What is education for?

The recent talk about raising university tuition fees (a bad idea when they were introduced and an even worse idea now), and the push to hike them even further, has brought me back to a question that was posed when I went to university in the early 1990s (as student grants had been recently withdrawn) and has taken on greater urgency in recent years: What is education for?

The problem, of course, with making students pay for their education is that they will quite naturally expect a return on their investment. And equally naturally, financial investments lead to the expectation of financial returns, while more abstract, although arguably equally important benefits, may be downgraded or discounted all together.

What this means is that students, and parents, are pushed into assuming that the measure by which a given degree is to be assessed is whether it results in a job with a higher wage than if the student had taken a different degree, or had not gone to university at all.

The belief behind all of this is that education can and should be expected to play a practical role in preparing one for gainful employment in the outside world, and to set one on the path to success (again, defined solely in financial terms).

That is reductive notion, as it begs the question as to how something as complex and multi-faceted as higher education could be reduced down to a series of numbers (with presumably plenty of zeros at the end), and plays into our human obsession with counting and classifying everything. Moreover, such considerations should, in an ideal world, be almost entirely beside the point.

The alternative proposition is that the purpose of undertaking a university degree is to expand one’s mind and one’s horizons, and nothing else. This is a more classical, if I may use the term in that way, view of education, one that is dismissed by cynics as students slouching around cloisters in a gown, quoting poetry at passersby while drinking a glass of college port (it is impossible not to think of Brideshead Revisited at this point).

There are some who argue, however, that it is possible to do both: to be educated in the ways of the arts and to grow as a human being; all the while learning enough to land a well-paid graduate position (and pay off the hefty debts you have incurred in the process).

I personally don’t think that is possible to do both, certainly not at the same time. Indeed, I do not believe that vocational courses, including medicine and law, are in fact ‘educational’ at all, in the broader sense of the term.

Having studied medicine myself I can say that I was not ‘educated’ by what I learned. I was merely required to absorb as many facts and principles as possible within the shortest possible timeframe, only to have to regurgitate them a few months later, with the hope that some of them will have stuck.

Frankly, I felt as if I was on a production line, with ideas and concepts stuffed into me as fast as my mind could take them. A sort of medical-grade foie gras goose, if you will.

The concepts and principles I was introduced to were admittedly not straight forward, and learning them relied on having understood and absorbed simpler notions, which acted as a scaffold or foundation on which the new items could be attached and built up into an edifice of knowledge and understanding.

The ‘art’ of medicine, however, is not the understanding and retaining of medical facts and figures, but in figuring out how to apply them judiciously in a given clinical situation, for the benefit of a given patient. And that, like learning how to drive, takes place in a genuine sense only after you have passed your test, and are forced into a real-life situation.

To take an example from journalism, it is a little like conducting interviews with people you have never met before, by simply going up to them and introducing yourself. You can learn all the theory you want, but it is only after doing it again and again, and having failed from time to time, that you understand what it means to interview someone cold, and how to do it well.

But none of that is an intellectual exercise, and one’s intellect is not developed as a consequence. That became painfully clear when I opted to do social anthropology in my third year, as an intercalated BA. The pace slowed down dramatically, from 35 hours of lectures and lab work per week for the medical cram-athon to something like six hours of lectures and four or so hours of discussion with individual subject tutors.

It was, frankly, a revelation. For the first time in my studies at Cambridge University, I was asked: What do you think? And from that point on, my education began, and I grew as a human being.

So, based on my experiences, I have a radical proposition: I would like to see all vocational courses be removed from universities and put into something akin to a polytechnic, where those who would learn a skill and achieve a qualification could be brought together and thrive in an atmosphere designed specifically for that purpose.

Then the universities could be left to offer, to those who would have it, an ‘education’, in which the mind and soul are nurtured and set free; and where students can ponder the eternal intellectual questions that form the framework of so much of our everyday lives. That, to me, is what an education means, and should be valued as such.

After all, the best ideas do not come from people working 80-hour weeks under immense pressure but from those who have the time to sit back and think a while.

Leaving aside questions of education, this week has been a busy one both for me as a writer, and for this site.

Long in the making, I am delighted to be able finally to announce that the first collection from the Thoughts and Pieces section, of which this column is a part, will be published in spring.

Pushing the Wave 2017–2022 distils down the best of the first five years of stories, articles, reviews, recipes and more. Each piece has been carefully updated and annotated for this release, together offering explorations of creativity, personal growth and modern life.

Alongside the images accompanying the original pieces, the collection is enriched with my original photographs and artwork, featuring scenes from Britain, Europe and Buenos Aires, as well as numerous illustrations that have never before been published.

It is due for release on 7 March, 2025, and you will be able to pre-order your copy soon.

Finally, there has been a new addition to this site since the last column: a recipe for Caraway grated carrot salad. This a refreshing twist on a simple salad—crunchy, zesty and full of flavor, and perfect as a side or a light meal. Enjoy!