Down with the exam factories
V S Naipaul, Nobel Prize-winning writer and admirably grumpy contrarian, has said the time he spent studying English at University College, Oxford in the early 1950s “didn’t teach me anything, nothing at all”. He wanted to write, he told a news conference at the University of the West Indies, and being transplanted from Trinidad to Oxford just got in the way.
This is perhaps not a message that Oxford’s gilded youth, just returning to do their finals, will want to hear, but it certainly accords with my experience. Oxford, when I was there 30 years ago, practised a sort of anti-education. Short terms, a quick skim through the syllabus (history in my case), and at the end, all too soon, the nightmare of finals – 10 three-hour exams in five days in which the game was to produce cleverly argued, apparently coherent essays on subjects about which you knew nothing. (I was very good at this and got a first, thus making me perfect material for a career in journalism.)
The medieval period was my particular nightmare. A rather brilliant medievalist, then not connected to any college but standing in for a don on sabbatical and charged with the onerous burden of teaching me, implied that I was abysmal. “If I said that was rubbish,” he said of an essay on the Anglo-Norman church I had researched and written in one unbroken 20-hour stretch, “what brickbats would you throw back at me?” I enjoyed the way he’d couched the criticism, but got his gist.
Anyway, I was hopeless on English history before 1485 (the 14th and 15th centuries are still a closed book to me), but somehow I had to get through the wretched medieval paper, which was the first of the 10 we took. Stupidly, I decided to leave revision on that one till last – that old human thing of doing the easy stuff, the periods I felt I knew, first – and still hadn’t started at midnight on the night before the exam. I went for a late-night sandwich in the bar, and when I went back to the library it had been locked, with my medieval notes and witless meanderings on the Anglo-Norman church still inside. I remember my panic to this day.
I eventually managed to contact the night porter and have them extracted from the library, so at 12.45am on the morning before an exam starting at 9am I finally sit down with my notes on an 800-year period about which I know nothing. I am sunk basically, but come the morning of the exam – after four hours’ sleep and so many aspirin that by day four of this ordeal I had vicious stomach pains – there are two questions I think I can do, including one very general one along the lines of “What did 1066 change?”
Dredging up my recollections from two years before of that terrible tutorial with the brilliant stand-in medievalist, I recalled him saying 1066 changed very little – how could a small band of Normans change the mores of Anglo-Saxon society overnight? Cultures just didn’t work that way. I decided to go for broke: on the basis of a tiny sprinkling of facts about the Anglo-Norman church and huge quantities of chutzpah and hollow rhetoric, I argued that 1066 – top date in English history – was a complete irrelevance. One in the eye for the examiners as well as King Harold (it was Harold, wasn’t it?), I felt. I got an extremely good mark in that paper.
At 18 or 19, one is too young to have anything to offer at university. Better to travel, do voluntary work, sweep the roads and talk to passers-by – our screwed up but sometimes interesting fellow citizens. In medicine and chemistry, I suppose you need to train; but not in the humanities. Read if you want to study English; go to the scenes of battles and the sites of monuments if you want to study history; go to France if you want to study French. It’s just a game – universities are exam machines, doing society the useful service of sorting us out into classes. It’s irrelevant and pointless and anti-educational. Education should be about the free play of ideas and the battle to understand; exams celebrate superficiality and rhetorical extravagance.
How much can you read in a couple of years? Proust, Joyce, Melville and the Bible if you’re lucky. Unless you’ve read, properly read, all four, you don’t even have the basis for the study of literature. How many 20-year-olds, at Oxford or anywhere else, have completed that set?
A writer I was talking to yesterday, the Australian Richard Flanagan, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the 1980s, told me he thought Oxford had “made mediocrity a virtue and called it a tradition”. But it’s not just the fault of Oxford, with its lawns and complacency and ridiculous finals, and loud, Sloaney students who think they know everything but know nothing. It’s the way we have mechanised university life and created exam factories. Go for two or three years – actually for 72 weeks, the true length of the “course” – if you like and read some books or study some history, but don’t call it an education. It’s barely the beginning of an education. Only by 50 do you know that you know nothing, and that you have to start learning.
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