You're Danger-What? Dangermouse, Did You Say?

These musings have not appeared in a scholarly journal and they have not been peer reviewed.

I keep hearing that people are dangerous when they're educated. Despite the fact that I am now, nearly, educated, I have to say something about this apparently widespread belief before steam comes out of my ears.

It's bollocks. And more to the point, it's snobby, class-ist bollocks, since even before the massive hike in student loans the number of students at university who'd come straight off the estates seemed pretty damn small. Now it will probably be smaller than the number of university bureaucrats who gave a shit when I talked to them about their relationship with China.

Every office of every politician in the land is filled with educated people; and not one of them is doing anything to change the world for the better. All they're doing is helping to keep a cruel, cancerous system running that benefits them and screws over the poor, the weak, the sick and the disabled.

You have to be educated to work in most businesses if you're not going to wear overalls or an ugly uniform with a name tag on it. And your only purpose in business is to make money to buy a nice house and keep the boss warm in his swimming pool, unless you're part of something that's producing really innovative technology that helps humanity in some way. The number of companies doing that in Britain these days must be very small indeed

You have to be educated to work in book publishing too, in the mainstream. And no one in the mainstream has published anything dangerous for years.

I have enjoyed my time at university, although I must admit it's mostly been fun because of the people I've met. But it has struck me over and over again that this education I was receiving was teaching me (unsuccessfully) how to say what they wanted me to say in the style that they wanted me to say it. University to me seems like a fancy intellectual cookie cutter designed to turn out thousands of people every year who are the same mental shape.

Perhaps - and I don't really think it's so - but perhaps a person who was dangerous already is more dangerous with an education. But what really threatens power and corruption is intellectual independence and a well-developed personal conscience, and you can find that just as frequently, if not more often actually, behind cash registers, in care home car parks on cigarette breaks, and outside on the wall at the Job Centre.

Saying that the educated are dangerous implies that the uneducated are easily duped by political parties with bad intentions. Sometimes that's so; sometimes it isn't. But who voted for David Cameron? Who, perhaps more germainely, couldn't see what a complete bullshitter Nick Clegg was and voted for the Liberal Democrats, who are supporting some of the most iniquitous policies carried out against the vulnerable in this country for 100 years? And who keeps re-electing their puppets in the local councils?

It certainly wasn't anyone from round my way.