Urban v's the Commentariat
- Thread starter Belushi
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DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
I'm glad I went, at 24 in my home town. After work/jail/streets/sofasurf/dole/work since 16 it was a brilliant doss to spend 3 years studying poetry and writing. I never had any thought of it being employment though, not poetry. Wouldn't do it with the way fees are now. 30k debt wouldn't be worth it.
seventh bullet
sovietwave
Not saying there's anything wrong with aspiration per se, so don't get me wrong.
I would be the first to go in my family (and I'm getting on!), however, I could graduate and realistically just end up doing the kind of job I'm doing now only tens of thousands of pounds in debt.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
I know
rekil
to menny cranks
My sister has an english and history degree and works in insurance. Last week she took her €135k a year boss aside and gave him a dressing down over his behaviour and bullying of women in the office. He got sacked on friday. That's a little bit radicalism - one bit more radicalism than anything LP has ever done anyway.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Love it
Good for her - and way more radical than anything LP has done.
rekil
to menny cranks
Not a one-off either, she has a solid track record of doing that kind of thing.Love it
Theisticle
Well-Known Member
Jesus Christ. I mean really?
The top 30 young people in digital media: Nos 30-11
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/16/top-30-young-people-digital-media-nos-30-11?CMP=twt_gu
The top 30 young people in digital media: Nos 30-11
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/16/top-30-young-people-digital-media-nos-30-11?CMP=twt_gu
I count myself very lucky that I graduated (from a polytechnic) just before student loans came in and before tuition fees. First and last of my family to graduate, although that's no indication of ability given the handful of HNDs among the others. Edited to add: And no, I don't regret going.
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el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
don't know really. i initially planned that after my a-levels i would sack everything else off and go and join a protest camp and see where life took me after that. if i'd been mentally healthier i would have done that. but uni was a good option for free, given that what i primarily wanted was to not have to get up in the morning. if i'd had any ambitions or aspirations greater than getting stoned or perhaps one day writing a bit, then maybe i'd have made different decisions. i wish that, at the time, i'd had the knowledge and mental strength to go and find something useful to do.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
She's my hero today
weepiper
I fix the machines that fight climate change
I should have used the NVQ I got at agricultural college the year before and got a job as a countryside ranger.
captainmission
Well-Known Member
There was a video on the previous thread that sums her up perfectly. She's giving a talk to some oxford types, government advisers, judges, barristers, in her own words ambitious people. And she says she's a revolutionary socialist. And they give her a little round of applause. And she smiles. It tells you everything you need to know about the role she plays.
barney_pig
Po-cha-na-quar-hip
Twelve years ago I was a train driver earning £30,000 to £35,000pa, owned my own mortgage and no other debt.
Today I have two degrees, £35,000 of debt and a rented house and I earn less than the living wage.
Today I have two degrees, £35,000 of debt and a rented house and I earn less than the living wage.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
But by Jove I bet you are full of ambition and spunk!
If you had your time again, would you still make the same choice? The thing is, I may not have made direct use of my degree, but bits of it have certainly been extremely useful.
barney_pig
Po-cha-na-quar-hip
In an instant.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
My point is not about it being worth going to university but about a class refusal to do so (however fanciful and forgetting the reality that w/c class kids are now faced with debt/education choices). And to make the calculation whether its worth it or not is to have already abandoned that refusal.
You seem to be assuming that "university" has to mean Oxbridge - what I went to was a well respected poly (a better reputation for modern languages than the university in the same city), although it's been called a university since the 1990s. BTW I'd also claim that the chance to leave the area I'd more or less grown up in was almost as helpful, albeit in a different way, as any of the course material.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Tbh, my point rests on university not meaning oxbridge - it's not going to mess much up if people who would never have gone to oxbridge boycott it!
It's specifically the normal unis that i want people to refuse - en masse - to go to. Now i know that's fantasy and isn't going to happen - i can even think of loads of good individual reasons to go - but,i was asked what i'd ideally like to happen (i think! Need to check).
It might have made more of a difference at a time when there was a very clear split between universities and polytechnics (now muddied by the so-called new universities) - both equally demanding, but the latter had far more of a practical and technical bias and were also less elitist in intake.Tbh, my point rests on university not meaning oxbridge - it's not going to mess much up if people who would never have gone to oxbridge boycott it!
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
She's more cock sock than rev soc.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
Only after he's spent a night down the docks, earning his less than minimum wage.
That's why I took up writing. The personal predilections of Plymouth's naval community are too vile even for one of my liberated tastes.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
As a method of throwing a clog into the workings of the education machine, probably hard enough to break the machine (the function of which is, of course, predicated on a certain number of people making an economic calculation that higher ed will accrue more benefits than debts to them), it'd work really well. If we look at how the academy has become managerialised - at how university no longer means learning how to think even in the limited sense that it originally did, but is merely a transaction between two parties - then refusing to enter the edifice, refusal to either implicitly or explicitly support it or the ideology(s) behind it, could only be beneficial to the class, either from the viewpoint that elements of the class were no longer being removed and potentially re-fashioned as members of the bourgeoisie, or the viewpoint of helping an edifice of domination to collapse under its' own weight.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I once said to a sailor "so, rum, sodomy and the lash, eh?".
He said "piss off! Way too vanilla!".
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
I once said to a sailor "so, rum, sodomy and the lash, eh?".
He said "piss off! Way too vanilla!".
Would this be the time to relate, in detail, the use submariners have for jars of chopped liver?
heh. Very similar to my situation. My dad always said, never work on the trains like he did, leaving school at 14. I couldn't have done anyway due to eyesight but you know... The general feeling then from teaching staff and alike, was a degree, any degree, was supposed to show employers you had some kind of application and ability to learn. Even if you hadn't gone to one of the Red Bricks. So I was gonna do History / Philosophy or English and Philosophy... Ended up doing Fine Art... I sometimes think I should have carried on with law post GCSE but I hate paperwork and whigs.
Currently unemployed. Have never earned the threshold to start paying back student loans (late 90's version.)
Can people explain what is wrong with memorialising the dead of Syria, or is it the person doing the drawings,
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