In Our Time - Education

Episode Date: November 4, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and the modern purpose of education. Nobody - would argue with the fact that education is of central importance to the people we are. And there seems to be no doubt at all that fine skills, flexible life-long learning and cultivated intelligence are the keys to all our futures. So how do we tackle what was until recently - just two hundred years ago - a unique preserve of the few, the privileged or the plucked out exceptions? Plato made his priorities in education plain when he inscribed over the entrance to the Academy “Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here”. He prized learning that revealed what he called “eternal reality, the realm unaffected by the vicissitudes of change and decay”, and this became the objective of education in Europe for thousands of years - vocational education, concrete skills, was hardly dreamed of. But was he right? What is education for: is its role to teach us the nature of reality, or to give us the tools to deal with it?With Mary Warnock, philosopher and educationalist; Ted Wragg, Professor of Education, University of Exeter.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Plato made his priorities in education plane when he inscribed over the entrance to the academy, let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here.

He prized learning that revealed what he called, quote, eternal reality, the realm, unaffected by the vicissitudes of change and decay, unquote. And this became the objective of education in Europe for thousands of years. Vocational education. Concrete skills were hardly dreamed of. But was he right? What's education for?

Is it thrilled to teach us the nature of reality or to give us the tools to deal with it? With me is Mary Warnock, the philosopher and educationalists, an author of many publications on the subject of learning. And Ted Ragg, Professor of Education at the University of Exeter, an author of several books, including the cubic curriculum. Briefly, to begin, Mary, what was the philosophy behind Plato's emphasis on abstract ideas in education? Plato, I think, believed that you couldn't really know anything except changeless truth,

and this was represented by mathematics and astronomy and music up to a point, but what he was totally uninterested in was the actual world we live in. For instance, he had no idea whatever of history or historical studies. They were completely absent from his idea of education. So you had to work away from being quite a young child through to the aim of education, which was to understand the nature of number and the reality that lay behind the world.

The world itself was really beneath contempt. So of course you didn't want to stick on learning how to be able to be. a carpenter or something with real objects because it was not worth anything. So no mechanical education would be mostly mechanical at that time, no particular concrete education to use concrete skills, entered his academy

at all? Well, no, nobody entered the academy who was interested in that kind of thing. But there was a very, very small elite who were capable of doing mathematics and the rest of the people just got on doing their carpentry and so on as apprentices. They learned

that way. But that wasn't education, really. Broadly speaking, would you say this is a distinction between abstract and applied education? And if so, do you think it continued for literally about more than a couple of thousand years until the 19th century? I think that is right. I mean, there was a

in the middle. The church, of course, had a tremendous influence on education in the Middle Ages, but that was really to teach people to write and to read. So that came into it. But I think it's placed there has had the most terrible effect on Western Education, actually, because it's

meant that even if you did learn history or modern languages or something, that was despised compared with learning mathematics and things that didn't change and were abstract. One of the things I am learning in this programme over the years is that these people who sit in studies and do things seemingly quietly have the most devastating effects on the world. But why do you think it was a terrible effect? I think it's really, well certainly in this country,

led to the despising of... of practical education and the division between, as it were, real education, which later on, of course, came to include the classics as well as mathematics. But real education was for an elite, and what you got in learning to get around the world, learning to read and write, learning to make things, was thought to be lower.

And I think that persisted for a very long time. Ted Rugg, do you think that Mary's interpretation, or explanation brief, but very clear, of Plato, do you find an echo of that in what you as an educationist have seen of education over the last 2,000 years? Oh, I think Mary is spot on, yes, it's exactly what's happened. And in fact, as Mary says, that we live with the legacy today when we have to educate everybody. I mean, that's the big change. We're not talking about an elite. Higher education is a very good example, you see.

After the war, 5% of the population went to university, and then it was double to 10. And then for 20, 30 years it remained about 14, 15%, one in seven. And now it's a third. We've now got one third of young people going into higher education. So we've moved, even in the last 10 years, pretty rapidly, from an elite higher education system to a mass higher education system. And the legacy, as Mary says, took about 2,000 years to shake off. Well, let's go back to the legacy.

Just for a moment. I mean, do you think that legacy, which is extraordinary long-lasting and enduring, between the abstract and the applied. And you could say that the medieval church taught reading and writing, but again to a few, and again for its own, one could say abstract, religious abstract, not religious abstract,

I'm rushing it too much, but it wasn't applied. It still wasn't. You think that distinction has been so long, is so deeply rooted, that it still affects, even though we may say, oh, we're not like that anymore, it still affects the way

a great number of influential people and the great, inside the society, system works. Oh, it certainly does. I mean, you've only got to look at the way that vocational education is looked down on in this country. Though it's not in Germany, you see. And yeah, I mean, Germany still has some of the same traditions and histories as we have here. But, I mean, the Germans shook it off more.

And so vocational education in this country, wrongly, is seen as second rate. Unless you're a surgeon or in one of the professions where there's a seen by the public to be a strong theoretical element, as well and it's respectable. And then that's why people jeer, for example, if you get a national vocational qualification level one for car park attendants, I mean, the nation falls about laughing. Well, why? Surely you can be safer

and you can have better client service and so on if you're a car park attendant, but we look down on it. In Germany, the Beruf Schule and the Technique Hochschule, which is the university equivalent, are very respectable places. And having a trade,

becoming a master in your craft and so in the medieval guild sense are alive and well. Why do you think it's proving so intransigent here? Do you think we, what, you tell me? Well, we've had, I mean, a good example. I don't want to malign the civil service, because it's full of people working hard and doing a good job, but for many years,

classicists were recruited to the civil service on the grounds that they would be able to turn their hands to anything. Well, I mean, they were very, very capable and quite adaptable, but they couldn't turn their hands, for example, to science and technology in a knowing way. That was the problem. I mean, for example, in a classics degree, you didn't study, on the whole, classical science,

and yet people like Euclid and Archimedes wrote in verse. I mean, they wrote elegantly about science and technology. But on the whole, people studied literature and history. Do you think that the classical education idea, which dominated here for the last two or three hundred years, do you think that that has had a deleterious effect on the intellectual economy of the country? Well, I don't think that, actually.

I think that there's a lot to be said for classical education for two reasons. One is that I think learning a dead language, particularly Latin, is something which is enormously useful. Because if you understand about an inflected language and you don't have to bother with how you pronounce it, but you just learn the bare bones of the language, then this is very helpful, I think.

for learning other languages. But this is a B in my body. I want young children in primary school to be taught Latin rather than taught French just for a few years. And then they're much quicker with other languages. But the other thing I think that so far we've left out is the, I suppose,

19th century, inclusion of history as a serious dimension in education, which I think is almost as important as learning about Darwin, which after all is in a way, a bit of history. I mean, our origins is history. But I think that this huge revolution, particularly in Germany, where history became a really serious subject, has had an immense effect, partly on religion,

because people began to think about the Bible in a historical context. And that was a tremendous step, I think. but also because we I think realize and this includes a lot of civil servants that you can't really understand where we are now politically or economically

unless you understand where we were the day before yesterday and I think history is one of the most important intrusions into the old style of education. Yes, it came in rather late with the idea of a nation state, didn't it?

I was going to say don't underestimate the vocational element of some Greek education, it wasn't manufacturing ball bearings, because it wasn't that kind of society. But wealthy Athenians were willing to pay people like Protagoras, 10,000 drachma, to have their children taught rhetoric, because at that time, as now indeed,

it was very important to be able to stand up and speak in front of people. I mean, that in a sense was a piece of vocational training, but not of the kind that we'd always see now. I'd just like to rummage around before this century for another few minutes before we come to this century. More than 100 years ago, J.S. Mill argued for universal education on moral grounds, because he said it would manifestly increase the general balance of pleasure over pain and happiness over unhappiness. Do you think it's had this effect? Would you still make that claim for universal education?

Well, I would, but I wouldn't minimize the unhappiness that education can cause as well. After all, if you understand why and how things are happening, you often angst more about them. So it certainly doesn't cure pain. But certainly, I mean, I think the whole notion of education as a fundamental human right is something that before Mills time has been asserted by many people, and I think many people who work in education, would want to demand it. Hence the arguments that you get when things like fees are introduced or whatever, and people are saying, hold on a minute, don't put any barriers in the way of anybody,

because education is a basic fundamental human right, hence the concern in the third world about the many children who get no education or only get an elementary education, don't get the chance to get a secondary or further or higher education. What argument would you use, Mary Warnock, for universal education now? Why would you say there ought to be universal education? I know it's being very fundamentalist, but why not? I think that we now do believe, and it is true in this country.

Believe, you see, it's a faith, you think? I believe that universal education could be counted as a right. I'm not particularly keen on talking about rights, but there is a law that says everybody must be educated. And I think Mills' arguments were probably very good. It increases pleasure to be educated, and it also increases the possibility of using a vote or talking politically with a modicum of good sense.

Because I think one thing that education for everybody should do is to make everybody critical. and I think it ought to rise at the same time as democracy rises as universal franchise, say there ought to be universal education. Isn't it rather curious that it'll link education to happiness? Can you, as it were, a structural system which delivers happiness? Happiness is Mills' word, not mine, but I would... Well, going back a bit, I once was a position where I had to justify

educating people who were never going to contribute to the economy, people who were severely handicapped, who were always going to be a liability, in a sense. And we had to think of a way of justifying spending money on education. And I came up with the notion that the point of education was pleasure. That is, it opens up enormous possibilities that there aren't before or educated in enjoying the world in the fullest possible sense, understanding it, enjoying it, manipulating it, all part of pleasure. Well, music is a very good example, you see, because, I mean, my family's keen on music, so I suppose I would have been keen on music anyway, but I mean, I had a marvellous music

teacher in my secondary school, and in primary as it happened, and for me, music has been a lifelong interest, and for me, music is pleasure. I mean, I don't have to listen to things I don't like, but, I mean, music has given me enormous pleasure and I would not have been able to make music and compose music and listen to music in the way that I can if I hadn't got it through education. And this is an education in values, isn't it? I mean, values are not only moral values, there are values in finding things that make life worth living, and music is one of them.

So we agree that education can be concerned with values, and we've skipped to every very, but we can't do everything, that education can be from a faith, and you believe in education, but you then rather reluctantly accepted that it might even be a right. It's certainly a law in this country. But can we talk about education and the economy? And as it were, go around that for the next quarter now because that's the thing that seems to drive it at the moment. We need more people educated to a higher level

because we need greater skills for the 21st century. Without those great skills, we're going to be decline into comparative industrial poverty. and none of us are going to be better off and so and so forth. There's that, I've just begun to touch on it. But the link now with education and the economy, with high skills and high learning, intensive learning, are very, very strong, and they're coming at us all the time.

What's your view of that, Ted? Well, it's certainly true that there's been a massive disappearance of unskilled jobs, for example, in our economy. Seven and a half million in the last 25 years. Well, exactly, in the 1970s, a million jobs went from manufacturing industry alone, and most of those are unskilled, barely skilled jobs. And no one's going to get rid of two forklift trucks and hire 20 blokes with big biceps, but no qualifications. It's not going to go back. And so what that means is that if you like,

the entry fee to society, certainly to working society, has gone up. But also you could say the same about recreation and leisure. If you have no skill, you can still have recreation and leisure, but your choices are limited. If you can't read very well, if you can't understand maps or whatever, if you can't organize yourself, then your choices are much more limited than if you've got to imagine drive, good standards of literacy and so on, when you've got a much wider choice. So we've seen now very clearly, why have we just seen it now? Why didn't we see it before? Because there were so many on skilled jobs available? Yes, because it's accelerated. I think the point was, I did a radio program with Sheena MacDonald in a school in a school in a school in Birmingham,

and we interviewed parents who'd been to the same school as the children who were in school now. And virtually every parent said the same thing, which was when I was a child in this school in the 60s or 70s, there was no worry about getting a job in Birmingham, but we're very worried not only about, about our children getting a decent job, but getting any kind of job at all. What do you think about this urgent linking of education to the future of the economy and the future prosperity of the country, Mary? I think it can be exaggerated. I mean, the facts are there.

We need, this country urgently needs, properly trained, skilled people to get jobs and to improve the economy. But I think if that is taken to be the only justification for education, then I think that's an exaggeration. And understandably enough, I think, people who rarely want to make that point tend to exaggerate it and tend to overlook the enormous benefits, which Ted has just talked about,

to the person himself who gets the education. It adds to his pleasure to have enormous, wider choices and things to do. It adds to his pleasure in work to be doing work that demands skill rather than just breaking stones or whatever it is. And it obviously is good for the economy. But it's interesting, isn't it, that almost reverse

from the time of play to it. And fashion, in its widest sense, has always fascinated me. It's such a vice. It takes a hold in such a way. I'm not talking about women's dresses. I mean, the fashion of the day. And the fashion of the day now is for that education must prove itself

by making people skillful enough to compete with Silicon Valley. That's really what it's all about. And anything else has to fight for a look in? I mean, do you think that that central drive is going to change education massively from the platonic to the anti-plotonic? Well, I'm afraid it may go too far. I sound tremendously Greek in saying nothing too much,

but I really do believe that one can swing too far in this direction. because if you find difficulty in justifying education in anything except what will get to a skilled job in a manufacturing industry to take an extreme case, if you find it difficult to justify any other education, then I think you've lost an essential point of education, which still is to increase the understanding to open up new values that make life worth living. But I think the key to trying to keep a balance between these two is the concept of imagination, because to be a good scientist, they're good technologists. You do need imagination as well as skills and knowledge.

And, of course, your imagination can go off in all kinds of different directions, and you still get the pleasure, the value out of your education. So I would find it very difficult to agree with someone who thought that the primary point of education is to educate the workforce that the economy needs. That will follow if the imagination is allowed to develop in all kinds of different directions. Ted Ragg, what's your comment on the?

Well, the curriculum doesn't actually, so you have a strong vocational focus anyway. If you look at the national curriculum, it's quite a liberal kind of curriculum. I mean, people study great eons of history, 4,000 years of it, with barely a vocational whisper in sight. The mathematics they do is the sort of mathematics

people have always been doing. The same with the science. It's fundamental precepts in science, learning about electricity, magnetism and so on, rather than necessarily concentrating on its applications in a particular industry. The arts, the same. And in fact, if anything, schools get criticised

for not being aware of the world of work other than a bit of work experience with older pupils. So I think if you look at the curriculum, I don't see any signs of certainly between, say, the ages of 5 and 16, of it being screwed towards the economy. The only danger, I suppose is when sometimes there's pressure wrongly, in my view,

to over-emphasise the basics. Of course the basics are important, but I mean there's so many demands on people now in the 21st century that to concentrate only on the basics would be doing children an enormous disservice. That would then be saying, we assume you're going to spend your lives in a pretty boring factory kind of job, so make sure you can read and write and count. Well, in fact, most of the jobs that people are going to do

are going to be in growing fields like what generically now gets called hospitality, which is things like hotel, catering, fast food shops and so on, they'll be working with people. The philosopher Gilbert Royal made a distinction between knowing that and knowing how.

And in your book, the cubic curriculum, you argue in favour of Royal's second distinction for knowing how. Could you explain that? Well, I think that's right at the heart of it, actually. I think he put his finger back in 1949 on something extremely important, which is that if you only know that,

In other words, if you were mending cars and someone only showed you with a diagram labelled how to do a certain kind of carburettor that wasn't functioning properly, and then either a new carburetor comes in or the whole principle on which the engine runs changes, but you don't understand, you're not inside, if you like, the concept of electricity or the combustion engine or whatever it is, because you don't know how, you only know that.

Then you're a very limited person. The person who's inside the concepts, who understands the basic principles, can adapt. If there's a new theory of the atom, for example, then the person who really understands all the previous theories is in the best position to understand the new one. The person who only learned a formula wouldn't have a clue what the fundamental precepts were anyway. Mary Warnock. Well, I think that, again, I'm deeply hostile to dichotomies,

and I think knowing how and knowing that is a famously misleading decotomy, because you need to know both. And I think music education is a very good example of this. Obviously, there's no point whatsoever in your learning the acoustics and other principles, friction and all the other things that make the sound of the violin. You also need to have a hands-on, the bow in one hand, and the fiddle in the other, and be able to play the fiddle.

But as you learn to play, in most cases, they're not all, your understanding and appreciation and imaginative possibilities with this violin are increased by knowing something about both the theory and the history of violin playing. So I think one does need to build a bridge between this huge dichotomy and say that the best educated people, the people who know a bit of both. And coming back, you were very, it was like having a sort of very useful to bring us back to Earth as to what it really is in the national curriculum, and that was extremely useful.

But nevertheless, I perhaps am talking about the overheated drive that I read in reports from politicians or in newspapers or in speeches given about we must catch up, we must get on, we must do this, that and the other. Do you think that that, even though it hasn't entered the curriculum, or you say it hasn't entered the curriculum, is having an influence on the way people are thinking about schooling, about spending on schooling?

And if so, what place to have things like, and the arts have in schooling? Well, that's the danger. I saw some signs of danger last year when the government said that in order to meet our literacy and numeracy targets, primary school, they didn't say that primary schools don't have to do the arts and don't have to do history and geography and so on. What they said is that these won't be inspected in the same way

and you won't have to follow the detail, but you have to do them, but you don't have to follow the detail of what's laid down. Now, I thought if that had gone on and it hasn't, because in the new national curriculum starting next year, the requirements for those subjects are firmly written into the Constitution, so to speak. I thought that would be very dangerous because schools would wrongly, in some cases, in desperation, have gone down the numeracy and literacy path only, and what on earth would children have hung their literacy and numeracy on?

I mean, the whole point about literacy and numeracy is that we hang it on our lives. In science, for example, if you're numerate, it helps, because so much of science is to do with mathematics. thematics as well in certain fields. So you've got to be able to hang this on other subjects as well, plus the other subjects are very important in their own rights. I mean, this generation may have 30 or 40 years of healthy retirement. We talk about work, but the third age, as it's often called,

the age of health retirement may well be for many of them longer than their second age. It may be their longest age. Do you think, going back to why we do education, the idea of education, is something that will set alight the economy. Do you think it is, I'm still trying to get at that. Is the economy necessarily going to improve because of the way people are educated between 5 and 16 particularly? I think, I don't know, I'm not an economist,

but I think the economy can improve only if there are more people who understand the possibilities of inventing things and the possibilities of selling what they invent, which they need to understand rhetoric, how to talk, how to manipulate people, and all these are functions of education, I think, both knowing what you're doing and knowing how to sell it, to put it crudely.

And I think that education is important to the improvement of the economy. But I do agree with Ted, that we also need to have around a view of education which is for pleasure. This is going back. But isn't this the idea that you object to very much the sort of sixes idea which can be traced back to

John Dewey but he could and praise even further back to Rousseau that children are plants who need to be cultivated and pointed in the direction of rather than taught and you're worried about that No, I don't like that at all I don't like these hot house plants sitting around and being watered and cultivated and finding things out for

themselves I do think that children both need and actually greatly enjoy a bit of competitive learning and I don't like, I hate to go back to the 50s and 60s in this century. Well, I'm sitting next to a Clowden view, was a Rousseau-esque view.

I sitting next to a teacher yesterday when I'm having something to read, and she said that she'd been teaching in a school in Glasgow where the idea of competitive and learning, both, particularly competitive, with regard it with horror. Well, friendly competition is okay. I mean, after all, in sports, for example,

you know, you have to learn to win and lose with grace. So competition in a friendly... I mean, I think killer competition is a different matter. People are so done down in the 16th century in a book called the Ratio Studiorum, I think it was, the Jesuit handbook. I think it was there that it first was raised the idea of having pairs of children competing with each other in the class all the time, so you pair children up to compete. I think that nowadays will be seen as a bit hard-nosed, but I think there's an element of competition that's fun that children enjoy. After all, you've only got to put a class into teams and provided there's nothing punitive if you don't do well because,

Some children don't know an awful lot with the best will in the world. Most children will enjoy that. But certainly one of the things I think that has become prominent is collaboration and working together. Because if you take something like NASA, the American Space Agency, you've got the world's leading experts in rocket fuels and flight paths and everything conceivable medicine and diet in space. And they work together, 100,000 people, and that's a phenomenal achievement.

Of course, this is something that is very much taught in the science department of universities now, and almost nobody works on his own. They work together, and that's a very important element. Well, it's true to say that no committee would have ever composed Beethoven's ninth or whatever. Committee wrote the Bible. Well, yes. I'm not saying committees

can't be creative. I'm saying usually that creative things are done by individuals or small groups. Not necessarily, I mean, Beethoven wrote it, but it takes all those people to play it. Yeah, but he wrote it, that's the point. Can you imagine a committee? Can you imagine it unplayed? Can you imagine a university senate on which

I sit, being asked to do something like that, I wouldn't give a university senator free kick on the edge of the penalty area because it would take two terms to decide who chairs the working party. I can't think of a better ending than that. Thank you very much, Ted Rack. Thank you very much to Mary Warnock, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.