the perks of being a university dropout
Notes on self-education
If you asked me what my biggest insecurity is — more than my skin, or weight, or weird anxiety around my coffee order — I would say it’s the fact that I don’t have a degree. No, not even a bachelor’s. In a world of peers with PhDs, MFAs and whatever other whole host of letters that follow their names, I have a stubborn nothingness. Just me, Ella, full stop.
Education in my family was a very serious business; the key to financial security. My mother was the first generation in her family to go to university (just beat out from being the first by her older sister). My dad surprised his entire family by pursuing a career in academia, and now is a historian at a well-regarded Australian institution. Neither were very good with money. They were part of the precarious middle class, unable to own a home, and relying on well-paying jobs to survive the debt that was racking up.
From the start of my life, it was expected that I would improve on their credentials. I would attend university, and then postgraduate school. I would get a good job and find a partner who also had a good job, and then I would never have to worry in my life ever again. It was practically written in the stars. I grew up surrounded by academics. I did well in high school. I got into the university where my father teaches, with assured entry into their law program after my undergraduate: a competitive award that I recall being proud to have qualified for.
My first semester saw me pulling high grades, taking entry-level classes in literature and astrophysics. I read H.D. for the first time, and learned about the transatlantic slave trade. I liked the source material — I loved the lectures — but I was so bored. Bored of Perth, bored of being on the same campus as my dad, bored of the same skies and faces and bus routes. From a tutoring job at a KUMON centre (I know) I saved up money. I didn’t know what I was saving for until I saw an advertisement for a job teaching children in Spain. Huh, I thought. Then I deferred my degree and booked a flight.
I never made it back to university, for a variety of different reasons. I tried, but I just couldn’t sit in a classroom anymore. My brain was betraying me, it felt like; shattering into a million pieces. I wanted to be with my friends, I wanted to be drunk, or high, or at the beach. I couldn’t make myself show up on time, or hand assignments in. I liked the books, but fundamentally, I could just not see the point. On balance I preferred to be at my job, where I taught children to swim; an occupation I found incredibly purposeful and rewarding. Its worth was self-evident. Kids came in with bad stroke styles, or unable to dunk their heads under the water, and by the time they left, their problems had been resolved.
When I moved to London, everyone had gone to college — UCL or Cambridge or Oxford. All the writers I admired seemed to have launched themselves from prestigious postgraduate programs in Iowa or NYC or Texas. They knew things I didn’t. They had mentors, and connections. One of them had, as his thesis advisor, Michael Cunningham. I was so incredibly jealous, not only of the opportunities that I felt had been provided to them (a helpful faculty member seemed to be able to pass on work to this editor or that agent with ease) but also of their effortless knowledge. Theory, philosophy, craft. I wanted to be inside their heads.
As such, I embarked on the task of educating myself with a ferocious determination. I printed out PDFs of Adorno, Jameson, Sontag, Said. I read magazines religiously — the ones I’d never known existed. I picked up books on the theory of fiction and the history of the Soviet Union and the culture of restaurant kitchens. I watched all the free Yale seminar videos that were available on YouTube, and took notes. I underlined, highlighted, bookmarked. Yet the more I did this, the more I realised I didn’t know, could never know. I worried that what I was really missing out on was a guiding hand. This frustrated me: why couldn’t someone just give me the right interpretation? Why couldn’t they point to the correct opinion I was supposed to be forming, and then tell me what a good job I’d done?
As time went on, I began to think that maybe this unorthodox and self-guided program was giving me things that a degree could not. For lots of people, learning can cease after university. And really, is anyone at a great place to be studying when they are eighteen or nineteen? I know I wasn’t. So basic things ended up being revelatory for me. Barthes, which is usually taught to first-years, had a momentous effect on me, as did Fanon. Because I came to these ideas late, with no essay to write or tutorial to prep for, I was reading differently. I was not reading to please any professor or keep up with any classmates. I was reading for me: I was in a place to really absorb the work and decide what it meant for myself. This is a form of confidence, I think, and the cornerstone of being able to really trust my own interpretation of the world. It is wonderful not to be told how to experience your own life.
Equally — and maybe this is delusion — I think a rigorous MFA might have trained me out of the things that I like most about my own voice: an attention to rhythm and accent, an unvarnished approach to narration. Someone said that I was honest, but I think maybe I just had no chance to learn how to create artifice. Again, I could take what I wanted from guides and other writers, but sometimes ignorance is a blessing. My most formative instruction is my daily existence: my nine to five office job, the music I listen to, my dog, my family, my partner. I don’t think about the mechanics of language when I write: I just sit down and it comes out. I am not thinking; I am listening to myself. The minute details of sentences and plots can always be refined and improved, but the initial rush, for me, must come from a place unfettered by rubrics and marking guides and other people’s critical feedback. You have to learn on the job, so to speak.
I am very lucky to not rely on a degree, and it’s that felicity that also influences my thoughts, because it isn’t guaranteed. I am lucky that people gave me a shot, whether it was taking on a pitch or employing me. I am lucky that my partner supported me when I was between jobs and the prospects looked bleak; lucky that I have travelled. I would never suggest to a young person that they skip college, because for most people it is a formative and very useful time of their lives — and by and large, it’s also necessary for most careers. Even now, I think about going back; being a student again. Would it make me happy? Would it unlock a secret part of my brain I have no access to right now? Would it change anything?
Perhaps, though, being a student has very little to do with being in a classroom. There is so much information out in the world: so many articles and textbooks and syllabi just floating around on the internet. You can learn anything that you want, right now, for free! If you don’t like reading, there are audiobooks. If you don’t like audiobooks, there are documentaries, millions of hours, available on YouTube. Interviews, panels, lectures — all out there.
The process of that learning is just as valuable as the information itself. You are teaching yourself to think, and ask questions, and pay attention and form opinions and argue your position. You are relying on initiative and curiosity to seek out knowledge, rather than academic or personal validation: a habit that I think is necessary in an age of misinformation and outright propaganda. In that respect, in a world that is otherwise so stratified and unfair, the only thing stopping you from continuing your education is yourself. What a wonderful thought.
I am reading Rural Hours by Harriet Baker — a bucolic and wonderfully evocative group biography of three women writers’ pastoral lives. The Woolf section is especially lovely.
I am listening to Spacey Jane’s new singles. It’s okay that all their music sounds the same because it’s good, and that’s all I have to say on that!
I am watching the new Turning Points documentary series on the Vietnam War on Netflix. I would love recommendations for Vietnamese academics and writers that tackle the subject, but I think it’s a great primer for one of the most tangled and terrible episodes of international conflict in the 20th century.
Nice!
I also think the idea of university has drastically changed in our times from an institution focused on "knowledge" to a place which is just there to produce workforce for industry.