One of the better tree consuming enterprises in Britain is a thing called The Week, which is a summary of the output of the rest of the print media. This week's The Week came out today. There's some best articles page, which features some of the best chunks of commentary they can find, and this week's number two British chunk is this, from Janey Daley, in the Telegraph:
When I was a student at Berkeley, says Janet Daley, I spent my evenings in a San Francisco cinema ushering people to their seats. I was not alone. Working your way through college is what most American undergraduates do - even the rich ones. It's not just a way to pay for your studies; it's regarded as a social good in itself. To Americans, economic self-sufficiency is a virtue. Imagine my shock then, when I came to Britain for postgraduate work and was told that my college would be most unlikely to permit me to work. In Britain, I soon realised, having to take a job while at college is regarded as an affront: consider how shocked we were all meant to be this week at the news that one in five Oxford students now find it necessary to do so. Underlying this attitude is an ingrained haughtiness: you don't go to university in Britain just to be educated but to become a certain sort of person. And that person does not wait tables. Small wonder relations between the classes are so much more relaxed in America than they are here: in America, the man who brings you-coffee "may be a future professor of history".
Quite so. That point about how you never know who you might be insulting is one of my favourite arguments in favour of rampant capitalism, USA-style.
Certainly some of the best education I've had has been on the job, and the nastier the job was the more educational it tended to be. I once had a month and a half stuffing plastic bottles two at a time under a machine that spewed photographic chemicals. One mistake, and you spend the rest of the day with your genitals soaked in the stuff.
I never got it wrong, so I was spared the worst of it. Good hands, I guess. Not clumsy. All that keeping wicket at school.
But imagine doing something like that for your whole working life. I had plenty of imagining to do when I was doing it, and that was definitely one of the things I imagined. (Not necessarily ghastly, was my conclusion, if you were really good at it and not good for anything more complicated or difficult.) Maybe I was only pretending to be a worker type worker during the vacation, but the experience surely made me a better person, and a better educated person. A different "certain sort of person", you might say.
Is that true for all British universities or just for places such as Oxford? (The phrase "red brick university" pops into my head -- is that what you call your government-sponsored schools? Do students there expect to work while they attend school?) I know that when I was a student I usually also had a job and so did most of my friends (and we all expected to have full time summer jobs) -- but I have a difficult time picturing an undergraduate Harvard student dashing off to work in a supermarket between classes. (Harvard students: please feel free to correct me in this.)
I spent my college summers working full time (a sweater warehouse, a supermarket, a discount store, an IBM factory) and, more often than not, I had a part time job during the academic year as well (supermarkets and discount stores and that IBM plant again).
My youngest child will start college in a few weeks and I assume he will work part time while going to school, just as his sister is doing and just as his older brother did. You might say it's the American way.
Nothing like a inspiring anecdote to distract folks from the reality of serious economic inequality.
What next? How tipping builds the self-esteem of the lowest-paid workers?
Here's another interesting article on college students and low-paid workers.
www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1103-02.htm
I wonder if that 'one in five Oxford students taking a job' refers to termtime or vacation 'money working'? Vacation working would fit with my understanding of the situation.
It would be nigh on impossible to work for money as well as writing the two+ essays per week that Oxford Arts students typically produce, and even less realistic for the lab-bound scientists.
Oxford graduates aren't handed out an MA after 7 years for nothing - they really do work harder and achieve more intellectually than graduates of most other universities.
*ducks fast*
"Small wonder relations between the classes are so much more relaxed in America than they are here: in America, the man who brings you-coffee 'may be a future professor of history'."
The former part of this statement is one of the great myths of North American culture. Look at some of the literature that has been written on class and classism in North America: Paul Fussell's brilliant if somewhat dated "CLASS: A Guide Through the American Status System," Jim Goad's abrasive, yes the truth does hurt, "Redneck Manifesto," and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed."
Janey Daley comes across as an elitest as she "regarded (her student work)as a social good." Yeah, Janet upper-middle or above. No way you had to work for your education with that point of view. As much as people who like to justify student work as educational and a well-rounding influence the reality is that the cost of a post secondary education makes student work, for many, a necessity that can take away from various apects of student life.
I worked at high school and then at university during the year and in the summer, and I'm neither American or British. Again, in NZ, it was what you did at uni.
How is regarding working as a social good evidence that you didn't have to work for your education? I had to work, but I regarded it as beneficial.
Yep, time spent working takes away from other aspects of a student life, but so does time spent playing sport, with friends, going to clubs, studying, going to lectures, reading books, sleeping. That's the trade-off we have to make with every hour of every day. Apart from the money benefits having a job means you meet a wider range of people than those at uni - like those who have no plans of going to uni, you get another range of experiences (working as a nurses' aide was something no uni club provided) and you get paid. And while I don't know about JJ, most of us who aren't independently wealthy get jobs when we finish uni. At my first professional job my boss also hired a girl who had only ever worked as a uni tutor, she found the whole process much more of a shock than I did.
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