We love to moan about the system – how it conditions our thought, places expectations upon us, is inflexible and ill-suited to the modern context etc. – and that moaning isn’t limited purely to students. Free education sounds wonderful but, in reality, a subsidised higher education sector works against students’ best interests.
The increasing supply of universities, places, graduates, qualifications etc. continuously devalue educational qualifications. With the exception of courses that have a significant vocational content such as Medicine, Engineering, Nursing, Teaching and Natural Sciences, many graduates will find their course’s academic content mostly unnecessary for the line of work they plan to enter. Unfortunately, an oversupply of graduates means that many firms advertise relatively well-compensated occupations as being exclusively ‘grad jobs’. This serves to reinforce the perception that you actually need a degree to even be capable of doing these jobs when, in actuality, it’s just that so many people currently have degrees that it’s pointless applying if you don’t. The necessary skills are better taught outside of a university.
What about all those who would essentially be coerced into going to university because, with free education and the increased supply of graduates, they’d have even less of a chance out there without a degree than they do now? What about those who left education earlier and whose relatively meagre qualifications are further devalued because of more graduates in the labour market? Funnily enough, the income inequality that education subsidies purport to alleviate would only increase. The training required to get a ‘good job’ (and, therefore, to fill them) would simply be lengthened due to qualifications’ devaluation. Normative signposting for how best to spend time is a subtle deprivation of civil liberty.
What is education? Why do we value one form of learning over another? Why stop at higher education? Why not subsidise gap years to Southeast Asia where people ‘discover themselves’? Subsidising one form of education almost always forcefully elevates it to a normatively superior perceived status; this perpetuates social structures, labour market characteristics, outcomes etc. since this normative dimension of legal institutions works to resist our attempts to reinvent social structures and deviating from the accepted norm. Does society really need to pay to offer free behavioural conditioning and thereby limit its own evolution? Free education protests are (mostly) unintended expressions of backward, socially destructive and misery-perpetuating conservatism veiled in social liberalism via equal opportunities and rights rhetoric.
- You diagnosis is, I think, generally along the right lines. But what is your prescription for a corrective course? I suggest that the new free schools in this country, fiercely opposed by the teaching unions and gained only after a considerable struggle with the Department of Education, are the only way forward. They are free in the sense that the government is still paying for them, but they would otherwise not be able to get off the ground. They are being set up by parents who want their children to have the same sort of quality education that the best private schools offer but who cannot afford to pay their sorts of fees.The new free schools are the first attempt to turn the clock back from the time around the 1820s and ’30s when even factory workers in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and a few more manufacturing cities were beginning to pay for their children to be educated — albeit only up to the age of about 11 years (longer for the brightest pupils), but it was a start. The parents couldn’t afford much even though their wages were just beginning to grow a little — only two or three pennies a week for each child — but it was a start. They managed to make the schools financially viable by using what became known as the “monitor system” or the “Victorian system”. (This method is still being used in India, China and other Asian countries in the poorest areas — where the teachers in the free state schools are slipshod and often don’t turn up at all.) One teacher would hold an early morning class in which she would teach the lessons of the day to about a dozen of the very brightest 11 or 12 year olds. They would then take over in turn as ‘monitor-teachers’ to the rest of the children, maybe 200 or 300 during the rest of the day.At the same time, local liberal councils in those cities, together with some of the more progressive employers, were establishing municipal universities. So here was the beginnings of a private education system that was catering to the children of ordinary workers.But what happened? The government stepped in. The government was aware of the free state schools in Germany which Count von Bismark had established with the prime purpose of indoctrinating young minds into the glories of the newly accreting German nation. The motivation was pure nationalism (with an emphasis on the science and warfare). By the 1850s and ’60s the British government realised they were going to be left behind by this powerful rising nation, Germany, which, more than anything else was jealous of the prosperity of Great Britain and power of the growing British Empire. By one means and other the British government effectively nationalised the new private universities and schools. By about the 1880s, the task was complete and the government was in charge of mass indoctrination in the schools — and employers realised that they could forget about their inputs into the universities. By the time of the First World War it was therefore not surprising that a million or so enthusiastic volunteers turned up at the Army recruiting stations. (They soon petered out after a year or so when accounts started coming back from the trenches, and the government had to resort to conscription. But that’s a diversion.)With the new free schools a start has been made in this country. So long as they keep to a standard curriculum they have a great deal more freedom as to what they teach and how they teach. You can also be fairly certain that, because of the parental inputs — those who have more idea of the trends in the job market than the Department of Education — then the new free schools will be giving much more emphasis on relevant subjects than the state secondary schools are doing at present. We can but hope for their future.
