“I went to uni for no better reason that it seemed to be the done thing.”Credit:WAtoday
In other words,university is nourishing for both your social life and your soul;like your veggies,it’s good for you.
Signing yourself into the cohort of Australian society with a degree means you will,by and large,live longer,be healthier and – as every university is quick to emphasise – get a job. You’ll receive a “career-focused education”(UNSW),“develop your employability” (UQ),“be in high demand” (Adelaide) and,finally,you will “graduate with the confidence to launch straight into your career” (Melbourne). It’s not for nothing,after all,that the last major overhaul of federal education policy was named the “Job-Ready Graduates Package”.
In my case,I went to university for no reason better than it seemed to be the done thing. I was raised by parents who had enjoyed bounteous education,courtesy of Gough Whitlam. I had gone to school with people who thought tertiary education was something to be admired,and I promptly found my way onto a campus. What surprised me,when I actually arrived,was how pointless the whole thing seemed.
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Of course,thinking something is pointless isn’t the same as it really being so. A speech I gave in year 7,for example,did not have any bearing on the rest of my life,but I still cried after I got a bad mark for it. All through my time at high school,there was a clear mentality that thingsmattered,no matter how dull they were:study hard,do well in exams,get good marks,get a shiny ATAR and set up that mythical thing known as “your future”.
But,somehow,I wound up in circumstances a long way from a vocational beeline:an arts degree. Here was a foreign scenario where I no longer knew what everyone’s marks were,or even if my marks were any good. (I soon discovered that university tutors are harsher than your high school teachers.) What’s more,these marks didn’tmatter. Most of my time was spent sitting around classrooms discussing obscure books and esoteric ideas. It didn’t matter if you agreed;it didn’t even matter if you did the readings – at least half the people in my courses didn’t. You would leave the place with a degree just the same.
What is frustrating on one level is liberating on another – you’re not bound to any immediate purpose,so you can just follow your interests as far as they take you. Much of my final year at uni was spent trying to get my head around the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This was not,by any reasonable definition,useful:a working knowledge of a philosophical theory is not something you flash on your CV,and Wittgenstein himself would routinely exhort his students to quit academic life for something more meaningful,like working on a farm. Still,I got pleasure out of this academic game,trying to figure out something that was deeply fascinating,being guided by a brilliant,generous professor,and without a need to worry about how this translated into practical existence.