Losing the Erasmus programme is a travesty that will impact negatively on future generations
The Erasmus programme was set up in 1987 as an EU student exchange programme. University students (and under Erasmus+, the programme’s current incarnation, secondary school students as well) from EU member states are able to go and study abroad for anywhere from three months up to a whole academic year. Students are able to apply for a grant from the EU to support themselves and they don’t have to pay extra tuition fees to their host universities. More than ten million people have participated in the programme since its inception.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Erasmus changed my life. Had I not spent a year abroad in Italy as part of my degree, I wouldn’t be sitting in Berlin writing this now. I’d be living in London, working for the man in some capacity, with a mortgage and a drug habit I can’t afford, and a different sweaty armpit shoved in my face every morning on my endless commute. I’m not saying I’d be unhappy, but I’d be unhappy. Instead, here in Berlin the only thing I have to worry about is the drug habit. Adulting.
I arrived in Bologna in August 2003 at the tender age of 22, and spent the next year on the most joyful, educational, horizon broadening (not to mention waist expanding) adventure of my life. I was the honoured guest of a Camorrista at a restaurant in Naples (no joke), got stranded in a Tuscan hill town at dusk with my bestie, nearly got arrested by a belligerent Bolognese police officer for peeing in the snow, and spent more time on the backs of dangerously driven Vespas than I care to remember. Wait, I’m supposed to be making this sound like an essential life experience right?
I look back on my year in Italy with nothing but fondness, smiles, a slightly engorged liver and without even the merest hint of rose coloured spectacles. It really was the best of times. I made friends for life, met people from the farthest corners of Europe, and even managed to learn Italian along the way. I was introduced to ways of thinking and being I had never experienced before, languages I had barely heard of, food I’d never tried before, music I’d never heard before. The list is endless. More than that though, Erasmus gave me a sense of self-confidence I never knew I had. Sure, going away to university makes many of us feel like adults for the first time; living abroad however, with all the attendant difficulties that brings really makes you feel like an adult. Anybody who has ever had to deal with the never ending purgatory that is Italian bureaucracy will tell you that if you can deal with that you can deal with anything.
Erasmus gave me the ability to dream (insert shooting star emoji), although to be fair it’s not like my horizons were particularly narrow to begin with.
Thanks to my incredible intellect, and overwhelming humility, I won an assisted place at a private secondary school. We went on holidays abroad when I was a kid, I grew up in the melting pot within a melting pot that is west London, and I come from a family with international roots. I guess I’m firmly in the liberal metropolitan elite camp. Bite me. But this just proves my point. If a year abroad was enough to blow my (already fairly well-travelled, well-educated) mind wide open, and consider the possibility of a life beyond the M25, imagine what it could do for a kid from the Rhondda Valley or an ex-mining town in the north-east who’s never travelled before. And that’s not even to say that everybody who participates in the programme will end up living abroad like me (so miss me with your “brain drain” arguments). Most of my Erasmus cohort still live in the UK (only the sensible ones like me have fled). But participants in Erasmus bring that transformative experience home with them, and, hopefully, use it to inspire others.
The Erasmus programme imbues its participants with a spirit of openness to new ways of learning, and openness to new experiences, people and cultures. For island dwellers like us in the UK where, as we are seeing right now, insularity breeds contempt, it has never been more important for the next generation to be able to explore the world right on their doorstep. As our country slowly becomes smaller and meaner, we need the values of Erasmus now more than ever.
This is exactly why this Tory government wants to scrap the programme. They want to keep us small. They want to keep us ignorant. They want our world view to end at the hallowed white cliffs of Dover. They know that once people have had a taste of la dolce vita it’s much harder to put them back in their box, and convince them that everything at home is hunky-dory. They don’t want us to belong to, or have a sense of anything greater than our sense of blind loyalty to their rotten ideology.
That is why we must fight them.
The axe hasn’t fallen yet, and there is still a chance, however slim, that we might be able to save Erasmus in the upcoming negotiations on our future relationship with the EU. Please write to your MP and let them know you won’t accept the next generation growing up in a smaller world than we did. Every kid should have the possibility of sipping coffee on the Grand Canal on the EU’s dime just as I did.
