How to cut tuition fees
We should teach only the useful stuff: scavenging, strangling and how to operate a water cannon
You can't put a price on a good education. Except, actually, you can – and it turns out that price is just over £9,000 a year.
Unsurprisingly many
students are furious at the hike in
tuition fees; but apart from shouting about it or trying to smash the Treasury to bits with sticks, what practical steps can we take to make education more affordable?
Nine thousand pounds a year sounds like a lot – but actually, it's shitloads. Yet it turns out that if you divide shitloads by 52, it comes out at around £173 a week, which sounds more achievable. Especially if your course only lasts seven days. So let's only provide week-long courses.
Obviously, to compress a three-year course into one week, the field of study will have to be streamlined a bit. Whittled down. Reduced to a series of bullet points. But in many cases, that's an advantage.
Take history. There's already far too much of it. In fact, mankind is generating a "past mountain", which grows 24 hours in size every single day. No one can be expected to keep all of that in their head. There simply isn't room. Even award-winning historians will be lost for words if you unexpectedly leap out in front of them and demand they list everything that happened on, say, 6 July 1919, before the special quiz music ends, especially if they thought they were alone in the house.
So instead of studying the whole of human history, why not focus on a concentrated period, such as the most exciting five minutes of the second world war? That way you just get the fun bits with the machine guns and everything, and there's none of that boring exploration of the "consequences" or the "causes" or "how we can stop it happening again". The philosopher George Santayana famously remarked that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. But if you
have forgotten history, you won't know you're repeating it – so it won't matter. And you won't have heard of George Santayana, either. Which is just as well, because, to be honest, he sounds like a bit of a smart arse.
Likewise, when it comes to studying politics, let's not waste time examining both sides of an argument – that's just confusing. Instead of learning the pros and cons of say, slavery, why not just learn the pros? Not only is it far quicker, but you actually stand more chance of getting a job when you graduate, perhaps as a feisty TV news pundit or Daily Express columnist. Or as the owner of a cotton plantation.
Speaking of careers, there are far too many courses with no clear vocational goal. If you're not studying with a view to ensuring your future prosperity, why, precisely, are you bothering to read the Decameron? For the cultural benefit of all mankind? Look around you. Culture's doing just fine without your help. We've got everything we need – from cage-fighting at the lowbrow end of the spectrum through to the dizzy heights of James Cameron's Avatar right up at the top. There's something for everyone.
Rather than providing frivolous courses in artsy-fartsy-thinky-winky subjects with no obvious revenue stream, our educational institutions could save a lot of time and unnecessary expense by only providing courses that train students for jobs we're definitely going to need in the brilliant future we're steadily carving for ourselves. What's the point in learning botany? We all know there won't be plantlife. Apart from maybe the odd triffid, or whatever sort of moss can withstand a dirty bomb. So why bother learning about it? There's no money to be made.
Instead, let's focus on giving young people the skills society will be crying out for in the years or months to come. Practical vocations such as water-cannon operator, wasteland scavenger, penguin coffin logger, Thunderdome umpire, dissident strangler, henchperson and pie ingredient.
Come to think of it, even those courses are going to be costly, and the eventual wages so insultingly low it'll take them three lifetimes to repay the loans. They can make up some of the shortfall by taking part in medical experiments, fellating ministers or breeding offspring for food, but the chances are that the big society will never recoup the funds it lent to these little people.
Which leaves us one final option. Let's simply give up. You know, as a species. Put an end to this weird "progress" experiment we've all been taking part in and actively revert to the level of farmyard animals. They look happy, don't they, with their tails and their mud? Let's join them.
Starting tomorrow, let's stop bothering to learn or teach anything. Within months the whole world will be far simpler for all concerned. We can issue the next generation with a few basic instructions, some warm clothes and toilet paper, and leave them to it.
Eventually society will regress to the point where there are only two words – "boh" (meaning good) and "bah" (meaning bad). Everything will be either bah or boh; we'll shuffle around bah-ing or boh-ing, chewing the cud or eating the vitamin rusks they occasionally fire in our direction from the turrets on their trucks. And everyone will be happy. Or ignorant. Or both.
Merry Christmas.
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Thelomen Toblerone, on 18 December 2010 - 05:20 PM, said:
