If I were getting my A-level results today...

... I’d dispense them straight in the bin and start saving up for a flight to Pennsylvania in order to join the Amish.

Just kidding (I’d never be allowed in the USA now, given the new proposed policies about social media scrutiny...), but it’s not too far from the truth: A-level day signals, for many, the destruction of the kind of community life that humans really need to thrive, and that the Amish centre themselves around.

If this sounds a little far-fetched, or that perhaps an over-immersion in English Literature A-level may have equipped your author with a lifelong flair for the dramatic (and you may not be wrong), please do read on...

Every year on A-level day, the press prints the signature celebratory pictures of students jumping up and down, thrilled at their results, and so, as ever, when the press takes a particular interest in relentlessly propagandising a subject (we don’t really see the same sort of coverage when electricians complete their apprenticeships, or hair and beauty graduates qualify), it’s worth delving more deeply into the subject, and exploring why the ritual promotion of A-level results day - meaning, for most, moving on to university - is so embedded in UK society.

More students than ever before have gained a university place this year, and over 50% of young people now attend university. Most of them will be moving away from home to do so.

So, on that note, I reprise a slightly amended article I wrote on the subject four years ago...

(For non-UK readers, A-levels are a two-year academic course UK teenagers undertake between the ages of 16 and 18, as the prerequisite qualifications to get into university. The time doing A-levels is spent in “the sixth form” - upper and lower sixth - equivalent to grades 11 and 12 in the USA.)

How ‘Neighbours’ becomes ‘Home Alone’

First published October 2022

One of my most enduring memories of the 14 years I spent in government (’state’) schools had nothing to do with anything I was formally taught in them (does it ever?), but rather, regarded an incident in the upper-sixth when I was 17, when my Psychology teacher decided to address the topic of higher education.

“So,” he said, hands clasped, and something of an earnest expression on his face. “I know most people in this room are planning on going on to university next year.”

“Yes, sir,” the class nodded and smiled gamely.

“But,” he continued, his brow furrowing and his smile turning into a near-grimace. “Please tell me some of you are planning on going somewhere, anywhere, other than [the local universities] Keele and Staffs?!”

To give this a bit of context: I was born in Stoke-on-Trent, and grew up on the nearby Keele University campus, where my dad was a lecturer (as, indeed, was my grandfather, my mum’s dad, meaning my grandparents lived on campus, too). Keele is about seven miles south of Stoke, and just three miles from Newcastle-under-Lyme, the small market town where Keele kids went to senior school and sixth-form college (Keele itself only having a primary school), and where - in the little huts adjacent to Newcastle-under-Lyme FE College, where A-levels were undertaken at the time - my Psychology teacher had posed this geographical query.

Himself a transplant from Essex, my teacher - like most middle-class university graduates - could not fathom the hideous possibility of not getting as far away as possible from home at the age of 18, and therefore found the common phenomenon in Stoke - of staying at, or near to, home and going to one of the local universities - to be utterly incomprehensible.

When only a small smattering of hands went up in response to his question, indicating an intention to go further afield to study, our teacher visibly shuddered.

“You need to widen your horizons! Open your eyes! Spread your wings! There’s a whole world out there!” he decried to the class, or other assorted idioms to that general effect.

The collective classroom mainly looked baffled.

“But, sir,” objected one scholar, quite reasonably. “My family’s here, my friends are here, why would I want to go to some random place where I don’t know anyone when I’ve got everything I need right here?”

Our teacher sighed deeply, exasperation etched all over his face.

“But don’t you want to see more of the world than just Stoke?”

“I do already,” said the scholar, stoutly. “I go to Manchester and Birmingham [the two nearby big cities] all the time. I’m going to London for my 18th. I go on holiday. But this is my home. Why would I want to leave everything I know behind and start again with nothing?”

This is, unequivocally, a reasonable position. We spend the first two decades of our lives building friendships and forging connections, often friendships as intense and important as any we will ever have. Why abruptly sever them all at the age of 18 to start from scratch in an alien environment?

Nevertheless, even in the face of what should have been largely non-controversial rationale, our teacher just sighed again and shook his head. “Small-minded fools,“ he might almost have said, but didn’t (quite).

Despite the fact that it was indelibly etched in my teacher’s mind that the only option for anyone with the remotest spark of intelligence or ambition was to abandon everything they knew to move to a random location more or less picked out of a hat (having worked in university admissions, I can confirm that the way most 17-year-olds select higher education institutions is not exactly stringent, and I spent many hours patiently explaining to those who had applied to study at Keele, where it actually was) - this is, in reality, a very bizarre, and exceptionally modern - phenomenon.

For thousands of years, the norm for the vast majority of humans who had ever lived was to be born, live, and die within roughly the same geographical area, where close communal bonds had developed over many generations, and which therefore represented a rich and sustaining network that - while, naturally, had its challenges - provided vital opportunities and support across a lifetime.

Modern neuroscience indicates we are hardwired to live like this, and to have about 150 close communal connections, a phenomenon known as Dunbar’s number.

So why, then, the modern encouragement for a mass exodus of a community’s 18-year-olds, every year when they get their A-levels?

Of course, some people are desperate to leave home as soon as they can, either because they don’t get on with their families, or because they’re craving independence from parental authority, so, understandably, they want to take the opportunity university presents to leave home - but “leaving home” has traditionally meant just that, leaving the house you grew up in to move into your own abode - not moving 300 miles across the country to a completely alien city where you don’t know a single soul.

Overall, this is a UK / US phenomenon, and it’s much less common in the rest of Europe and Australia, where people do typically stay close to home and go to their local university. However, the prospect of catapulting across the country to begin your adult life has become so deeply ingrained in UK culture that, to millions, the thought of not immediately abandoning your hometown upon acquiring your A-level results, is simply unthinkable - worse even than failing your exams.

An exam can be retaken, but the admission that you are an unambitious, small-minded, prospect-free failure (which, clearly, is irrevocably signalled by not going to university at the opposite end of the country) can never be retracted.

In many, if not most, sixth-form colleges across the land, this “fact” is clearly understood by the students - but Stoke, where I was born, is a bit of an anomaly. It has retained a lot of the close communal and intergenerational bonds that used to define most of the country, but have been largely lost over the post-war years, as society becomes more mobile and cosmopolitan.

Stoke is solidly working-class, and although it has retained many social benefits of traditional working-class communities, it’s also beset with economic struggles, with the demise of the pottery industry and the mines that had traditionally sustained it, leading it to become one of the most disadvantaged areas in the country (having the dubious distinction of winning ‘Worst Place To Live in England‘ in 2001).

Keele, on the other hand, the village on Stoke’s outskirts in which I grew up, has - ever since the university arrived in 1949 - become a middle-class enclave, and, therefore, those who grow up there - typically the offspring of Southern-transplant university lecturers - develop middle-class sensibilities, such as: leaving home the minute you’ve got your A-level results and never, EVER dreaming of resettling in the town where you were born (ugh!).

Despite the fact that those who grow up in Keele and the surrounding areas are typically very attached to and fond of them, considering building on this strong attachment and affection - on the two decades of friendships and connections already forged - and founding an adult life there, is simply not conceivable as an option. You MUST go away to a random city to study (and then another one upon graduating), otherwise you might as well give up now and sign up for a life of benefits, fags, and Jeremy Kyle.

Did this attitude infect me too? Of course it did. I too believed it was a mark of abject failure in life, on a scale I found almost impossible to comprehend, not to go away to a random alien city upon acquiring your exam results. I remember trying to convince some of my sixth-form classmates of the merits of random city universities, and managing to persuade one or two to contemplate Wolverhampton: the next town along. “Obviously I still need to be able to get back to see my mates every weekend,” I was told firmly, when I questioned why they might not consider somewhere more “exotic” (i.e., further away).

Yet when I myself acquired my own exam results - and they were decent results, easily qualifying me for the offer I had received from the two-hour-drive-away University of Sheffield - a funny thing happened: I was struck with an extremely strong, visceral, almost primal rush of emotion - that I hadn’t anticipated at all - that I did not want to leave my home. I promptly rang Sheffield and cancelled my place, opting to get a job locally instead.

That wasn’t to say I didn’t crave independence in terms of leaving the parental home, which I did aged 20, but that I didn’t want to leave my “homelands”, which I didn’t until I was 23 - geriatrically late, as far as my cosmopolitan contemporaries were concerned, who’d all gone off to study in London, Bristol, Edinburgh, France.

Instead, I rented my own little flat in Newcastle-under-Lyme, in walking distance of where I was born, and might still be there today, were it not for the fact that, as almost everyone else I knew had left, eventually and inevitably, I did too. After a brief stint in Liverpool, I went to London, where - despite it being somewhere I had never lived for a single day before rocking up in Lewisham nearly halfway through my twenties - I knew markedly more people than I did from my own hometown, several of my old friends having relocated there. There’s none of us left now in the place that we originally called home.

That means that my hometown is now, to me, a ghost town. It sounds strange to say it, because there are still plenty of people there. I just don’t know any of them. So, walking around it, I feel something almost akin to a sense of mourning - but I am grieving a community and a generation of people still alive.

It’s a strange and unsettling sensation, and has led me to question on many occasions whether this really represents “progress”. Is it really “progress” to break up all our families, our treasured friendships, our close communities, at the age of 18? Or has this social trend, like so many of them, been developed and foisted upon us for nefarious reasons?

Please let me be clear that I’m all for people having access to every opportunity in life, following their dreams and so on and so forth, and if going to university in a random city is someone’s dream, then they should be supported to fulfil that, and they shouldn’t be guilt-tripped into staying close to home if they don’t want to (which I’m certainly aware can happen).

Yet in many, if not most, cases this doesn’t really seem to be an example of a freely chosen ‘dream’ or carefully constructed ‘choice’, but rather, an example of aggressive social programming and indoctrination, designed to serve the best interests of anyone but the teenagers doing it.

Whilst some people are lucky and have the time of their lives at faraway universities, being socially confident and outgoing and easily able to make new friends, this is certainly not so for everyone, and university mental health services are typically overwhelmed with suffering, struggling students, not coping with the stresses of being a long way from home in an alien city where they have no long-term bonds.

There’s nothing pathological about their responding like this: human beings are not built to be ripped out at the roots at the age of 18, abruptly losing everything they’ve ever known, and it’s not surprising that many react badly to it.

Indeed, we have exhaustive evidence collated over many years showing the consequences of mass mobility and community dissolution, and how the typical human responds to such things.

Comprehensive happiness and fulfilment studies, involving millions of people, have been carried out across the Western world in recent decades, and the findings are always the same: the more mobile and transient society has become, the unhappier its people (especially women). What the evidence shows us is that the modern expectation that people will have little stability in their early adult lives, moving all over the place for education and career, all too often translates into increased feelings of loneliness, atomisation, and isolation, which are a very poor foundation upon which to build a successful and meaningful life.

Human beings do not thrive on constant instability and flux, they thrive on robust communities and supportive networks, and these, obviously, do not develop if everyone is moving around every five minutes. I remember house-sharing in London in my twenties and it was fairly farcical how often people came and went, to the extent it was not unusual not to know the full names of all your flatmates, or even - as one friend of mine reported when his then-flatmate passed him in the street and blanked him - to even always recognise them.

I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue this is a better, more fulfilling, and more human way to live than staying in your local community where you actually know the names and faces of those around you.

On the subject of transient travellers through London, it’s also worth mentioning that the phenomenon I am describing here exists to an even more powerful degree with young Australasians. The UK runs a reciprocal scheme with Australian and New Zealand governments whereby its young people (18-35) may acquire a two-year “working holiday” visa, enabling them to come over to the UK for up to two years, enjoying all the same rights to live and work in the country as UK citizens. This scheme seems to be a veritable rite of passage for large swathes of Australasians, over 30,000 of whom take up the visas every year. So, while they typically don’t leave their hometowns for university as teenagers, many do leave their country, continent, and hemisphere to come to London when they are in their twenties.

They, typically, have the absolute time of their lives over here. There’s a huge ex-pat network for them to tap into, enabling them to easily access housing and job opportunities. They love the culture. They love the nightlife. They have amazing experiences, make best friends, fall in love... and then, bam! Their two years are up and they have to go home. “Home” isn’t simply a modest train ride away where they can still easily keep up with new friends and connections, it’s thousands of miles and a hugely expensive long-haul flight away.

I saw too many times this sudden and abrupt severing of the lives they had built up absolutely destroy people. Two years is a long time in your early adulthood, and a lot can happen - as it typically had - and so to suddenly have to leave it all behind to go back to, often, next to nothing (no job, no partner, no bustling social life), would often devastate people.

One friend described how she spent the whole flight back to Sydney in floods of tears and had to pretend to her parents when they picked her up at the airport they were tears of joy that she was “home” - even though Australia no longer felt like home, London did. (This friend consequently spent the next five years doggedly determined she would return to London and eventually managed to get a job at a company with a London office who agreed to transfer her back.) Other friends would illegally overstay the terms of their visa, taking whatever dodgy cash-in-hand work was available, so utterly desperate were they to hang on to the lives they had built here, and loved (you’d be amazed at what a huge throng of illegal Australian labour there is in London for precisely this reason).

When they did eventually have to return home - as almost all of them eventually did - this would often be shattering to those left behind, too, to go from seeing a close colleague or best-friend flatmate every day, to, realistically, probably never seeing them again, once they had gone back to the other side of the world.

I reflected deeply on this phenomenon at the time, and thought: why do governments do this? Australia and New Zealand are modern, safe, first-world countries, there are plenty of opportunities for young people there, they don’t need to go to the other side of the world to find them (any more than UK youngsters need to go to the other side of the country for a decent education).

Of course, people should be free to travel and explore other countries if they wish to do so - but to live there for a period of years is an entirely different experience to being a tourist, as it means powerful bonds are built (especially in the 18-25 age-bracket when social energies and relationships are particularly intense) - which are then, as per the terms of the visa, brutally severed, very often causing profound pain to all who this affects.

So why, I asked myself, do governments make available this non-essential scheme when the results for so many are inevitably so brutal and painful? I see my friends from those days, still - more than ten years later - suffering the effects, mourning their London lives as “the best times of their lives”, and seeing the return to their homelands as a bitter consolation prize. Wouldn’t it therefore have been better for them simply to visit London as tourists, never settling there, never putting down roots, when it was always inevitable they were going to be ripped out like this?

Equally, are we helping or hindering native young people by sending them to random cities for university - where they, once again, build up communities and then lose them - and then other random cities for work, where the same often happens? Is this the optimal way to begin your adult life and the best way to secure a strong foundation for the future?

If it isn’t, then why has living this way now become so common - the norm and the expectation - for so many?

In understanding why this phenomenon has developed, why it is seen as a mark of ambition and success to move to random cities (and even countries) where you don’t know anyone, and of small-minded failure to stay at home (even if staying at home means you are more solvent and with better personal and professional opportunities), we have to remember what the “ideal” citizen is to the ruling elite - a rootless, atomised, worker-drone, who lives only to work and consume, with no loyalties to any entity beyond their employer and the state.

Community, culture, family, these are all competing loyalties and therefore, threaten this “perfect” citizen model - and that is why the ruling classes have waged war on these things.

In the post-war decades, they have shattered innumerable communities by dangling the enticing carrots of “career and success”, “opportunity and adventure” in front of ambitious young people and their parents, parents who often vociferously encourage their children to spread their wings and pursue big dreams... Only to find themselves utterly alone in their twilight years, since all their children and grandchildren followed their advice and now live in all four corners of the country (and even globe), too far away to see each other often. My friend, who came back to London from Australia, how often can she see her parents (or they their newly-born grandchild)?

Some older adults are genuinely happy with these choices, those who are active and have retained good social lives - but I know that very many are not, especially as their health declines in their later years - and that loneliness and isolation is a terrible epidemic for the elderly, including those with large families. Yes, some families don’t get on, but in so many cases, the reason modern families don’t see each other much is because everyone lives so far away. Hence, we now witness more and more people - however they started off in life, however big or well-connected their initial familial and social networks - ending up completely on their own.

And, like nearly all large-scale social trends, this hasn’t happened organically and the mechanisms behind it are not benevolent. Widespread loneliness and isolation isn’t an unanticipated side effect of post-war social engineering. It is the intended effect.

Devious social engineering initiatives have been hard at work these last 60-odd years to make millions of people effectively stranded, ensuring that, in an emergency, they don’t have that complex tapestry of long-term, intergenerational community to turn to, and so they are - and here’s what it all comes down to - forced to throw themselves on the mercy of the state to survive.

That is why the ruling classes have so incentivised the decimating of traditional communities and extended families (whilst remaining very well-connected and family-oriented themselves). That is why they’re so fixated on sending a country kid to a big city university, an Australian sun worshipper to cold and rainy London. They don’t care about broadening anyone’s horizons or giving them additional opportunities - of course not. Those are just the marketing slogans they’ve used to encourage people to break up their communities and atomise themselves, at the earliest available opportunity. And it’s worked, devastatingly well.

I am going to add the slightly tedious disclaimer that, obviously, leaving one’s hometown works out really well for some people and that opportunity should always be available as an option. But that’s just what it should be: an option, not a mandate, and the alternative - staying in the town you were born and building your life there - should not be so deeply stigmatised that entire generations of people refuse to even consider it, thus turning “hometowns” into “ghost towns”, even for whole generations of people still alive.

In conclusion, and to return to my baffled Psychology teacher (dead now) in that sixth-form social science hut, all those years ago, he never could understand why so few hands went up when he asked who planned to leave the area to go to university. Similarly, I couldn’t understand it at the time, either.

Suffice to say, I understand it now.

They say you can “never go home”, but what they don’t say (because they don’t want you to know) is that some of the happiest and most fulfilled people in the world, are those who never left.

---

I wrote that four years ago, and, unlike several other positions I held around that time (such as belief in viruses and Laurence Fox), I still emphatically agree with myself.

This essay does not really focus on the professional merits - or otherwise - of going to university, as that’s been extensively covered elsewhere. I don’t think there are many families unaware of the fact that university saddles students with huge debts, and many degrees don’t reliably boost their employment prospects.

So the fact that, despite this being widely known, nevertheless, more youngsters than ever before are opting to go to university, shows us there is something much more powerful going on in drawing them there, rather than simply a rational and considered choice to improve their employability.

I opened by saying that, if I was getting my A-level results today, I’d skip university and join the Amish, and I was only half-joking: I invoked the Amish because they do prize stable and well-integrated communities, and make these the focal point of their lives, taking a rather dim view of personal ambition (see my article, ‘Why there are no Amish geniuses‘).

We as modern people have been trained to balk at this thought, to see such a life as oppressive and limiting. It’s “obvious” to us that happiness and fulfilment can only come through the aggressive and single-minded pursuit of personal ambition.

Yet this “obvious” fact is not supported by the evidence - far from it.

We’ve tried it our way - putting personal ambition as defined by education and career at the centre of our society for more than half a century, and dispensing with all the things that have traditionally sustained people: extended families, integrated communities, meaningful culture, and shared faith.

The evidence of how successful this experiment has been is strewn all around us.

Perhaps, then, it’s time to try something different.

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