EDUCATION: Make the brutes pay
University should cost you pain, sweat and at least 3Ok
As a final year Law & Politics undergraduate at Cardiff University (for shame!), as well as an itinerant film critic, I read Noel Lackland's recent effort with avid interest. I am delighted that someone has finally spotted the one somewhat obvious point that seems to have escaped every other commentator I have read since the University funding announcement last week: there are too many students at University. Valid point aside, the problem is, though, still more complex.
An excess of students is a good starting point nonetheless. More precisely, in fact, there are too many students doing pointless and unnecessary degrees. The former polytechnics, that the Tories misguidedly insisted on turning into full-blown universities, are annually churning out graduates by the bucket-load whose degrees are not worth the cat-skins they are written on. One could easily assume that the simple solution to the university funding problem would be to reduce drastically the number of courses of the Sports Science and Food Preparation type (the latter of which really does exist as a degree scheme, I assure you) and encourage eighteen year olds to go and learn a vocation, rather than to take their three A-level D grades to study textiles at the University of Hull. That way, there would be more money left over to pay for the university education of those who succeed academically at A-Level and who will become the next generation of doctors, teachers and lawyers.
This shamefully elitist suggestion, however fancy actually rewarding academic success, after all is utterly unthinkable within the current education set-up in this country. Dr Lackland omitted any mention of the way in which the comprehensive system has so negatively affected the higher education system in turn. The dire situation we are in is entirely attributable to half-baked socialist post-war education policy: the comprehensive school system revolves entirely around the concept that all pupils, regardless of intellect or achievement, should be treated identically: hence the lack of streaming in many comprehensives. This concept of enforced equality is reflected in the stage-managing of A-Level results to ensure that specific grade quotas are reached. As a result, A-Levels have been devalued to the extent they are now not much more than a system of rubber-stamping certifying mostly the amount of time the unfortunate pupil in question has been obliged to spend in school.
Such an "everybody equal" policy has contaminated the university system too. By making it effectively obligatory for just about everyone with A-Levels to proceed on to university, we now have tranches of graduates whose degrees are thus stage-managed in the same way as A-Levels, thereby devaluing the whole process of higher education. A degree, by definition, is devalued if everybody has one: we really cant all have prizes. Thus, the problem with our university system is far more deeply rooted than a mere funding dilemma.
The whole education system needs re-shaping. We should give pupils every opportunity possible to excel academically from primary school onwards, and we should ensure that all pupils, wherever the location, are given such a chance. The higher education of those who prove themselves intellectually inclined, through success in a robust A-Level system, ought to be encouraged, paid for, and rigidly assessed. Those who would be doing themselves no favours in studying for meaningless fluff degrees at academically fifth-rate institutions should be encouraged to train in more vocationally-orientated subjects.
I, of course, appreciate that this suggestion is entirely lacking in political expediency; we are suffering government by a generation of Spock children who, in the words of Simon Raven:
Whenever they so much as whimpered, they were lifted out of their cots and petted and pampered until they stopped. The result is, the theory says, that over the years they have come to believe, and believe absolutely, that they can have anything they want simply by whimpering for it.
The current belief seems to be that degrees should simply be handed out upon the merest whimper; the concept of actually having to work, and work hard, for one's degree (or indeed A-Levels and GCSEs) is alien; for such a monstrous idea, good sir, would be elitist and unequal and unfair.
And so we see the result of fifty years of socialist class envy: an undisciplined, over-complicated and over-examined education system that is a let-down at all levels to teachers and students alike, and the shameless weighting of university access to lower-income families, in the name of so-called equality. That is not to suggest for a second that lower-income families should not have equal access to higher education I merely suggest that such access should not come at the expense of others. Genuine equality in education will only be achieved when every pupil is given the same opportunity to demonstrate academic ability from primary school onwards, and be rewarded according to individual achievement. The bilious higher education system needs to be drastically pared-down; until then, charging students thousands of pounds per annum would appear to be the only solution.
Andy Fox, January 27, 2003 02:02 PM