THE EDUCATION SWINDLE
Duke Maskell says that spending more and
more money on universities makes us less and less educated
OUR education system is in a mess, but not because classes are too large or teaching child-centred, or schools badly managed or under-resourced. Our system of education is in a mess because our idea of education is puerile. The most poorly educated are, no doubt, abominably poorly educated, but it is by no means the worst of it. The worst of it is not that the badly educated are so unedu- cated, but that the best are.
The problem with education in modern Britain — the essential, intractable prob- lem — is not at the bottom but the top; it is the problem of an insufficiently educat- ed governing class — the class that staffs Parliament, the press, the universities — a class with an uneducated idea of educa- tion. Education, ever since the original Academy, has always been known to be different from training. Philosophy came into being when Socrates went around Athens as one conscious of knowing little, looking for someone who knew more. The men Socrates talked to, those who had a techne, that is, turned out not to know more than he did because they knew only their skills.
The distinction between liberal educa- tion and useful knowledge persisted strongly when the universities developed in the 12th and 13th centuries. For eight cen- turies afterwards, European universities were endowed as centres of piety, learning and thought. Nations got rich, then used some of their wealth to endow universities. The 'red-brick' universities in the north of England were founded after the brass had been made out of the muck, not to make more brass.
Then, about 40 years ago, we began to understand that, all along, we had been putting the cart before the horse: you didn't make money in order to afford an education, you got educated in order to make money. Education wasn't distinct from training in remunerable skills; it was the same thing. Education wasn't to do with religion and virtue; it was a service industry. As the Charter for Higher Edu- cation of 1993 puts it, universities 'deliver' a 'service' to 'customers', students and businesses, which 'buy' education and research. Education is directly, practically useful. It's an investment. It is vital for economic competitiveness/survival in the new millennium. It is necessary/essential for regional growth and national wealth creation. It promotes/facilitates/enhances the national economy and the skills/highly skilled workforces needed by the labour markets of the information/global econo- my. Education serves tiger economies, Pacific rims, Nafta, EU, WTO. And so on, and so on.
So, says Gordon Brown, 'economic suc- cess tomorrow will depend on investing in our schools today'. David Blunkett says, 'Our university system is in crisis. Our competitors in North America and the Far East have more young people going into higher education.' Three years ago Tony Blair summed it all up with 'Education, education, education'. What he meant was 'Money, money, money'. Mr Blair values education, but only for the effect he thinks it has on GDP.
He thinks not just that there is an eco- nomic case for it, but that the economic case is the case for it. He thinks that, his Education Secretary thinks that, his Chan- cellor thinks that. The vice-chancellors of all the universities think that, and the edi- tors of all the newspapers think that too. There is no one in either the Liberal or the Labour party who does not think that; and if there is anyone in the Conservative party, it is someone who dares not say so.
It was the Tories, after all, who created the combined Department for Education and Employment, confident that the point of the one was to cause the other; and it 'Not tonight, I'm washing my heir.' was the Tories who turned all the former polytechnics into universities, by the magic means of calling them universities. (What happened was not that the polytechnics became universities but that both polytech- nics and universities went on using a name whose significance had evaporated.) If, uniquely, education spending is invest- ment, the more time we spend at school and the more it costs the better. And for 40 years we have been acting on that principle. The dividends aren't so easy to trace but the con- sequence for the universities is: they haven't so much expanded as exploded. At the start of the 1960s about three people in every 100 did degrees; now more than one in three do (Gordon Brown says he wants to make it one in two). And there's been another, relat- ed, expansion. Higher education is now full of vocational, quasi-vocational and pseudo- vocational courses like the following: Arts Management; Asset Management; Beauty Science; Beauty Therapy and Sci- ences; Broadcasting Studies; Business Deci- sion Analysis; Business or Catering Management and Sports and Exercise Sci- ences; Business Mathematics; Coaching Sci- ence; Cosmetic Sciences; Costume and Make-up; Early Childhood Studies with Sports Science or Marketing or Tourism; Enterprise, Entrepreneurship, Innovation; European Food Studies; Facilities Manage- ment; Fine Arts Valuation; Floristry; Global Futures; Golf Course Management; Health and Fitness; Health Promotion; Hospitality Management; International Tourism Man- agement; Investment; Knitwear Studies; Leather Technology; Leisure Management; Lighting Design; Model Making; Packaging; Perfumery Business; Pig Enterprise Manage- ment; Popular Music Studies; Promotion of Fashion and Fashion Design; Sports and Exercise Sciences and Leisure Management; Travel and Tourism; Women's Studies, World Studies. .
The majority of such subjects — made the material of three years' academic study — can only be shams, practically as well as aca- demically. At best, students will have their time wasted, learning useful things ineffi- ciently; but what they are most likely to learn is how not to tell the difference between pretentious waffle and genuine thought. In accepting such courses, the uni- versity confesses that it has no definite char- acter, that education has no definite character, and that what counts as knowl- edge might be anything. Each of its hun- dreds of courses goes its own way without reference to any other or the standards of any other. So what, if the examination papers in Tourism are rubbish by the stan- dards of those in Philosophy? The philoso- phers have no say in what goes on in Tourism. How could they? They haven't been trained in it. The only thing that makes the two subjects part of the one body is that both get the funding to be so. And, of course, if customer demand dropped for Philosophy and rose for Tourism, a respon- sible management would have no choice but to move the funding with it, and perhaps move Philosophy off the premises. So here's the one definite achievement of the investment: more has been made to mean worse; the university has been turned into the anti-university Newman prophesied, 'a sort of bazaar, or pantechni- con, in which wares of all kinds are heaped together for sale in stalls independent of each other . . . to save the purchasers the trouble of running about from shop to shop'. Having been created from an uned- ucated idea of education, it then goes on to entrench that idea more and more deeply in the minds of our supposedly edu- cated and actually governing class. 'Education' has become such a test of virtue that no one seems to know any more what was once a commonplace: that the schooling by which it is supposedly Obtained belongs to that wide class of good things of which one can have too much. Prolonging schooling and postponing responsibility for half the population until they are 21 and more is not only a sure means of wrecking the universities and a fantastic waste of public money, but mon- strously cruel, too. It puts an emphasis on education that is quite pitiless. To know just how pitiless, read the Dearing Report. That characteristic utterance of the mod- ern great and good wishes on us, all of us, schooling not merely to 21 but for life! 'Young people entering higher educa- tion will increasingly come with a progress file which records their achievements up to that point and which is intended for use throughout life. We favour the develop- ment of a national format for a transcript of achievement in higher education which students could add to their progress files.' And that's not the end of it: 'We envis- age. individuals building up a portfolio of achievements at a range of levels over a working lifetime', and having them entered into their files too, as permanent measures of progress made, or not made. In this brave new world, we are to have not only the poor always with us but their school reports as well. It's an English version of the report card which every Albanian had to have under Enver Hoxha. Here is the Big Brother for our time; not Hitler, not Stalin, but Sir Ron Dearing, a headmaster and a dunce rolled into one, someone for- ever checking your progress file and hand- ing out education — as a life sentence. The result of all this is what else but a swindle? We are persuaded to part with upwards of £36 billion in taxes for educa- on every year, 12 per cent of government income, on the grounds that it is an invest- ment; and not only do we not get the edu- cation but no one has ever traced the dividends either (and just try selling your shares!). Dearing did try to audit the return nn the £6 billion that goes into higher edu- cation and persuaded himself that the result was favourable, but he did so on grounds that no independent financial authority would do anything but laugh at. Sub-reports 7 and 8 purport to show that our tax invest- ment brings us an an annual return of 8 per cent. What they actually show is that the consequences of having an enormous high- er education system subsidised by taxation are that the worse off, who don't go to uni- versity, subsidise the better off, who do; otherwise the consequences are unquantifi- able, but as likely to be bad as good. No one would put his own money into any scheme as dubious as this.
Until we learn how to think about educa- tion again we will only go on as we have for the past 20 years or so, going round in cir- cles and multiplying cures that aggravate the disease: solving the problem of teach- ers doing what they like, by launching the national curriculum; solving the problem of them not having enough time for reading, writing and 'rithmetic, by scuttling it, and then launching in its place a couple of very old boats with grand new names, the National Literacy and Numeracy Hours. Having saved all the time infants waste in play by making school exclusively workful, we go on to solve the problem of Jack's being such a dull boy by adopting the very latest 'European' method — 'learning through play'. But the real problem is not what to do about education but what to think and to say about it. It isn't money or national curricula or concentration on literacy and numeracy skills in whole-class teaching that education in this country needs. More money to spend, for the present, will produce nothing but more money spent. More whole-class teaching will pro- duce nothing but more classes taught as wholes. The more national curricula, the less the reading, writing, 'rithmetic; the more the 'rithmetic, the less the music and art, the nearer we are to England the further off from France. The one thing needed — without which nothing will fol- low, with which everything does — is gen- uine thought, and the genuine speech without which there is no thought. (It is no flourish to say that the Dearing Report's 1,700 pages contain not a scrap of thought.) We need to divorce ourselves (and some will find it agonising) from the crippling and delusive idea that education is a ser- vice industry like dry-cleaning, identical with the material arrangements through which we seek to provide it. You might as well identify the Church that is the bride of Christ with the Church that runs a pen- sion scheme. You might as well try to organise the delivery of love or virtue as of education. We need to learn — to relearn — how to think and to talk about educa- tion. The educated classes in this country will never succeed in educating the unedu- cated until they first see the need to re- educate themselves.
Duke Maskell is the author, with Ian Robin- son, of The New Idea of a University, to be published early next year by Haven Books.
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