During the strike by the National Union of Journalists on Friday 5th November 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a repeat of a documentary on the life of Winston Churchill instead of the Today Programme. It was a clever move by the management of Radio 4, because to complain about the shift in the schedule would be – in effect – to demean a national hero who was, according Lord Digby Jones: “the greatest Englishman there has ever been”. Who could dare complain about that substitute for the Today Programme? Not me.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tpsvk
The documentary reminded us that Churchill did not do well at school and did not go on to university. But the presenter, Matthew Parris, was at pains to make it clear that Churchill was by no means stupid. Not at all – Professor David Reynolds quickly agreed: Churchill was a man of great industry and determination.
Professor Reynolds made the further point that because Churchill lacked a university education he was able to think laterally rather than sequentially. Churchill’s mind was not ‘ordered’ in the way that those of his contemporaries were, and this very feature of his mind, it was implied, made him a particularly good problem-solver.
Of course it does not follow that had Churchill gone to university his industry would have been sapped and his mind conditioned. But in protecting the reputation of Churchill’s intellect Professor Reynolds described very clearly the intellectual virtues particularly associated with the autodidact, namely determination and a certain freeness of mind.
If only the intellectual virtues associated with a university education were so readily marshalled. Instead, we scrabble around to establish the value of university education by calling upon its higher income earning potential. It is little wonder that since we lack a proper vocabulary to describe the virtues of a graduate, there has been an ambivalent public response to the proposed cuts to higher education.
Owen Gower
Senior Fellow
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