We’re Nearly All Infants Now

nick cowen, 18 April 2007

The new Educational Conscription blog is chronicling the burgeoning opposition to government proposals to extend compulsory education up to the age of 18. The big shift in policy is not the increased availability of further education to young people, a long held and frequently frustrated government aspiration. Instead, it is the use of coercion, with the threat of sanction, to ensure young people comply with these objectives. Fearing that the value of their educational initiatives won’t be evident, the government wants to give young people an offer they can’t refuse. Hence, the correct approach is to examine this as a civil liberties issue – not as just another initiative in the myriads of education reforms.

How to properly treat the rights of children presents a difficult problem in classical liberalism. Not being able to rely on them as individuals to seek out their own interests in a rational manner means that significant direction from an authority is necessary when ensuring children have access to their rights. How much of that authority the state should have over children presents another problem. The political consensus has been to acknowledge that people need full-time, compulsory education provided (in most cases) by the state up until the age of 16. After that, individuals are encouraged to go into further training and education and often supported in their endeavours through public funds but, as young adults, it is their freedom and responsibility to choose what to do next. And it is exactly this recourse to individual liberty and choice that this government means to stamp out!
As Alan Johnson has argued: “It should be as unacceptable to see a 16-year-old in the workplace without any education or training as it was to see a 14-year-old, which used to be quite common before the Butler education act [1944].”
We can see in this the seedling of a rather worrying trend. We might well agree it is ‘unacceptable’ to see a 14-year-old working, although not as unacceptable as seeing slightly older teenagers drinking their way through a worthless three-year degree course (which is also taking place under the Department for Education and Skills’ brief).
But should a 16-year-old in work place really be equally as unacceptable as a 14-year-old in work? If two more years on this earth doesn’t have any impact on whether someone can start earning money, then why should two more years after that? And two more years after that? If this policy of banning able (and for now, adult) individuals from working continues, then what will stop a future education minister from announcing ‘It should be as unacceptable to see a 18-year-old in the workplace as it was to see a 16-year-old’ in 2057? This will be presumably after an announcement of a new compulsory 3-year joint-honours degree in chair-sitting and telephone-dialling studies for those hoping to be eligible for office work.
The government will say it is these two years of 16-18 that are crucial to giving young people a proper education within a system that still manages to fail many pupils in the 11 years that it already has to teach children. While the government already has powers to experiment on children with its endless initiatives and policy changes, to requisition two further years from those who are now young adults is rather a different matter and the government would do better to actually deliver teaching these adults are happy to opt themselves into, or else leave them alone.
The government’s interest in extending the compulsory age of education might not be entirely pure either. It is now becoming accepted that their open-door policy to economic migrants is having a disproportionate impact on youth unemployment. This is not entirely surprising, considering that the flood of migrants will happily provide low-skilled work that would otherwise be a first step into the workplace for young adults with few qualifications. Compulsory education up to the age of 18 would allow these spiralling unemployment figures in some areas to disappear overnight.