Out of balance

SCIENCE PETER J. SMITH

It has long been accepted as an article of faith in this country that our educational system, at all levels and in most disciplines, is superior

to that of the United States. That this dogma is in total opposition to the evidence provided

by the end-product of the system, at least as far as science is concerned, has either been conveniently ignored or explained away in secondary causes. Thus the fact that American science and technology is conspicuously more successful than the European version has been attributed to crude differentials of finance and population, greater market potential, the management gap (by myself) and the propor- tional difference in educational quantity, but seldom to educational quality.

That there is truth in each of these assertions k beyond doubt. The management gap, the

inability of the higher echelons of industrial

society to exploit technological potential to the full, represents a more viable analysis of our

present predicament than a simple technology gap, the non-existence of the basic knowledge. However, at the same time we should recognise that the management gap itself was not a spon- taneous creation but the product of a set of circumstances obtaining over a long period.

Four years after the advent of the white-hot technological revolution, which some will no doubt recall as a Wilsonian imaginative figment limited to the superficial plane of political eye- wash, we are at least beginning to gain an insight into the really fundamental problems in-

volved in technological exploitation. To' those of us who have long admired the American

educational process, the discovery that the British stumbling-block lies in education hardly comes as a surprise.

The bogey in the British system, then, turns out to be the specialisation of which we have heard so much in connection with secondary education but so little as regards the university. The effects of rigid specialisation within the sphere of tertiary education have hardly been recognised; and only now have they been quantified with the publication of a compara- tive study of the us and Lac commissioned by the Swann Committee on the employment of scientists and technologists.

The figures alone are devastating enough. In the us some 65 to 70 per cent of science and engineering undergraduates take a general course in which about 80 per cent of the curriculum is devoted to non-major subjects, many of them in the humanities. In compari- son, only about 16 per cent of British students take the scientific 'general' degree which is widely regarded by staff and students alike as an inferior option designed for the less able. But the crucial question for a technological society is this: which set of figures most closely

corresponds to the demands of the employment market? We now know the answer. In Britain, as in the United States, only 30 to 40 per cent of science and engineering graduates are em-

ployed in research and development, spheres demanding specialist knowledge, where 60 to 70 per cent are employed in management, sales and production, where not only is specialist training a wasted asset but in which the generalist is a positive advantage.

The situation thus becomes perfectly clear. In the United States, where demand and supply are perfectly matched, the system operates with minimum wastage. Here, on the other hand, our most valuable natural re- source—brain power—is being grossly squan- dered. Over 50 per cent of the science student population is being trained for a type of em- ployment which quite simply does not exist in sufficient quantity, whilst the less specialist back-up jobs necessitated by a technological society are being filled by highly, but irrele- vantly, qualified people. Taking into account the long-appreciated phenomenon of over five times the proportion, and over twenty times the absolufe number, of Americans attending college, the basis of our disproportionately low productivity per unit expenditure on science and technology is not too difficult to discern.

Admittedly the sequence of events leading to the present situation is quite easy to follow, and is, in a sense, understandable. Over the past few decades the bulk and complexity of scien- tific knowledge have grown to the point where one man can cope with but a very small frac- tion. In Britain there has occurred a drastic narrowing of the individual scientist's horizons at the point of training, which, on the face of it, appears to have been inevitable. But the American experience clearly indicates that the inevitable may be mitigated by approach. Whereas the British have accepted events at face value by responding to pressures for early specialisation, the Americans have adopted a generalist approach whereby a basic training applicable to a wide range of disciplines is used as a springboard to specialisation as the need arises.

Having said this, however, it is surely perti- 'Now, Spiro, how would you like to do a tour of the Yemen?'

neat to inquire why it is that the British and American systems of higher education have reacted so disparately to what, on the face of it, are similar external conditions.

The reason is not hard to find. Ever since the war British universities have increasingly been viewed by successive governments as ex- tensions to the apparatus of state, required to react to the real or imagined needs of society as defined by purely political and economic Considerations, that is, by politicians. The near- total dependence of the British university on directly allocated public funds, and the general socialist climate of opinion leading to the cen- tral planning mentality, have resulted in the almost total capitulation of the university to the state under subtle (and often not-so-subtle) pressures.

But the United States system of higher edu- cation, comprising a far. wider range of insti- tutional types (private, state, etc), divided vertically (state colleges, universities, etc), with more diverse financing (endowments, fees, government, etc) and in which public support, where it exists, arises from a greater variety of agencies, has thus far largely resisted governmental manipulation. It has thus been quite free to react to market forces in a way denied the British system. In so doing, in- cidentally, it has also managed to combine social realism with the traditional function of the university as provider of a truly liberal education—an ideal long discarded by our own science departments.

The British university, then, misled by false prophets and shielded completely from society's realities by paternalism, has produced what Mr Wilson would delight in terming a 'fundamental disequilibrium.' It can, and hopefully will, react, but only with a disastrous time-lag.