C'EST LA VIE. OR MAYBE NOT?

L. was the first person who has told me that, once abroad, the most stupid thing that an expat could ever do is to hang out just with internationals. Or - worse, with people that shares your same nationality. 

It's true. We all know it: if you hang out with locals, your language and pronunciation gets better, you get into local customs way faster and you're probably on the right path to get some good friends despite the differences.

We used to spend much of our time with true Englishmen, just to end up too drunk to even remember any interesting conversation we might have had. That's also English culture, and that's fine. Although you can never get to a level where you can genuinely share opinions, especially in this cold latitude where build up a friendship not-alcohol-based seems to be tabu. Or at least not so easy to build up for latinos :)

So we came to the conclusion (or maybe we're trying to convince ourselves that we're not making a mistake) that perhaps, sometimes, we can also hang out with the hundreds of international students that Leeds luckily has. And for once, I can write about a nice conversation we ended up with about what's good and what's not so good about English educational system.

English schools, especially universities, are widely known as having one of the best way to teach students in order to better introduce them to the work world. Seeing it from an undergraduate perspective, i cannot support neither of the two thesis, but thank to P., a MA student, we saw some clamorous fails.

It's true universities try their best to open up work possibilities. But they also rely way too much on the student himself, giving hints but never complete knowledge. I.e., isn't it weird that for a language student not even a module of Linguistic is compulsory? Linguistic is the basic to study any language, it teaches you how they have formed and it's surely a big help for those who are trying to learn a completely new lingo. Instead, is seen as an elective: in other words, you can do that or you can spend two hours of your week learning about nanotechnology. Which is cool, but how relevant is for your degree?

Also, not much importance is given to history. Which, even from my fresher's point of view, was crystal clear. I mean, I guess in Italy no lecturer would ever ask a vast audience "how many of you have ever heard of the word harem? Who knows what comintern is? Lenin, never heard of him?"

That's because at a GCSE level history is taught just from a UK vision. And later on, if a student can choose whatever he would like to learn, why should he bother? So again, a student is expected to fulfil these huuuuge gaps involuntarily left by schools. It's okay to ask for some personal interests, but isn't it too much? Why a seventeen years old kid should bother reading Anna Karenina if is not vaguely related to what he's studying?

Moreover, this again creates huge gaps between people and social classes. Is not new to Sociology that who is born in a low income family has fewer way to get to knowledge and probably, in it's life time, he will get less and less interested in something that he cannot literally learn and enjoy at school. 

I kind of see this big freedom given to students as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it raises up an individual able to organise himself, think by himself in any situation and deal with problems a normal Italian student could never deal with. On the other hand, those who do not have the possibilities, will or just enough support to stick to one decision are lost forever.

A way of thinking highly highlighted by the new welfare and educational agenda undertaken by the government: raise by 300% university fees it's a way to discourage people who are not really willing to study from starting a degree, but also a way to stop both those who do not have the money or qualifications to enter any scholarship program.

If Einstein was born in nowadays England, the world would have never known the great physicist who changed so badly twentieth century's history.

C'est la vie. Or maybe not?