Last week, a certificate arrived in the post. It was an MA.

It’s my first ever degree, gained at the age of 41, and getting it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. In contemplating the lessons I’ve learned on that journey, and attempting to distil them, in this student issue, for those of you about to start college, I realise that I haven’t really come to terms with the wildly conflicting attitudes and feelings I have towards academia. I am, as they say in psychotherapy-speak, split.
Of course, I blame my mother. She once typed out, on an index card, a paragraph of the wisest words I have ever read on the subject of formal education and, after a painful time when I was struggling with this split at school, and freaking out about doing the Leaving, pasted the card on my Swiss Cheese plant in my bedroom so I would see it when I came home. “You are in the process of being indoctrinated,” it began. These were words written by Doris Lessing, in the preface to her masterwork, The Golden Notebook. “What you are being taught is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show you how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors.” She goes on to encourage those who are robust enough to leave this “self-perpetuating system” and educate themselves, hone their own judgment, and offers advice to those who stay in the system to remember, always, that “that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.”
Like a lightning bolt, these words hit home, and fanned the flames of my individualism, my anarchistic sensibility that (rightly) found fault with all authority. The trouble with such a fierce manifesto for individuality is that it’s tough to live by. Artists in garrets starve for a very good reason. The forces of conformity are powerful, and, in a sense, are necessary to submit to, to succeed financially. Very few individualists manage to succeed outside the system.
The other message I received loud and clear from my parents and teachers at that time was the need to get a qualification, almost any qualification, in order to give myself choice later in life. But it seemed to me to be too high a price to pay at the time. Once a scholarship boy, with a record number of A’s at the Inter, I stewed in an unhappy adolescent soup of guilt and fear in the last two years of school. The fear was of being judged – for as much as I despised the “authorities”, part of me badly wanted their approval. But, for that, I needed to study, and come up with the goods that demonstrated I was compliant. I could not find the maturity to separate from the fear, to see the whole endeavour as a necessary evil, a means to an end - I took things far too personally. If my words weren’t good enough, then I wasn’t good enough. But then, as an adolescent, everything is personal. On my last day of school, my history teacher took me aside and wished that he could have written on my report card “this pupil shows a good sense of revolt”. (Happily, he was to become headmaster, after the old retainers and fascists had their turn.)
The downside of this choice to flunk the Leaving and avoid University was that I’ve been relatively poor for most of my adult life. I trained as an actor, and in my 20s found that I could make quite a good living from it. But actors are like divine children – we give ourselves over to the gods of theatre, and if we’re lucky, we find that the gods smile down on us. I’d receive a tax bill for £1000 one day, and get an American ad that paid me £1200 the next day. Chaotic living. I worked in the Abbey, when there was a National Theatre to speak of, and was able to wine and dine myself most evenings of the week, travel the world and get paid for it, and through that mysterious fateful Bohemian mechanism of show business, I was the right face at the right time in enough auditions to make my 20s fulfilling and comfortable. In between jobs, not having a degree, I worked as a waiter - but when you’re young, restaurant work, while exhausting, is highly sociable and fun. You can eat at the restaurant, live off tips, and the wage pays the bills and the taxes. I still have friends from that time, whom I would not be without.
But, in the end, when Hollywood wasn’t beckoning, and I became tired of speaking other people’s words, I reluctantly realised that I needed that which I had spent all my life resisting: a qualification.
And I’ve gained a few, over the years, in London. The most rewarding one was a diploma that enabled me to become a teacher myself, in a subject that is wildly, determinedly esoteric: psychological astrology. The college where I teach is one that is world-renowned, but one that resolutely avoids the pitfalls of becoming an institution, a hide-bound authority - its loose modular structure, and its encouragement of students to excel in their own individual talent and personality is beyond the remit of traditional education. Students there who seek validation or approval from the staff invariably drift away and do not complete the course - those who have a sense of their own inner authority and wisdom thrive in the Platonic atmosphere, and allow themselves to be educated - from educare – to draw out what is already there. I am blessed to be associated with it.
But the Masters pitted me, finally, against the demon of conformity, a psychology department that prided itself in being in the “top third” in the UK league table. And it almost defeated me. It was touch and go whether I could find the words that retained my sense of the world and its chaos and confusion, and simultaneously demonstrated that I was embedded in the academic conventions, had accepted their necessity. It took a year longer than it could have, I had to rewrite everything I presented in the final year. I found some original ways of writing, employed unconventional methodologies. I had to face my fear of being fiercely criticised and come through it, and not take it personally enough to cripple me, although I was wounded for a while. The thing that sticks in my throat still is the absurd notion that academia is impartial - while most people in it attempt to maintain the illusion of it, all it takes is one teacher to take a dislike to your work, and you’re sunk - because they’ll couch their criticism in seemingly objective terms, that are nearly impossible to counter. I managed to, but the unfairness still rankles.
As a strange final gracenote to my last days of studenthood, the director of training did a strange thing when my last piece of work’s mark had arrived - he told me, with a long face, that he had bad news for me. Then he said, “only joking, you’ve passed.”
He did me a service. I have a piece of paper. It’s a necessary joke. It is both worthless and highly valuable - for I have empowered myself to give myself real choices over the next few years, with the opportunity to get some very interesting and lucrative jobs, should I choose to. That’s it. It’s nothing more than that. The real stuff I’ve learned in spite of academia, not because of it.
Of course, my mother deserves no blame, only my most profound gratitude. She was speaking to the highest in me, challenged me on a level that, although risky, has borne a harvest of fruit later in life. I’m proud, finally, to have had a life inside and outside the self-perpetuating system that is education, to have experienced both.
Dear student, I could wish no more than this: that you should be so lucky.