What is the point of education? The question's at least as old as Socrates, but I suspect a lot of confusion about education policy - in both main parties - arises from a failure to answer this question, and to see the trade-offs between the answers.
There are (at least) three possible functions of education:
1. To improve social mobility or increase equality of opportunity.
2. To transmit technical learning, acheiving high educational attainment.
3. To (help) create a virtuous or even happy citizenry.
The thing is, these three goals conflict. For example, increasing overall educational attainment might well require that parents be able to choose among competing schools. But this would reduce equality of opportunity, as better parents would nab better school places.
Also, for choice to be meaningful, schools would have to be more autonomous. But if they are, some will teach things - religion, creationism, whatever - which many believe to be incompatible with truth or virtue.
There's also a trade-off between teaching virtues or happiness and teaching technical skills - simply because there's a limit on the length of the school day.
And there's a trade-off between improving social mobility and teaching virtue and happiness. The latter tells people not to be ambitious. Social mobility requires that they be so.
I take only one message from this. Education policy cannot be a merely technocratic subject - though of course experts can help tell us what's feasible. It is inherently political, in the noblest sense of that word - in that it asks us to choose between competing values.
But could we at least try to reduce confusion by formulating the questions properly?
Have you never read Vygotsky ? The main pupose of education is to transmit culture (of the state in western societies) to the malleable minds of the nations youth. It's why the left in particular are so keeen to control it.
Education, Education, Education = Future voters, future voters, future voters.
Posted by: Matt Munro | May 17, 2007 at 12:28 PM
"Education, Education, Education = Future voters, future voters, future voters."
And how does that work? Arguably one of the great failings of the Conservative party in recent years was its failure to elist the support of a profession that are overwhelmingly of a conservative disposition. I suppose it depends on where you live but you can scarcely find a teacher who is prepared to admit to voting Tory. This isn't going to stop them winning the next election, though.
Posted by: Shuggy | May 17, 2007 at 12:34 PM
Shuggy - If the Tories win the next election, it is only because they have given up any kind of traditional conservative viewpoint, and are babbling the same feelgoodspeak as Blair. In other words the left's takeover of education worked.
Posted by: Rob Spear | May 17, 2007 at 09:16 PM
"And there's a trade-off between improving social mobility and teaching virtue and happiness. The latter tells people not to be ambitious. Social mobility requires that they be so."
Isn't ambition a virtue?
But I agree with you overall, on the need to assess competing educational values.
Posted by: Richard | May 18, 2007 at 03:44 AM
Shuggy - I don't know where you live but I have never met a state school teacher who would vote anything but labour, and a good few who wouldn't vote anything but SWP. They are not of a "conservative disposition" with either a small or a large C and see "progressive" education as the only education. It's teachers who campaigned for an end to corporal punsihment, no uniforms, unstructured lessons, no competitive sport etc etc.
They are all indocrinated at teaching college with the a constructivist, egalitarian, tabula rasa model of education and are in complete denial that intelligence is largely inherited, they won't even accept that boys/girls have innate difference. In short they are still following a tired old 1970s social engineering agenda based on 1960s research.
Recently my son (6 Years old) bought home a load of proapganda about recycling and now they are all completing a data logger for the quanity of fruit and vegetables they eat. Next week they are being shown is Al Gore masterpiece of eco prpoaganda "An uncomfortable truth". Left wing views being taught as fact.
It's only a matter of time before he denounces me to his teachers for being a smoker and refusing to sort my rubbish.
The kids practically work for nu lab now, god knows what they'll be like at 18.
Posted by: Matt Munro | May 18, 2007 at 10:16 AM
It's very funny to see all you right-wing bloggers demonstrating such paranoia about education. As a socialist I think education is currently a disaster area, but if you lot are annoyed then something must be going right.
Posted by: Igor Belanov | May 18, 2007 at 11:55 AM
I think education is somehow above traditional notions of left/right. Ideology is all very well at Islington dinner parties but no one wants their kids to end up flipping burgers.
Oddly enough I don't consider myself right wing, but I did go to a grammar school and belive in "old fashioned" education i.e one that begins with the structured learning of facts in a disciplined environment.
I don't send my kids to school to be inculcated with the "challenge authority" message of marxist teachers who all got thirds from Hull and can't get a real job. It makes me laugh that they then complain about the lack of discipline in the classroom - doh - u reakon the 2 might be connected teach ??
Posted by: Matt Munro | May 18, 2007 at 01:35 PM
"I don't know where you live but I have never met a state school teacher who would vote anything but labour, and a good few who wouldn't vote anything but SWP. They are not of a "conservative disposition" with either a small or a large C and see "progressive" education as the only education."
Blimey! Jus' goes to show how different perceptions can be. I'll take your word for it that the teachers you've met are like this, in which case I'm very surprised. The overwhelming majority of teachers I know pour scorn on the concept of 'progressive' education; *know* the 'tabula rasa' is a lot of shit; favour uniforms; are nostalgic for the days of corporal punishment and have nothing but contempt for the teacher training colleges, which are indeed stuck in some seventies time-warp. By conservative I mean with a small 'c'. Most - no, all - teachers of my acquaintance understand that order is the first virtue of the classroom and most of them, us, cannot help but extrapolate from this to wider society. This is what makes us relatively conservative. But I live in Glasgow and the sixties didn't arrive here until the 1990s ;-)
Posted by: Shuggy | May 18, 2007 at 03:05 PM
"The main pupose of education is to transmit culture (of the state in western societies) to the malleable minds of the nations youth. It's why the left in particular are so keeen to control it."
That's a very slanted view - while transmitting culture is part of it, education has an enormous amount of practical value. People need to be able to write fluently, and add up, at least if we want a functioning economy. People need to be able to tell the difference between charlatans selling pseudo-science, and reality. Badly educated societies are very prone to cults and conspiracy theories.
And as for the left being 'particularly keen to control it', I suggest you take a look at the activities of the Christian right in America in attempting to control science teaching.
If state education is 'controlled by the left', commercial education is equally 'controlled by the right' - well, the *economic* right, at least. He who pays sets the agenda - even if he doesn't want to.
In my experience, there is no such thing as an 100% neutral school, at least beyond primary level.
Posted by: junglecitizen | May 19, 2007 at 06:49 PM