Views From A Graduate - (Skill acquisition VS Education) Dillon Everest

Well, “where to start?” A question many of us probably have asked ourselves when embarking on what may be a long journey or a seemingly difficult task. But! Just like the beginning of every good novel, every well thought out film or the cartoons we all love in private beginnings never really have to make sense or follow a formula, its just important they start. And in starting, the story evolves and develops into what we share with our friends and family as the “one time I did…” or the classic “do you remember when…” episodes around a dining room table that one spontaneous night you decide to stay awake until the early hours of the morning.

But where are my manners, I haven’t even introduced myself. My name is Dillon, I’m 22 and I’ve just finished my final year at Coventry University studying BSc Analytical Chemistry & Forensic Science – yes, that’s a mouthful, but trust me it’s not as menacing as it may appear by the length of its name (but it’s certainly not suited for the likes of a twitter conversation). My three years in Coventry has brought me a cumbersome amount of joy, countless memories to take away, invaluable life skills and a set of trustworthy, like-minded people I can truly call my friends. It has also taught me a number of lessons I wouldn’t have otherwise learnt if I hadn’t come to university. Thus, this three-year rollercoaster has brought me to realise a number of things. These have varied from discovering things about myself to coming to accept that a lot of what goes on around me in ‘real’ world does have a direct impact on how I go about my life right now, as appose to when I was younger and being able to comfortably say “that doesn’t concern me”. My first experience of this was the increase in university fees.    

As many will know, currently in the UK universities have been given permission to raise their student fees up to a total of £9000 per year as a result of a lack of government funding being made available to many universities across the country. 64 universities announced their intention to charge the full £9,000 allowed by the government from 2012, with the remaining 59 all charging at least £6,000. Back in 2010 when this was first brought up (as a result of the Browne Review), it didn’t cross my mind at the time that I could eventually be paying up to £9000 for the right to study for a degree. But that’s not because I was worried about the figure, the number didn’t resonate with me in terms of it being expensive because to me it was worth the money. In 2012 when the fees were raised, I was in the mental position that a degree is the reason I’ve been in education all this time; the reason I had gone through exam after exam painfully surging forward to achieve the best grade I could. So with this in my head, at the age of 19 the price was irrelevant, because what was up for grabs was worth it.

Three years pass and it’s now 2015. I had grown a beard and put on a bit of weight thanks to the atrocious sleeping patterns and the role alcohol had played during that time. Amongst the drunken nights out (and in), the deadlines and exams, I feel university and the importance of what I gained from it had changed in comparison to what I felt I would gain when I first came to Coventry. My time in university made me realise that for the entirety of my academic life, I have been subservient to a system that has no true meaning and is nothing more than arbitrary figures set by a group of individuals who throw questions at you like cheese to lab-rats. At each passing stage of education I was told not that was I had learnt previously was incomplete, but rather it was wrong. Lessons and assignments proved to be nothing more than preparation on how to pass an exam – where the result will mean that an individual was good at passing exams, but not necessarily understood the information nor knew a way to apply it in the real world. THAT is what my problem is with the education system right up until and throughout university. Learning should be an opportunity to truly expand ones knowledge and a tool to enable them to acquire new and exciting skills. Nowadays, the purpose of a lesson or lecture is to arm you with tools to pass your upcoming exam and to penultimately make the educational institute, of which you are a member of, seem more appealing on paper.

I once thought that the point of going to into education was that you would gain the opportunity to come out with new set of skills allowing you to work efficiently in the real world but really all you’re doing is falling into a system that supposedly designed to help you get a job or earn more money or be beneficial member to society, rather than to increase quotas and raise funding. A book I read recently titled “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast” by John Kaufmann highlights the topic of skill acquisition vs. education and credentialing and the point he made in this segment hit every nail on the head for me. He goes on to say:

“Despite the high-minded efforts of teachers and professors around the world, modern methods of education and credentialing have almost nothing to do with skill acquisition.

Skill acquisition requires practicing the skill in question. It requires significant periods of sustained, focused concentration. It requires creativity and flexibility, the freedom to set your own standards of success.

Unfortunately, most modern methods of education and credentialing require simple compliance. The primary (but unstated) goal isn’t to acquire useful skills, it’s to certify the completion of a mostly arbitrary set of criteria, established by the standards committees far removed from the student, for the purpose of validating certain qualities some third party appears to care about.”

It is that focus on acquiring the certification rather than the skills that pains me to say no form of education is truly worth £9000. The real life skills like house hunting, paying bills, your entitlements as a student and a tax-paying member of society; all of these aren’t taught to you. However, from a young age you’re filled with the idea that the natural progression of thing is to go onto university and get a degree, in the hopes it puts you ahead of those competing for the same job role as yourself. The truth of the matter is, we’re guided like sheep into the barn by the idea that a university degree means success or ‘safety’ in the real world, when in actual fact you’re no closer to applying the skills needed to survive in a work environment than your degree-less peers.

In summary, university provides the opportunity to learn lessons about life and how to manage yourself by creating a sandbox environment where more often than not, it is safe to make mistakes, squander money here and there and even go hungry for extended periods of time – all without life changing consequences (in most cases). In an ideal world, these lessons cannot and should not come at such an extortionate price. But the exposure one is subjected to by going to university, mixing with a wide variety of different people and having to get along with said people, is a journey we should all have the chance to experience in one form another. What university lacks in cost effectiveness, it makes up for in life lessons.