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Will today's students - as consumers demanding value-for-money - take to the
streets as previous generations have done?
The natural rebelliousness of youth may soon manifest itself in student
protest, says Sarah Dunant in her A Point of View column.
I'm not sure how many of the thousands of new students who began lectures at
university this week will have their dials tuned to my Radio 4 broadcast (if
indeed, after freshers' week, they have the hand-eye coordination to find the
radio at all).
But given the numbers, I would bet some parents certainly will; people who,
like me, have come through the choppy waters of "the last family summer" and
are now experiencing the empty nest with a mixture of pain and euphoria.
With the possible exception of defusing landmines, parenting is surely one of
the most nerve-wracking jobs one can do in life, since the crisis you've just
weathered is never adequate preparation for the one you don't know you're about
to hit.
Thus, having survived supermarket tantrums, an age of teenage grunting, and the
endless neuroses of exams, you - like me - may still have been taken aback by
the emergence of what can only be described as the 18-year-old caged
Rottweiler, gnawing at the bars of home and taking lumps of flesh out of
whoever tries to come too near them.
It's nobody's fault. Be they fresh out of school or grudgingly back home after
the dramas of a gap year, they have all been stir crazy to get out and start
real living. In this respect, 18 is probably the most difficult age of all.
Because while they are now technically adults, in reality they (as we did
before them) still have an awful lot of growing up to do.
In the past, of course, children took on the overt mantle of adulthood much
younger: Boys through work, or war; girls through work, or marriage and
children. In societies that valued education - at least for the rich, say the
heyday of the renaissance - schooling took place earlier. By their mid-teens
even girls with an education were ready for marriage, while boys were at
university; come 19 or 20 they were out in the world.
While young blood could and did make history, in many of those societies boys
were still seen as too immature to take on the full responsibilities of
citizenship until well into their 20s. In Venice, for instance, boys born into
the oligarchic web of ruling families were not allowed a vote until they were
25.
There was even a change of uniform to mark the rite of passage.
Spend any time looking at Venetian paintings of the period and you'll notice
flocks of cocky young men strutting their stuff in brightly coloured hose (each
leg a different colour). Come their 25th birthday and this peacock fashion
would be swapped for the sober black robes of the Venetian senator. It was time
to stop playing and become players, even if that meant only deciding which
faction to sell your vote to.
Across the Italian peninsula, Florence pitched the bar even higher. Most
wealthy male Florentines were not deemed ready for marriage till their late 20s
or early 30s. When they did tie the knot it would be with women 10 or 15 years
their junior, sequestered in convents or family homes to secure their
virginity. Needless to say such purity was not demanded of the boys. The very
opposite in fact.
Hot-blooded
The result? Some 20 years of testosterone on the streets. Sex 'n' drugs and
rock 'n' roll may have been coined by the baby-boomers but knocking back the
booze and getting your rocks off has been a time honoured rite of passage for
all young men with time and money. History, however you clothe it, is often
just biology in action.
Take the streets of Verona. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, like many of his
plays, originates from a much earlier Italian source, but many elements remain
constant. The first folio doesn't give actual ages for the protagonists but
most of the young men gripped by the tribal violence of family would have been
in their late teens or 20s: Rash, bellicose, hot-blooded, with time and no
responsibilities, theirs was a license to cause trouble.
Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet: Not so different from today's young adults
Juliet, younger - though in some ways emotionally more mature - is still highly
volatile. A stroppy teenager in other words. Though, interestingly, there is no
word for teenager at this point in history, they did have a term for the
trouble it caused in girls.
"Out, you green-sickness carrion! Out, you baggage! You tallow-face," yells her
father when she defies him over her marriage to Paris. Greensickness was a
recognised malady; a disease to explain the arrival of rebellion in what up
until then had been sweet, subservient little girls. The cure? Either lock 'em
up and beat and starve it out of them or marry them off and tap the rising sap
of sexuality that way. They would recover soon enough.
By 18, while the young men were still out playing, those same young women would
have had one, two, even three children, if they hadn't died in childbirth along
the way.
So, thank heavens in all manner of ways for western modernity, not least in the
equality of life and education.
Decades of debt
Nevertheless, as I kissed goodbye to my 18-year-old daughter (and though she
hugged me tight it was clear to both of us that she couldn't wait to get away),
I did find myself wondering how the next three years were actually going to
help her grow up. How far they were going to feed or frustrate her. It is a
worry that has nothing to do with her gender.
Since history is, at root, simply a long-term accumulation of change, we are of
course living through it all the time. And the recent changes in higher
education, alongside the drastic cuts that are about to come, mean that
university is going to be a very different experience for my daughter and her
peers.
Continue reading the main story
Start Quote
Some things are worth fighting for - and the quality of higher education and
its rightful place in a modern democracy is surely one of them
End Quote
First there is money. After years of tuition fees, students now hitting a
post-crisis job market are shouldering a debt that many of them will take
decades to shift. While the idea of fees was always going to be a shock for a
country where higher education had been free, when the economy was booming and
the dominant culture was "buy on credit, pay back with crippling interest
sometime, but never now", saddling students with debt in some way just got them
onto the ladder earlier. Owing money was almost a badge of modern citizenship.
If anything good has come out of this economic debacle, it's surely that our
belief that debt is a way of life has been severely challenged, so that we now
see it for what it is - selling a future in order to buy a present. Not only do
current students face long and very uncertain futures but their present does
not look too rosy either. With universities about to be hit by what many
predict will be an unprecedented 25% of cuts, no-one - certainly not those
imposing them - has a clue what the impact will be.
Add that to the Browne enquiry, which is expected to recommend that tuition
fees be allowed to rise to up to 10,000 a year and higher education is
beginning to look more like a liability than a privilege.
Stroppy
How students will react to all of this is yet to be seen. Maybe they'll be
docile, put their heads down and accept it. But maybe not. After all, if there
is one thing that the introduction of fees has done, it is to redefine higher
education as a commodity rather than a right. In the language of the Thatcher
revolution, students have become customers. And these days when they don't get
value for money, customers - rather like teenagers - can get quite stroppy.
How ironic, then, it would be if this first generation of "academic consumers"
really did sink their teeth into the hand that was no longer properly feeding
them.
The last noticeable period of student unrest was in the 60s when only 13% of
young people went into higher education. Now, with getting on for half of 18 to
22-year-olds at university, it could be a seismic political moment. Ironic also
because today's politicians have spent so much time hand-wringing over the
political apathy of youth. But this may be the moment when that changes.
If when the going gets tough, the tough can no longer go shopping, maybe
they'll get out on the streets instead. While we will no doubt worry about what
they will not be learning in class, maybe something else will be learned about
life: That some things are worth fighting for. And the quality of higher
education and its rightful place in a modern democracy is surely one of them.
All this, of course, is still in the future. For now, those of us with empty
nests must swallow our tears and celebrate getting the bathroom back, or
walking into a kitchen which doesn't resemble the aftermath of a three-day rock
festival.
In fact, maybe this whole vision of student protest is simply my own perverse
form of wish-fulfilment. Because if they're not occupying the provost lodge, or
wherever the centre of power is these days, it's less than three months until
they come home again for Christmas.
A Point of View's latest writer
image of Sarah Dunant Sarah Dunant Author and journalist
My specialism is history and, in particular, the Renaissance period.
I will be looking at contemporary moments through a lens of history,
culturally, politically and economically - but hopefully with a flat smile on
my face.
A lot of people out there tell you what you should think but I was never
convinced by the wagging finger.
If you make people "come out to play", think more and respond, then you have a
conversation.
My topics will include the vilification of the baby-boomers and how society has
handled huge wealth and poverty.
The best thing about the web is that you have to be up for conversation, so I
look forward to reader's comments with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.