DEAD END ?
By PENELOPE HOUSTON
THE older universities still boast (and how soon will the boast become a confession 2) that they teach one how to live, but not how to make a living. They stand for values, theories of life, which, one quickly finds out, are alien to modern society. An arts course is no training for a particular job, no jumping off place for a particular destination ; by the technician's standard, it leaves us uneducated. This becomes increasingly and depressingly obvious to the many graduates who have received the certain benefits and uncertain rewards of a university education, who are now looking, gloomily, despairingly, for jobs. These are the advertisers in the personal columns, the hundreds who pounce on any remote possi- bility of an overworked and underpaid job. The British Council, a notoriously bad payer, has two or three thousand names on its files ; the B.B.C. is inundated with applicants. These graduates are beginning to wonder (since this is the way they have been brought up to think) just what was the point of it all. Men come off little better than women ; for women, this is the position. University appointments' boards offer jobs by the score to teachers, to those interested in welfare work, to those interested in industry (this often seems to be a grandiose and big-business way of saying welfare work), and, of course, there are the sticky, clutching tentacles of the Civil Service, with the bribes of security and pensions. Every- one cannot fit into these neat pigeon holes ; it would be unfortunate, although perhaps convenient, if everyone could.
At college we saw the arts degree as the limit of the immediate horizon. It seemed to give us the key to any number of doors. We talked, confidently, exhaustingly, exhaustively, of the future. We were not frightened of work, but we developed a dangerous taste for doing work that we enjoy, and it is hard to believe that such work no longer exists for us. We talked of journalism, publishing, broad- casting, the film industry, of those government jobs on the fringes of the civil service, of a range of possibilities that seemed inexhaustible. We publicly envied the holders of safe jobs, and secretly determined that in a few weeks we would be laughing at them. We were given a close approximation—perhaps too close— to Virginia Woolf's five hundred a year and a room of one's own. To justify this, many of us are would-be writers who are interested not in State help, in itself an alarming and even threatening idea, but in securing work which will keep us alive, rather than killing us off in our twenties with the routine of the in-tray and the out-tray. In fact, we have been encouraged to hope for a future which seems no longer to exist, except for those with influential friends or infinite patience.
Disillusionment comes quickly ; everywhere the " house full " notices are up. By now we know all the answers ; no paper, no premises, staff limited by a fixed establishment, no time or inclination to train us, no money. The reasons come sympathetically,, sadly, smugly, helpfully ; we are given good advice at every corner. We have no experience, the fatal handicap, but we are not to be allowed to acquire any. There seems, for women, to be one magic which unlocks the door: shorthand. But we may feel that we should be able to walk up to the front door and ask for a job, instead of sneaking in the back way, armed with an unwanted qualification which puts three years behind those who did secretarial courses straight from school, and which must condemn us to some years behind a typewriter. We are, incidentally, inclined to be abnormally bad typists.
We see the point of those who reject us so unanimously, and we do not really expect theta to see ours. More and more people come from the universities into a world which has no labour problems, and where the demand for new blood seems to be a platitude rather than a reality. The position was given me in the cold, irrefutable tones of the government official. We are a luxury that society cannot afford, on a level with foreign books, newsprint, and the work of foreign artists who annoy the unions. We are useless for export, regrettably unproductive ; we are not wanted on this voyage. Our existence is precarious, unhappy and disillusioning, and there are many more of us than most people imagine. We live on a spiral of nerve strain, excitement, inertia and depression: the keying up of expectation, the sales talk, the insistence on qualities we seem no longer to possess, and then the descent into boredom, futility, obses- sion with failure, until the whole process starts again. After three or four months, thirty or so interviews, we are worn down to the thin edge of exhaustion. We expect the worst, we agree to anything, we want only the chance to prove that we can do a job of work. Perhaps, defeated, we retire to the shorthand schools, putting off reality for a few more months, finding temporary comfort in the illusion of business. Or we accept the verdict that jobs exist only in certain very limited spheres, and take our first- and second-class honours degrees to jobs we do not want, and may do badly. We do not yet question the value of our education, but we can only realise that in believing that work can be enjoyed rather than got through, and in looking for such work, we are revealing our own remoteness from actual conditions. We are, in our strange, inadequate and slightly idiotic way, casualties of war, and of the planners' dream which rough cuts its pegs to fit its pattern of awkwardly-shaped holes.
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