An Education: Why a traditional education system has failed, and why now is the time to shake it up.
Upon graduating, I was reminded of a quote from Lynn Barber’s autobiographical novel An Education. In it, the protagonist, Jenny, pronounces that “If people die the moment that they graduate, then surely it’s the things we do beforehand that count.” Jenny, on the cusp of deciding whether to pursue an English degree at Oxford or get married to her exciting older boyfriend, decides momentarily to abandon her academic ambitions on the pretext of this admission above.
To her, growing up in dreary, 1960s suburban London, pursuing a life of academia is a surefire way of ending up like all of the people whom she deems to be failures ‘at life’. They are: unstimulated, trapped and devoid of spirit. Jenny ultimately decides to pursue her university education. The audience breathes a sigh of relief as we see her cycle off into the sunset on her college campus, wistfully pontificating her narrow escape from a life of pointless and misjudged rebellion.
Watching the film as an impressionable 16 year old, reinforced the notion that in order to be someone in my life, I must not get tempted by wayward, hedonistic fantasies. But, looking back now as I sit at my desk trying to sum up how I feel about my education, I am drawn to Jenny’s quote. Do we, as young people “die the moment that [we] graduate”? The expression is of course hyperbolic and through the lens of a middle-class, white teenager, yet so many of us, regardless of our backgrounds, feel like this. To enter into the mainstream higher education system is to simultaneously delay, but also perpetuate, our imminent spiritual decay.
Universities are now preparing to run online classes for their incoming first years in September. Initially I pitied the students missing out on “the uni experience.” And then I paused. Surely the ‘university experience’ should be about studying. To many of us, university has become about living away from our parents, partying and dating. When the sun begins to set on our last term of our final year, we sober up, squeeze nylon ties tight around our sweaty necks and refresh grey, online job boards on the hour, every hour. The end is coming, we all accept. Real life must begin.
How sad, I think now, that we are encouraged to see our university years of as last ‘hurrah’, and yet the last opportunity to do any meaningful learning. I happily partook in that way of living, treating it as a respite from the inevitable return to the big, bad world. It is my belief that Jenny was right after all, that when we graduate, a part of us does die.
Sir Ken Robinson, a world renowned educational expert, presents the notion that modern day educational systems seek to ‘anaesthetise’ its students. He elaborates by explaining that in the 21st Century, young people are overwhelmed by an increase in information targeted at them, from TVs to iPhones to school work.
This has resulted in increased attention deficit disorders amongst our peers. Instead of altering the way in which we receive information, ours and the generations afterwards have been encouraged to “deaden themselves to what is happening.” Robinson uses the example of the increased use of Ritalin and Adderall prescribed to students in the US.
It is perhaps this ‘university experience’ as it exists today, which is one of the ways young people are being anaesthetised. We are encouraged to drink, make mistakes and waste money, and are expected, overnight, to ‘grow up’ the moment we leave the campus gates.
We are immediately in debt, both financially and spiritually, to the post-educational society. I think this is what Jenny means when she says we ‘die’ when we graduate. Our indulgent behaviour is turned off at the tap and we must take our places in society and contribute to the economy, without any further opportunities to find ourselves. Jenny’s temptation to leave the path that had been paved for her and rebel was, although problematic in several ways, not as pointless as she remembers it. Those desires to break away comes from a very real place within ourselves that shouldn’t be ignored.
Fundamentally, the metrics by which we judge someone’s ‘intelligence’ are highly flawed and archaic. Robinson continues by saying that the educational system has statistically benefitted only a minority of the world’s population and has succeeded in oppressing the majority by devaluing the things which drive them, and that they are good at. He circles back to the argument that we have an “epidemic of attention deficit amongst students” that has risen in accordance with the rise of standardised teaching and testing. We should, he argues, be doing the exact opposite, and highlights a study on the concept of ‘divergent thinking’ as a core principle of a necessary paradigm shift within the education system.
Divergent thinking, he explains, is “an essential capacity for creativity” and creativity is fundamentally “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Thinking ‘divergently’ means, in his view, having not only several answers to one question, but also several ways of interpreting the question itself.
It is the ability to not think in only a linear, constricted fashion that values the one, ‘correct’ answer but to deconstruct and challenge the world around us freely. It is in his opinion, and mine too, that our current education system has drained this capacity for creativity, and ultimately freedom. This is leading students on a path to fatigue and disengagement from their learning. He evidences a study whereby a group of nursery-aged children are tested on their ability to think ‘divergently’. In the study, 98% of the cohort were able to respond to the prompts in a ‘divergent’ manner.
The figure begins to decline as the children progress through the education system, being taught that there is only “one answer to the question (in the case of universal, standardised testing, for example) and that it is in the back [of the book].” Robinson uses this study to show that we are all, more or less, capable of — and ‘freed’ by — creative thinking. Being encouraged to explore skills outside of the system he likens to being modelled on “factory lines” will “wake up” a generation of young people.
So, exactly one year ago, when deciding whether or not to quit my stifling job, I came across an advertisement for an alternative to a Masters style course.I found myself asking if this was a chance for me to actually enjoy my education again. The thing that struck me most about Year Here was not only that it was free, but that it could satisfy a very real and often repressed need within myself to learn holistically. As someone who enjoyed studying and working within both the scientific and artistic sectors, committing to a degree or career where I would have to sacrifice one or the other prevented me from fully investing in one path.
As the social theorist Indy Johar posits: “We live in the institutional remnants of a silo-ed industrial age. An age of the hero and individual leader, and yet we exist in an interconnected and interdependent world.”
Year Here is fundamentally about collaboration, something that Robinson says is misnomered in mainstream education as ‘cheating’. Year Here flips this concept, and many other pejorative tropes of the education system, on its head. One of the most important things Year Here has championed is that education can and should be free. Talking to my friend and classmate Ayesha Aleem, she emphasises to me her belief that “a good education should be everyone’s privilege.” Whilst Year Here is still in a relatively nascent phase, it has tirelessly advocated on the behalf of its students to make our learning free. It has also found ways of courting students from outside of London, helping them find affordable housing and so called ‘side hustles’ to make sure Year Here works for them.
Year Here also recognises how ‘soft’ skills play an important role in a good education. Each phase of the course is full of lectures, workshops and seminars that range from confidence building and communication exercises to training in financial modelling. “This is how you do it”, I thought to myself, “this is how you engage students.”
There are no grades in Year Here, no archaic measures of intelligence or success, only the desire for us to grow organically and to help others. As Louis Holliday, another friend and classmate, commented: “In recent times, education has become so methodical and prescriptive in an effort to achieve the best grade or the highest exam result.” The foundations of Year Here are based on allowing a person to grow, and to have access to an education that recognises their individuality.
To do so is to rewire a generation of students into thriving after a post-graduate degree. As I come to the end of the experience and reflect on the last year, I feel as if I have been ‘woken up’. When our founder Jack broke the news that our final few months of the course were to be virtual as a response to the pandemic, we were prioritised in the shift online. I knew that the team would do a great job of ensuring we thrive in this new environment. For education doesn’t do well as an inflexible, risk averse system, fearful of its beneficiaries. For young people and millennials alike, we do well to be part of our own education.