Graduation is a beginning, not an end

I read a very interesting article in the Times today by Libby Purves: "The simple way to stop being uneducated".

Purves discusses various ways in which not having a University education isn't really an impediment to learning at all. The article is written after an interview that Keira Knightley gave to a magazine. Knightley states that she is "completely uneducated" because she did not go to university. Absent the point that nobody would notice whether Knightley attended university or not, Purves argues that she has been able to get a more meaningful education and through a better route.

Libby Purves writes: "The poor girl is currently wading through a biography of Albert Speer, a history of the Vietnam War, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Germaine Greer's hoard old Female Eunuch". With dyslexia, too. What a heroine. Meanwhile, innumerable men and women who have university degrees - and therefore no chips but a sense of 2:1 superiority - will be on the beach happily sinking themselves in moronic chick-lit and Jeremy Clarkson."

All very true, I thought. I go get the feeling that many students treat their university education as an end rather than as a beginning. But a university education should have a much greater role than just being another line on a curriculum vitae. The skills and interest levels in learning that students have acquired over 20+ years of education can surely be put to much better use. Moreover, if this doesn't happen soon after leaving university, surely the mind goes stale and you eventually lose all worth of your education.

It is difficult, I acknowledge, to find time to do whatever it is that you find interesting. There's always increasing pressure to find work and pay off debts whilst simultaneously acquiring lots of new responsibilities.

I have to say, though, that these things whilst being troublesome for me too, haven't thus far prevented me from doing the things I wanted to do. Primarily, this means that all those books that I kept thinking I would definitely read at some point in the future, I have now actually come back to. I shall omit reciting all the reading I have done this Summer (may be at some point on this blog I shall talk about the odd book that really caught my attention) but suffice to say: its been very pleasurable and I do believe that I am spending more time in books each day than I did during my time at university. At first, I found this quite disconcerting; but now, helped somewhat by this article, I feel pretty good!