open Democracy News Analysis - What is education for?, Susan Bassnett - Comments

tomfrom66 on "What is education for?"

tomfrom66 — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:58:00 +0100

tomfrom66

John Seddon's recent book "Systems Thinking in the Public Sector" is a devasting indictment of the mindset behind the problems within education which Susan Bassnett so ably summarizes.

It's clear that all the (once) public services are being degraded on several fronts: the inane targets culture; the itch to privatise/outsource "delivery", and the injection of competition into areas where it only does further damage; these are all part of a seamless attack on teachers, nurses, police officers, and fire fighters.

Seddon catalogues the vast army of apparatchiks who are employed to push targets, and the essential mindless triviality which results.

Only today (15 August) it's being reported that care for the elderly is skewed by the targets built into the doctors' contract of 2004. Treatment which the elderly might need is less likely to be given if it was not specified in that document.

In a recent issue of New Scientist - 06 August 2008 - AC Grayling argued the importance of critical thinking skills in education.

There are two problems with this argument in the current dystopia: first, measurement - by which I mean conversion into a target - would be difficult, for obvious reasons; but second, and much more problematic is this question: do the current global "movers and shakers" want people coming out schools applyig the "critical thinking skills" to the way government and economy are currently structured?

okoth on "What is education for?"

okoth — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:56:37 +0100

Thanks for this important commment. I strongly support your comment.With the current education system especially in kenya which is my country.People are being trained with the mentality of seeking the employment and passing their exams for the sake of certificates but never to utilise their full potential/Talents.This has results in proffessionals who can`t be self reliance interms of indepent deciscion making or thinking inovatively.

kerrywinn on "What is education for?"

kerrywinn — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:41:34 +0000

Pedagogy is destroying true learning. Face it, pedagogy demands that all children succeed, and, as a consequence, teachers are forced to dumb down the curriculum for the slowest student in the class. This damages the very bright, motivated students. Drawing pictures is wonderful for art, but to assess a high school student's understanding of a novel by drawing a six-framed storyboard is pure crap. The whole base in education is missing with students unable to read, write, add, and subtract when they are 16 years old. Lose the pedagogy, and students skills will improve. When you lose your culture, your sense of right and wrong, you lose everything. Know your friends well, keep them close; know your enemies better to defeat them.

John Hutchinson on "What is education for?"

John Hutchinson — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:13:38 +0000

It is extremely refreshing to read an article which addresses today's educational malaise. As someone who is a casualty of the educational system, having worked in FE/HE for many years, and forced to leave it for my own survival, I fully echo the majority of the concerns and malpractices discussed. In particular, the narrow focus on vocational education in FE has caused immense damage and its poisons have spread into almost all levels and areas of education. The lack of "joined up thinking"is especially telling. Apart from having a good education at a good university, I also have experience of the Danish education system, Like many linguists, I have worked in the world of private language schools, which in many ways has paralleled the development of FE and spent a short period in a special needs Steiner school. In addition, for many years as predominantly a business studies teacher, I tracked the business environment as one of my specialities. This breadth of experience and concentration of subject matter has led me to examine the pernicious trends decribed in the article. I have forgotten how many times I have noticed that colleagues from a whole range of educational institutions that I have met in meetings, conferences, training sessions, etc seem to be completely absorbed in the specifics of their academic worlds , unable or unwilling to make connections. The devil is in the detail but there is no God in the big picture, for the simple reason there is no longer any big picture. The lack of moral and social cohesion is also something highlighted in the article.There is no accepted set of values, other than the cult of the market system, and that runs much deeper than education into the nature of democracy itself. How have we arrived at this situation in which as the previous writer identified, knowledge, itself, has been subordinated to economic and utilitarian needs? There seem to be three main sources of this subversion of the purpose of education, if we define its purpose as a primary one of free enquiry, of stimulating the thirst for knowledge. The pervasiveness of management values, the counterblast of political correctness in its attempts to rectify social disadvantage,and less obviously, the stranglehold of the computer combine together in ways which reinforce the paralysis of education. Good management should create wealth,social policies should smooth out the excesses of the market system and ICT should open access to an almost limitless amount of knowledge. Indeed, they do all these things and in abundance. They have also given rise to a growing and nationwide authoritarianism in which the autonomy of the educator is the principal victim, and here I chime with the views of Susan Bassnett in emphasizing the failure of a critical faculty,to assess all of these three influences instead of blindly accepting their concepts and formats. Managers have infiltrated the education system (it is particularly self-evident in FE) at the expense of academics. In October 2005, for example,Radio 4 was tracking a group of students starting out at a particular university in order to see if the experiences of the students matched their expectations. The (managerial?) member of staff in charge of the student liason committee declared that the lecturers had got to get used to the students being able to dictate to members of staff. Dictate? What has happened to the knowledge, expertise, experience and judgement of the lecturer or tutor? Student feedback is important, but it is not overriding. The consumerist approach to education is the flipside of the "commodification" of learning, and we allow management jargon and the double-think of political correctness to distort and invert our organisational thinking (the way we perceive the educational institutions we work in) in ways that no self-respecting academic would allow in a specialism. The result is an acquiescence in the face of institutions which appear to subsume their individual employees in corporate plans and controlled interactions with the media. Image has become almost an absolute, presentation is preferred to substance, an apparent emotional empathy becomes a substitute for analysis and debate. The minds of students are not being developed at whatever level of the education system you look at ,since training and skills have become paramount. This is creating dependency in learning, not autonomy of thought and investigation. it leads to an obsession with targets which ensures that the lowest common multiple of learning is achieved not the highest common factor. These prejudices against the free spirit of enquiry have become embedded in the corporate roles of academic organisations, ossifying a managerial hierarchy into a false sense of status to the detriment of the educator. Despite the enormous advances of IT and its tremendous potential, of which this site is but one example, the hype has exceeded performance so far. The negative aspects of IT are such tendencies as the format dictating the content, the decontextualisation which can occur when disparate sources are drawn together without insight or understanding, rather like a patch essay. and the sense that one's PC is not under one's personal control, that one is the slave of its logical rules, from which genuine interaction and intuition have been deleted.These also feed into the loss of autonomy of the educator. It therefore needs great self-confidence for the teacher to act as provocateur, to establish and defend a position against which the students can develop their criteria and their minds. The assault against the educator is a war on three fronts, corporate, emotional and technological.

nostler on "What is education for?"

nostler — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:23:36 +0000

'Education', or rather the state of our schools and universities, is constantly in the news, but one word is consistently missing in the debates on what it is for: namely, 'knowledge'. We hear about qualifications, social equity, childcare, bullying, imaginative/critical thinking, socilal skills, entrepreneurial skills, IT skills, sports provision, even (very occasionally) about bringing out the best in the students. We hear about the education system's function in providing qualifications, or more usually the relative performance of schools in provision of same, assessed statistically (i.e. 'evaluated'); we might even hear scepticism on whether this is really preparing its patients for either their future use as workers (cue comments from industrial and other money-making organizations) or even their future lives (but there are no experts to ask about this, so we settle for politicians pontificating). Either way, the assessment of the system is seen in a profoundly utilitarian light: does it bear fruits which add (directly and quantifiably) to the utility of pupils, parents, university admissions officers, employers, the government, national prestige, or even UK plc? The thing is: none of this is central to education, even if some of it will follow if good education is achieved. Education itself is about giving people access to knowledge - a whole body of propositions believed to be true, or effective, which collectively make up our culture. It may be 'knowledge that' or 'knowledge how', but it is all quite independent of the characters and desires of the teachers, as it is of the students/pupils. Education is about being put in touch with an abstract 'other'; only by acquiring some of it can the pupils end up in a different (intellectual) place from where they started, i.e. actually 'have learnt something'. We need students to learn, and teachers to be (in the full sense) learned. So the only issue for parents choosing schools, teachers evaluating students, governments evaluating university departments, or whatever, is to ask: is knowledge being acquired or transmitted? All the other stuff, examination grade statistics, publication counting, value added assessments etc,, are just (rather poor) proxies or indicators for answers to the knowledge question. The knowledge question may seem vague, even open to subjective interpretation. It may be difficult to answer (though it is surprisingly easy to assess if people are really motivated by love of learning). But it is the only one which actually gets to the point, and hence will not (if systematically considered - e.g. by government policymakers, or funding formulae) lead to successive distortion of the education system. And it is equally applicable to any education, from the most abstract to the most apparently vocational. When everything else has been tried, I wonder if educationists will actually revert to this. A linguist

jules on "What is education for?"

jules — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:58:24 +0000

An interesting topic. I took a PGCE in ICT four years ago, and never wanted to be a teacher after that. Why? Because during training all I saw were teachers as disciplinarians. In my training, I saw little evidence of real teaching. I couldn't wait for the course to end, so I could get back to real life. Another aspect that bothered me tremendously was the insistence on the school system in turning out little sausages, all identially suited to their new roles in the workplace. Good for society yes, but for the pupil? I think not! Creativeness is not the buzz word in today's curriculum. Unfortunately, the teaching profession is in part becoming an ageing profession, so many teachers are there to see out their years, and really just want to be left alone. While this attitude may get them a good pension (really?), and a well deserved rest, it is hardly good for the pupils! Jules.

chris thomson on "What is education for?"

chris thomson — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:16:30 +0000

I agree with Susan. It is very rare to come across true education in these frantic times of training everyone to become relatively mindless cogs in the economic growth machine. In its original sense, education is all about bringing out the best and uniqueness in each one of us, even if that means we end up questioning prevailing beliefs, values and behaviours. It is about helping us to realise our potential, including our potential to be highly conscious and intelligent. However, although we continue to use the word “education” to describe what happens in schools, colleges and universities, there is not much true education around these days. To a large extent, it has been replaced by its opposite, schooling – which is the process of shaping people to believe and follow prevailing beliefs, values and behaviours. Although there is a lot of talk, by politicians and others, about the importance of education, one is left wondering whether they are talking about a preparation for life or a preparation for work. If “education” is mainly a preparation for work, then we have a serious problem because it means that our schools and universities are producing people with skills and knowledge for working in the global economy, but they are not producing people with wisdom and consciousness for living well in the world. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. The fact is that true education enhances and enables consciousness and intelligence. Schooling seems to restrict them. Insofar as schooling is the prevalent mode of “education” in the modern world, consciousness and intelligence are being restricted on a massive scale. That is a global tragedy. There is an urgent need to bring true education into the world.

What is education for?, Susan Bassnett

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:45:12 +0000

This autumn I find myself thinking very hard about the fundamentals of education, especially in England where I work. Tony Blair declared on becoming prime minister in 1997 that education was a top priority for his government, but ten years on the problems are manifold: among them failing schools; rising teenage illiteracy levels; and violent, disruptive and obviously bored schoolchildren. In the universities, despite the apparent rise in A-level standards there is increasing need to help students with basic literacy and numeracy.

Susan Bassnett is professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies and pro-vice-chancellor of Warwick University

Also by Susan Bassnett in openDemocracy:"The education revolution" (19 February 2007)

It is not, overall, a cheerful picture. Ministers can bluster all they like about improvements in education, but the reality at the chalk-face and computer-screen is very different - and parents, teachers and academics know that only too well.

It is the right time for me to reflect on education for another reason: for the first time in thirty years I no longer have a child in school. My eldest started school in September 1977, my youngest left in July 2007, and over that time I have seen a lot of change. Moreover, I have been a school governor for some years, so have seen at first hand the way in which school budgets operate and have also seen some of the enormous social and educational problems that teachers are having to face. Finally, as an academic involved in senior university management, I also have an overview of what is going on in higher education.

These different experiences and perspectives has been very useful in helping me to gain a picture of the system as a whole, from primary to tertiary levels; without this extensive personal engagement I would have had no way of joining the dots.

Indeed, that very phrase and the integrated approach it implies is a key to the predicament of education in England as a whole - the absence of any joined-up thinking. It's clear to those inside that changes (for example) in the primary curriculum will have a knock-on effect on secondary schools and, ultimately on universities, yet so many decisions show no awareness of such connections or consequences. For example, the silly decision to downgrade the teaching of foreign languages in secondary schools has led to the closure of several university departments of modern languages, which will make it far harder to train the teachers who will implement the introduction of languages into primary schools after 2012.

The league-table illusion

My eldest daughter is looking for a school for her son, who is about to turn 4 and hopes to start in September 2008. The search is complicated. There are all kinds of constraints, most notably the catchment-area. She has been stunned by class sizes of over thirty pupils, depressed by the lack of sport and music on offer, bewildered by the vaunting of interactive whiteboards and computers for tinies.

A generation ago, my daughter started out in a Victorian building with a concrete playground in a poor inner-city area, but was privileged to be taught by gifted, dedicated teachers who excited her imagination. My advice to her today was to focus on the teachers and the head rather than on the infrastructure, the technology and the league tables.

This "league-table culture" is, in my view, very damaging to education. It creates false impressions and leads to schools and universities devising all kinds of strategies to massage their way up the charts. I was lucky enough to be a governor for years in a school with the highest incidence of free school-meals in the area, located in a sink housing estate, yet the quality of education provided for the children by the head and his team was fantastic. Unfortunately, the budget he was allocated every year was not, for many of the children failed to score highly in the standard assessment tests (Sats) and so the school failed to rise in the league tables.

It was useless to complain, as we did every year, that if you have a high number of children coming to school unable to speak, let alone hold a pencil, and often from homes with a high level of violence, usually drug-related, then you are not going to get the same results you will see in a school where the children come from four-bedroomed houses and have enjoyed top-of-the-range educational toys and books from birth. This is not what politicians want to hear. So instead, we get ministers pontificating about the elitism of universities who are failing to take students from poor backgrounds. The link between educational deprivation at primary level and ability to score highly at A-level is blindly ignored.

League-tables at all levels mislead people and create a culture of competition that damages education. They derive from a misconception about what education is for: whereas once education was seen as a process of building-blocks upon which individuals could start to erect their own structures later in life, now it has been commodified - hence the need for endless quantification. League-tables are only part of the problem; the absurd levels of testing to which English children are subjected is another. Thankfully, the Scots and the Welsh have backed away from the English testing frenzy, but our children are still the most over-examined in Europe, and certainly not the best educated as a result.

The mind-drill evasion

As long ago as 1854, Charles Dickensrepresented the horrors of bad education through the character of the unimaginative schoolmaster, Mr Gradgrind, whose name speaks for itself. Gradgrind in Hard Times taught his pupils facts and sought to suffocate their creative imagination. The endless round of examinations that, we are told, provides vital "evidence" of "improving educational standards" is our 21st century version of Gradgrindism.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising, that recruiting new teachers is proving increasingly difficult. Why spend three years obtaining a degree in a subject you love, then another year of teacher- training, if what you end up doing is marking tests, filling in forms and providing social care for seriously disadvantaged and damaged children who are not receiving adequate help from their families or from the community? Whatever happened to the idea of teaching as a vocation?

There are already signs of similar difficulties in universities. It is very hard to recruit good people in some subjects (even in the "Russell group" institutions) due to low salaries and poor job-satisfaction. The culture of inspection that has oppressed schoolteachers has been extended into the university world, with no obvious improvement of the quality of education on offer. Some universities are run as corporate businesses, others as degree factories.

Many vice-chancellors and pro-vice-chancellors are drawn from outside the academic world, from business and industry. Management, many academics feel, is seen as more important than the primary task of educating young people.

The thinking solution

Society is made up of individuals, who cohere into different groups at different points in their lives. Every nation needs to educate its citizens and social improvement is obviously bound up with greater knowledge and awareness. But it is important that in formulating educational policy, governments recognise that education means much more than just training a workforce.

Education is about teaching children to grow up into adults who will take some responsibility for the world they inhabit, and who therefore will understand why they cast their votes in elections; why concern about climate change is essential; why preventive healthcare matters; why history remains relevant in modern society; why it is important to learn about how other cultures operate in a globalised, computer-driven, but also divided world.

Perhaps above all, education is about teaching people how to think and how to question what they see and hear. The Burmese monks willing to risk death to challenge a repressive government are educated enough to understand that collective action combined with courage can bring about change. The Taliban hardliners who throw acid on women teachers in Afghanistan because women should not have the right to be educated are the antithesis of those Burmese martyrs.

Children in British schools need to hear about both those worldviews, need to be able to weigh them up, understand how they came to exist, debate the rights and wrongs of each and so discover the value of freedom of speech and the right of human beings of all sexes, races, religions and classes to dignity and to education. In short, they need to be educated to live fully in the world, not merely trained to perform a set of limited and limiting tasks.

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