A Distorted Reality.

‘Go to university,’ they say. ‘It’ll broaden your horizons and outlook on the world, not just from the academic side but also from the social aspects of meeting people from all over the world,’ they implore. ‘It’ll be the best three years of your life,’ they reiterate to a point borderlining brainwashing.

It’s all bullshit.

Sure, university is definitely useful as a means to an academic end, and also indeed for its unintended end of social interaction; but there is nothing of the much fabled ‘broadening of horizons’ to be found there. The people you meet will, with very few exceptions, have an agenda and nothing but the will to fulfill it. the sort of intellectual debate which higher education is fabled for will not occur until you find a group of people with at least the tolerance to hear your views, rather than immediately disregard them and use your cessation of speech as nothing as a marker for the starter of their own. Again, these people will be hard to find, as illustrated by reading Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: ‘disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome’ – I would care to wager that David’s levels of ‘irk’ were ‘pertinaciously’ high.

There’s another problem: there’s every chance (unless you’re doing a real, rather than social science or any other humanities degree) that you’re going to be expected to read shit like that. There is a world of literature written in a manner written in prose so prosaic yet unnecessarily flowery with punctuation that you will become delightfully au fait with over the next three years of your life. Minutes will turn to hours will turn to days as you battle with these books you will end up reading two to three times overall in order that you actually understand what’s going on; and that’s just hoping that you’re not going to be educated in the ‘real’ meaning behind the text: something completely abstract and definitely not explicitly stated in the text, just to spite the hours you’ve spent in a vain attempt to understand. Following on from this, your essays are never designed to actually have the questions answered directly: ‘what is x‘ never means ‘what is x‘, rather ‘what is x? What do leading scholars think of x? What problems does x pose?’ followed by more and more implied questions ad infinitum.

As a first year student, enjoy your halls. These generally basic buildings with generally basic amenities will be regarded as luxury once you leave and end up in your bedsit in that rough part of town, with the leaky toilet which never quite works properly. Paying £2 for use of washing machines and £1 for tumble driers will seem like the rational choice once you remove yet another pair of limescaled jeans, and they are no doubt your favourite this time. Sure, your doors may be set square in this hovel you now inhabit, but that offset door which would never close had a certain element of character and charm about it. It was quaint: a testament to the experiences of others who had done godknowswhat to that door. Of course, your time in halls won’t be without some shortfalls which won’t (most likely) befall you in your later years: some fucking idiot turning off your freezer (to conserve electricity, apparently)* and spoiling around £20 worth of your frozen food probably being at the top of this list. Tasteless frozen-thawed-and-refrozen sweetcorn will never happen to you again.

And yet I’d change nothing: reading Machiavelli’s casual sexism makes it all worthwhile.

*I should probably point out here that I took that point a little far: it was most likely just an accident. But I loves my food.