"Education, education, education."

For some reason English-speaking countries seem to excel at generating hubris in regard to the education sector. Central government’s in New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain are constantly engaged in pointless reforms to fulfil the needs of the “knowledge economy,” as if skilled work was something completely new, which didn’t exist prior to about 1985.

In many respects, English-speaking countries would be better served by down-playing the commercial importance of education, and providing students with more honest advice about the benefits and limitations of education in today’s world.

When I was at secondary school in the late 1980s, students were advised manual work would become a thing of the past, and that students with high education levels would invariably obtain higher paying jobs. This was in line with right liberal government policy that discouraged teenagers of average and above average intelligence from taking up practical apprenticeships (those yuppies really had it in for the manual trades).

The result has been a major labour shortage in manual trades, and a surplus of tertiary graduates with degrees in subjects like corporate communications.

By falling for the hubris of corporate managers who talked up the so-called “knowledge economy,” the governments’ of Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have created major structural problems within their economies which are proving difficult to reverse. University graduates have also had a very difficult time finding work because of the competition between the sexes.

In the social sciences, humanities and biology, females now outnumber males by a sizeable margin. Subsequently, suitable jobs for arts graduates are now hotly contested and many lose out. In the 1960s, many working class males with arts degrees and higher school qualifications moved up into white-collar work. Today, many male arts graduates from working and lower middle class backgrounds are moving back down into manual work.

All of this should have been highly predictable to policy advisers but students going through the education system were given little warning.

Despite all the reforms initiated by central government, there hasn't exactly been a dramatic increase in education standards. More students are graduating with poor writing skills and weaknesses in basic mathematics. Rudimentary knowledge of history, geography and hands-on science is also declining, as seen in the Channel Four documentary That’ll Teach Em'.

Similarly, spending on manual skills training has also fell significantly. At the risk of offending a few jocks, this hasn’t been helped by sometimes excessive spending on sports facilities (the school I went to had an excellent metal workshop, sitting idol, because the school management couldn’t sort out getting a new teacher at the same time that a large amount of money and effort was being pumped into a new sports hall).

Let’s face it, only a few students end up as professional sportsmen, and a lot of students who aren’t academically inclined also need to have some practical skills. Similarly, despite the high spending on sports, most students get relatively little basic physical exercise like running and swimming.

If the governments’ real aim was to increase education standards, then they could have given more attention to the unfashionable field of IQ testing, which can potentially help identify learning disorders, and guide teachers in identifying their student’s strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they have followed a muddled combination of political correctness and half-baked commercialisation.

Teaching teenagers is often made impossible by discipline restrictions in which teachers are not even allowed to raise their voice in a forceful manner. Schools let students get away with poor grammar at secondary school, only for them to fail their first year of tertiary study. Market populism reigns in the universities where subjects like American studies receive significant funding, despite being neither intellectually or commercially useful.

Where there are opportunities to try meaningful reforms in education, bad ideas seem to drive out good. Although schools talk about tailoring education to the needs of the student, they rarely seem to do this in practice. As far as I know, subject-based streaming is almost never used in public education in English-speaking countries, despite the fact that it would allow for far more focused teaching. If you are competent at English, but poor at maths, why should you have to sit through your English-literature class with a bunch of semi-illiterates?

Similarly, theories from psychology are often used in a simplistic and poorly informed manner. An example of this is the idea of dividing students into visual, auditory and hands-on learners. For practical reasons, academic subjects at higher levels simply cannot be taught in a range of styles and the scientific basis for such teaching ideas is weak.

Perhaps one of the worst aspects of today’s education system is commercially driven dishonesty.
As tertiary institutions in New Zealand have become semi-commercial enterprises in competition with each other, the needs of the institution have taken precedence over those of the student. Faculties market their courses in a flattering light and give misleading information about how many graduates find jobs through their programmes. Similarly, many practical courses are padded out with unnecessary theory that is not necessary for entry-level work, yet tutors (often baby boomers, who forget that students now have to pay for much of their education) are often reluctant to admit this.

Competition between institutions also means that a lot of taxpayers money is wasted on advertising and marketing aimed at attracting more students. However, for most subjects there are more than enough students passing through the education system. The biggest problem is finding jobs for them once they graduate, something for which governments and universities seem to feel little responsibility.

Another liberal misconception is the belief that education can solve a nation’s economic and social problems, summed up in Tony Blair’s banal catch phrase, “education, education, education”. Education can’t kick start an industrial revolution, reduce inequality, or pull a country out of a prolonged recession. If education could do these things, Argentina would be as rich as Australia, and Russia would be economically equal to the West. Similarly, education can’t cure unemployment, reduce crime, or protect the environment.

By over-stating the role of education, today’s elites make it harder for educators to focus on teaching itself. Teachers are often harassed by neurotic parents and over-bearing civil servants that clamour for incessant reforms. This discourages many of the best teachers from staying on while encouraging education departments to over-assess students and cram too many subjects into the curriculum.

Education should be focused on getting the basics right at the secondary level, promoting high academic standards in universities, and practicality in technical colleges. The drive towards commercialisation and premature specialisation has left many students ill-equipped for the needs of the workforce and perhaps more importantly, without the skills or direction to begin to correct the mistakes made by today’s elites.