Why is high school generally awful, and university generally all right, if not better? There are many aspects to the answer, but one that may be less obvious, because it involves a social creation that has come to seem inevitable, is that university offers an escape from the horror of the class.
I use “class” in its ordinary sense: that group of twenty, thirty, forty souls that each school pupil is placed into at the beginning of every school year, and with which she or he must then spend five days a week, for the whole school year.
Classes tend to grow more disagreeable as kids get older.
Pupils are placed in classes from the beginning to the end of their time in school. A class can be unpleasant at any age, and can also perhaps, every now and then, become a warm and cohesive group. But there are intrinsic reasons why this is rare, and why classes tend to grow more disagreeable as kids get older.
A school class is not a group of kids united by some personal bond of family or friendship. In school systems with some elements of choice, the pupils may, at least, share some affinity of interest, but even here, the mandatory nature of schooling and the dreariness of so much teaching means this will rarely be enough to create a satisfactory bond.
What unites the class is essentially administrative: the authorities within a given school have decided on some principle—perhaps no more sophisticated than the alphabet—that this group of kids will have to spend the entire year together. For the kids, there is then no escape. They cannot leave the class; indeed they are penalized even for not showing up at its every gathering. Day in, day out, five days a week, ten months a year, they must be together, no matter how much unease or distress or dislike their classmates provoke in them—emotions that will so often come to the fore in the sensitive years of adolescence.
The class is a social formation birthed by compulsion and bureaucracy. Hence its most bizarre feature: everyone in a class is, with only small deviations, to be the same age. The complex, nourishing interplay, in ordinary life, of infants, children, adolescents and adults of various ages is abolished by the class. No one in their right mind would seek to form a durable social group made up of twenty (say) thirteen-year-olds and nothing else, yet we were are all raised by being shoved into a succession of such groups from early childhood onwards. No wonder we grow up frazzled.
The class is disquietingly similar to the modern army.
The class is disquietingly similar to the sorts of social groups created by the modern army. There too, the groups are formed of people of about the same age, who are brought together by administrative fiat, subject to constant impositions of authority, and must serve out their time before they can leave the group. There too, whatever cohesion the group does manage to form can be shattered by a new set of orders, breaking it up in favour of new groupings. Why have we devised a form of education so similar to the systems designed to get men to kill and die on an industrial scale?
To be sure, university students are also gathered into classes. But there are crucial differences. A university student is afforded a great deal of choice in what she will study, and of course there is no law saying she has to study at all. She is also not placed in a single class, a unit that she must be with all year, for all of her time in the classroom, hour after hour, week after week: there are different classes for each single course.
The homogenization into age groups is also less extreme at university. An adult can start university at any age, and her age will, in itself, play no role in determining to which classes she will be assigned. Students also simply spend far less time in the university classroom than they do in school, so that far less of their lives is taken up by compulsory socialization with others exactly the same age as them. The young do of course largely enjoy each other’s company—and often much more so at nineteen than thirteen—but it is far more enjoyable when it is part of a more varied diet.
The ideal type of the university class is a small group of people, mostly, but not all, young, who meet for a few hours a week to study something they have chosen to learn and for which they are apt students. Of course, reality often falls short of that ideal, but at least it is, in itself, an attractive proposition for how to conduct education.
The school class is group of children or adolescents, born within the same twelve months, compelled by law to gather together for some thirty hours a week. This can only seem an educational ideal at all for those who imagine education’s role to be the mass production of depleted, obedient subjects.
