The profitable lie of the fee-paying education stunts personal, social and cultural growth
I am British and I got my BA in the UK.
When I applied to my present masters programme, the website listed fees of €2000 (£1600) – a lot, but tokenistic in comparison to the UK. When those numbers disappeared, my application was already in.
I arrived in Prague on September 20th. I matriculated at Charles University on October 1st. Today I got an email telling me that I’m here for free. No fees payable whatsoever. It isn’t a scholarship; it’s just how the system works. I almost fell off my chair.
Clearly I have a vested interest in free education – I am now a direct beneficiary of it – but that aside, the way I see it shaping the learning environment is strikingly positive. If ‘trickle-down theory’ works anywhere, it’s in education: from education, down into society, into the surrounding culture. Free education means freedom of social and cultural movement, which both individuals and societies need to move up in the world.
Prague gets this. Who precipitated the Velvet Revolution? Students, of course. Perhaps education equipped them for free thinking in a totalitarian regime.
My Head of School seems an unlikely hero of free thought; his pointy beard, ruddy cheeks and vivacious, kindly manner remind me more of Saint Nick than Socrates, but mixed with profound cosmopolitanism, shrewd politics, and a capacity for fury I haven’t seen but can sense, I’d be unsurprised to find a phoenix in his office.
I have been accused – and he has defended me – of coming here to exploit the system. As the UK allegedly fills up with Europeans stealing our jobs, scrounging our benefits, and clogging our NHS, I am here to scrounge myself a degree. This apparently universal tendency to dichotomise society into ‘us’ and ‘them’, or rather, ‘entitled’ and ‘foreign’, is interesting because it always presupposes the objective superiority of the native system. Why would ‘they’ come here, if ‘we’ didn’t do things better? In such a way, the mere presence of the alien justifies a nationalist ego, in turn justifying nationalist resentment.
But the UK university system is objectively better, isn’t it? We’ve got Cambridge! And we need to maintain that status – why else would we be paying £9000 per year? Good question.
Charles is ranked in the top 300 of 18,000 universities worldwide, which beats most UK universities hands-down. Charles is free, if you can pass the entrance tests. But still, topping the Times World University Rankings, there it is: Cambridge. For me, the crucial difference is to be found in the learning culture.
Františka, a Czech student on my programme, told me she’ll probably take three years to complete her masters, just so she can fit in all the classes of interest to her. She’s already 23, but for the first year of an MA here that’s younger than most.
Masters degrees in Europe usually take two years, but they are not the same workload at half the speed. They’re twice the work and more if you want it – extra classes, an extra year, an extra two years, from zero to polymath, as far as you want to go. Many of the classes Františka is taking won’t count towards her degree, because she’s not studying primarily for a degree; she’s studying to know stuff. The degree is a happy consequence. And where’s that terrible gnawing anxiety, tapering to existential panic as the end nears? Why isn’t Františka, right now, eating her own hands over personal viability on the job market?
It appears that in this environment, where education is not priced and is, therefore, not understood as a market product, the students haven’t internalised an idea of themselves as products, facing a binary future of success or failure. They remain young adult humans accruing cultural capital, but mainly studying simply to equip their minds. The pressures UK students associate with university – money, time, the future, and to a certain extent academic pressure – are all absent or considerably reduced. Czech students aren’t concerned whether their earning potential in a recession will prove equal to £30k of student debt. Moreover, as the UK watches an unprecedented proportion of the young people passing through its education system suffer with depression, anxiety or other mental ill-health, the light-touch Czech model strikes me as a much easier place to be happy.
Does the UK’s pressurised educational environment at least result in higher academic standards? This is debateable. Students who are paying for their time at university are predisposed to avoid wasting their time. Time is money. So they take safe bets. They don’t go off-piste, intellectually, so they never get to discover anything for themselves. It’s a dizzy joy missed, but it also constitutes a step never taken towards genuinely ground-breaking research. Fees are mentally hobbling in a way you don’t realise until you’re free of them. The freedom at Charles is breathtaking.
It’s not perfect. Every document has to be stamped by at least five different officials – no exceptions. Digitised documents are regarded with fear and confusion, as one would regard a child out of reach, with car keys. There’s a puzzling degree of arbitrary deference to men expected from women, which does concern me. And the faculty looks like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine.
But as a student, you don’t need to know where exactly you’re going before you’ve even started. If you make a wrong turn, you can just turn around, without being screwed, and you can follow your interests as far as you can run with them. For me, it’s deeply refreshing.
Some of the Czech students are less sold on the idea. Post-communist Prague, born in ‘89, shares some of the character of the millennial. There’s a feeling here of new social freedom: a culture come of age, living it up, still too young to be told. Capitalist logic is consumed and gladly proselytised as something young, free, maybe even slightly edgy. Some may see free education as a socialist relic, a useless breeding ground for fecklessness and economic irrelevance. As someone on my table murmured into their (subsidised) cafeteria soup, “people don’t value education if it’s free”.
A further cautionary tale exist in the university Apocrypha: one undergraduate circled the halls for ten years taking free classes, and nobody can tell me what happened to him, ultimately. But the warning is clear: beware your own complacency.
I entered university in the first year of ‘top-up fees’ in the UK, in 2006. It is sobering to realise nobody now studying in the UK will be able to recall a time before then, yet the difference to individuals’ understanding and experience of their own education is palpable.
Education can be for its own sake; a means of sharing and enriching the complex web of society and culture through which all of us move and live. It is cultural currency. It is worth the time to make you a bigger, better, happier person, more connected to your world.
Introduce fees at any level, and you transform this from a qualitative interaction into a quantitative process. A social and cultural exchange becomes a numbers game. Everyone in it is dehumanised, particularly the young, and intellectual exploration is levered onto rail-tracks. Despite the argument, fees are not necessary to maintain a university’s standing on the world stage. I am living the proof.
It may be too late for the UK – instead of raising standards, fees have changed education qualitatively. The Czech Republic must not make the same mistake.
Image from: http://www.expats.cz/prague/czech/colleges/charlesuniversityinpraguefacultyofsocialsciences/