BBC News reported a few days ago that the number of people in adult education classes in the UK has dropped by 700,000 or 21.7% in the last year. I have a few ideas why this may be.
I think it's to do with the fact that the variety of courses on offer in schools, colleges and other education providers has dropped off. Adult education become a place for outsourced job training with a few leisure courses to go with it. The leisure courses are things like three weeks to learn basket-weaving and the vocational courses are such exciting things as "Customer Services NVQ". Real intellectually challenging stuff. I say that not with contempt - or at least not much contempt as one could conclude from my tone. It is my contention that the bulk of adult learners are in fact people who are already capable of - and are - productive members of society (ie. they have a job, or they don't have a job but the reason they don't have a job is not something that an NVQ in whatever will fix), but they wish to broaden their horizons.
What the government is trying to do is to deal with creating a class of worker drones with things like Customer Service NVQ, rather than try to educate people in their wholeness. I know a number of people who have gone from evening classes in 'hobby' subjects to then go on and get Masters degrees and become teachers, even professors. But, of course, according to the education establishment, such educational rags-to-riches stories are not 'real' education - because these people weren't disadvantaged to begin with. What current education policy shows is an absolute contempt for intellect, and an absolute charade being played with people's lives. The government is playing catch with business - and using FE policy to respond to the desire on the part of the private sector not to have to risk providing their own on-the-job training or a meaningful approach to apprenticeship. At the same time, government is trying to fob off the universities with a pile of cobblers about how two years designing Excel spreadsheets to meet some made-up "business requirements" is a perfectly suitable alternative to an academic education for the purpose of admitting someone to do physics or philosophy or psychology.
We really need to get some ground rules in place, some values on which to base education policy - because currently it's almost anti-intellectual in design (which is strange, since those who design it tend to have gained a position to be dictating education policy by dint of having a first-class education). I'm not sure what values to put in place, but I can think of a few.
The first value: academic and vocational education are both better than each other at the things they are designed for. If you take a vocational course, you should not expect university admissions tutors to care. Vocational courses should be designed for people who plan to go to work immediately after finishing them. Academic courses serve a different purpose. This means a rather terrifying prospects for some of the idiots engaged in this debate - namely that academic courses are better suited to academic students with academic intentions. This is not politically expedient, but it is pretty obvious and really quite sane.
The second value: design education policy with educational excellence in mind, rather than as a lever for your favourite social group. I don't give a crap what your class or racial group is. I come from the Internet, and we judge things based on whether they work or not. If your code doesn't compile, fix it and make it work. Education policy should be determined in a way that promotes excellence in as broad a range of people as possible. Just as we don't judge art on the basis of whether it cures a headache, we should try to judge education on the basis of whether it educates, not on whether it cures social ills. For instance, if one studies something like Literature, one knows that employment is not the object of the course - but an understanding of Literature. Judge it on that basis!
The third value: presume that anyone could feasibly study anything. This is not a policy that admissions tutors should adopt, but is a policy that those determining policy ought to have. Education policy should be based on the fact that I could feasibly go and get a degree in, say, dance. Now, I'm not likely to. I dance about as well as a dead fish - I am more suited to reading, writing and coding. But education policy should presume that I could feasibly do it - take dance lessons, buy a frilly leotard and go on and become a professional dancer. This is a naive view, for sure. But so is the view that allowing people to vote gets us enlightened, responsible, liberty-respecting parliamentarians. We hold this view in spite of the mountains of evidence, mostly out of hope that one day it will be fulfilled, and because the alternative - rule by an elite of self-serving bureaucrats without a democratic mandate - sucks quite a bit more than rule by an elite of self-serving bureaucrats with a democratic mandate. This is a value, remember.
Why have the previous value? Because I believe that individuals are better at knowing what they want to learn in life than the Department for Education and Skills (or whatever they are called this week). I say this as someone who has almost wandered off down some strange false paths. Better that I be able to take risks - even expensive ones - than someone at the DfES decides what I can and cannot do in life.
A fourth value: pragmatism is not the be-all, end-all. Pragmatism is a fine philosophy to have, and it's one I subscribe to. In fact, you kind of have to in order to be a programmer. Things must work, right. No point arguing about something that will never actually fit. But there is a dangerous brand of pragmatism currently in use by governments that seeks to justify all policy on the basis of pragmatism. There is an even more worrying tendency that I see in some of my friends to think this a perfectly acceptable position. It's a failure though. Morality and values cannot be made 'pragmatic'. If you are choosing whether or not to steal a car, it is not a choice between a pragmatic and unpragmatic option. Even if torture were a pragmatic way to get to the truth (which all the evidence suggests it isn't), we would be completely crazy to follow this because common human values and our conception of rights forbids it. Human rights and civil liberties are by their very nature unpragmatic, certainly for the State. Having all these people running around with these ideas of their own, spouting off about them, doesn't leave one in a society which is easy to run. If people are offending one another with political rants and religious sacrilege, that is a far less pragmatic outcome. It'd be much easier to lock them away without a trial and throw away the key. Pragmatism is a fine tool to have once one has determined that a course of action is morally acceptable. Philosophers starting with Hume have discussed this as the is/ought problem, and politicians haven't suddenly solved it in the last few years.
A fifth value: people are not just pocketbooks. A goal in some education is profit - through getting a job or through discovering something that one can use for commercial gain in some other way. This is fine. It is also not the only reason people study things. We need to be wary of that and not make presumptions about goals. The student sets the goals, then the teacher, then the school or college, and finally the government - and each one has to decrease in importance, not increase. The say that government has over the goals and intentions of a student taking a particular course of study needs to be as minimal as possible so as to encourage the student to be able to express their own aims.
There are other values which I have not discussed, and I leave you to fill those out for yourself. Now, a further (hopefully) brief diversion into meta-ethics. Does this mean I support government taking the roles it currently has in education? No. The values I have listed above come from the standpoint of "the government is involved in education, so this is how it should act". Whether or not it's right for the government to be involved in education at all is another matter. And it's one that I can see good arguments for on both sides, and one which I am quite ambivalent about. Politically, I have gone from a sort of unthinking, reflexive Marxism through to a libertarian and, now, hover in the middle as a sort of critically individualist liberal. I cannot reject the existence of the state outright, and I find libertarian moral arguments somewhat convincing. But due to the practicality of the situation we live in, I find it more coherent to try and work in a philosophical standpoint whereby the deeper ethics of politics are pushed aside and ethical reflection is used to enlighten how we deal with the day-to-day reality of politics. I think of it as a sort of common sense approach to just being a normal participant in the political sphere. In that sense, I reject meta-ethics being applied to politics on (and I risk contradicting myself here) the grounds that the State exists, and we have to deal with it.
What would be my solution to adult education? I think that if it is to exist, it needs to be broad - covering situations including both the deathly-dull sounding Customer Service NVQ through to the introductory/leisure courses as well as intellectually fulfilling courses for adults. If the government is trying - as it keeps saying - to promote "learning for life", then it needs to have a curriculum that is relevant for normal people - as well as providing targeted support for those who have - for whatever reason - not got the basic skills that basic schooling should have given them. The danger comes in making presumptions - that if, for instance, one has a well-paid job, that is all one needs in life.
The problem with the education system is that we basically have a bunch of people who already have a lot of high level degrees and professional qualifications making decisions about what the Common People are going to do in life. This can lead to a situation where they climb the ladder - go to Oxford - and then pull away the ladder that helps others achieve similarly by declaring that such elite education is "a bit dodgy" - so sayeth Charles Clarke, educated in Mathematics and Economics at King's College, Cambridge, of the possibilities of studying abstract, non-vocational subjects like history and classics, which are completely irrelevant to life - which is why he was a Cabinet minister, while those doing Customer Service NVQ are off doing much greater things, no doubt.
I could waffle on further and longer, but to save your poor RSS feed readers, I'll sign off and go enjoy a brisk walk with the canines (and the aural accompaniment of Berty Dreyfus et al.) in the winter sunshine.
