I would like to share with you part of the writer, Alexander McCall Smith’s, article in the June 2015 edition of “Prospect” magazine, under the title “If I Ruled the World”:

Education is a good thing. You might think that this hardly needs to be said, but there are plenty of people who view education as a form of technical training designed to fit you for a job. It is so much more than that; the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom is an end in itself. It enriches our lives. And it should be within the reach of everybody who wants it. I would seek to reintroduce that great good that we had in the UK and that somehow we lost: the grant system that enabled people to have a tertiary education without ending up with a massive debt. A graduate tax would pay for it; if you have an education courtesy of the state them you pay slightly higher income taxes throughout your life. It would probably amount to the cost of a Starbucks coffee a day”.

I was fortunate enough to have had a first class tertiary education courtesy of the taxpayer. It was a wonderful thing, something I was conscious of throughout my undergraduate experience. Unfortunately there is no way of conjugating the expression “enriches our lives”, except to say that it enriched my life beyond measure, and I benefit from it every day, not financially but on terms of excitement and awareness of the world and the wonders of it. Lifelong learning. Very Epicurean.