My application was already in when the information disappeared.
Today, three weeks into the course, I found out that it is in fact completely free. It’s amazing; it improves my life. I can work more on my course, and less to pay rent. I can get enough sleep.
Of course I have a vested interest in free education –I am a direct beneficiary of Prague’s free education system– but if that were not the case, I’d stand firm on its ideological necessity. Free education means freedom of movement - physical, social, cultural.
And if the ‘trickle-down theory’ actually operates anywhere, it’s in education – from education, down into society, into culture. It deepens my understanding of the people in the world, and even a little understanding can send ripples a long, long way.
It’s not just me who understands this; it makes up the marginalia of my lectures; is presupposed in every word from my Head of School. It precipitated the Velvet Revolution – who started it? The students, naturally; free thinkers in a time of unfreedom.
My Head of School looks a bit like Saint Nick; ruddy, twinkly, Czech, an elfish pointy beard, and a vivacious, kindly manner; shrewd politics, profound cosmopolitanism, a capacity for righteous fury I can only estimate. I’d be entirely unsurprised if he kept a phoenix in his office.
I have been accused – and he has defended me - of coming here to exploit the system. As the UK allegedly fills up with Poles, Romanians, and other Europeans stealing our jobs, scrounging our benefits, and clogging up our NHS, I am here, blessing the EU daily for my freedom of movement, to scrounge a degree.
Irony aside, what’s interesting about this apparently universal tendency to dichotomise society into ‘us’ and ‘them’ (to put it another way, ‘entitled’ and ‘foreign’), is that it always presupposes the objective superiority of the native system.
Why would ‘they’ come here, if we didn’t do things better? The mere presence of the alien justifies the nationalist ego. And in doing so, also justifies resenting that presence.
And are we better? (-Wait, am I ‘us’ or ‘them’ now? It’s confusing…)
The British are very proud of their NHS - never mind, for example, that the Czech Republic has Proton Beam radiotherapy, which the UK won’t finish installing until 2018.
The UK’s benefits system is also unjustifiably generous, a system of flat-rates capped per household, notwithstanding the rest of Europe which in some places ties unemployment benefit proportionally to previous household income, and in others has not capped it per household as in the UK, but provides a guaranteed minimum income per household.
We should also disregard the opinion of organisations like the Red Cross, which has rolled out a food aid programme in Britain for the first time since the Second World War, largely due to falling welfare payments in a time of rising costs.
But the UK university system – No competition, right? We’ve got Cambridge! I’m only doing my MA in Prague because I wasn’t good enough to get funded.
Well, no.
Now I am the alien, I cannot entertain for a second the idea that immigration or emigration is driven by a desire to exploit.
Yes, it is driven by a desire for a better life. That’s why I came to Prague. But I’m not here because life in the Czech Republic; is objectively better; I’m here because experiencing different ways of living in itself makes life better.
The question is wrong. It’s not ‘where is life better?’, it’s ‘how can I better my life?’
A question of motivation
Today Františka (native Czech, perfect American-inflected English and enough German to take classes taught in German) told me she’s probably going to take three years to finish her masters, so she can take all the interesting classes.
She’s already 23. Many of the classes she’s taking won’t count towards her degree.
A masters in Europe usually takes two years, but assuming you do all the work, there is twice as much of it. It’s not the same workload at half the speed. I saw Františka’s timetable; she’s taking extra classes for no extra credit.
So she’s studying because she wants to gain understanding. A degree is just a happy consequence.
Why have I never met a student like this in the UK?
And where’s that terrible gnawing anxiety, tapering to existential panic as The End nears, about what comes after? Why isn’t she comparing her CV unfavourably to Mark Zuckerberg’s, aged 23? Why isn’t she, right now, eating her own hands over her viability on the job market? Why aren’t people talking about a ‘youth mental health crisis’ in the Czech Republic?
Could it be because in an environment where education is not priced, and is therefore not thought of as a market product, the students don’t understand themselves as products?
Oops, leading question. Let me try again.
Because a fee-paying system does not allow this type of student to exist within the university environment.
Students who are paying for their time at university are predisposed to avoid wasting their time. Time is money.
So they take safe bets. They don’t go off-piste, so they never get to discover anything for themselves. Our fee system has crippled ground-breaking research at the grassroots. Commodification has, ironically, crippled real growth.
In contrast, the freedom in Prague is dizzying.
There are pressures. The organisation is a bit of a joke. The staff looks like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine. Every document has to be officially stamped by at least five different people. Digitised documents are regarded with fear and confusion, as one would regard a child out of reach, with car keys. Nobody is well paid.
But you don’t need to know where you’re going before you’ve set off. If you make a wrong turn, you can just turn around, without being screwed for time and funding. You can take the time you need. You can follow your interests freely.
It's incredibly refreshing.
Some of the Czech students are less sold on the idea. Born the same month as my younger brother, post-communist Prague has the millennial character, and is still optimistic about the freedoms of the free market.
As someone on my table murmured into their subsidised cafeteria soup, “people don’t value the education if it’s free”.
A cautionary tale exists in the university Apocrypha of the perpetual undergrad: supposedly circling the system for ten years or more, he accomplished nothing but immortality as the Univerzity Karlovy bogeyman of existential irrelevance. At the end of my second week I’ve already been warned twice.
But no amount of temptation to drift, obsolete administration, or nationalist resentment outweighs the value of this breath-taking opportunity. Free thought!
In 2006 in the UK, I matriculated into the first year of ‘top-up fees’.
Only today did I realise that I’d quietly internalised something about education which I now understand to be a profitable lie; that it must count towards something concrete and quantifiable. Time, money, talent, and effort go in; a degree and job prospects come out. That’s the deal.
The Czech system doesn’t buy into that. Education is celebrated for its own sake, as a means of sharing in and contributing to the enrichment of the complex web of society and culture through which all of us move and live. It is cultural currency.
Introduce fees at any level, and you transform this social and cultural exchange from a qualitative interaction to a quantitative process. You dehumanise the young studying, and you move intellectual exploration onto rail-tracks. I know, I’ve studied in both systems.
It may be too late for the UK: instead of raising standards, fees have changed the meaning of education.
The Czech Republic must not make the same mistake.
