Why is everyone so intently serious and sober?

The Liberal Democrats have always prided themselves on their belief in the value of education. The question is, what do we mean by ‘education’?

Do we mean earnest and studious reading in the university library? Or do we mean something that promotes more free thinking and a genuine spirit of enquiry?

It is a question raised in the Spectator by Rory Sutherland of the advertising company Ogilvy, in an article titled Why I’m hiring graduates with thirds this year. It is one of the most life-affirming articles I have ever read:

It’s hard to tell the difference between a university and a business school nowadays. Where are all the hippies, the potheads and the commies? And why is everyone so intently serious and sober all the time? ‘Oh, it’s simple,’ a friend explained. ‘If you don’t get a 2:1 or a first nowadays, employers won’t look at your CV.’

So, as a keen game-theorist, I struck on an idea. Recruiting next year’s graduate intake for Ogilvy would be easy. We could simply place ads in student newspapers: ‘Headed for a 2:2 or a third? Finish your joint and come and work for us.’

Let me explain. I have asked around, and nobody has any evidence to suggest that, for any given university, recruits with first-class degrees turn into better employees than those with thirds (if anything the correlation operates in reverse). There are some specialised fields which may demand spectacular mathematical ability, say, but these are relatively few.

So my game theoretic instincts suggest that if we confine our recruitment efforts to people in the lower half of the degree ladder we shall have an exclusive appeal to a large body of people no less valuable than anyone else. And such people will be far more loyal hires, since we won’t be competing for their attention with deep-pocketed pimps in investment banking.

What Sutherland calls “this credentialist arms-race” is getting us nowhere. I think he’s on to something.

Oh, and me? I spent most of my time at university buggering about in student politics or in the union bar. Still got a 2:1, though. Damn, damn, damn...

What political genius thought of this?

Yes, let’s pick at some old scabs, shall we?

The New Statesman reports that Danny Alexander has confirmed the student loan book will be privatised. The report explains why this makes no economic sense.

What the New Statesman doesn’t say is that reopening the issue of student loans makes no political sense either. That issue has become a byword for mistrust of the Liberal Democrats. So why revive the controversy?

Oh yes, I forgot. Everybody who used to vote Liberal Democrat is a ‘protest voter’ who can be safely jettisoned in favour of hard-working-centre-ground-alarm-clock-Britain. I hope these imaginary voters will be impressed.

In defence of Michael Gove

Everybody hates Michael Gove, right? But if you want to challenge his education reforms, you must do better than resort to tendentious argument.

Frank Furedi has written an interesting article for Spiked examining the fad for ‘Govephobia’. Leaving aside the specific pros and cons of Gove’s reforms, Furedi raises two interesting points.

The first is the sort of bien pensant groupthink that assumes no argument is necessary – just a knowing smirk or a right-on posture will do. This sort of lazy criticism simply plays into Gove’s hands, because it displays precisely the lack of intellectual rigour that he proposes to tackle.

Which brings us to the second point; the anti-intellectualism that makes low demands of school pupils:

The main thing that breeds anti-Gove hatred is that he seems to be really serious about challenging the regime of low expectations in British schools. Consider all the flak directed at him for his attempts to change the history curriculum. If you listened to all the criticisms of Gove’s proposals for improving the history curriculum, you could be forgiven for thinking that history-teaching in schools is flourishing and that British children have a formidable knowledge of their nation’s past events. What people are effectively saying is: ‘Why is Gove messing with our wonderful history curriculum?’

The reality, of course, is very different. As someone who has dealt with undergraduates for over 40 years, it is clear to me that, today, even smart and idealistic 18- to 19-year-olds lack the kind of historical knowledge that is a pre-requisite for studying my discipline, sociology. Not so long ago, my colleagues and I could assume that all our new undergraduates understood the difference between a traditional and an industrial society. We could also expect them to have some clear ideas about the distinction between the pre-modern and the modern. This is no longer the case, because the history curriculum is now more interested in teaching so-called skills than providing pupils with the knowledge necessary to understand historical change.

When our new Childrens’ Laureate says Gove’s proposed history curriculum is not ‘relevant’ to black children, she is expressing the prevailing utilitarian ethos of valuing school subjects for their usefulness only. In this case, what makes history relevant is its usefulness for affirming certain identities. Mobilising history in order to flatter children might play a useful therapeutic role… but the true purpose of a quality education is to provide children with the knowledge and intellectual resources they really need, and to make them understand that such knowledge does not emerge from their experience. It is precisely the capacity to transcend experience and ‘relevance’ that distinguishes academic knowledge from folk knowledge. Those who hate the proposed history curriculum do not believe that most British school pupils would benefit from an intellectually oriented education; and they hate those, like Gove, who believe that they would.

It is this crass attitude towards the discipline of history, and many other subjects, that motives Govephobia. Why? Because if we were to create a school curriculum that was truly devoted to cultivating an intellectual ethos among the next generation, then a significant section of the education establishment would be exposed as emperors without clothes.

As I pointed out in a post here on Monday, the obsession with making things ‘relevant’ does not liberate people but limits their aspirations and so limits social mobility. Whether Gove’s reforms are the best way of tackling this problem is moot but, if you wish to oppose him, there is no excuse for anti-intellectualism or lazy thinking.

I think, therefore I’m French

The BBC’s Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield has written a fascinating report about the central place of philosophy in the French education system. Why do the French consider philosophy so important?

The purpose of the philosophy Bac is not to understand the history of human thought but to leap into the stream that is the actuality of human thought.

If you learn about what Kant or Spinoza once said, it is not so much to understand their argument as to use their argument.

...the purpose of teaching philosophy was – and remains, in theory – to complete the education of young men and women and permit them to think.

To see the universal arguments about the individual and society, God and reason, good and bad and so on, and thus escape from the binding imperatives of the now – by which I mean the dictatorship of whatever ideas are most pressingly forced on us in the day-to-day by government, media, fashion, political correctness and so on.

This is a very liberating idea – in theory.

You can see the effects if you compare voxpops on French TV news with those in Britain. In France, a person stopped in the street at random and asked for their opinion on an issue of the day always starts off by setting out a premise before explaining a logical thought process and arriving at a rational conclusion. In Britain, you get an incoherent jumble of anecdote, supposition and emotion.

Mind you, the French way can create rigidities in thinking. There is a story (possibly apocryphal) about an EU meeting, where a British representative put forward a proposal. His French counterpart replied, “That’s fine in practice, but will it work in theory?”

Kick creationism out of our schools

Where is David Laws when you need him? That’s David Laws the education minister, as distinct from the various other hats he wears.

It turns out that the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum is used in more than 50 UK schools. This curriculum includes a science text book that cites the existence of the Loch Ness monster as evidence against evolution.

It gets worse. ACE also asserts that God is right-wing and that Liberals are the root of all evil. It denies that transitional fossils exist, despite copious evidence to the contrary. It claims that solar fusion is a myth. It claims that evolution is a deliberate lie. And it claims that homosexuality is a learned behaviour.

Despite this, the government agency UK NARIC (which advises on overseas qualifications) has defended its decision to deem ACE’s in-house qualification, the International Certificate of Christian Education, as comparable to A-levels.

In a Liberal society, people should be free to believe in creationism if they want to. But that liberty does not extend to the teaching of demonstrable scientific falsehoods to schoolchildren.

Creationism is not ‘science’ by any definition. Science is a rational and systematic process that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. There is no place in science for dogma, religious or otherwise. And creationism is a dogma that flies in the face of the best scientific evidence we have.

To teach creationism even as one scientific hypothesis among many is therefore gross professional misconduct and should be treated as such. The government should withdraw recognition from ACE’s qualifications and it should ban creationism from science classes entirely.