Education news & jobs at the Times Higher Education Supplement: "Gary Day

Gary Day
Published: 02 January 2004

Ah yes, students. Are they getting dimmer? One recently asked a colleague if he was the author of the medieval morality play Everyman. A few weeks ago, I gave a talk to some sixthformers about the hero in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the novel critics love to hate. I thought I'd done a reasonable job but I hadn't reckoned with my audience. "What's a mandolin?" asked an A2 English student. You hear it all the time. Students don't know anything.

They don't read and they can't write. But isn't it just that, as we get older, the gap between us and the students widens, giving the illusion that they know far less when, in fact, it's us who know far more - and that's very little?

Worryingly, there's a new breed abroad who have little patience with such thinking. They are unashamed elitists who are appalled that more people are going to university now than ever before. What particularly offends these products of privilege is that the comprehensive pupil, who did not have access to the best teachers and a well-stocked library, may need support in adjusting to a university environment. It is obscene to witness those who have had every advantage pouring contempt on those who have had none.

They don't allow for the fact that students are changed by what they learn.

And staff too, as I discovered when discussing The Rape of the Lock, Pope's poem about the cutting of a curl from a woman's hair, with students who wear the hijab. The teaching context gave this work a wholly new and unexpected power. The more we are shaken up by such encounters, the more chance there is of creating what Leavis called an "educated public" that would check the power of press and politicians. Yes, he was serious.

These self-styled guardians of higher education have got it wrong. It is not students who are a threat to standards but government bureaucracy, which wants to maintain them at a low level because that's what makes them easier to measure. We can all join in this fight and, in doing so, prove that intellectual battles needn't lead to colleagues cutting one another in the corridor. And if we win, why, we can all go out and celebrate and show each other our footwear.

Gary Day is principal lecturer in English at De Montfort University.