like the days of old. Why such a spectacular fall from grace? Because of student loans. I, like so many others, had to return home from university in thousands of pounds of debt only to walk straight back into the same shitty job I had before I went away, now with the added indiginity of seeing the idiots who stuck around and didn't get an education zooming past me in beemers boasting about their 40k a year incomes. The young people I work with now tell me only a chump would go to university. Despite the good times, on reflection they may be right.
Working class people are taking this advice to heart, staying away from higher education. This in turn is leading to the student bodies of such institutions to become boring, bland and ultimately self-satisfied. My year was the first year that it was a loan. We didn't really look forward. We just took the loan,the overdraft and the credit card and didn't say anything. Since that experimental year people have learnt the hard way not to bother.
Not that you don't get personalities in the upper classes you understand. But put purely middle class people together and there is no reason for them to get up to anything, no-one to lead them down roads they have never previously explored.
The knock-on effect it has had on the student movement as a political force is evident as well. NUS is at an all time low, ridden with petty, self important, bickering imbeciles. It acheives nothing for its members, and dedicates way too much of its time to national issues it can't change because it echoes the debating teams they all used to be on back when they were at their private schools.
This was not the case for me but, not wanting to miss out on anything, I pushed it just about as far as I could go, a continuation of the debauchery that blighted my young life. It was a great time - a stand alone point of my life where there were no real responsibilities, no-one to put ahead of my own selfish desire...
It should have been nice to revisit this. Instead what I saw was disgusting... A sea of banality and mediocrity. A university populated by middle class students so desperate to impress with faux home county voices and sensible haircuts. Even those that touched upon being different or individual did so in a way that appeared to me to be some kind of parody, like the characters in the young ones made real. It was awful.
Attempting to make the worst of a bad situation I tried to cajole and coax these greenhorns, to explain stories of a past when students actually did things. when mayhem did not equate to having your first pint at three in the afternoon. Their eyes glazed over, I don't think they understood.
I continued to try through my time there, managing to spark a few incidents but nothing like the days of old. Why such a spectacular fall from grace? Because of student loans. I, like so many others, had to return home from university in thousands of pounds of debt only to walk straight back into the same shitty job I had before I went away, now with the added indiginity of seeing the idiots who stuck around and didn't get an education zooming past me in beemers boasting about their 40k a year incomes. The young people I work with now tell me only a chump would go to university. Despite the good times, on reflection they may be right.
Working class people are taking this advice to heart, staying away from higher education. This in turn is leading to the student bodies of such institutions to become boring, bland and ultimately self-satisfied. My year was the first year that it was a loan. We didn't really look forward. We just took the loan,the overdraft and the credit card and didn't say anything. Since that experimental year people have learnt the hard way not to bother.
Not that you don't get personalities in the upper classes you understand. But put purely middle class people together and there is no reason for them to get up to anything, no-one to lead them down roads they have never previously explored.
The knock-on effect it has had on the student movement as a political force is evident as well. NUS is at an all time low, ridden with petty, self important, bickering imbeciles. It acheives nothing for its members, and dedicates way too much of its time to national issues it can't change because it echoes the debating teams they all used to be on back when they were at their private schools.
posted by Richard Lewis at 5:01 PM
1 Comments:
Ah, the good old days of grants,sit-ins and beer at 13p a pint!
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