Lost generation? : new strategies for youth and education PDF
Preview Lost generation? : new strategies for youth and education
Lost Generation? Also available from Continuum Overschooled but Undereducated, John Abbot, Heather MacTaggart and Prue Leith Killing Thinking, Mary Evans Lost Generation? New strategies for youth and education MARTIN ALLEN AND PATRICK AINLEY Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York, NY 10038 London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com © Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Patrick Ainley and Martin Allen have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781441134707 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Allen, Martin, 1955- Lost generation? : new strategies for youth and education / Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-3470-7 (pbk.) 1. Education–Economic aspects–Great Britain. 2. Youth– Employment–Great Britain. 3. Labor supply–Effect of education on–Great Britain. 4. School-to-work transition–Great Britain. I. Ainley, Patrick. II. Title. LC67.G7A45 2010 338.4’7370941–dc22 Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in Great Britain by Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: New term, September 2009 1 1 From Jobs without Education to Education without Jobs 13 2 Overtested and Undereducated 45 3 Overqualifi ed and Underemployed 69 4 Lost in Transition or Transition Lost? 103 5 New Directions for Youth and Education 131 Afterword 163 References 171 Index 183 Acknowledgements Matthew Cheeseman for the many suggestions he made, only some of which we have been able to add – we should have talked to him sooner as he probably knows more about English under- graduate experience than anyone else no longer living it. Lorraine Petersen for also kindly reading the draft all through – any remain- ing errors are not her responsibility. Also, other students and former-students at the University of Greenwich and elsewhere – including on Facebook – who have shared their opinions and experiences with us. Beulah and Adam. My sixth-form economics students and their efforts to make sense of the current global crisis. Colleagues and comrades in the National Union of Teachers. To J for curiosity and providing a dif- ferent take. To friends, family and, in particular, a teenager, or two. vi Introduction New term, September 2009 No one would seriously claim that the rush of applicants for UK university and college places in summer 2009 represented a new found enthusiasm amongst the nation’s youth for higher learning. Nor that it was the triumphant achievement of the New Labour government’s long-held goal for half of 18–30 year olds to be in some sort of higher education by 2010. In fact, the government had refused to fund the necessary increase in places and was later to fi ne those institutions that offered them. Nor could it be claimed that the record levels of qualifi cation of the applicants for undergraduate degrees that reached unprec- edented proportions of top passes (67.1per cent A-C at A-level) – represented a new accumulation of knowledge or wisdom when the publication of rising GCSE and A-level scores and their Scots equivalents are annually dismissed by a media chorus with the insensitive label of ‘dumbing down’. Indeed, grade infl ation is recognised by all but government, university Vice Chancellors and the heads of exam boards. These are the same vested interests for whom the queues of would-be students willing to pay, only encouraged those in the elite universities who want to raise fees still higher – perhaps to whatever the market will bear. It is surely not coincidental that widespread allegations of ‘diploma devaluation’ coincided with widening participation to post-compulsory further and higher education and accompanied 1 Lost Generation? supposedly rising standards in compulsory schooling. This paradox is explored and explained in this book. Similarly, social mobility is known to have decreased at the same time as participation has been widened to higher education. There are also consider- able doubts about whether levels of non-computer literacy and numeracy have risen at all. A generation of students and teachers at school, college and university are working harder, but not necessarily learning more. Another paradox whose resolution is also becoming clear to the growing number of disillusioned educators and educated alike, is that in important respects, society is not learning at all but the culture becoming more ignorant and irrational. It is not just that teaching to tests may not, after all, have improved literacy and numeracy when student standards of spelling and maths are slipping. More importantly, largely corporately owned mass media daily plumb new depths of banality and sensation, whilst a self-destructive society is stuck in recession and slides towards ecological catastrophe. This is perhaps the gravest indictment that can be made of the education system since the prime role of institutionalised learning in any society should be to critically learn from the past to discover new knowledge that can contribute to altering social behaviour in the future. Hope triumphed over experience in the willingness of would- be students to rack up record debts for student fees and loans in expectation that they would be repaid with professional salaries in three or more years’ time. The experience this ignored was that of those graduating a few months earlier in record numbers to another media chorus greeting them as ‘the lost generation’ of graduates without jobs. They were the fi rst to have paid the new higher fees and therefore left higher education with record levels of debt. The desperate hope of many of the new applicants and their parents – along with other not so young people who also applied – was that the economy would soon recover from the recession into which it had plunged the year before and business as usual would soon be resumed, a bandwagon joined often by pure panic at the lack of any other alternative. 2 Introduction Overtested and undereducated To understand how this situation came about, our fi rst chapter recounts the history of education and training in England since the war. To do this it compresses the account we presented in our 2007 book Education make you fi ck, innit? which was written mainly for Education Studies students but is here précised for a more general readership. We move on from the past to the middle three chapters which look at the present before advancing an alternative future in the last chapter. Chapter 2 then looks at the testing regime that has been imposed on England’s schools and colleges and which is now sinking under its own weight. We explain how and why this is happening and we look at its consequences which are endemic to the whole system of education and training. One consequence is the culture of plagiarism shared across education. Another is that competi- tion between schools, parents and students has generated a new cramming industry of private tuition on and off line, adding to the national obsession with passing tests and taking exams. We also explain how it happened that under New Labour, while being ‘over tested’ and assessed as never before, many young peo- ple, despite their prolonged period in formal education, can also be considered ‘undereducated’. For the large majority of students – and their teachers who, instead of being autonomous profession- als, have become the directed deliverers of a product – education has become a mechanical and instrumental affair. Students learn what they have to, when they have to and in many cases by whatever means they have to. The perception of this situation is not lost upon them, as a fi nal year Education Studies student at the University of Greenwich summarised in his investigation project in 2004: Students learn to connect their self esteem and what they may achieve in later life to their exam results . . . Over-assessment has made subject knowledge and understanding a thing of the past as students are put through a routine year after year, practising what exactly to write and where in preparation for exams. 3
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