Ah, September and the new fresher students are preparing to embark on their first year at university. How I envy them! It is one of the great regrets of my life that I was never a young college student, participating in that experience with others starting adulthood, discovering ideas and forming bonds that often last an entire lifetime. Now, in my senior years, it even prickles when I hear friends say “Oh, yes, I know him – we were at Oxford together” (or Trinity College Dublin, or even some American campus). It’s hard to transmit the experience of one generation to another, and it can be difficult to explain that, when I left my convent school in the 1960s, only a small elite went on to college. You had to prove yourself to be “brainy”. You also had to have parents who would support you, both financially and psychologically, rather than elders who told you to “go out and get yourself a good-looking job”. One of the best descriptions of student life in Ireland is in Maeve Binchy’s novel Circle of Friends, based on her time at University College Dublin. There’s an illuminating class basis to the uni intake – the students are the offspring of doctors, lawyers, prosperous business folk. Nowadays it’s considered to be everyone’s right to go to university, and that seems to me to be a good thing. And yet, there is also growing revisionism on the question of third-level education. Many educational commentators now claim that too many youngsters are aiming for uni, when they might be better off learning a trade, or getting a vocational training. Perhaps it is true that university isn’t for everyone. Perhaps the trend, reported in the Times, for private schools to steer some of their pupils towards more practical skills, is sensible. All the same, if you never got that chance, at 18, to aspire to the dreaming spires, you never quite get over a rueful feeling of having missed out on a truly formative experience. ……….. When Sigmund Freud started publishing his works on psychoanalysis, he incurred the disapproval of the Holy See. This, I was told, was not because of his unearthing of peculiar sexual theories like the Oedipus complex – the Church has always known about the dark side of human nature – but because, in explaining guilt, Freud seemed to excuse sin. Freud was in high favour among fashionable thinkers up until the end of the 1950s, but his theories have been increasingly attacked in recent years. The latest onslaught on Dr Freud comes from a disillusioned follower, Dr Frederick Crews, who, in a gigantic book, claims that the Viennese doctor was a fraud who falsified evidence and was unethical in his own sexual conduct. Most astonishingly, Crews writes that Freud was indeed deliberately anti-Christian. By advancing an idea that makes “sexual gratification triumphant over virtuous sacrifice for heaven … Freud meant to overthrow the whole Christian order, earning payback for all of the bigoted popes, the sadists of the Inquisition … and the Catholic bureaucrats who had held his professorship hostage”. Freud, above all, wanted to destroy “the temple of Pauline law”. Crews’s fierce salvo is considered over-stated by critics, but it’s significant just the same. Personally, I’ve always preferred Jung. ……….. What larks we shall have if Jacob Rees-Mogg, currently the bookies’ second favourite (after David Davis) to succeed Theresa May, does become the first Catholic incumbent at 10 Downing Street. First, we shall pay a lot more attention to Latin, Mr Rees-Mogg’s great pursuit – did he not name his sixth child Sixtus? And it will represent an overturning of a traditional bar against Catholics attaining the highest offices of the land. If there was no actual prohibition, there was an informal understanding that it didn’t usually happen. I thought there was still some ambiguity about the Lord Chancellor having to be an Anglican, since he (or she) presides over certain Church of England offices, but I am told by my friend Fr Fergus O’Donoghue SJ, who knows about these things, that only the Crown remains reserved for Protestants. The Lord Chancellor’s office is not as important as it used to be – “a recent holder wasn’t even a lawyer!” Follow Mary Kenny on Twitter: @MaryKenny4