EDUCATION
In defence of universities
Rhodes Boyson
Edward Short, MP, wrote an article in Education and Training quite recently recommending that universities should open their doors to everyone irrespective of qualifications and stated his belief that by the end of the century "the girls in Marks and Spencer and corporation dustmen" will have dOgrees. This is but a further step to a society where academic excellence for the able, and basic literacy and numeracy for the less gifted have both been abandoned for a form of egalitarian social mix with no standards. Victorious in the primary school, destroyers of the eleven-plus, attacking the separate sixteenplus GCE and CSE examinations, producing high figures of illiteracy at huge cost, the destruction of the universities would mean that the social egalitarians had won their final triumph and an overpopulated country would in the future never know that man had aspired to higher values and a cultural and even spiritual existence.
The City of New York University with some 200,000 students has open entry for all students with a secondary school diploma, a standard around that of our General Certificate of Education ' 0 ' level. Even at this level remedial help has to be given to many students, special tutorials are provided for those of lower ability, and new subjects are introduced because they make fewer demands on students. Completely open entry, as suggested by Edward Short, with 7 per cent illiterates now produced from British schools while a further 13 per cent cannot read fluently, would mean that it would be considered ' divisive ' to write on the blackboard, give notes, expect students to read books or use words longer than four letters. Degree standards would collapse unless it was understood that ' students ' should be allowed to buy their theses from academic ghost writers as some 10,000 Italians with doctors' degrees are said to have done.
Edward Short is not the first Labour spokesman to advocate the virtual destruction of our universities. Christopher Price, late Labour MP and educational correspondent of the New Statesman, expressed such views clearly at the 1970 Labour party conference: If the eleven-plus examination was wrong
so was the fourteen-plus, the sixteen-plus, the eighteen-plus and the filtering and selection mechanism for university and higher level education.
Miss Jennie Lee had produced the right idea by starting the Open University with no entry qualifications. The principle of the Open University should be applied to the whole of the higher education system and the Labour party should adopt the slogan of higher education for all. This would be a good policy for the next ten to twenty years.
It would be interesting to ask Mr Price what policy would follow after ten to twenty years. Since he certainly understands the effect of educational changes far better than does Edward Short, he probably realises that there would be no higher education left.
Mr Dick Scorer, a Labour Parliamentary candidate and a Professor of Mathematics at London University, went even further at the same Labour conference and followed his views to their logical conclusion by condemning degree examinations: "The eighteen-plus examinations were just as bas as the eleven-plus and so were the degree examinations." This is indeed equality with a vengeance — with no qualifications for course entry and no examinations at their conclusion anyone could set up as a doctor, an engineer, an accountant or a veterinary surgeon! A society with no standards would have destroyed itself. The only universities then remaining would be those that archaeologists dug up, if there were any archaeologists left.
It is fascinating that vastly increased educational expenditure has recently gone hand in hand with a decline in standards. In 1945 we spent £155 million on education, 1.7 per cent of the gross national product. This year we shall spend over 0,000 million, 6 per cent of the g.n.p., and this percentage will soon rise further to 7 or 8 per cent. Are we really getting value for money for this vast sum of money? Isn't a firm objective analysis of present primary and secondary school standards essential? Can the raising of the school leaving age really be justified when, to paraphrase Kingsley Amis, more education does seem to lead to worse? Wouldn't it be better if we concentrated on giving pupils of varying abilities the education most
suitable for them instead of conning them, raising their expectations and finally turning them out into the world disgruntled because their skills (or lack of skills) are unsaleable? It is fascinating that Edward Short wrote this article at a time when the percentage of unemployed graduates was rapidly increasing and there were the first signs of a decline in applications for university and degree places. The Polytechnics recently spent £10,000 in two weeks in the Observer advertising their vacancies not a sign that there was the most urgent demand for places in higher education. Meanwhile university career advisers and at least one junior minister are energetically twisting the arm of industrialists to get them to recruit more graduates. An objective study of the value of graduate recruits to the management side of British industry would be very interesting. Their recruitment began in large numbers in the late 1940s and the 1950s because business was persuaded by government and university administrators that due to the increase in the number going LIP to university they would lose their most Intelligent entrants if they did not recruit at twenty-one or twenty-two instead of sixteen or eighteen. It was part of the propaganda for the university growth In" dustry which is still going ahead. Could it be that special degree recruitment has seriously worsened labour relations in Brit' ish industry by creating a form of class system and has seriously curtailed the chance of promotion from the shop floor to general management? The active and ambitious worker knowing that his prospects of promotion are very limited has turned to militant trade unionism. The end of the special graduate recruitment for business management could possibly transform for the better the spirit of British industry. There would be a great wave of support for any political party which brought reality back into the educational scene. There was a sign recently that the Conservative party might at last tap this support. Mr van Straubenzee told a private meeting 0,f student union presidents at Bradford University on September 15 that the Government is considering raising student grants while making student union membershiP voluntary to be paid by the students themselves. This obvious and long overdue reform alarmed at least one union presldent who said, "If the Government ny troduces that system we might as well pack up and go home. Students' unions would collapse." What a revolutionary idea that students should go up to university for serious study not for fringe political activities at the expense of the taxpayer! Maybe the Government could perhapa steel its nerves further and bring in gener' ous loans for higher education students instead of minimal grants and with onlY genuine scholars prepared to enter university there would be no need for further capital expenditure on higher education.
The "girls in Marks and Spencer and corporation dustmen" would then not mind
not going up to university and would even be willing to help subsidise some of the genuine scholars who went. We might then retain a literate and cultured societY; Another revolutionary idea — any takers'
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