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Last edited by uziq (2022-02-17 02:32:22)

The​ ideological assumption, taken as read by the OECD or the World Economic Forum, that the benefits of literacy – indeed of education generally – are ultimately to be realised in the marketplace has provoked huge political disruption and psychological pain in the UK over the last ten years. The trebling of university tuition fees in 2012 was justified on the basis that the quality of higher education is commensurate with graduate earnings. The hope, when the new fee regime was introduced, was that a competitive market would spontaneously emerge as different ‘providers’ of higher education charged different rates according to the ‘quality’ of what they had to offer. When the market failed to come about, because so many universities opted to charge the maximum fees allowed, the government unleashed further policies in a bid to create more competition. In 2013, the cap on the number of students a university could accept was unexpectedly removed, leading to vast over-recruitment by ambitious universities (many of which didn’t have enough teaching space to cope with the increased numbers), and dire financial consequences for others. In 2016, the Teaching Excellence Framework, overseen by a new Office for Students, was introduced; it measured, among other things, universities’ graduate employment rates. And since 2019, with the Treasury increasingly unhappy about the amount of student debt still sitting on the government’s balance sheet and the government resorting to ‘culture war’ at every opportunity, there has been an effort to single out degree programmes that represent ‘poor value for money’, measured in terms of graduate earnings. (For reasons best known to itself, the usually independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has been leading the way in finding correlations between degree programmes and future earnings.) Many of these programmes are in the arts and humanities, and are now habitually referred to by Tory politicians and their supporters in the media as ‘low-value degrees’.

But if the agenda is to reduce the number of young people studying humanities subjects, and to steer them instead towards STEM subjects, finance and business studies, the rhetoric is superfluous: the tuition fee hike, combined with the growing profile of league tables, had already worked its magic. The number of students studying English and modern languages at university fell by a third over the decade starting in 2011, and the number studying history by a fifth. In 2012, English was the most popular A level subject, with ninety thousand students taking the exam that summer; by 2021, that figure had fallen to 57,000. The number studying French and German at A level fell by around half over a similar period. Academic jobs – even whole departments – in these areas have been threatened by a combination of brute market forces and university managers beholden to ‘enterprise’ and ‘impact’.

One consequence of all this is that studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position. (This effect has already been noticed among young people going into acting, where the results are more visible to the public than they are in academia or heritage organisations.) Yet, given the changing class composition of the UK over the past thirty years, it’s not clear that contemporary elites have any more sympathy for the humanities than the Conservative Party does. A friend of mine recently attended an open day at a well-known London private school, and noticed that while there was a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers, nobody was waiting to speak to the English teacher. When she asked what was going on, she was told: ‘I’m afraid parents here are very ambitious.’ Parents at such schools, where fees have tripled in real terms since the early 1980s, tend to work in financial and business services themselves, and spend their own days profitably manipulating and analysing numbers on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.

Moral​ panics about ‘political correctness’ date back to the 1970s and early 1980s, when there was no mandated national curriculum, and conservatives could entertain paranoid fantasies of ‘loony left’ councils busying themselves with the policing of language. It’s true that teachers then exercised considerable discretion over what children learned, and central government had little power or influence in the matter. The current panic over ‘wokeism’ on the part of Tory politicians and some newspapers has an entirely different pedagogical and political context. As the academies programme expands, more and more schools have been brought under the direct supervision of the Department for Education, while all live under the gaze of Ofsted. Local authorities have been stripped of their powers or – in the case of the GLC – abolished altogether. Universities are forced to compete with one another, their performance assessed by means of financial metrics, league tables and burdensome audits. Teachers, in both schools and universities, are alienated and exhausted by the routinisation and sheer volume of work, and a worrying number want to leave the profession altogether. Despite all this, humanities teachers remain the focus in the culture war waged by the right.

Leaving aside the strategic political use of terms such as ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, it would be hard to deny that we live in an age of heightened anxiety over the words we use, in particular the labels we apply to people. This has benefits: it can help to bring discriminatory practices to light, potentially leading to institutional reform. It can also lead to fruitless, distracting public arguments, such as the one that rumbled on for weeks over Angela Rayner’s description of Conservatives as ‘scum’. More and more, words are dredged up, edited or rearranged for the purpose of harming someone. Isolated words have acquired a weightiness in contemporary politics and public argument, while on digital media snippets of text circulate without context, as if the meaning of a single sentence were perfectly contained within it, walled off from the surrounding text. The exemplary textual form in this regard is the newspaper headline or corporate slogan: a carefully curated series of words, designed to cut through the blizzard of competing information.

If people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it is not because there has been a sudden revival of 1970s pedagogy or radical local government, or, given the political and economic trends of the past dozen years, because the humanities are flexing their muscles. Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, ‘behaviour’ and quantifiable ‘learning outcomes’. Andreas Schleicher is winning, not Michel Foucault. If young people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it isn’t because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of forty years ago, but – on the contrary – because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.

There’s no question that literacy and pedagogy must evolve alongside technology. It’s possible to recognise this while also defending an educational humanism – with a small ‘h’ – that values the time and space given to a young person to mess around, try things out, make mistakes, have a say, and not immediately find out what score they’ve got as a result. It has become clear, as we witness the advance of Panopto, Class Dojo and the rest of the EdTech industry, that one of the great things about an old-fashioned classroom is the facilitation of unrecorded, unaudited speech, and of uninterrupted reading and writing.

uziq wrote:

it's ironic that we spent the last 20-30 years gloating about the inferiority of china's education system, their 'cram school' systems, their rote-learning methods, their hyperfocus on metrics and confucian-style constant examinations. meanwhile we have demonized our humanities, excised everything considered 'non-quantifiable', and made our education systems as much like china's as possible.

uziq wrote:

they are obviously highly qualified, highly skilled workers in a knowledge economy.

the market itself prices university educations at a very high reckoning. it's just the money gets hoovered up by management and speculators.

doesn't make any sense to me that the actual academic workforce of top universities are engaged in such a bitter labour/union struggle.

some of these institutions are richer than small states.

Last edited by uziq (2022-02-21 03:47:50)