The End of Education?

Prince Charles is right on the ball concerning his comments on education. The development of human potential is a crucial issue on 21st century Earth.

I attended a conference on the role of the Learning Skills Council (LSC, responsible for the Further Education of 16yrs+ adults) in the voluntary sector and then emailed a senior member of the LSC to enquire whether or not ‘the development of human potential’ was part of their educational remit.

I cannot publish the reply email here due to copyright restrictions but can report that I was directed to the “key tasks” of the LSC which are all related to numbers of people achieving particular levels of qualifications, not ‘human potential’. Any personal benefit to the learner’s own potential is secondary to the output of qualifications. As a qualified adult educator who had come 'into the business' I felt at a loss because an interest in developing human potential is what had led me into FE lecturing as a career.

Why was I attending this conference ? I had completed a unit of my masters degree in education, titled ‘Adult Learning in Community - Education or Indoctrination?’ My conclusions led me to quit my employment as a lecturer in F.E. and set up a community college in my local town with the help of a local University.

I saw that much provision in the education sector was, and continues to be, actually ‘anti-educational’. For many people it provides little more than a lifelong distrust of formal learning experiences with their dictated assessments, milestones, targets, outputs, cohorts and so on. The percentage that ‘make-it’ educationally to doctorates is very small and how relevant is this to human potential ? By then their level of specialisation and integration into ‘the system’ often prevents any innovative thinking and any change to the system itself. Creative input into the educational system at FE levels is often blocked and has been since the last Educational Reform Act. Even Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education at that time, was heard to utter concerns about the future of 'creativity in learning'.

My teaching experiences at one of the top, award winning, F.E. colleges in the country have led me to see this college as a factory geared towards turning out students with qualifications. Much of the personal wealth of the teachers, staff and students there is focused on getting good examination results above any developing the potential of individuals - as if there was time for this anyway! The curriculum is strictly controlled and still based on knowledge and conformity over developing personal values and individual creativity / potential / interest.

Dr. A Bartlett Giamatti was once President of Yale University and included in his freshman address:

Education in its ideal sense is a positive force for human evolution, in that if we are ‘going somewhere’, as individuals, communities or as a species, it can help us discover the way through exploring both knowledge and values together. My own experience as a college lecturer is that formal education generally seems to be getting further away from this ‘discovery’ ideal and more rigid and dogmatic in its application, although there are notable exceptions to this, usually found in unique teachers who are adaptive to the situation and fired-up with their subject. Despite the system they pass on to their students enthusiasm and 'inspiration'.

The formal educational system we still have has emerged from pedagogic ‘transmission’ of knowledge based on training small boys for the priesthood 500 years ago. There is no time for ‘learning by experience’, self-guided learning, applying reflection, experiment and theory to activity here. Learning by experience, truly the ‘only way to learn’ is bypassed in preference to ‘accepted’ knowledge regurgitated in a pre-ordained format, like training a parrot to talk. There is no longer any time for individual tutoring to help individuals beyond anything but their conformity to the exigencies of the system.

The work of ‘The Prince’s Trust’ is way ahead of this anti-educational mission in conformity by actually helping young people to gain experiences they want.

Schumacher College in Dartington also provides an excellent example of a new approach to education outside of the system. Students take time to develop their own agendas, methodologies and philosophies of learning. Examples like the ‘Small School’ in Bideford, Devon, and other brilliant works by Satish Kumar, or Steiner’s work in education are a torch we should carry to the Olympics.

New qualification targets imposed by government and ratified by industrial bodies aim to train as much of the population as they can in order to appear more competitive in a global market. Training programs such as BTEC, GNVQ, NVQ and C&G are based on students attaining competencies, a sort of rational checklist of abilities construed to increase conformity in employees.

Eliot in Action Research for Educational Change criticises the assumptions of the Educational Reform Act which bought these qualifications and new targets into being.

As the pace of technological change steps up it is effecting work and employment in many ways, we have only just begun to see the effect of technology on both industrial production and the service industries. Has your job been ‘outsourced’ yet ?

The ‘new qualifications’ we have do not increase the initiative, creativity or innovative traits that every one of us needs right now to face change in 21st Century Earth. Creativity is such an essential resource in creating the new as much as conserving the old.

We all have immense creative potential. The system sucks us into money, and spends our energy and the taxes on it in ways we hate. There has to be another way. We will presently find it in experience rather than ‘education’. And there is no better learning experience than the chaos we presently face on Mother Earth.

So the current cry from the system of ‘Get Educated Now’or ‘Education, Education, Education’ is little more than a tour of conformity. Formal education is now ‘something you get’ rather than ‘something you find’. Real education is something that happens every minute, every second and is based in your own needs and values. It has been hijacked by formal ‘suppliers’ in a system that all but ignores creativity and the development of values in preference to industrial outputs.

In 'Adults Learning', Jenny Rogers the author describes this process of experiential learning as being central for adults:

So where has the system become lost? Why is the educational system still based around pedagogy? Knowles gives us a historical context for pedagogic transmission. He states the Greeks invented Socratic dialogue as an aid to learning, where a member of the group would pose a question to be explored by the ‘group mind’. The Romans were more confrontational and developed polarities in argument which we can still see in our political and education system today.

Information surrounds us, we swim daily through lakes of the stuff and have to set up perceptual screens to avoid its clamour. Instead of helping us find our way through this clamour by educating us into our own values, our own liberty, the system is here still creating factory fodder for an industrial age that has already passed.

For a real education for our young people, I’m with the Prince.

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