Chris Port Blog #62. Is education a commodity?

(I put this question to Ed Miliband, Labour Leader of HM Loyal Opposition, in the National Union of Students Facebook Debate on tuition fees on 9 December 2010)

Background to question (posted during debate)

Until recently, I was a teacher. Teachers are not paid to motivate because, unfortunately, that is impossible. They are paid to tick boxes and take blame, and they are quite demotivated themselves. True motivation would require respect for their judgments, quality time and professional autonomy, which they don’t have. Please understand that, in our current education ‘system’, for all the deluded brochure-jargon, your children are just data fodder. 

It is no secret that our education ‘system’ has failed. Teachers aren’t allowed to say that out loud, of course. If they do, they get bullied out quietly. Nobody wants to know. Too many management jobs depend on a lie. So much for whistle-blowing and ‘accountability’. All those billions of pounds of taxpayers' money under Labour were wasted on cynical tick boxes. 

But the seeds of destruction were planted long ago, in 1976, when James Callaghan made his ‘Ruskin Speech’. He proclaimed that ‘the educational system was out of touch with the fundamental need of Britain to survive economically in a highly competitive world through the efficiency of its industry and commerce’. This is when a reductionist pragmatism crept into the British educational system with the ‘competitive energies of a market-economy ruthlessly transposed to the nursery, the school, the college and the university’ (Peter Abbs, p.44, The Educational Imperative, 1994). 

Margaret Thatcher’s fanatical obsession with the free market led to disastrously misappropriated ‘league tables’ under the Education Reform Act 1988. The promotion of performance target management to deliver competitive ‘production figures’ simply led to schools shopping around for ‘dumbed down’ exams, grade inflation, and telling the students what to write in their coursework. 

The institutional mass hysteria created by a punitive OFSTED regime led to management paranoia and bullying of the workforce. Teachers have been crushed under the paperwork of jargon-rich, funding-poor government initiatives designed to dump social problems in schools. New Labour’s obsession to improve public services with totalitarian ‘systems’ and Stakhanovite ‘targets’ first undermined and then utterly destroyed teaching as a profession. Now, the Coalition is going to price students out of the market to finish the job. 

Unless and until our paradigm (way of looking at things) changes, all government-led reforms of our education ‘system’ are doomed to failure (at prodigious expense to the taxpayer) because they are nothing to do with education and everything to do with systems. For various (cynical political) reasons, the profession of teaching has actually been de-professionalized and systematized instead. It’s what Donald Schön termed ‘The Crisis of Professional Knowledge and the Pursuit of an Epistemology of Practice’. A more humorous and dramatic interpretation of some of Schön's arguments is outlined in 'Targets'. 

Teachers should be regarded as professional experts undertaking a noble vocation on a par with medicine. Instead they are treated as a fast food franchise being hustled to make sales targets so that store managers can grab their performance-related bonuses. The streets are littered with discarded wrappers. They are called children.

[Click here for a word document of 'Targets']. 

Ed Miliband’s response

Chris - Of course education matters because it helps people get on when they leave school or graduate from university. But it is about more than economics - education is a right and offers the opportunity to value learning for its own sake.

My response

Ed. Thank you for your reply. It was, however, a cautious one. As a politician, in an uncertain world, you are probably wise to advocate the best of both worlds. However, I would argue that this has been the cause of the problem. We have fallen between two stools: the academic and the vocational.

There is, of course, no real argument (in the intellectual sense) between viewing education as preparation for work and as preparation for life. Obviously it is both. However, in the battle (and it is a battle) for staff, time and resources, it tends to be one thing or the other. This ‘battle’ is futile, nonsensical and counter-productive. It is a needless conflict which has arisen (I would argue) through the promotion of a performance management target culture of measurable ‘productivity’.

This performance management culture has been disastrously misappropriated from the incompatible mindset of business. Business deals in profit. Education deals in people. Business abandons unprofitable clients. Education cages them and throws taxpayers’ money at them, via meaningless tick boxes, to no avail. Hence my question of whether education is a commodity (which you avoided answering with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ since either answer opens up a can of worms). Until we decide what the purposes of education actually are, then questions of how it should be funded (and who should fund it) are poorly framed.

If education is about giving people work skills that are going to make them money in the future, then there is a valid argument in requiring them to pay for that training via graduate loans (so long as it is a business-related qualification). However, under current and foreseeable economic circumstances, there isn’t much of a workplace to look forward to. Higher Education no longer seems to unlock the gateway to social mobility, so why get into debt with no prospect of work?

Also, since the Arts and the Humanities are mostly considered to be of aesthetic value to society rather than of monetary value to the individual, these should be funded by the taxpayer. If the electorate no longer wish to subsidize aesthetics, or the Treasury can no longer afford them, then we should at least be honest that our education policies have, in one generation, destroyed our birthright and heritage. We used to be one of the most cultured nations in history. So much for the Tories being the party of traditional values...

If education is about socializing people to become well-adjusted and versatile with transferable learning skills, then society (i.e. the taxpayer) should pick up the tab since it is to society’s benefit. Business (which benefits from having a socialized and versatile labour force to hand) should also contribute its fair share through a ring-fenced proportion of its taxation and tax breaks for philanthropists and patrons. This is not the same as allowing business to set the curriculum, any more than we should allow social services to.

Returning to our faltering stool-straddle, it is no longer a precarious balancing act or a snap jump if we just move them closer together. The opposition of the academic and the vocational is a false and artificial dichotomy caused by moving these stools in different directions. Unfortunately, this widening gap has come about as a direct and avoidable consequence of the education policies of all governments from the 1980s onwards.

The introduction of market place methodologies and terminologies as the lingua franca of our education system has devalued academic currency. The freedom of thought necessary to develop transferable critical thinking skills for the business trailblazers of tomorrow (which you describe as ‘learning for its own sake’ – perhaps 'versatile deferred applicability' might be a better biznobabble term!) has been over-ruled by the smaller pragmatic considerations of the educational market place under the reductionist philosophy of Catoism.

Let me reiterate again, the obsession with neo-positivist data and league tables has been a disaster. Grammar schools and top universities have become increasingly distrustful of the quality and validity of standardized test results, spoon feeding and grade inflation. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘failing’ schools have only ‘failed’ because they have been held to unrealistically high ‘productivity targets’ while trying to cope with the ‘rights’ of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Under these circumstances, to claim that education is a ‘right’ is as hollow as claiming that dignity, self-respect and meaningful work are a right. They should be but, in a free market economy, they are not. Why should education be any different? It is just the antechamber to the world of adulthood. If that world is a shambles and a sham, it is no surprise that our education system has followed suit. If schools are businesses, they will do whatever is necessary to survive in the economic system imposed upon them.

Put simply, schools need highly qualified teachers, smaller class sizes, decent classrooms, less data and more time. What they are going to get is cheap ‘learn-as-you-go’ burn-outs trying to crowd-control increasingly alienated and demotivated students crammed into decaying buildings, while management fund-chase, figure-juggle, and try to preempt litigation with ever more procedures and paperwork.

The enforcement of rights without responsibilities and resources deprives other people of their rights. Teachers do not have the time to deal with the problems of society. It is difficult enough to teach society about its problems, let alone solve them.

If education is a commodity (a market currency) then places of education are, in essence, the apprenticeships of business and should be funded by trade guilds. If this is so, then education is not a ‘right’ in any meaningful sense. I have the ‘right’ to apply for a job in a fast food franchise, but going to my local ‘McUni’ it is hardly the stuff of universal declarations of human rights.

If education is the more idealistic encouragement of individual excellence in whatever skills and interests a student shows, this would require a complete overhaul of the current system in order to allow for true ‘differentiation’. Tragically, this was the wasted opportunity of the last decade. I now suspect that neither the political will, nor the money, are available to do this.

We are now lumbered with the worst of both worlds for another half decade. During this time, I would ask you to consult widely and deeply with people who have witnessed, at first hand, the failure of so many good intentions by woolly thinking and bad management. If nothing else, education should at least encourage people to think. Unfortunately, in my experience, it has taught many people to do the opposite. Again, this is a false dichotomy that should never have been allowed to happen. It must never happen again.