Will Hosking is an intern for Civitas
Tony Blair wanted A-Level finishers in graduation caps. Andy Burnham wants them in hard hats. Burnham’s call for a ‘complete rethink’ shows that our once great education system is broken. Graduates face sky-high unemployment and a drastically over-skilled economy. With 700,000 university graduates out of work, ballooning the existing welfare bill, questions must be raised over the value of education alongside its aims. Given the current education system exists to serve the sole purpose of producing economic utility maximisers, the system is dysfunctional.
Much of the contemporary issues that we see around the overproduction of graduates is attributed to Tony Blair and his promise to get 50 per cent of young people to attend university. This stemmed from Lionel Robbins, who headed the committee on higher education in the early 1960s under Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and was chair of the Robbins report.
There was a drastic shift in education policy following the publication of the Robbins report in 1963. The report aimed to establish the principle that higher education should be expanded and reconceived as a tool for economic growth. Yet, this report is usually remembered as an act of educational democratisation and a move away from elitist access to education.
The Robbins principle, which emerged from the report, was the idea that higher education should be available to all, irrespective of financial status or caps placed on student populations. It was reported that full-time university places needed to increase by more than double from 216,000 in 1962/63 to 558,000 in 1980/81.
This was justified on the basis that higher education should be available to all of whom were qualified for them by ability and attainment and who wished to pursue them. This massification and drastic expansion in the availability of higher education materialised in the creation of new universities. Robbins recommended the founding of six new universities. These included the Universities of East Anglia, York, Lancaster, Essex, Kent and Warwick – all built in the 1960s.
Robbins also proposed raising the status of teacher training colleges by encouraging partnerships with universities and introducing a teaching qualification with degree status. This is the single clearest instance of skill-based logic entering the university world. Teacher training was unambiguously professional and vocational – its purpose was producing a specific occupational competence, not cultivating knowledge for its own sake. This, in turn, established a template – the applied, professionally validated degree – that would later expand into other areas such as social work, policing and nursing.
The current systems model of the person is an input to be optimised. A bundle of skills whose worth is measured by market return and increased university access is an instrument of this. In The Republic, Plato argues that education’s purpose was to turn the soul towards truth and goodness – famously using the allegory of the cave, where education is described as leading someone from shadows into the light, not merely pouring facts into an empty vessel. For Plato, the highest end of education was the cultivation of virtue.
It is difficult to locate any trace of this ambition in a system whose success is now judged solely in terms of graduate salaries and employment rates which stems from the availability and sole focus on the need for people to go to university.
Yet, what is presented as an act of educational liberalisation was an act of economic conscription. The justification for the massification of education is rooted in the idea that there was a pool of ‘untapped ability’. It was framed as a waste of talent, based on the idea of constraints on economic utility due to the restriction in access to higher education. Teacher-training reforms make this even more explicit: the university’s function in this manner is stated outright as the production of a specific, certifiable occupational competence in parallel with human capital.
This presents a diminished view on the purpose of our collective endeavours as a society – and the role of education as a part of it. The idea that education systems are the catalyst for an input of learned skills measured solely by market return undermines the value of humans. This diminishment is not incidental but structural, reflecting a broader way in which scientific materialism has overtaken education. Curiosity, moral formation, critical thought and the capacity for appreciation escape quantification – they cannot be captured in a metric or test score.
Thus, under a materialistic logic, such as those of examinations which are designed to create a homogenous foundation of knowledge amongst students,, the previous ideas are treated as if they do not exist at all. This is precisely the error Plato’s allegory of the cave was warning against – mistaking the shadows on the wall for reality itself, while the cultivation of character, resilience and virtue is dismissed due to its unquantifiable nature. A materialist education system does not simply neglect the character and soul of the person; it instrumentalises humans and their value.
This was illuminated in the Civitas report: Renewing Classical Liberal Education. This is not a presumed elitist proposition. Liberal education has existed in Britain largely in the form of grammar schools over time, alongside public schools. It was only in the name of ‘equality’, narrowly redefined as material sameness rather than the fulfilment of each child’s fullest potential – that this inheritance was stripped out of state education during the mass closure of grammar schools. A costly mistake.
In practice, implementing a classical liberal education requires several concrete changes. It means teaching greater, harder, older texts – those that were previously chosen because they are timeless. In the words of Matthew Arnold, “the best which has been thought and said”. Texts that, in GCSE English Literature, may not have been considered teachable within a two-year period with a quantifiable outcome at the end of it.
Renewing classical liberal education means restoring a mode of engagement within education that has been hollowed out: critical engagement and debate with immersion and appreciation for discussion, rather than atomised knowledge regurgitation. The movement back to a liberal education is one that is needed before we finish teaching an entire generation that they are worth only what the state or market judge them to be – not what they can achieve with their unlimited potential.
Will Hosking is an intern for Civitas
Tony Blair wanted A-Level finishers in graduation caps. Andy Burnham wants them in hard hats. Burnham’s call for a ‘complete rethink’ shows that our once great education system is broken. Graduates face sky-high unemployment and a drastically over-skilled economy. With 700,000 university graduates out of work, ballooning the existing welfare bill, questions must be raised over the value of education alongside its aims. Given the current education system exists to serve the sole purpose of producing economic utility maximisers, the system is dysfunctional.
Much of the contemporary issues that we see around the overproduction of graduates is attributed to Tony Blair and his promise to get 50 per cent of young people to attend university. This stemmed from Lionel Robbins, who headed the committee on higher education in the early 1960s under Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and was chair of the Robbins report.
There was a drastic shift in education policy following the publication of the Robbins report in 1963. The report aimed to establish the principle that higher education should be expanded and reconceived as a tool for economic growth. Yet, this report is usually remembered as an act of educational democratisation and a move away from elitist access to education.
The Robbins principle, which emerged from the report, was the idea that higher education should be available to all, irrespective of financial status or caps placed on student populations. It was reported that full-time university places needed to increase by more than double from 216,000 in 1962/63 to 558,000 in 1980/81.
This was justified on the basis that higher education should be available to all of whom were qualified for them by ability and attainment and who wished to pursue them. This massification and drastic expansion in the availability of higher education materialised in the creation of new universities. Robbins recommended the founding of six new universities. These included the Universities of East Anglia, York, Lancaster, Essex, Kent and Warwick – all built in the 1960s.
Robbins also proposed raising the status of teacher training colleges by encouraging partnerships with universities and introducing a teaching qualification with degree status. This is the single clearest instance of skill-based logic entering the university world. Teacher training was unambiguously professional and vocational – its purpose was producing a specific occupational competence, not cultivating knowledge for its own sake. This, in turn, established a template – the applied, professionally validated degree – that would later expand into other areas such as social work, policing and nursing.
The current systems model of the person is an input to be optimised. A bundle of skills whose worth is measured by market return and increased university access is an instrument of this. In The Republic, Plato argues that education’s purpose was to turn the soul towards truth and goodness – famously using the allegory of the cave, where education is described as leading someone from shadows into the light, not merely pouring facts into an empty vessel. For Plato, the highest end of education was the cultivation of virtue.
It is difficult to locate any trace of this ambition in a system whose success is now judged solely in terms of graduate salaries and employment rates which stems from the availability and sole focus on the need for people to go to university.
Yet, what is presented as an act of educational liberalisation was an act of economic conscription. The justification for the massification of education is rooted in the idea that there was a pool of ‘untapped ability’. It was framed as a waste of talent, based on the idea of constraints on economic utility due to the restriction in access to higher education. Teacher-training reforms make this even more explicit: the university’s function in this manner is stated outright as the production of a specific, certifiable occupational competence in parallel with human capital.
This presents a diminished view on the purpose of our collective endeavours as a society – and the role of education as a part of it. The idea that education systems are the catalyst for an input of learned skills measured solely by market return undermines the value of humans. This diminishment is not incidental but structural, reflecting a broader way in which scientific materialism has overtaken education. Curiosity, moral formation, critical thought and the capacity for appreciation escape quantification – they cannot be captured in a metric or test score.
Thus, under a materialistic logic, such as those of examinations which are designed to create a homogenous foundation of knowledge amongst students,, the previous ideas are treated as if they do not exist at all. This is precisely the error Plato’s allegory of the cave was warning against – mistaking the shadows on the wall for reality itself, while the cultivation of character, resilience and virtue is dismissed due to its unquantifiable nature. A materialist education system does not simply neglect the character and soul of the person; it instrumentalises humans and their value.
This was illuminated in the Civitas report: Renewing Classical Liberal Education. This is not a presumed elitist proposition. Liberal education has existed in Britain largely in the form of grammar schools over time, alongside public schools. It was only in the name of ‘equality’, narrowly redefined as material sameness rather than the fulfilment of each child’s fullest potential – that this inheritance was stripped out of state education during the mass closure of grammar schools. A costly mistake.
In practice, implementing a classical liberal education requires several concrete changes. It means teaching greater, harder, older texts – those that were previously chosen because they are timeless. In the words of Matthew Arnold, “the best which has been thought and said”. Texts that, in GCSE English Literature, may not have been considered teachable within a two-year period with a quantifiable outcome at the end of it.
Renewing classical liberal education means restoring a mode of engagement within education that has been hollowed out: critical engagement and debate with immersion and appreciation for discussion, rather than atomised knowledge regurgitation. The movement back to a liberal education is one that is needed before we finish teaching an entire generation that they are worth only what the state or market judge them to be – not what they can achieve with their unlimited potential.