But of course I’m generalising. Of course if I had gone to an ultra hip school (somewhere along Bras Brasah) where students don’t get put under some self-professed great idea of a liberal arts experiment the foundation on which this entry rests on would not have stood. And of course if I had not endowed my education with such Great Expectations I may not have been dealt with something closer to a Bleak House.
Here, you do not read widely. You’re not even compelled, nor motivated to read widely. And this is not because the school runs off with your tuition fees and decides to patronise your attendance with scant notes so that you pass your final exams and leave with a certificate from the 21st-ranked university in the world. It is, lo and behold, precisely because the school bombards you with readings that you find little else time for anything to further this metal tinsel of a mind they so gleefully oil. The outcome? You read loads of articles prescribed by the school, so that all 60 of you in the same class are armed with the same information, same quotable quotes by which each of you attempt to regurgitate in a 3-hour exam at the end of your course. No, I do not even have the time to look up on what Karl Marx talks about in his Communist Manifesto about “commercial crises” even if it relates (somewhat) to what the syllabus attempts to cover. No, I do not have time to compare the trade ideas of Krugman or Ricardo, nor do I have the time to assess China’s role in nuclear energy, if these -God forbid- not be found in our “readings for the week”. Here, you are a machine. A machine that depreciates and rots and rusts. You read, highlight and regurgitate. Here, you kiss goodbye to hours spent intellectually sparring over thoughts on global imbalances. (And your classmate, to your quiet exasperation, will say, “Why are you reading that? That’s not tested!”) Here, reading T.S. Eliot during lunchtime is construed as arrogance because that implicitly means that you have done all your school readings, and that textbooks are beyond you. Oh yes, if it be architecturally possible the school would, I suspect, build its building on stacks of textbooks and books alone.
What have I learnt? I have learnt what Bernanke (2006) says; I have learnt what Gros & Thygesen (2009) says, I have memorised Howorth (2005) – and clearly the system works in such a way that Loo (2011) is merely a plagiarised form of all of the above.
I cannot wait for August. When ideas will finally not be dictated by a page number, nor will thinking aloud be an act of crime and cowardice in class.
