Labour’s New Election Battle-Cry: ‘Educashin, Educashin, Educashin’

Civitas, 16 June 2009

How bold must New Labour have seemed to itself in 2001, when it re-branded the Department of Education the Department for Education and Skills. And again, in 2007, when it reconfigured the DfES and the DTI into three new departments:  one for Children, Skills and Families (DCSF), a second for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and a third for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR). The second departmental reorganisation was a veritable job-creation scheme in itself!

Last week’s Cabinet reshuffle saw a reversal of the trend, the DIUS being absorbed by the BERR. Now, not a single Government department makes reference in its title to any form of learning. Schools have become subordinated to social work and universities to employment. A real Workers’ Revolution, I don’t think!

Universities are, reportedly, none too happy about the recent change. According to a brief item in this week’s Economist:

‘Higher-education bosses wonder how congenial they will find a department created to “build Britain’s capabilities to compete in the global economy”. They fear a further shift towards naked utilitarianism, with fundamental research in science sidelined. (And if particle physicists are fretting, imagine how poets and classicists must feel.)’

When I read the news item, which was really more about the adverse effects of constant government reshuffles than it was about education, I was struck by how differently universities and their function are now seen by government and how they were regarded a century or so ago.

In 1916 Lloyd George brought the historian H.A.L.Fisher into his war-time administration as President of the Board of Education.

Fisher was largely responsible for the enactment of the 1918 Education Act which raised the school leaving age to 14 and required local education authorities to provide secondary schools for all who could benefit from such a form of education.

In his person, this country enjoyed a rare moment of ministerial oversight of education by a true philosopher-king. Fisher was a distinguished academic of impeccably classical liberal persuasion who really understood that preparation for work is not the prime function of education in general, especially not of universities.

To illustrate just what a true visionary statesman this country had in Fisher, here are two brief extracts from speeches he gave as President of the Board of Education. The first extract comes from a speech Fisher gave in the House of Commons about the Education Bill as it made its way through Parliament in 1917. He said:

‘There is a growing sense… that the industrial workers of this country are entitled to be considered… as fit subjects for any form of education from which they are capable of benefiting… I notice also that a new way of thinking about education has sprung up among the more reflecting members of our industrial army. They do not want education only in order that they may become better technical workmen and earn higher wages… They want it because they know that the treasures of the mind they can find… a source of pure enjoyment, and a refuge from the necessary hardships of a life spent in the midst of clanging machinery in iur hideous cities of toil.’

The second extract comes from a lecture Fisher delivered at the University of Oxford in 1919. This was shortly after the enactment of the Education Act, when the consequent need was beginning to be recognised for a vast expansion in the size of local education authorities and in the numbers of trained teachers recognised. He said:

‘It is not my submission that it should be made a condition of entrance to the higher branches of the local service of Education that a man should have won a University Degree, but I do contend that there is urgent need that the spirit of a liberal education should be infused into this important branch of the public service, an object which may perhaps be more readily attained when it is realized that University men who elect to adopt a career under a Local Educational Authority may, if they have the necessary qualities, find themselves armed with a degree of power for furthering the educational progress of the country which far transcends that attaching to the headmastership of a great Public School.

‘Whether a large increase in the number of University graduates, exercising an influence on the educational system of the country, will be a benefit to the State, depends upon the way in which the Universities conceive and discharge their function. If the main energies of teachers and taught are concentrated upon examinations and these examinations are framed in a narrow and specializing spirit, if teaching is dogmatic and learning parrot like, if it is possible for students to pass through a University without having been brought to the point of view from which learning is regarded in Von Humboldt’s words as something  “not yet revealed and never quite revealed” , if specialization is carried so far that neither Art nor Philosophy, the two all-pervading influences in any truly liberal education, enter into the ordinary work of the ordinary student, then very little will be gained by the enlargement or multiplication of our Universities. Whether their main business be literary or scientific they will have failed if they cannot do more than this, to give to the country what it should ask and receive from an institution claiming to rank as a University. The mere aggregation under a single constitutional umbrella of a Training College for Teachers, a Medical School, and a Technical Institute does not ensure the presence of those qualities which we associate with the University tradition.

‘To enable a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer to obtain a minimum professional qualification is a useful function which may well be discharged in a University, but it is not in itself a University function. The business of a University is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgment, to enlarge curiosity, and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty view of its resources and demands.’

Read the extracts from these two speeches by H.A.L. Fisher, think of  who are now in charge of education in this country, Messrs. Balls and Mandelson — and weep!