STUDENT DAYS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 144, 14 December 1935, Page 9

STUDENT DAYS

THE ENGLISH SYSTEM

FREEDOM OF UNIVERSITIES

FORTUNATE METHOD

Autumn, for some reason beyond my comprehension, is education's spring; we madly insist that the student's year shall come to a fiery crisis of examination amid the merciless scorchings or the leaden afternoons of a thunderous July, writes Ivor Brown in the "Manchester Guardian." So the cycle of instruction must begin to turn again when the leaves are dying; the new life of colleges appears as the season darkens and the sun depans. Thousands of men and women have just made their first contact with university life, and first impressions are abiding. Surely one's first habitation of Oxford jor Cambridge should be made when May is painting the water meadows with delight and not when October is sucking up the mists from the now muddy and unfiowered surface of those once enchanting fields. To me at least the word Oxford incurably suggests rain on the \vindo\v, mists creeping up, and the dull droop of a grey day. Such, from October to December, was the constant colour scheme of first acquaintance. Not that one minded; it was all so good; there could, be lustre without sunlight; in any case, to be fussy about weather is a sign lof middle age. CAUSE FOR JOY. Yes, the dullness was climatic only. I would not demur to the "best time of your life" theories of undergraduate existence. One cannot generalise with confidence. There are many types of studenfand several types of university. For some, still resident at home and going daily by tram or bus to the college lecture instead of to the school class, the difference of status and of circumstance is not large. But to one recently "a boarder at a closely disciplined school who how suddenly finds him or her self in the larger liberties of university 'life .the change is sweeping, and for 'those who can use their liberty with' some gusto arid discretion it is a'cause for great rejoicing.. V ' '.-.. ,'" ;' , V ■.■'.',., ~,;;.' J '. "Often," •wrote- Mr. Max in : his .essay '.otiV "Going' Back to School," "have, I wondered whether a Spartan system be., really, well for youths who are. bound mostly for Capuan. universities. 'It is; true; certainly, that' this system, makes Oxford or ' Cambridge doubly delectable. Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the consciousness ttiat they are.no longer at school. The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is ail put gently back at Oxford or Cambridge. And the discipline to which they are subject is so slight that it does but ■ serve to accentuate their real; freedom," . '•'.'■■"■ more consoling experience for a boy or girl of .lively mind than ..to be allowed, the nonsense which, school denied? Schools, I know," are less intolerant nowadays of what, used to. be called nonsense; there are even.some which thrive, on ; nothing else. Still; for the average student arriving at Jus university it ris a pleasant ; prospect which permits him. to air his peculiarities and indulge a vagrant taste in fads and follies of the mind. THE HAPPY STUDENT. So there is a general tradition of the Happy Student. This may sometimes be the romantic fidde-faddle of an adult mind cosseting its weakness for nostalgia. "Imagine an undergraduate saying, 'Boys, it is May; we are young; we are in Heidelberg."1 jC. E. Montague naturally pointed out that nobody ever regards youth in that way until youth is over; only the elders, he thought, might wallow in this kind of emotion "as wallowing narwhals love the deep." But the fact that youth does not self-consciously proclaim the vernal vigour and the flush of May does not destroy the fact of undergraduate felicity; nor does this bliss depend upon the presence of ancient walls, rooms with a view, velvet of lawns, and the bookish smell of a city drenched in scholarship's tradition. The undergraduate makes Alsatia for himself; in one place he does it more easily than in another, but he will not fail wherever there is liberty and company to share it. "In^the meantime we talked and ran about London looking for second-hand copies of Anatole France, or stood in the rain to listen to Socialist speeches, indifferent, because we had heard it before, and yet believing in it and in fraternity and equality and all that." Thus Miss Storm Jameson writing of "Student Days" and writing for all the generous-minded that ever were poor and happy, free and simple; in their university years. HARDER TODAY. "And yet believing." It must bs a good deal harder to believe "nowadays. For things seemed pretty simple just before the war; you went on educating and giving votes, applied Home Rule principles, ended or mended the House of Lords, taxed land values, disestablished a church or two, and perhaps nationalised a little. Then, of course, the state of the nation would look up; prosperity, like freedom, would broaden down from Government to Government—Lib.-Lab. Governments, of course. It was in the year 1913 that Professor J. B. Bury announced that "the struggle of reason against authority has ended in. what appears now to be a decisive and permanent victory for liberty." Permanent! The. professor's "History of the Freedom of Thought" can only be brought up to date by reprinting it with the black margins of a funeral card. Those who are now joining political clubs and debating societies for the first time, neglecting their books to talk all night, as every undergraduate occasionally should, and contriving wild symposia on every topic under the sun, have my profound sympathy. It must be so much harder' to acquire the feeling of a human dawn, of warmth and light increasing in the skies of the world. Is it possible to be happy at eighteen if one disbelieves in everything save the possible advantage of keeping gas-masks on the premises? The common answer of the generous mind is now to snatch at Communism. It is a chilly article to hug. One could derive a certain warmth from hopes of democratic Socialism with its freedom, equality, fraternity, and so forth. But iron discipline, dictatorship, liquidating the bourgeoisie, dismissal of truth as an abstract bourgeois, metaphyiscal conception, suppression of all opinion save the official party hokum —whe that Is human can sing a chorus or empty a- glass to a creed like that? Is this the sunrise dreamed upon by chivalrous minds revolted by the spectacle of present night? It may, for all I know, be the necessary method of escape. lam not now concerned to counter or deny the logic of Communism; I am merely regarding it as a beacon and central heater for the somewhat dark and shiversome condition ot those young people who would like peace and justice to flourish upon earth, Viewed as such the creed most certainly has serious limitations. None the less, however chilly the political air, however cloudy the economic sky, however natural the appre-

hension of cosmic catastrophe round the corner, the student is in some sort briefly blessed; and it is the crown of his blessing that he does not realise its brevity. Three years are little enough in later life, but between eighteen and twenty-one they are an epoch, an epoch in which the responsibilities are so much smaller than the opportunities. That happy proportion of life will soon be reversed, the chances dwindling as the duties grow. As Miss Storm Jameson says:— As soon as that vagabond life comes to an end, when from poor scholars you become taxpayers, heads of families, and what not, you may be comfortable, but are you happy? Of course not. You have possessions— and that alone is enough U- destroy your peace of mind. Besides, you have become conscious of time. You j feel its work in your bones, like thu' death-watch beetle in an ageing fabric. | That is sad but sober truth for the parent, consolation for the sqn and daughter. Having no job, the student cannot lose one. For him tomorrow Is almost eternity and the world, accoraingly, a malleable article It is | there to be hammered and there is timo ! for the job.