Tony Howell from the Birmingham City Council LEA has suggested the unthinkable - lowering the school leaving age from sixteen to fourteen, desite the government going in the opposite direction of wanting to raise the school leaving age from sixteen to eighteen. Education being something I value (and schooling being an occasionally effective method of distributing the fruits of education), I can feel the paternalist argument for maintaining the school leaving age or even increasing it. I want people to be less ignorant about the world around them, and I want them to become educated citizens. And what I say may be determined by the fact that I've had what I'd consider to be a superb education.
I tend to favour a more paternalistic attitude in education than my usual easy-breezy libertarianism for two reasons. Firstly, for the 'higher pleasures' reason that Mill spelt out. My fourteen year old self would have quite happily left school without a single qualification. That's because my educational transmutation didn't happen until about seventeen (although it stirred a little earlier at about fourteen), when the shackles of a uniform education were removed a little and I could actually use my brain. My attitude to education was that it was pretty much a waste of time, and on the objective measures of schooling, I was at best average, at worst a slacker. I'm in two minds though. I would want to have left school at fourteen to have gone on to do some kind of vocational training course.
I think that, based on my personal experience, of going from being considered by my school to be a middle-of-the-road student to now, graduating from a pretty tough degree at a good university with a higher upper-second (not bragging or anything...) and getting prepared for a Master's, I think that the measures we use for students are not nearly as good as they could be. On the basis of where I was, the idea that I would get to where I am would be considered a near impossibility. Part of it was a realisation that I have to do something and part of it was a determination to show the bastards!
That's the problem I have with this. As much as we all do the politically correct thing of thinking that becoming a doctor and a hairdresser is just "different paths in life", we all know that there is a hierarchy. It'd be nice if the educational and career hierarchy were flattened a little, or at least if some of the distortion were pulled out of the hierarchy - but the hierarchy does exist. Money is only part of it. Social respectability and the degree of interestingness (are we allowed to use that word in non-Flickr contexts?) are an important part of it too. We don't all want to become City bankers, even though the pay is great. The hierarchy exists, even though it's a multi-dimensional hierarchy - money, power, social respectability, interestingness are all dimensions.
And I feel that there are certain people who have the capacity to climb to a much higher summit on the hierarchy who would be consigned to a much lower station in life by the ability to leave at fourteen, and thus missing opportunities that they might otherwise have if they stayed on in academic study. If you saw the quotes from the LA Times article the other day, you'll see how empowering getting access to a decent liberal education can be, even if it's via podcasting: I felt like I discovered the Fountain of Youth
.
As I've said, I'm very ambivalent about the whole thing. There's just so much wrong with the education system, that things that should make it better on the face of it may end up making lives worse.
