Those who know me at all well will be aware of my deep-seated and passionate loathing for the education system, at least in England – I hope it is better in other cultures, and I’m fairly sure there are some where it does not inculcate a contempt for intelligence. Where else is the word “clever” an insult?
One thing that riles me is the assumption that the only way to become educated and knowledgeable and civilised is to stay at school for years and years.
I left school at sixteen, my sister and parents left school at sixteen. We were about as educated, civilised, intelligent, knowledgeable and well-read a family as I have ever met. My grandparents left school well before sixteen, the three I knew were also intelligent, knowledgeable and well-read. All of us could follow a logical argument, and behave in a rational way. We all read books for pleasure. None of us was stupid, coarse, brutal, or wilfully ignorant. My parents gave me a thorough grounding in poetry and Christian theology, which neither of them studied formally. My mother’s father was an engineer’s patternmaker, an immensely skilled job I couldn’t do in a million years – he did an apprenticeship. My father was a chartered accountant – he started at sixteen as an articled clerk.
Somewhere the idea got in that everyone must go to university – whether or not that style of learning was what they were suited to, whether or not their particular talents were served by that route. I would not argue against the idea that everyone should have the chance to go to university – which now is becoming more difficult, as it is so expensive again. But if a person’s talents or temperament are better served on some other path, that should be an equal option, and equally respected.
I sometimes think I might have been more successful if I had taken a degree, in so far as it would have changed people’s perception of me. I also think I might have gone terminally round the bend. But I don’t really think I would have been more intelligent or generally well-informed. (Those who know me are free to argue to the contrary…)
There is a point after which you can only educate people with their consent and co-operation. There is also a point after which you cannot stop people acquiring education, short of locking them up away from all sources of information, and even then they will go on thinking. And that point generally occurs before they are twenty-one, or even eighteen.
I have dear friends with a university education. I have dear friends with none. I perceive no consistent difference in their intelligence or all-round awareness and knowledge of things in general. If a person’s calling is to be a surgeon, they should be given every facility. If their calling is to be a street-sweeper, likewise. Streets need sweeping, and to assume only stupid people can do it is really rather insulting.
andallshallbewelldotcom 
Fair points, well-made. I too always had problems with the education system, which seemed to be as much about getting us to conform as about educating us. I value what I learned, but have forgotten most of it, all the parts which I didn’t go on to use in my career and life. I wouldn’t have missed my university education for anything, as much for the social aspect of it as the opportunity to study literature in depth, and I think the main value of the education I had before that was to get me to the point where a university would accept me. University was not so kind to my brother, and he might have been better off without it. Indeed, school was not so kind to him either, and given his level of intelligence he might have done better without that too. My mother used to tell a story of my coming home from infant school and saying ‘I can read and write now, why do I have to go to school any more?’ (clearly I must have asked why I had to go to school in the first place and been told ‘to learn to read and write’). I still think it’s a good question.
Veronica – Yes indeed, all good questions. Glad you enjoyed uni. I so feel for your brother. We are all so different, and all the time society is trying to force us all into the same mould. Some of us fit, some of us adapt, some of us break, and some spend out lives trying to wriggle back into our original shape.
I’m not really sure how to respond. In many ways I agree that it’s a huge mistake to insist on a university degree for occupations that don’t need it. Some things are just better learnt “on the job”. Certainly I learned far more about “management” actually running a plant than many people i worked with later with their Harvard and Wharton MBAs.
OTOH I’m profoundly glad that I did study what I studied. We all interpret the world through the filters that our education and experience give us and I’m acutely aware that I have some that I wouldn’t have without all those hours studying Hilbert spaces and Markov processes; even though I can’t do a fraction of the actual maths that I once could. Right now, for instance, it’s comforting that I do understand what my epidemiologist friends (yes I have some!) are arguing about.
I do think it’s very personal though. If I look at my parents; who both left school at sixteen, I strongly suspect that my father would have been no more successful and probably less happy if he had gone to Manchester after the RAF. OTOH I strongly suspect that my mother would have enjoyed the experience and been enriched by it. But then girls of her class didn’t go to university in the 1940s did they? That they can now is a real plus I think.
I entirely agree. If a person can appreciate and in any way benefit from a university education they should be given every opportunity. I’m saying that if for any reason a person has not had a university education, that does not mean they necessarily know less or think less well than if they had. Everyone is different.