In Search of Truth ?

This here's rotten commie subversive propaganda and I don't wanna catch any a you clowns readin' it!!

This Friday, March 31st, is the last day students can withdraw from this university and still have their fees returned to them.

If you have had any doubts about being at University, any suspicions about the worth of the place, any thoughts as to just what you are doing, then take note: they may be the last honest thoughts you have while you're here or after you leave.

If you haven't been taken in by all the raving about the challenges you will face and the adventures you are undertaking, then have faith in your instincts. Humans have few enough creative impulses to thought or action, and almost all of them are stifled by one or other system of education. Take heed of the voice within you that asks you to stop driving yourself on. That voice may well be your last gasp before you sink into the quicksand of the system.

Get your money back while you can, drop out, and start living.

How many of you have slaved for years within schools in order to get to university, to make the final preparation for your life? You may not have thought of it in such terms. But for what other reason have you spent a dozen years being taught and coaxed through an endless succession of 'achievements'. Did you ever notice how many of these 'achievements' are signified by a piece of paper? A boy scout certificate, a school report, or a university entrance — piles and piles of paper, fit for nothing other than pinning on the wall.

How many children suffer primary school in the hope of liberation at high school, then get to high school and find themselves yearning for a place at the top; be it the first fifteen, the sixth or seventh forms, or the prefects? No sooner do they attain a new stage than they are told of the allurements of the next, with university at the top. So few people have the courage or the foresight to say "no". This of course is hardly surprising from products of an education system which does not encourage students to question, let alone rebel.

Perhaps this whole hierarchic (not to mention hieratic) structure has some relation to the development of the brain: God knows, but psychological science certainly doesn't. Even if it has, does that excuse the number of freedoms that are denied in the promise of the next level. "You can't do that yet, wait until you get to university", they say. Except that stage one students so often find that they have to wait until they're doing a thesis before they can be original. And even then there are restrictions. So it goes on.

Hopefully Salient does not still have to point to the ultimate villain, which is to be found not so much in the misguided search for truth itself, but in certain truths about the economic structure of society. We do, however, want to implant in the minds of our readers a questioning attitude. In this instance, as everywhere, the question to be asked is: "in the end, whose interests does it serve?" If students find it hard to answer this question, and fail to become aware of the economic forces that shape the university, hopefully they will at least question some of the more glaring illusions about the university.

Then in the first Salient this year Economics Professor Brian Philpott claimed: "It is the job of the university to seek the truth to teach the truth ..."

The experience of too many students repudiates these claims.

Roger Steele