EDUCATION (Mini-articles) Index

New evidence of a sharp deterioration in the quality of university education has emerged from a study of teaching standards across more than 400 departments in 100 institutions. Reports by teams of official assessors show that thousands of students, many of them ill-equipped to cope with the demands of degree-level study, are being poorly taught by over-stretched staff in overcrowded lecture halls.

A disturbingly high proportion are dropping out, complaining that the work is too difficult and that they have too little contact with their lecturers. Classes of more than 200 are becoming commonplace and the small group teaching is rapidly disappearing. Many students admitted with low-grade A-levels, or none, are being awarded degrees whose validity is, for the first time, officially questioned. External examiners, poorly paid and over-burdened, are no longer capable of guaranteeing comparability of standards across the system.

These are the some of the consequences of the abrupt introduction since 1990 of mass higher education, accompanied by a 25 per cent cut in funding per student and strong incentives to institutions to boost recruitment, cynically referred to as "putting bums on seats". The evidence strongly suggests that the unconsdered expansion of higher education has finally spun out of control. Alarm over these developments has prompted Gillian Shephard, the Education Secretary, to order a review of the system's future.

From Newsletter of the Job Society, April 1995

Graduates with modest degrees in irrelevant subjects from undistinguished universities can look forward to little more than poorly-paid clerical jobs, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said yesterday. It found mounting concern among employers about the quality of graduates. Almost half the graduates recruited recently by banks and building societies--regarded as being typical of the service sector--were being paid £8,000 a year to do "sub-graduate work" jobs involving routine tasks traditionally assigned to school-leavers.

"Nearly all managers reported encountering large numbers of job applicants who apparently lacked both technical expertise of any kind and the desired personal qualities. Managers of small and medium-sized firms preferred to recruit graduates with degrees in comp[uting, languages and business. Larger companies in the service sector were prepared to employ graduates who has studied non-vocational subjects but required them to show maturity and business awareness and have communication skills. In the steel and manufacturing industries, however, employers were interested only in graduates with some vocational element in their degrees, such as engineering or technology.

The institute suggested that the Government should spend less on funding full-time degree courses and more on part-time vocational education.

From the Daily Telegraph, 22 June 1995

As the cost of a conventional university education soars, university presidents in the US bemoan the difficulty of getting students. While the number of university students in the UK has been artificially stimulated for the time being, the number of 18-22 year-olds enrolled on full-time courses in the US has fallen by one-third since 1979.

However, communications can totally alter the economics of education. Courses, many of them degree-level and some even doctoral, are delivered by satellite, cable and, since last year, over the Internet. They cost less than conventional full-time courses. America's National Technology University (NTU), a private non-profit degree-giving body is now the largest source of continuing education for engineers, many of whose companies have moved to sparsely populated parts of the country, where conventional universities are scarce.

The Central China Television University relays lectures to two million students all over China. Mind Extension University, a Colorado-based cable-television network devoted entirely to distance-education, launched services in Taiwan in February and in Thailand in March, selling courses assembled mainly by American universities over local cable systems. About 100 universities are now offering courses on the Internet.

This month, British Ort, a large Jewish educational charity will be teaching Barmitzvah lessons over the Internet. The idea is that young Jewish boys in isolated communities around the world will be able to receive the lessons -- an appealing mixture of ancient rituals and leading edge technology.

From the Job Society Newsletter, June 1995

In the advanced countries, we are seeing a few highly-skilled, well-educated, well-paid technological aristocrats and the top end of the work force, and about 70 per cent who have become foundering, searching, angry, anxious, uncertain people.

All the rules have changed. The rules of security, pension plans, future employment no longer exist for many Canadians. If you look at the city of Toronto today, look at who is poor, who is unemployed, and who gets the jobs in between. It is people under the age of 35. They are the ones who are now suffering the new age and asking where do we go from here and are looking for some way out.

But where do we get the money for the necessary re-education, lifelong learning and reskilling of a population? How much more money can we put into colleges and universities? We don't have it. The taxpayer is already paying more than 80 per cent of the bills for higher education. There is no more to pay.

But if we can open up access to distance education, virtual classrooms and new learning capacities, we have a chance. We can plug people into new networks and bring new skills to the reserve, the outport village, the downtown inner city community centre, the downtown apartment block. All this can be done at much lower cost than present methods.

Lloyd Axworthy, Canadian Minister of Human Resources and Development, February 1995

The main barrier to raising standards in schools is the culture of the teaching profession and its resistance to change, Mr Chris Woodhead, UK chief inspector of schools, said yesterday. In an outspoken attack on 'progressive methods', he said teachers were so committed to a 'woolly and simplistic' orthodoxy and that the Government's education reforms risked running into the sand.

The threat to standards came in particular from: (a) child-centred teaching that relied on impulse and inclination; (b) a commitment to 'discovery learning' in place of formal instruction; (c) teachers acting as 'facilitators' rather than moral and intellectual authorities; (d) the practice of dividing classes into groups instead of teaching them as a whole; (e) the view that knowledge of subjects such as English was arcane and irrelevant to the needs of industry and commerce.

'The national curriculum remains mere words on the page until those words are translated into action by the teacher," he said. If the teacher believes that knowledge is unimportant, that subjects are artificial impositions which fragment the seamless web of knowledge, or that facilitation is more important than teaching, then nothing much is going to happen, however energetically Parliament might legislate.'

From an article by John Clare in the Daily Telegraph, 27 January 1995

Government should do no more than establish a legal framework in which individuals can pursue their own goals. State control of education is pernicious because it leads to social conditioning: it imposes one set of values on every body--those favoured by the establishment of the day.

It also undermines the family by relieving most parents of one of their fundamental responsibilities, which is to manage (and pay for) their own children's education. The modern concept of compulsory, state-financed schooling arose in 18th century Prussia. The primary goal was not to educate, but to turn children into pliant citizens who would revere the state. As Frederick the Great said:"The prince is to the nation he governs what the head is to the man; it is his duty to see, think and act for the whole community." To this day, schools are regimenting children like little soldiers.

Educators of the last century regarded children as "human dough" to be placed on the "social kneading board". So what? you may say: children are no longer indoctrinated. I wonder. Even a novel as innocuous as Huckleberry Finn is being banned in many US schools. The truth is that teachers cannot avoid transmitting values to children. If they are paid by the state and spend their entire lives within bureaucracies, they are unlikely to understand the real world. Make them part of the market process and attitudes might change. The advantage of relying on market forces is that they will raise the average quality of schools (just as they do of supermarkets) while offering far greater diversity.

From an article in the Financial Times, 13 Mar 1995

With the annual round of school exams a little more than two months away, the parents of thousands of candidates are wondering how they can help their children to prepare. Sadly many are likely to do more harm than good. The pressure on young people to succeed academically is now so great that an alarming number do not achieve the grades of which they are capable.

University admissions tutors, teachers and fellow pupils all contribute, in different ways, to the generation of such stress. But the prime responsibility lies with the parents. Long-term economic uncertainty makes more and more parents concerned for their children's career prospects, and many are still inclined to see high academic achievement as the only way forward.

A survey I have just completed among A-level students in 1993, from a representative sample of 135 schools and colleges across Britain has produced some distressing statistics. More than 71 per cent of candidates reported that their parents became "very anxious" as the exams approached, and nearly 30 per cent felt this anxiety had been passed on to them. Almost half of those questioned were worried about letting their parents down by achieving poor results and a quarter believed that their parents expected them to do far better than they felt capable of doing so. No less than 45 per cent reported that their sleeping patterns were disrupted and 6 per cent said they could not sleep at all.

From an article by Don Davies, Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1995

Education does not lead the way and is seldom at the cutting edge of social change. It is retrospective, even conservative, since it teaches the young what others have experienced and discovered about the world. The future of education will be shaped not by educators, but by changes in demography, technology and the family. Its ends--to prepare students to live and work in their society--are likely to remain stable, but its means are likely to change dramatically.

The simple view of governments and universities that they themselves can improve education by the expansion of present methods and more credentialism is futile and counter-productive. Tinkering with schools and colleges is not the answer. Double the number of graduates without doubling the number of graduate-level jobs and you promote graduate unemployment and debase academic qualifications.

The primary impulse for educational success is the family--far more than the school, let alone the university, or government policies. At the present time, parents are confused but, sooner or later, they will get their bearings again, and we shall see educational methods and content that will be far more relevant to the world of tomorrow.

Education is much too important to leave to the educatorss because the latter are primarily interested in protecting their own careers, while the parents are interested in their childrens'. Parents know what is happening in the real world long before the educational institutions.

From Job Society Newsletter by Keith Hudson, March 1995

The premium paid for greater skills is increasing from year to year. But it is a long leap from recognising that education and skill-training are good things to concluding that massive government programmes are required. Most students of American government-sponsored schemes agree that they have been miserable failures. In this country, Michael Portillo, the Employment Secretary, has admitted that the government's Tecs schemes for re-training are not doing anywhere near re-skilling Britain.

Will more education in the universities do it instead? Research by Martin Weale of Cambridge University, calculates that increasing the proportion of 18-year olds who go into higher education from its current rate of around 30 per cent to 50 per cent might only--and it is only might--increase the underlying economic growth rate by 0.08 per cent a year , the full effects not feeding through for a generation later. Raising the staying-on rate is far from cheap, so expanding universities and other forms of higher education may offer little or no bang for the taxpayer's buck.

Government programmes are inherently rigid and are administered by bureaucrats who themselves have little knowledge of the requirements of the real economy. It is also to be wondered whether the universities know much about it either. Apart from the really talented self-initiators, "sitting next to Nellie" seems to be the best way of training and re-skilling for most of us.

From an article by Keith Hargreaves in the Sunday Times, June 1994

The number of full-time first-year students in higher education in the UK has risen from 208,000 in 1982 to 436,000 in 1992--despite a fall of more than a quarter in the number of 18-year-olds. Over the same period, the number of part-time students rose by 53 per cent. But this enormous expansion has raised questions about the nature of higher education, and particularly about standards which the government and the universities are only now beginning to answer.

Last November, the Government had to cap funding until 1998. The Higher Education Quality Council, the universities self-regulatory body, found "little consistency and much variation" in classifying degrees between universities, and even between faculties in the same university.

Employers are also raising questions about the quality of a degree. With a doubling in the number of graduates, recruiters are increasingly concentrating their attention on fewer universities, paying more regard to the institution that awards the degree. There is much evidence of a sharp decline in interest from recruiters in the 37 "new" universities which were created from the polytechnics in 1992. Visits to these universities have been cut by 23 per cent this year compared with a drop of 14 per cent at the "old" universities. Employers' interest in the more prestigious institutions, including Oxford and Cambridge, is unimpaired. The 50 per cent increase in the proportion of students at "old" universities winning first class honours over the last 10 years is also seen by some as disquieting evidence of an overheating system.

From an article by John Authers in the Financial Times, 20 February 1995

The headmaster of Harrow School is the latest critic of A-level examinations to launch a broadside against the "gold standards" of school examinations claimed by government ministers. Such a claim "should be taken with a pinch of salt", he said. Nicholas Bomford told parents at speech day that his school had experienced an "extraordinary improvement" in grades over the last seven years, with 42 per cent of pupils achieving A grades this year compared with 17 per cent in 1988. "I cannot believe that the Harrovians leaving last year were that much more able than their predecessors of 1988," he said. "Nor can I readily accept that the quality of teaching can have improved that much over the years, hard working and capable thought the present generations of beaks undoubtedly is." Mr Bomford said he believed syllabuses had been slimmed down and modified "to take account of the fact that the end-point of GCSE is not the same as that of the old O-level."Expanding on his speech yesterday, he said that he knew of a number of university admissions tutors who were increasingly concerned about the quality of candidates applying for places.

Mr Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of Schools, gained final approval at a meeting of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority last week to undertake an enquiry whether A-levels have become easier over time and whether some subjects are less rigorous than others. He declared himself "agnostic" over the issue at this stage. The enquiry will compare papers and the standards required to reach different grades over several decades. Many in the examination boards, however, argue that such a project is flawed because what is required of pupils has altered. They also point out that research in the United States has shown a gradual rise in the IQ of university entrants. The results of the investigation are not expected before the end of the year.

From the Sunday Telegrqaph, 9 July 1995

Last week a Leeds prep school made the headlines by its promise to return fees of pupils who fail to pass the common entrance exam or get into a leading independent school. "If a pupil does not manage to pass the entrance for one ofmour senior independent schools, then the preparatory school is not doing its job properly," it said. The Leeds school idea has the makings of the real thing as far as accountability goes, but only the makings, because there are limited areas where its example can be usefully followed. A money-back guarantee can be no proper substitute for parents and pupils having had the chance at the outset to take themselves to something better. Here is the real lack of choice.

The problem in Britain is the framework laid down by government, inspired and implemented by education officials and theorists, which is anti-excellence, anti-academic, anti-elitist and anti-training. If a parent or pupil wants something different from that found in the national curriculum or its Kafkaesque battery of assessment targets and jargon, they will, in all likelihood, be unable to find it. Just look at the national curriculum-inspired school reports now hitting the doormats.

Two steps are need to make the change. The first is to fund the pupil, not the system: in short, a universal voucher system for all pupils, not just nursery-age ones. This would make schools responsive to the user at the time -- without the more drastic solution of getting your money back after it's all over. The second step would be to liberalise the education structure. This is the only sensible way to higher standards. Instead of the present system designed in the dream world of the educational establishment and imposed on all schools (and shadowed, I regret, even in the independent sector where heads boast that their teachers are trained to "manage and deliver" the national curriculum), let us open up the gates of learning to real subjects and real teaching, and bring back the national written examination as the fairest way to measure standards. This is the week in which we read of plans to set up a national academy for sport -- and yet many pupils still cannot find a school which offers the science or classic subject they want!

From the Sunday Times, 16 July 1995

Media studies -- a subject either mocked or ignored by conventional academics 10 years ago --is sweeping British universities. Nearly 35,000 sixth formers finishing their A-levels this week have applied for degree courses that they hope will get them into television or the press -- far more than have applied for maths, physics or chemistry. To scientists, the success of universities offering to introduce students to everything from music videos to quantitative methods of media analysis is a symbol of the country's change and perhaps its decline. "I wonder if watching the telly stretches the mind," said Peter Saunders, professor of mathematics at King's College, London, whose department has been at the centre of attempts to raise standards of numeracy in Britain. "And I wonder if we should treat students as if they're customers and give them what they want to study. The real cutomer is society. If we forget that we might as well offer courses in beer-drinking. I'm sure they would be popular."

Media studies academics regard such lamentations as cries from the past. They are convinced that study of the media is not just "relevant", to use one of their favourite words, but serious. Their conviction is bolstered by the remarkable popularity of their courses. In 1990, 5,855 people applied for degree courses in media studies, according to the Universities and Colleges Admission Service. Last year, 21,277 applied. This year the numbers have rocketed to 32,862 media studies applicants and a further 12,039 for communication studies courses. The popularity of media studies allows departments to be very choosy. At Loughborough University, where 600 have applie for 34 places, the department demands the equivalent of two Bs and a C at A-level -- grades that would get applicants into many law faculties. The Westminster University school of communications is so over-subscribed that it is moving out of the city and building a £30 million department, the "biggest media studies centre in Europe", in suburban Harrow.

Media studies academics look slightly confused when asked what the point of it all is. Their practical course offer students vocational training in video, radio, periodicals, public relations -- every conceivable branch, in fact, of the media. About three-quarters of students find work. Theoretical courses are served with dollops of Marx, Weber, Brecht, feminism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism. David Cardiff, at Westminster University does not have a problem with the intellectual relevance of media studies: "They are justas important as English literature and probably more directly important in the modern world."

From the Independent on Sunday, 25 June 1995