Man About Town
Boy about town
Come October 2010, Fitz freshers will see a particularly fresh face in their ranks: 15-year-old prodigy Arran Fernandez. But should he even be here?
There was a time when my supervisor was someone who wiped my arse and cut up my apple. Now I’m at Cambridge, I know I won’t go back. Childhood is a thing of the past. Apple cutting is for pussies.
Next year, however, there will be a boy-about-town. We will be accompanied by Maths prodigy Arran Fernandez, who is set to join the freshers at Fitz. Fernandez will turn fifteen in June and, assuming he meets his conditional offer, will become the youngest undergraduate admitted to the university since Pitt the Younger joined Pembroke 237 years ago.
In 2001, at five years old, Arran became the youngest person ever to pass a GCSE, achieving a D in foundation Maths. He has had several mathematical sequences published in the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, a number-theory database and has high hopes for a future in research – “it would be nice to work for Cambridge. There are a few things I want to work on. I’d like to solve the Riemann Hypothesis.” Yet, it is his admittance which raises the real problem. Why is Cambridge admitting children to the ranks of higher education?
In his Christmas message, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, mocked social attitudes toward childhood which seek to cut it short: “we shall do all we can to make childhood a brief and rather regrettable stage on the way to the real thing - which is independence”. The example of Arran Fernandez amounts to an expression of this trend.
The child-genius was home-schooled by his father who won £1,050, having placed a £50 bet on his son passing his first GCSE at five-years-old. Neil Fernandez had pursued homeschooling, arguing that school education was “inferior” to home teaching – “I believe any child can do this. I think part of his [Arran's] story is not just his accomplishments at his age; it’s why other children can’t do this.” But has Neil got it right?
We should not be asking why other children can’t achieve reach the same academic heights as Fernandez, but why they should at all. The transition from home schooling to university at fifteen denies Fernandez the opportunity to learn from people of his age. The boy’s aspiration is clearly something which should be nurtured. Cambridge must continue to compete for its reputation as a leader in research and as a natural home for someone like Arran Fernandez, but his premature admission will not only deprive him the ‘life lessons’ that university is meant to teach, but it denies that our university experience teaches them.
The madness of it all appears in Alain de Botton’s essay in last week’s Varsity, which addresses a need to reframe the role of education for the teaching of life skills. De Botton’s decision to establish an actual ‘School of Life’ and curriculum which teaches ‘death’, ‘marriage’ and ‘child rearing’ is the ultimate manifestation of the misrepresentation of higher education. Universities should not have to teach people this stuff.
I have to agree with Dan Hitchens, who attacks de Botton’s ‘School of Life’, arguing that “if you want a practical guide to living in the world from day to day, mere books will not provide it”. But if we give off the impression that university is for kids, we undermine the broader function it serves and buttress de Botton’s madness.
The inquisitive Tom, commenting on a Tab article covering Fernandez’s story, asks “can you imagine the sheer horror a girl will have if she wakes up next to a 14yr old in freshers’ week??!!”. A concerned Jim writes “I hope Fitz made it absolutely clear to him that he won’t be able to get into Cindies.” That judgments regarding Arran’s capacity to make shapes will be confined to geometry supervisions is something that Tom and Jim might find comfort in. Fernandez will not live with other students. But is this not the problem?
De Botton expected university to endow him with life skills: “I still haven’t quite recovered from my disappointment with Cambridge…My problem with the venerable University was that I was asking something very naive, very adolescent and very urgent of it. I wanted help in learning how to live.” I would argue that too many British universities are going too far in providing the mere lessons of ‘life’. But if Cambridge is to continue to provide the model of the academic university, I don’t think it should be open its doors to fifteen year olds. Pitt the Younger never settled down. He drank himself to death.
