I shouldn't have had to teach myself how to swim

When I was two, I jumped into a pool because I thought I knew how to swim; when I was eighteen, I arrived at university and was thrown into one. That is to say, I came to university expecting to be taught. Instead, from day one, I was left to my own devices and told that this struggle of gaining knowledge without guidance — whilst simultaneously learning to navigate the world — was called independence, and that it was a crucial aspect of adulthood.

I grew up in an ambitious, competitive academic environment where it was conjecture that being thrown into the deep end was the best way to learn. No one at university seemed to suggest otherwise. For the last three years of my undergraduate degree, I sustained this approach, and it more or less worked. I taught myself in first year when I rediscovered the power of Indian men on YouTube who could explain a topic with greater detail and clarity than a lecturer did in forfty-five minutes; I taught myself how to conduct a systematic literature review for my tutored dissertation when my supervisor declined to help on the basis that my paper should carry only “my name”; I even taught myself this year when I was assigned a dissertation topic tangential to my degree stream. When I resented being left alone, I also taught myself to justify its merits: I was the most motivated when I knew no one was coming to save me because in these cases, failure held the highest stakes.

I was genuinely satisfied under this pretence until a few weeks ago when my  flatmate explained the “zone of proximal development”. A theory proposed by Lev Vygotsky, it suggests that a student’s learning is maximised when they are pushed just beyond their ability, on the condition that they are supported by a more capable other. On hearing this, it finally clicked where the college had fallen short. I do not have offce hours. I do not have EdStem. I have unanswered emails and Teams messages left on read.

Still, I didn’t drown – none of us did – because we were forced to create support networks ourselves.

I am not ungrateful: I have certainly learned a lot throughout my degree and have even thrived. Yet I remain disappointed. I am disappointed because this was the last stage of life where my hand could have been held. At the very least, the letting go of it could have been gradual. I am disappointed that the ostensible education I paid for is actually abandonment dressed as pedagogy. But most of all, I am disappointed because I feel that very few of the teaching staffhave seemed to care about my learning, let alone me.

As I have come into independence, I have sadly realised that I learned in spite of this university, not because of it. In the end, being thrown into the deep end did teach me a great deal. I just shouldn’t have had to be my own teacher.