My young life was a travellator up that mountain. I come from precisely that generation for whom attending university was a no-brainer for those in the brains game. And I come from a place in which where you would go to university wasn’t something you ever had to think about. There were only two full universities within a 400-mile radius — and one of those taught in Afrikaans.

The tyranny of choice, the terror of UCAS, the holy mysteries of “clearing”, all passed me by. As did the English “university experience”. When your university is a twenty-minute drive from your family home, you live in that family home. The upside of this model is that you can enter adulthood without much debt. The downside is that university becomes a kind of superannuated school experience: all the same friendship cliques re-establishing themselves. It can easily become a flatpack, wipe-clean lifestyle, notably low in personality formation, windswept romance and regrettable fumbling. Home by half past three. Dinner on the table at half seven. A time of bland stasis, at exactly the moment when everything from Brideshead Revisited to The Young Ones has promised you a rite of passage, adulthood and “freedom”.

These days, having lived in the country for over a decade, I can bluff Englishness easily: I’m odourless, flavourless, practically indistinguishable. But when it comes to that military service for the middle classes, The University Experience — that particular confection of shoe-vomiting on cobbled stones, of WKD-saturated student unions, of “blowing your grant on pills and Beefa then subsisting on baked beans for two months”, all the clichés — I know it only through careful study of BBC3 sitcoms and mid-period Adrian Mole.

Back then, this rankled — so much that one year into a degree, I dropped out, hopped a plane to England and spent 15 months emptying drip trays in a series of bad pubs and worse hotels, in search of a life less ordinary. Up above the bars, in scabby live-in rooms, I scanned various kinds of .gov.uk bumpf, searching for a way to join the English University Experience, until I managed to piece together that it would cost £12,000 per year excluding accommodation, no loans available. I binned the dream, and eventually returned home, thereby performing the uncommon feat of dropping-back-in.

This was still the Mbeki era, when the nation’s farcical political successes of the 90s hadn’t quite dimmed, and a sense of collective purpose still spanned from black to white. In South Africa, the key problem of student politics was “student apathy” — the student paper would run endless pointless pieces on it. A few years later, the storm clouds of Rhodes Must Fall would herald a prickly new world, but at that moment, university was positively prelapsarian. Identity politics was already inside the seminar rooms, but not yet beyond them. Cancellation was unheard of. One winter, a charity I was involved with staged a Big Brother-style live-in contest in a fake squatter camp on the main plaza. Coceka, the girl who won, did so with the slogan: “Keep the black in the shack”.

The university experience, such as it was, was a reflection of the city from which it emerged: suburban, laid-back, jocky, mildly anti-intellectual. The campus was dominated by the Commerce faculty — the eccentric if admirable British insistence on studying impractical subjects, like Spanish, Classics, or History, being largely absent. In a country with no social safety net and stonking unemployment, the wonderfully genteel mentality that leads to so many Brits spending three years studying History of Art is either for the high bourgeoisie or the terminally insane. The system of post-undergrad conversion courses and the graduate fast-tracks is a rather backwards-engineered First World bauble.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

In recent years, my position has come full circle. Ever more, I feel sorry for the English. I feel sorry for the rampant grade inflation in their school system, such that every fresh year requires another wheelbarrow full of A*s to buy a simple 2:1 from Leicester de Montfort. I feel sorry for the firewall of clichés that bound their experience. Most of all, I feel sorry for the oppressively hierarchical nature of the system — the tyranny of the eternal CV distinction between Imperial and King’s, between Bristol and Durham, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent.

And that hierarchy maps onto the job market, too, when you finally get into it. I recently worked with someone who beat out 5000 applicants to a BBC traineeship. The list of fillips you need on your CV to do that these days is mind-boggling. When people talk of “late stage capitalism”, this may be what they mean: a level of competition that turns the humans underneath it into mere abstractions of tendencies.

On the rare occasions employers have been made to scan my resumé, the Higher Education section has likely only baffled and annoyed them. Where exactly does this guy stand in the great horse race of British society — is he more Manchester or is he, you know, a bit Bournemouth?

The truth is that UCT was both and neither: South Africa is simply not the scale of higher education universe that can sustain twenty different words for “upper management material”. At the school on the hill, you got some world class profs, but you also got proper dimbos. It’s neither clubbable nomenklatura nor cultural wasteland. Some of the people I met went on to real greatness. From time to time, I look up the student paper’s chief sub, now a professor at Cornell publishing things like: “Quantum-dot spin-photon entanglement via frequency downconversion to telecom wavelength”. But then you also got the same loping C students who’d been along for the ride since high school. Throw into that the kids from township schools, who slogged through remedial years on lower grades, and you’ve got a fairly balanced pool of talents, all centred around the geography of the city itself. It made for a world that felt human in scale.

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Only the rich can afford to be woke

By Gavin Haynes

By contrast, the rigidly stratified British model seems to involve taking every BBB in the country, and disinterring them to one market town in the Midlands. On this lunar landscape, the colonists will never meet anyone from outside of their IQ standard-deviation. Even the Left-wing interest in social mixing ends at the eleven-plus. A very smart friend completely mucked up his A Levels, and ended up at a lower-tier university. He describes being treated as vaguely godlike by his peers and tutors in the seminar rooms: The Guy Who Seemed To Know What Derrida Was On About. It was perhaps awkward for each party to become aware of that gulf — and of quite what it was each wasn’t getting.

But whatever they lacked, they were getting their latter-day equivalent of the Grand Tour. In the era of Massive Open Online Courses, the price of knowledge is fast approaching zero. And the price of credentialism — of having the piece of paper that pushes you through the recruiter’s door — is finally in recession, as employers get wise to years of academic hyperinflation. In a society that has mislaid many of its rituals, one consumerised Rite Of Passage seems more popular than ever. The eternal desire of kids is to escape their parental homes and go ape — the Cameron reforms simply succeeded in opening the system up to working class kids also eyeing up the same domestic tourism bargain as the middle classes. But post-Covid, it does seem that the long-awaited reckoning on the value of higher education might be about to take place. It is no longer a no brainer.

I was desperate to get out of the provincialism of the New World. But as I look back, I doubt that swimming among Oxbridge super-achievers would have given me nearly as much imaginative scope. Hothousing can be the whetstone to greatness, but it’s also a good recipe for over-narrow specialisation. When I dropped back in, I realised that everything I wanted had been there all along, if I just threw myself into it. Competition for places on the student paper was thin. You could muck about, write what you liked, build fiefdoms, get weird. I did, and it was the making of me.

Perhaps, far from the Oxbridges of the world, the platonic ideal of a university was always much closer than I’d imagined. 9-5, in the Colonies. If you’re going to dream on a spire, you want to have a sense that you’re Sebastian Flyte lounging on a lawn, not hyper-ventilating in a library.

For my first English literature class, I read Things Fall Apart cover to cover in one evening. I felt liberated: I’d actually enjoyed reading something I’d imagined was outside my comfort zone. With the other students on the Access Course, all of whom had also been to terrible schools and faced massive barriers to learning, I was able to laugh at my lack of general knowledge and poor historical and geographical facts, rather than attempting to cover them up.

Students from the course were guaranteed a place at the Polytechnic of North London (PNL) if we passed. I did, and when I started my degree in Film Studies and Discourse, I was in my element: I had a decade of feminist activism under my belt and there is nothing that cannot be studied through the lens of patriarchy. I was used to watching a film I had seen BF (Before Feminism) and howling at the misogyny in it, which I had once simply accepted and absorbed. My final thesis focused on men in gangs and, within that, the prevalence of sexual violence and abuse against women and girls. It was based on Grease.

The discourse part was less fun. Full of Derrida and Foucault and other incomprehensible philosophers and queer theorists, it flew in the face of my grassroots feminism. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity had just been published, and I recall being told by one of the lecturers that patriarchy was “performance”. I informed him that rape, domestic violence and other forms of male violence are rooted in the material reality of women’s oppression in relation to men. He responded by saying that perhaps “old-school feminism” needed a revamp.

A seasoned activist, I was used to defending my corner. But it felt like some of the lecturers found it threatening or uncomfortable to teach anyone who was used to engaging with ideas, theories and critical analysis. The staff at PNL were great when it came to class, but not so great at being corrected about feminism. The most amusing example happened during a class taught by the brilliant feminist sociologist Professor Sue Lees, who I believed had misrepresented a feminist law reform campaign I had co-founded the previous year. When I raised my hand to challenge her, explaining who I was, Sue shouted: “No, you are not!” We later became friends and would laugh about it.

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Why I had a baby at university

By Sarah Ditum

One of the male lecturers was a bit trickier. When I quoted Andrea Dworkin in an essay critiquing the male libertarian view of pornography, he was almost frothing at the mouth. He said Dworkin was “monstrous” and, in front of the entire class, accused me of taking a “moralist, anti-sex” approach. I asked if he thought it was a healthy sexual response to masturbate to women being gagged and raped. He declined to answer.

And I remember very clearly, in a class on the so-called feminist sex wars, a debate about sexuality and sexual practice that took in pornography, sadomasochism, and commercial sexual exploitation. On the one hand, there with libertarian “feminists” arguing that all sex is good sex; on the other, anti-male-violence feminist such as myself that ascribed significant meaning to the eroticisation of female subordination, and campaigned to end the sex trade.

“Here we have tension between the pro-sex feminists and the anti-sex neo-feminists,” proclaimed the male lecturer. Glancing down at the suggested reading for the module I saw not one actual feminist text but a load of stuff in praise of pornography.

“It is not ‘anti-sex’ to critique the sex trade,” I told the lecturer. “Making money from women’s pain and humiliation is surely open to criticism?”

At that point, the lecturer began to quote Foucault in French. Today’s universities preach an updated version of this anti-feminism, for example by promoting the view that prostitution is a fine way to earn money, and that speaking out against extreme transgender ideology and commercial sexual exploitation is “White Feminism”.

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Feminism's dangerous new allies

By Julie Bindel

Meanwhile, in my film studies class, I would often seethe with resentment at being told that depictions of horrific violence against women in Alfred Hitchcock films were merely “symbolic” of men’s fear of female sexuality and that feminists often “missed the point” about “meaning”. Silly girls!

These lecturers probably preferred to work with a clean slate than a person who could express opinions as opposed to simply form them from scratch.

And there were lots of people at PNL who just didn’t care that much. A number of posh kids swanked around, pleased with themselves for rebelling against their parents by not going to Oxbridge. Most of these entitled, arrogant teenagers had flounced around the global south on a gap year before embarking on three years at university. How disappointed their families must have been that they ended up in some grotty polytechnic rather than a redbrick. How proud mine were that I was doing something no one else in the family had been able to.

Still, I would fanaticise about being at a redbrick, channelling Julie Walters in Educating Rita. I wanted to sit in a ramshackle room full of bookshelves and whiskey decanters, with a don wearing a tweed jacket who gave me loads of attention and took my ideas seriously. What I got was a monthly seminar with 19 other students in a room with the paint peeling off the walls. I had always imagined university to be so much more glamourous.

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Cancel Culture has captured campus

By Eric Kaufmann

I was at university to get a degree, nothing more, because I thought it might give me more options in the job market. I wasn’t engaged in any social events or clubs because I already had my own tribe, although I once went to the student bar with a friend who promised it would be “a right laugh”. A couple of members of the Socialist Workers Party tried to recruit me, telling me that feminism was a “bourgeois movement” and that if, capitalism was destroyed, women would be liberated.

In 1993, I got what I had come for: a degree. But my battle with those who took exception to my prior knowledge was not over. Two of my final-year essays — a feminist critique of heterosexuality and an analysis of misogyny in the movies — were marked very low. They’d been so heavily edited with red pen that they looked as though a vein had been opened over the pages. I knew they deserved better. My work was externally reviewed and the marks shot up for both pieces. The reviewer commented that the tutors appeared to have marked me down because they disagreed with rather than because I failed to substantiate my arguments.

When I look back on the good things about my three years at university, I think about the working-class single mothers who somehow managed to fit a degree into their hellishly busy and stressful lives. I recall the way in which these women spoke about wanting to feel more confident in the world and get some qualifications that would give them options in the workplace. Like me, they considered education to be a privilege as well as a right.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

Polytechnics catered to their communities, offering vocational qualifications, but, during the time I was there, changes to the labour market meant academic qualifications were seen as the best route to a good job, and the government began to turn polytechnics into “new universities”.

And as the number of universities has increased, the focus has shifted even more towards the postmodern horror story known as “discourse”, where the abstract “floating signifiers” are given precedence over scholarship that can be used to make a material difference to the lives of oppressed people. Universities should take a lesson from the now defunct polytechnics, and focus on making higher education accessible to those oppressed people, not just a privileged few.

The rampant elitism endemic within today’s universities has led to “feminist” societies being taken over by dudes sporting man-buns who dictate what feminism actually is to young women. It is no wonder that working-class single mothers in universities have become almost extinct as dinosaurs. Universities need to get back to reality. And it would help if feminism, in its true form, was put back on the curriculum.

Then I got glandular fever when I was 14, and spent six weeks mostly in bed. I was blessed with the damascene insight that no one could make me go if I chose not to. And so, I stopped. I learned that there was a threshold of non-attendance at which an intervention would be staged, and showed up just enough to avoid that. Otherwise, I claimed to be generically “ill”. No one really believed this, but no one really seemed to mind.

I stayed at home, listening to morbid records, writing diaries and reading in the garden. I did adequately in my GCSEs, and barely adequately in my A-levels. This stung my pride, but didn’t seem to matter. Whatever I was supposed to be, it wasn’t going to happen here, in the countryside, where there was one bus to town every two hours. This was not my place, even though it was the only place I’d ever known. University was where the Sarah Project would truly begin.

And it did. I started an English degree, and it was immediately clear that no amount of going to school would have been better preparation than my years of skiving. Six contact hours a week and as many novels as I could consume in the meantime? I knew how to do this! When I discovered that I didn’t like my course (too much theory), I just worked harder and got better marks, so that by the end of my first year I could offer my clutch of firsts around to other universities that would never have looked twice at my A-level grades.

I ended up, not exactly coincidentally, transferring to the university that my boyfriend was attending. And then, two weeks into my second year, I found out I was pregnant. Two days after that, I realised I was going to have this baby. I didn’t experience this exactly as a choice, though I know it was one. I experienced it as knowledge. Whatever had made its home in my belly had made me a mother, and I would have to catch up with that.

Even as the person who made that decision, I find it hard to reconcile the ambition I had at 20 with the will to throw my lot in with maternity. All I can say is that I believed I was equal to anything then, and my life so far had shown that I could overcome whatever obstacles I put into my own way. The baby would go to nursery (I assumed there would be a nursery). I would go back to university (I assumed this would be possible). The Sarah Project would continue, with some light amendments.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

It’s difficult not to be conspicuous as a pregnant student. When I came back for my third year, I would introduce myself to classmates and find out they already knew me as “the pregnant one”. Well, they could hardly have missed me, with my huge belly and my dreary, hated uniform of Mothercare tunics. I understood that I wasn’t like most students, and I didn’t really mind.

For most people, university — or an arts degree at least — is the first time in their education that they realise what I realised laid out in my bed at 14, with a raging fever and a furious lymph system: no one else can force you to do this. You can choose not to. Outside my first Victorian tutorial, my peers joked about how they simply hadn’t had time to get through Middlemarch over the summer break. I had read it during breastfeeds, resting the massive paperback on the small body of my baby, trying to coax his appetite into sync with the chapter breaks.

I read the chapter where Dorothea Brooke visits her sister Celia, who has just become a mother. Dorothea watches Celia “watching the remarkable acts of the baby”, hardly knowing the person her sister has become. I felt like both sisters at once, besotted with my child and simultaneously astonished to observe my own besottedness. But I felt only annoyance for most of my classmates, who had nothing but time and no inclination. What had they come here for if they didn’t want to do the work?

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Given my time again, I wouldn't choose journalism

By Sarah Ditum

More disconcerting still was the realisation that I didn’t belong in the same world as my tutors either, even as I started to fit myself for lecturing as a profession. (I wanted to write but a baby seemed an insuperable barrier to getting into journalism and academia was right there, offering me funding.) The ones who were parents were, mostly, male. For female early-career academics, the trade-off seemed impossible.

If you could complete your doctorate in three years, you still had a race to convert insecure and underpaid jobs into a proper departmental role before your fertility began to fade. I felt, smugly, that I’d carved a private path through the system, then realised I had not. The most senior women tended to be childless. This is a bit less true now than it was in the early noughties, but it’s still the case that having a baby is about the worst thing you can do for your career as a woman in academia.

I had a sturdy faith in the myth of my own exceptionalism, but not sturdy enough to believe that I was so much better than every other woman with a university career. I survived through my BA and an MA, and a little way into a DPhil, for the same reason I failed to sink myself at school and college: because there was a system that believed I would eventually succeed. I did not just “get to university”: I was carried. Teachers guided me, despite my great reluctance, through the admissions system. My parents had hand-couriered my paperwork when I was in danger of missing deadlines. And I did not just “complete my degree”. I had support — most importantly, the backing of my boyfriend, my family and my boyfriend’s family; but also, a generously subsidised and excellent student union nursery on campus.

It mattered as well that my tutors did not want to see me fail, and when I finally fell out of university it was because my doctoral supervisor simply could not deal with me having another baby: he called me a child bride and stopped answering my emails. Still, in a way, that disinterest was a relief. Before then, I had had to learn that there is nothing quite as suspect as the person in authority who takes a special interest and then takes a bit too much.

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Oxbridge is killing journalism

By Justin Webb

Part of the problem, nowadays, is that no one seems entirely sure what universities owe their students: complete protection from all distress, or benign neglect. Then universities minister Sam Gyimah argued that institutions should see themselves acting “in loco parentis”, with particular responsibility for the mental health of their students; but he also claimed that students were being coddled by a “culture of censorship”, suggesting that campuses were if anything too protective of their charges.

Those two apparently conflicting positions might be closer than it seems. Students are treated increasingly as consumers — they want and expect their university to look after them, and universities write policies on wellbeing and inclusion that suggest they can meet this demand. The necessary resources, however, rarely exist. A fully funded psych service is expensive. Trigger warnings and no-platforming come cheap. They may not be moral and they may not be effective, but they allow beleaguered lecturers to believe they’re discharging their duty of care, even if deferring to student demands ultimately only traps young people in permanent adolescence.

In the last few years, I’ve done some teaching at university, and the rawness of students — the childishness of them, in the safety-rails-on simulacrum of an adult life that university offers — can be painful to see. I’ve sometimes felt the same annoyance with my own classes that I did outside that Middlemarch seminar: why are you here, if you can’t manage your own life?

But the bargain of university has always included the promise that it will form you in the last stage of your growing-up: you become a part of it and emerge, finally, as a fully matriculated member of the bourgeoisie. It was never only about the education, and students will always be liable to do slightly dumb things. That might be trying to protect themselves from the literal violence of people with ideas, or it might be having a baby. The duty of a university is to see that neither of those decisions can keep someone from becoming the adult they could be.

At an airfield outside Delhi, I was shepherded onto a Russian Antonov troop carrier with a few other journalists. It had no seats. The journey took hours and at one point a pilot appeared and started walking down the row of reporters, asking each person something. It was very loud so there was no way of hearing his question until he got to me. “Do you have a guidebook for the Maldives? We don’t know which Island the airport is on.”

I did. The pilot beamed. He returned to the cockpit, and the plane changed direction, doubling back on itself. I’d spent long hours in the library with Hayek and Schumpeter, but in the end I was saved by Berlitz. We landed safely in the Maldives — only to find the coup had fizzled out. The pirates who had cackhandedly attempted to overthrow the government set sail and never came back. This was the beginning of my career.

Since then, it has included wars, revolutions, errors of judgement, stomach-turning fear, blood-spattered sights, narrow scrapes, changes of heart and mind. And that’s just inside Broadcasting House. Could all of this — should all of this — have been achieved without an education provided at the taxpayers’ expense in the years 1980 to 1983 at the London School of Economics?

Almost certainly. My father Peter Woods had no degree when he threw himself out of an aircraft for his first and last parachute jump in order to report on the Suez crisis for the Daily Mirror. Martha Gellhorn had no degree when she became the world’s most celebrated and intrepid reporter and author. Nor did another force of nature, the great John Humphrys, whose alma mater is The Penarth Times.

But John’s hopped it to Classic FM and we are left, on the Today Programme, in a fusty senior common room impervious to cheeky lads and lasses from South Wales — unless they’ve spent years looking at books. The current presenters’ roster boasts two Oxford graduates, two from Cambridge, and me. It is unlikely that another non-graduate like John will present it any time soon and we are reduced as a result. Our perspectives are less diverse. The BBC, to its credit, is upping the number of recruits from non-degree backgrounds, suggesting that it understands that three years punting on the Cam is not the only pathway to success.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

Perhaps that’s because the Corporation sees the wider picture. Death by professionalisation. It’s not elite over-production that worries me so much as the quality of the elite that is being over-produced. University these days encourages a way of thinking about the world that is homogenous. Those who go — even those who have seen hardship and adversity — are smoothed around the edges. They don’t question the establishment because they (alright, we) are the establishment.

At its worst, all this leads to a deadening. A weeding out of the kind of prickly cussed characters who bring vivacity to any line of work — and have made British journalism what it is.

Take the late great Brian Barron, a former BBC war correspondent. He came across an ITN crew broken down in the desert in the first Gulf war he gave them water and passed on their co-ordinates to the military so that they could be rescued, but he refused to take their tape back to base to be broadcast. Brian was once described by Jon Snow (who competed with him in Africa for ITN) as, “the most tenacious, even ruthless, correspondent I have ever worked against — the ultimate, objective professional.” That word, “professional,” is used here — was once always used — to describe ability rather than status.

Because Brian did not go to university. I seriously believe if he had he would have taken the tape for the stranded crew. He would have been professional in our modern sense — polished and polite — but unprofessional in Snow’s terms.

Snow, though he went, never graduated, and has also been professional without being, well, a professional. In their pomp these people found things out, asked simple direct questions, never let anyone get away with waffle. Their minds were uncluttered. They respected themselves and their craft. They thought they knew the difference between up and down, right and wrong, good and bad, male and female. They were not befuddled by questions asked for the sake of asking. Thoughts had for the sake of thinking.

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Boarding school put me in my place

By Justin Webb

And yet even as I write this, I know my heart is not in it. I learned nothing of much use to me at the LSE and yet, in truth, I learned everything. Crucially, I learned that I didn’t matter as much as I assumed I did. On a Saturday afternoon, sitting in the hugeness of the light-filled library and realising, courtesy of Eileen Barker’s moral philosophy course, that humans might not have free will. Rushing in on the tube for an early class with George Jones, doyen of politics professors, who hated what select committees were doing to the House of Commons. Bill Letwin (father of Oliver) who seemed to me to be impossibly Right-wing because he thought governments needed to be wary of involving themselves in economic life. David Starkey on how every other historian of his period was an idiot and a charlatan.

Here is the first lesson they all taught: they don’t care about you. For the first time in my life I was on my own. Of course, there are schoolteachers who don’t care about you either, but they had to pretend. At university in the 80s, they didn’t pretend. David Starkey was a good example, on the up in those days and with bigger fish to fry. And because of that: an electrifying teacher. I loved the idea that this was an opportunity I could feast on or pass up: the choice, for the first time ever, was mine.

So while I am sympathetic to the “too much education” school, I can’t in all honesty join it. University, done right, sorts your mind out. Confronts you with your own insignificance.

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Of course, the education has to be real. Meaning lecturers must lecture and students must listen. Although the LSE in the 80s had its share of protesters and no-platformers and shouters about this and that, most of us understood that the trick was to listen. Humility is not much in fashion in the age of Twitter but it’s a good thing to have at university.

Perhaps that’s an argument for paying for the whole thing from general taxation again: we never thought we had ‘rights’ because we were not consumers. We were privileged — all of us at university in the pre-fees and pre-mass attendance age — and we knew it. This may have allowed those who taught us more space to be better at what they did, which was thinking more than teaching.

Nobody had to worry about being cancelled because they’d committed a micro-aggression. And this in turn encouraged eccentricity, intellectual heterodoxy, adventure. Most of the academics and most of the students actually believed in freedom. One of my lecturers was a supporter of the Cambodian mass murderer Pol Pot. Another (the wonderful Kurt Klappholz) had  been in a Nazi Concentration camp. Neither of them prepared me to cover a coup, but they taught me to look twice.

No punting of course in Aldwych, no misty memories of dawn after the May Ball. But halcyon days. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Even if it’d made me a better journalist.

Knowing that my mother wanted me to be popular, I would shun my classmates when they came to call, instead going to the local library first thing on a Saturday morning and returning home with an armful of books which I would sit and read like a machine. Even as a teenager, I used books as deadly weapons long before I learnt how to use words as them; lying in the park reading Lolita in my school uniform the summer I turned 14, I regarded the dirty old men who tried to chat me up with a newly informed contempt. It was me and books against the world.

I mention this because an early love of reading is supposed to lead to a desire for education. But I never once wanted to go to university, and I wonder if this came about because of my early relationship with reading, which was so intense that I resented my parents, my friends, the dog and, more than anything, school — which robbed me of so much precious reading time. Though I knew that, in theory, furthering my education would lead to more, not less, reading, I was offended by the idea that I would be told what to read; to my childish mind it seemed to sully the purity of my love, like an arranged marriage of minds.

I’m 61 now, with the time and resources to become a mature student (or an immature student in my case) if I should choose. But my enmity towards education has, if anything, grown to become almost visceral. There are quite a few words which make me seethe — gusset, feisty, ‘Enjoy!’ — but none are worse than “uni”. Every time I hear it I think of entitled nobodies wasting three years of their lives, believing that they’ll swan out and nab a dream job, with no feeling of urgency that they need to get out there and get started right now.

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According to a recent YouGov poll, 60% of Britons would choose to be writers — the highest approval rating of all. For a working-class girl in 1970s England, becoming a writer was only marginally more likely than becoming Queen. Why would I want to sit in a classroom until my mid-twenties when I could be out earning a living and following my dream? On the other hand, I wasn’t keen to follow my parents on to the factory floor, even though I quite enjoyed the poetry of Aleksei Gastev, who wrote thrillingly of industrialisation in post-revolutionary Russia. (Yes, I was insufferable.)

Playing for time, I told mater and pater that I was planning to go to teacher-training college — the only respectable way for a working-class girl to get a further education without being waylaid by long-haired layabouts in search of Free Love — returning to school in petulant mode to do my A Levels. That was the theory. Within six weeks I was in London, snorting speed through twenty-pound notes with pop stars after being rewarded with the role of punk correspondent by the New Musical Express. I hated the music (“It’s just a racket!” as my mother used to say about my adored Glam Rock) but it was my big chance to be a writer and I wasn’t expecting another to come along any time soon.

Punks hated students, even though many of them had been in some sort of further education; John Lydon met Sid Vicious when they were teenagers at Hackney Technical College. A reader sent in a badge saying “I HATE STUDENTS, YEAH!”. I wore it everywhere. I still believe teenage pop stars should be the norm — not a bunch of privately educated namby-pambies getting together in a punt and thinking it might be fun to be in a band.

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What I've learned about suicide

By Julie Burchill

There’s something exciting about the fact that the teenage Beatles (George still too young to legally drink) learnt their trade playing all-nighters in the dives of Hamburg, impatient to get out there and own the world rather than sitting around watching daytime TV for three years. Yet the Beatles were succeeded by the rise of public-school prog rock, made by and beloved of students, and we punky ankle-biters felt a particular satisfaction in giving this cultural blip a good kicking. Or rather, we assumed it was a blip; such a high proportion of chart acts are now so privately and lengthily educated that Cerys Matthews no longer plays records by “over-privileged” artists such as Coldplay and Florence Welch on her radio show.

Do bright working-class kids really want the “privilege” of being stuck in a classroom for an extra three years, though? Obviously we don’t want our doctors to go straight from school to scalpel, but if you’re not training for something practical, university looks like an increasingly pointless rite of passage. After all, the vast majority of Gen Z malcontents moaning about not being able to get on the property ladder are degree-holders who will forever rue the day they first heard of Media Studies — unlike the kid who leaves school to become a plumber’s apprentice and may well be on the property ladder in both Britain and Spain by the time he’s 30. (A few years ago, the Mail on Sunday featured a 34-year-old plumber who earns £210,000 a year, owns a flat in Kensington and takes holidays in the Maldives, having been brought up on a council estate by a shelf-stacker mum.)

The relationship between the working class and education will always be bittersweet. There was a lovely scene in TOWIE recently where Chloe Sims, the glamour-puss Mother Courage of the crew who has spent her life living by her looks, welcomes her younger sister, who has just graduated, to the show: “College girl…” she says, with both pride and bemusement. Reality TV and the social influencer racket has very much become a kind of further education for bright, attractive, non-academic youngsters, the toffs of Made In Chelsea as much as the Essex spivs.

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How I fell for the USSR

By Julie Burchill

Yet there was something of a scandal when there were 85,000 applicants for the 2019 season of Love Island — more than twice the number of applicants to Oxford and Cambridge. That I was learning my trade when I was too young to vote — and am still practising it more than forty years on when most of my over-educated contemporaries who saw me as a performing monkey left the pitch long ago — makes me very happy indeed.

“Libraries gave us power,” sang the Manics — but too much institutionalised book-learning can eradicate original thinking, making us indistinguishable from the bourgeoise, which is a far worse fate than growing up to be like our poor but honest parents. I was offended the first time someone called me an autodidact, but having looked it up in one of them there dictionaries, I can’t think of a better thing to be.

I wouldn’t have fancied further education at any time, not even when it was free, in both senses of the word. But now student debt means starting adult life with a deficit — even though you may well be paying for the pleasure of attending an institution where students are suspended for stating that women have vaginas and dons are warned that raising an eyebrow may be a “micro-aggression”. Because, of course, the whole wretched Woke lark started in our hallowed groves of academe, where students are taught to believe that, contrary to the Latin root of the word, “education” is not “to lead out” but rather to shut in, the approved manner of learning being no longer listening and debating but putting one’s fingers in one’s ears and shrieking about safe spaces.

As graduation season begins and a new tranche of starry-eyed students discover that their dream job is not waiting to greet them at the other end, once more I thank my lucky stars that I escaped the constraints of my background — and of too much education.

I’m no genius, but I do know something about the social dynamics in that scene, because I kind of lived it.

All my friends got labouring jobs at the ages of fifteen or sixteen. To us, students were the middle-class kids who didn’t work, then left to go to “uni.” They never really came back, or if they did, they returned just to boss us around. Our home, for them, was something shitty to escape from. In their world, everyone babbled endlessly as if everything they had to say was fascinating. In our world, if you spoke self-importantly, people told you to shut the fuck up. They thought nothing of us; we thought nothing of them.

My experience of secondary education wasn’t good. I sat for five years in a crumbling comprehensive with thirty other bored working-class kids. There were fights in the corridors, bullying, shoplifting down the town at break times. We threw things at teachers, dragged our feet and our bags between lessons, and resisted every well-meant attempt to change us. Often disillusioned and half-broken teachers did their best to hold it all together. I hated it. I left as soon as I could with nothing to show for it.

My education might have ended there, but a decade later, I was talked into going back to school by my girlfriend. I got my A Levels by taking night classes at an adult education centre. A teacher there suggested I apply for university. I decided to give it a go. I didn’t tell my friends.

I was building a dry-stone-wall by a roadside, mulling over which through-stone fitted best, when the postman stopped to hand me a letter. He was a lad I’d been to school with. I opened it while I was chatting to him, and he seemed baffled when I told him the letter said I’d got into Oxford University. “But you’re thick like me,” he said.

After he’d driven away with a friendly wave, I thought, “How will I tell everyone?” Was I about to become one of the people I’d grown up hating? In fact, my people were proud of me and cheered me off to war against the posh people (they’d seen Good Will Hunting too).

I went for two main reasons, and neither of them were very nice. I went because our farm was struggling and had become very claustrophobic and small, way too small for me and my dad, and because I needed a new hustle: everyone I knew who had money seemed to have gone to university. But I loved books, too, and liked the idea that you could study just one subject, and skip the rest, which was handy as I was useless at most of the subjects. But it was terrifying. I didn’t want to leave the place and the people I was from, or give up being who I was. I wanted to come back afterwards, but had no plan for how that might work.

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Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.

If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.

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How to save British farming (and the countryside)

By James Rebanks

But posh kids still dominate these institutions. I learned, when I was there, that their trick was not any kind of genuine superiority but pure conditioning. Their schools and families had taught them that university was as much a social rite of passage as an opportunity to learn. They aimed high, in terms of grades — and to be fair, often worked very hard to pull it off. I was from people with lots of excuses for not doing things out of the ordinary; posh kids strode into their extraordinary future with their heads held high. No one I knew had that kind of polish and swagger, but I soon realised you could fake it. I looked at them and thought: if you fuckers can do remarkable things, then why can’t I?

It was liberating to find that I was clever enough, if I worked hard. And I knew how to work hard — for hours, days, weeks and years. OK, my people didn’t achieve highly in education or the professional white-collar world, but we were proud farmers with a culture of striving. I simply switched that mentality and applied it to education — something I hadn’t realised was possible at school. I knew the posh kids couldn’t outwork me. And the fact that I’d failed a lot was a strength, faced with their easy but brittle confidence. I knew how to get back up off the floor. People from more disadvantaged backgrounds than mine often lack this self-belief. But what if they were surrounded by people and institutions expecting and helping them to excel, as the posh kids were?

So much of this is about self-fulfilling prophecies. For years university worked because we believed it worked. It turned out “clever” people for “clever” jobs with good salaries, and sent the rest down the mine, to the factory or the farm. No one asked whether these students were really the most intelligent people. The system just confirmed the advantages of birth and background. My odd, and entirely untypical, journey exposed me to the extremes of the British education system. It has left me with complicated feelings about what universities can and can’t do.

A lot of people treat you different when they think you are an Oxford graduate than when they think you are a farm labourer. They talk to you differently. They talk to you more. They invite you to their house and try to make friends with you. They talk about books. Some of this is perhaps based on not unreasonable assumptions. Some of it is just lazy snobbery. I knew people that would talk down to me or my friends because they thought we weren’t very bright or worth very much. With those people I’d shamelessly mention having been to Oxford to knock them back a bit. It was like sprinkling fairy dust. They’d shrink back as if I’d said the password — or worse, start fawning, when five minutes earlier they’d thought I was northern, common, and knew nowt. Snobs and the powerful fetishise ‘academic’ credentials. I didn’t even pick my degree up, but it didn’t matter. Once you are in the club the detail isn’t important. You just have to look at our leading politicians. Boris Johnson would be stacking shelves in Aldi or working down the chippie if he’d been born in Hartlepool.

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My story is sometimes seen as a rags-to-riches tale. But I wasn’t exceptional; I was lucky. The point of this story is that a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society.  I look at bookshop shelves and wonder where half the stories are. Where’s the book by the girl that works in the laundrette, the man who serves you in McDonalds, the Romanian woman who cleans your hotel room, by the lads that work on the railways or the building site? We don’t care about these people enough because they don’t get heard, and they don’t get heard because we build a success machine that they don’t want to be part of, or can’t access, or use, or afford. Instead of a fair system, the machine churns out entitled mediocrities, born to be heard, born to rule.

And though universities are trying hard to become more “accessible”, there is only so much they can do. Perhaps it’s too late by the time the kids are eighteen. And if working class kids don’t apply, what can an admissions system do?

Around this time eighteen ago, I was sitting down to take my final exams. I did well. I could probably have stayed and become an academic, but I was drawn home to my own landscape and work — to the place and people that made me. Oxford didn’t make me, as a person, or a writer, but I’ve returned there over the years. The people that once taught me seem sad. They say it has gotten worse: the posh kids arrive, use it, then leave to work in the City.

And perhaps all the debt this training requires means that the kids are right to be mercenary about it all. Work hard, get the grades, move to London, do the job, get promoted, earn more, pay it back. Love of subject, creativity, taking risks and experimenting: these things feel marginal. I can see why people are sceptical about universities, and angry at the elite ones. They are often now little more than training camps for the stormtroopers of capitalism. I may have been lucky to go when I did.