What Ed’s All About, IT

Civitas, 15 July 2008

If anyone were seemingly less well-suited to be in charge of the country’s education system, it is surely the current Secretary of State for Schools, Ed Balls.
For anyone to be qualified for that job surely demands that he or she should have some modicum of feeling for what the purpose of education of is.
Yet, judged by the account he is reported to have given of its purpose in last week’s Times Educational Supplement , it is clear he hasn’t a clue.

In response to a reader’s question enquiring what he thought was the purpose of education, this is how the Secretary of State answered:
‘You want children and young people to have fun, enjoy growing up and have their natural curiosity triggered and nurtured. Beyond that, you also want to make sure they are coming out of school with qualifications, that they are equipped with the kind of skills that universities or employers are going to need and which, therefore, give them the chances to do well – to get a mortgage and to pay their pension.’
There is so much wrong with this account of the purpose of education, one hardly knows where to begin in enumerating what is.
Perhaps, the single greatest fault in Ball’s account of the purpose of education is its complete and total instrumentalism. Basically, what he is claiming the purpose of education to be is equipping its recipients with such skills as will make them employable.
Well, of course, no one would want children to grow up without having skills that render them employable. But that hardly renders their becoming employable the purpose of education.
Compare: no one would want to a motor-car that failed to spare its driver and passengers from the elements. However, the purpose of motor-cars is not to spare their drivers and passengers from the elements. It is to convey them speedily by road from one place to some destination of their choosing.
Suppose per impossible that all need of human labour was to become transcended by future development of a system of super-automation whereby all jobs previously performed by humans were now carried out by robots. Human life in this scenario would have become endless free-time.
Would education cease to have any purpose under such circumstances? Or would, rather, the need for it never have been any greater to enable humans through its receipt become able to make best use of their time?
The Secretary of State’s answer suggests that, under such circumstances, there would be no purpose in anyone’s receiving an education.
Anyone with a grain of sense can see that this is just not so. At a minimum, without being able to read, people would be deprived of access to the world of knowledge and culture contained in books. It is hard to see how anyone would not want to be able to read. Therefore, at a minimum, people would still have reason to want to become literate and want their children to as well. The acquisition of literacy forms an essential part of any decent form of elementary education. So, there are some parts of education that are absolutely vital in rendering their recipients employable the purpose of which is not wholly, or even mainly, exhausted by their utility in rendering their recipients employable.
Of course, the acquisition of literacy by no means exhausts those parts of education that have both an instrumental value, in rendering their recipients employable, as well as a non-instrumental value, in so far as they enable them to get the most out of their lives.
Every academic subject within a liberal arts curriculum imparts some skill that enables those who engage in its study derive more out from life than they would otherwise have been able to. What is of especial importance about them is the extent to which the purpose of engaging in formal study of them is to enable those who do to create, or at to least to appreciate, works of art, literature, music and philosophy.
In sum, the non-vocational and non-instrumental purpose of education is to cultivate the intellect and sensibility of thsoe who receive it so that they may thereby be able to experience what John Stuart Mill referred to as the higher pleasures. Experience of them forms an integral component of any human life worth living and is the true end of a liberal education.
Given his account of the purpose of education, Ed Ball clearly prefers push-pin to poetry. Unlike poetry, the capacity to play pushpin can be effortlessly acquired by evryone and anyone without any formal study. This is unlike the capacity to appreciate and compose poetry which demands prior effort and study.
If, as Balls thinks, the purpose of education is to render those who receive one employable, then learning to appreciate poetry forms no part of its purpose, since being able to do so is without any vocational relevance. A paradigm of a vocationally useful subject is IT (Information Technology).
This is the man in charge of the country’s education system.
No wonder that, since he took over the job a year ago, the country’s schools have been going to the dogs at a faster pace than ever before.