Higher Education and the Philistine

18 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by John Charmley in Education, Faith, Newman

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The UK Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds, wishes to see a new ‘value for money’ test applied to universities, which, he says, will see cuts to the fees charged to students doing Arts and Social Sciences subjects.

Mr Hinds, who got a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, seems to think in terms of the first and third of those subjects. Mr Corbyn is offering to abolish fees, so politically the Tories need to do something to appeal to the young. One might expect a man with an Oxford First to realise that offering something for nothing is always going to trump offering something from which you have to pay; especially with anyone economically illiterate enough to believe the Labour leader. Economically, he seems to think it an easy matter to put a value on a degree. Does it lead you to a good job?

Mr Hinds was educated at a Catholic Grammar School. One presumes he did not come across the Blessed John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University there, or, indeed, elsewhere. But that he went through a Catholic education and should have come out with such a utilitarian view of the purpose of higher education is a disappointment. Managing to study Philosophy at Oxford and still having a purely instrumentalist view of higher education ought to be surprising.

But one does not need to be a philosopher to question whether Arts and Humanities subjects are of lesser value than more vocational ones. That well-known leftist Think Tank (that is joke by the way), The World Economic Forum, has articulated the qualities it thinks desirable in national leaders. Not one of the qualities, which are needed among more than just the ‘leaders’, is discipline specific. All of them require what the Minister himself seems to lack, which is the ability to take the skills one learns at university, skills such as critical thinking and empathetic understanding, and apply them to the task in hand. One hopes Mr Hinds will remember some of those skills before it is too later.

At the moment the UK’s universities stand second only to those of America as an international success story. In the last five years they have faced a revolution in the context within which they work. From a situation where they had to deal with a Government-imposed cap on the number of students they could take, and low fees, they were pushed into a free market where they could take as many students as they could get, and charge up to £9k a year (now £9.25K) to each of those students. The market worked as the market tends to. Many students went where they thought they could get the best value for that money. They based that judgment of ‘value’ on many things, but not money alone. Universities adapted with speed and agility to the new situation. But now, just as they are coming to terms with it, HMG seem determined to change the rules of the game – again.

If Mr Hinds’ views are economically reductionist, they are also regressive. Children from backgrounds where there is enough social capital to realise the value of Arts and Social Science subjects, will continue to do them, but at a reduced price; children from other backgrounds will be deterred. So, within a generation, Arts and Humanities and Social Science subjects will be the the preserve of a social elite at a few “top” universities. Let’s return to the 1930s, it was so much better then.

But above all, Hinds expresses a deeply philistine view of education. Wilde defined a philistine as one who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Value and ‘values’ as not the same thing. What value a society of educated people able to think and make informed decisions about political and economic issues? But let’s not worry, seems to be the argument, ‘value for money’ can be defined in narrow utilitarian terms.

If, as Mr Hinds claims, he wants to continue widening access to Higher Education – a line I support, let us widen it for all subjects, not just the ones a current generation think economically useful, especially when the yardstick used is the wrong one. That a Conservative Catholic should be so confused about the value of higher education is deeply depressing.

Diversity?

19 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by John Charmley in Education

≈ 6 Comments

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Aspiration, Higher Education, Students, Success, Teachers

becoming-teacher

Yesterday’s post on measures of success in education prompted some interesting comments, not least from Neo and Scoop, who both made the point, as did Annie, that educational qualifications are not all there is to life – we need people with practical skills. I doubt anyone whose electricity has failed or whose drains are blocked would argue with that, and if the gravaman of the comments was that sometimes we focus too narrowly on a certain type of academic education, there would, I suspect, be quite a bit of nodding. But I wonder how accurate that perception now is? When I look at the range of things people can study at university, it is now pretty diverse. Critics concentrate on supposed easy options like Women’s Studies and Media Studies (though as anyone who has done courses in either would attest, there is nothing easy about them) but miss out on things like physiotherapy and sports rehabilitation, not to mention courses to do with computing and law, all of which, when I began my academic career, were not options pursued at many universities, and which, when they were introduced, encountered a certain sort of snobbery as to whether they were really things people ought to do at university? Well, they are, and they are, so to say.

Universities were not founded by the Church and supported by Monarchs and rich nobles because any of these funders thought education for its own sake was a good thing, they were funded to provide the Church and the Monarch with educated men who could help run their institutions. We live in very complex societies which need a diversity of skills, and universities provide more by way of teaching than those who have not looked at them for some time might suppose. But they are not the be all and end all of life. It is wrong to give young people the idea that they are some kind of failure if they don’t go to university. Some people are not ready for it at 18, others never will be. I remain the only one in my birth family to have gone to university, but my siblings never felt a failure, because we did not come from the sort of family who expected to go to university; in that sense I was the odd one out, and to her dying day, my dear mother never understood why, as she put it I ‘could not read books somewhere nearer home’.

We hear much of ‘diversity’, but if we really understood the word we would not apply it so narrowly to a set of politically-correct objectives; indeed, at University nowadays even in its narrow sense, we might be asking why fewer and fewer young men are going there, and why young men do worse at school than young women. Education ought to be about helping young people to become the best they can become, and if that means the best electrician, the best plumber or the best nuclear physicist, then our education systems have to try to provide that. That’s why teaching remains a vocation. In many years in education I’ve found young people remarkably forgiving of my foibles, and those of my colleagues, but there is one thing they won’t forgive – laziness and lack of interest. You can’t fake sincerity as a teacher, and the kids notice if you try.

As education comes to see itself more and more as some sort of business (at a recent meeting an external consultant used that word 15 times in a presentation of half an hour), and as those who manage it set targets, they need to bear in mind that there are many things you cannot measure, and that good teachers, whilst they can be made better ones by training, cannot be made into good teachers by it. We need, I think, to value our teachers, they are men and women who devote their lives to helping others to outdistance them – and then smile at the result.

Success?

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by John Charmley in Education

≈ 18 Comments

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A Level results, Higher Education, Universities

The sort of photograph newspapers are not supposed to publish any more in case it upsets people.

Today is the day on which students in England and Wales get their A level results, and on that depends the fate of any of them wanting to go on into higher or further education. Social media is full of reassuring messages for those judged to have ‘failed’. One which moved me greatly was from a former student of mine who is now a Professor of History, and who came to us with what he calls ‘crap A levels’. But in those days (the late 1980s) we could take him with those grades; we could not now. Why the difference? Back then higher education was not a ‘market’ and with numbers of applicants fewer than they are now, we were allowed to exercise our professional judgement. Mine was that he had the attitude of mind and the determination to succeed, and his A level results in no way measured his real potential; something had gone wrong at exam time, but I was confident that could be put right. A BA and a PhD later, he showed the wisdom of that attitude. He was not the only one, but I admired his determination then, and I admire his sharing his poor A level performance with others – may it encourage them.

Sometimes exams don’t work in the way they are meant to. Sometimes we don’t work at them in the way we are meant to (after all between 16 and 18 many people discover other interests in life). It is easy when the results don’t go the way you wanted to bemoan your fate. In an era where league tables of Universities seem to have taken on a life of their own, it is even easier to be despondent because you cannot get into the place you wanted and you have to settle for less. That is one way of thinking about it; but it is the wrong one. The UK in fortunate in having lots of good universities, and that can mean that if you take a bit of time, you can still find one which suits you and in which you will do well. League tables tell you something, but not everything. They tell undergraduates very little about the quality of the teaching they will receive for their £9k fees – which is why the Government is driving forward with plans for a ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’. Of course such exercises cannot measure what they claim, but that is true of the Research Excellence Framework, and we have lived with that for much of my academic career. If we are to have league tables (and like the poor they are always with us) let us at least have ones with proxies for teaching excellence.

We hear much about so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, presumably from those with PhDs in quantum mechanics. Most degrees are not vocational in a direct sense. No one, after all, knows how many engineers, chemists, accountants and lawyers the economy will need, and most past attempts to second-guess it have failed, Newman thought what was needed were people who knew how to think critically and who were able to adapt themselves to the demands of any career – vocational training could be provided on the spot. I have spent my life either teaching bright young minds, or helping run places which do that. It is not, someone said to me the day ‘much of a career’. I agreed. It isn’t, it is a vocation. Universities began as places where the Church and the State could acquire bright young men to help run them, but they soon acquired what all good universities have, which is a love of learning for its own sake, and a desire to work with young minds to help them achieve their best. For all the many changes, such an ethos still lies at the heart of our universities, and those young (and now, thank goodness some not so young) people who go there will embark on an adventure in learning which will help equip them with the critical thinking skills needed to be be of service to themselves and society in the fast-changing world into which they will graduate.

I wish them all well.