(Firstly an apology and appeal: I reply to all emails I receive, but last month I accidentally deleted a bunch of spam and replies – there were a few very interesting ones on novel writing that I was leaving for a more relaxing time to reply: if you wrote, please re-send, sorry!!)
Whilst musing around the garden under the relatively sweltering heat of a truly impressive English summer that's led to a run on air-conditioners on this green and usually pleasantly damp isle, I thought I should compile an archive of something I look at each day that irks my soul and irritates my professional wisdom: namely, reports on education.
In the early days BB – Before Blair – our Beloved Leader (now sunning himself in Barbados for his well earned holiday away from the growing hatred at home) raised his multi-coloured standard for the election battle and cried aloud, u2018Education, Education, Education.' An interesting mantra but of the style we have come to expect from our Favoured Leader (or should that be Leiter?) So each day, I have considered making a report on what's been happening to education in Blairdom. After all, if you say something three times, something magical usually happens – ah, the essence of modern spin.
But then so often I shrug and then proceed with more entertaining things like weeding. There's so much to criticize! Where to start? Well, each day, after enjoying the pleasures of this site and an essay or two on Mises.org, I check the omnipresent Blair Broadcasting Corporation for up-to-date national news on the web, and each day my eye creeps down the page to see what the latest education headlines are. Two days were sufficient: a book could be written on the problems in state education and many lewrockwell contributors provide a sufficiency as it is, so I shall keep my thoughts to three subjects to mirror Blair's u2018education, education, education.'
7th August.
"Universities campaign for top-ups."
This refers to the nominally u2018independent' universities seeking the right to charge students higher fees. I say nominally, because we only have one private university – Buckingham. All the rest depend on the state for a good proportion of their income and are suffering as a result.
One of the great steps Blair can be quietly congratulated for is the introduction of a flat tuition fee payable by most students. Blair be praised! Prior to the introduction of tuition fees (max. 1100), students enjoyed free tuition and even, in my day, received a grant to go to university in those wonderfully elitist good old days when only 8% of us secured a place at university through hard graft and good A-level results. Nonetheless, quite aware of my privilege, I used to campaign for student loans back then – to the confusion, bemusement, and even anger of my peers who thought students should also be paid to doss around in the holidays too. Back then, in the feisty days of Thatcher's Britain, universities were more u2018nominally independent' than they are today. But as government funding has increased and the number of universities expanded and upwards of 30% of each generation now drift into university u2018to get a degree' as they quip (get? get? like get a new dress or pair of sunglasses?), the quality of UK degrees has fallen to pander to the wilfully ignorant and indolent. Student numbers have increased and are expected to rise to 50% (even die-hard lefties shake their head at the prospect), but, of course, the numbers of lecturers and general funding levels have not increased correspondingly. What do they expect when the government holds the purse, and demand and supply do not operate?
Dissecting the article, we find that Professor Crewe is heading a group to lobby the government and educate the public on why students need to pay more for their higher education. Fine: but no mention of permitting the market to enter the equation. Universities want 5000 a year. The Government will probably allow 2500.
No free market here. No one is suggesting – Blair forbid! – that each university or each department may set its own tuition rate and pay its professors according to what its students pay them. But why not? Immanuel Kant – so respected by the left but so fond of commerce – argued for teachers to be paid according to the number of pupils they attracted. Now, contrast that with a lecturer on a fixed salary, set by collective, national bargaining between the unions and government – the student does not come into the deal whatsoever. Not surprisingly, we have a lot of lecturers who would be serving themselves and the market better by taking up different occupations as well as serious capital depletion on campuses.
All quiet on the education front until Monday 11th August.
Growing Calls for Post-Exam Applications.
Now this is an interesting one – a meagre element of common sense in a centralised structure?
Presented by the opposition parties (Liberal and Conservative), their proposal amounts to allowing 18 year olds to know their A-level results before applying to universities. It would save a lot of time and effort knowing that if you received two As, a C and a D overall, you could apply to X,Y,Z universities and not bother with alpha and beta. Teachers favour the idea too. I've helped pupils fill in their university clearing forms (guess what – we have a centralised clearing system for university places) and the whole process is nerve-wracking for the students, who are making important decisions on where to apply whilst they are in the stressful final furlong of exams.
Incidentally, our pupils seem to be examined every year these days – a parent of a six year old, whom I teach privately, related her fears of Standard Assessment Results: kids – standard?? Crikey, who dreamt that one up? When I was young, not so many moons ago, we actually were allowed to enjoy childhood; we weren't tested according to national scores until we were on the brink of leaving school at 16. But that's all changed in the mass production Soviet-style education system we possess today. Back to the proposal: wonderful, given the system.
But will it be implemented? Well, let me make a short digression and take up the third element to this article.
They have to pitch this idea to an Education Minister who thinks that: "The idea that you can learn about the world sitting in your study just reading books is not quite right" and that study for its own sake is a "bit dodgy."
As a Cambridge educated Mathematician and Economist, this may seem a strange theory to hold: maths and economics are both logical, armchair studies requiring deductive reasoning. (See Mises's Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science.) Study for its own sake prepares and exercises the mind; it broadens the mind's curriculum to permit the all important potential for unforeseen connections across the sciences and arts that in turn may generate revolutionary theories or artistic movements. The greatest minds were not channelled into vocational studies designed by bureaucrats on what they think would suit the future work force; they possessed a broad foundation of knowledge, often studied disparate subjects for their own sake, that gave them a vast and deep mental capital upon which to draw for their own, necessarily chronologically and logically later application.
My beagling friend, Houseman, made a poignant comment that we can draw much from in this regard. Schools try to make physics, say, u2018interesting'. His retort, as a one time Cambridge PhD post-doc atomic physics researcher who's presently trying to enlighten me on alpha-particles and thereby blowing my mind, his retort – spluttered out in indignation – was: "Physics is interesting. You don't have to make it so." Quite. In the hands of the right teachers any subject draws one in – we are, as Aristotle noted somewhere (and if anyone knows where please let me know, I'm forever trying to rediscover the quotation!), we are innately curious. We have a burning desire to know and to understand – even if it is just for its own sake. Only … well, only that schools are so damn good at killing that instinct, that we forget that children burn with the eternal why that does not require an application or a possible job attached to it or some pathetic excuse, easily seen through by kids of course, that u2018this will be good for them one day' with those wonderfully attractive eyes u2018trust me, I work for the government'.
Take modern languages as another instance. The government has decreed that all pupils of all state schools (the state possesses even the mainstream economists' definition of a monopoly in education) should be taught a modern language to the age of 16.
The waste I have seen is diabolical. In one exam room, I saw three hundred or so pupils about to take an exam in something most of them disliked so intensely that the fiery atmosphere could have caused books to spontaneously ignite. The body language of so many teenagers would have provided useful sociological research for anyone interested in the effects of mass production education. Then they were offered dictionaries to help them with their paper. Two or three had actually spent the equivalent of ten bucks to buy their own – the rest put up their hands waiting for the all-providing, all-loving state to present them with knowledge and answers. But without grammar skills, these pupils knew not whether they were looking at a verb or an adjective, or what tense the sentence was in. Many of the questions were multi-guess. Such arcane skills as learning grammatical rules have been rejected in order to teach a language that would allow the pupils to u2018get by' or u2018communicate in a foreign language': the language level would embarrass even the most basic tourist guides, for that is all, after five or more years of French study, these pupils could muster. I won't mention music, as that will anger my fiancée, who's enjoying a few weeks off from being frustrated with the annihilating music education received at schools.
We can admit that some of the teens rebelled against having to study a subject; but most came out despising foreign languages because, in the effort to make them u2018interesting' (memorising how to ask for a double room with a shower – very useful for teens; what your family did last weekend – the kind of questions that titillate six year olds maybe) all interest in studying any foreign language was obliterated. Education Minister Charles Clark wants more – like many, he believes an education should be for a purpose that leads to a specific range of (government u2018careers-service' concocted) jobs. Note: no careers library I've been in explains to a budding sixteen-year-old how to enter kennel work for hunting hounds, ride horses, or be a gamekeeper though.
The headlines each day strain with disappointments and failure; and in most articles, the presumption is made to pray to Blair and his minions to make things better. Few question the wisdom that the state should get out of education on moral as well as economic grounds. But my fellow countrymen do not have long to worry. It's on the cards: a European-wide Euro-curriculum, designed by the French and Germans to teach all the children of Europe to love (one day he's bound to be) President Blair and to be prepared to work for the good of Europe.
Watch this space.
August 13, 2003
