So let's begin, by, as every presentation of research should, in my opinion, by explaining a little bit about where we are and what we're talking about in case anybody has any doubts.
So let's get straight into the small things. In almost every country in the world, we have, alongside established schooling and universities, we have vocational pathways with a work-oriented curriculum. Sometimes that involves study in the workplace or learning in the workplace. Sometimes we like to say that there are pedagogies that then relate to those pathways.
And increasingly, these are pathways that not only national but international governments advocate as ways by which the nations of the world can achieve economic growth, can move their countries forward to the bright and sunny uplands of a bigger economy.
On a peak on these pathways folks, around the world 48% of upper secondary students in Europe and increasingly we have parts of higher education or parts of tertiary education, depending on how you want to measure these things. And you might argue that the vocational pathways claim both to offer access to higher education and to, be part of higher education too.
Okay. Now, at the same time, there's another salient feature of these pathways, and it's this: these are also pathways on which working-class young people and sometimes adults, are more strongly represented than they are in general education pathways.
You might think that's obvious. Actually, it's not. There's no particular reason why as being on a policy, which proclaims that these really broad segments should recruit to its ranks those young people who are less successful academically, it enables policymakers to say that they're doing their bit for inclusion, but it also means that they've reproduced society's inequalities.
And as Nyland et al so eloquently put it, they extract working-class schemes and socialize them for working-class stocks.
Now, let's explain a bit about what's happening now you digested that bit. We have certain requirements at the University of Derby okay. For these inaugural lectures, you know it has to be a public lecture addressing the non-specialist audience and not all of you, the Vice-Chancellor, may or may not consider yourself to be a specialist or to be experts in this particular field and that's okay.
There's supposed to be a staff list with research findings. And then at the same time, you've got to tell a bit of a personal story about your heroic achievements as a researcher and my goodness you've got to do all that in 45 or 50 minutes or so.
So there's quite a lot. I'd like to be able to give you a plan and say I'm going to do this, these things one, two, three and four, I'm going to do all of them. Okay. But they can't really be unpicked. So you'll get a bit of all of these things.
What that's about, why our attempts to bring it together with other educational pathways fail, we're going to look at a bit of history, obviously starting at the present because we're in it and going backwards. And then we're going to ask this final question about is a more meaningful relationship between education and work possible?
Now look, here's a field of study, that most of you all have some kind of knowledge of, but you don't always understand. You're not always familiar with the methods that it uses to make sense of all these different countries in the world.
Some of you have seen these photos before. Okay. We paid a graphic designer £100 for each of them I think, with some money out of the Vice-Chancellors ideas spun in 2018. We've been building them out a lot getting our money's worth.
Okay across different countries in Europe, we have models that have different balances between education and work. We talk about these with the transition systems of those countries. There are different philosophical traditions across those countries that inform them. And often we talk about these, about this as an institution, not so much VET scholars, as political science scholars talk about these as, talk about skills formation as an institution, the people who the EU likes to call its social partners. And the way they have contended to have control of it.
So research in that field, this little neat description of it on the right there. You know, some of this is about education. Some of it is a bit less about education and a bit more about the world of work.
So because I've only got a few minutes to talk to you tonight a lot of this is going to be UK focused. So apologies to international colleagues who, who are joining us.
So this is what we've had in the UK or the UK government has prescribed for England in particular since 2010, post-16 education has become bigger in UK government policy.
It's been at the top of some of the major statements of of where the countries will go next. It's got a stronger orientation to work. The caveat will be poor isn't really part of so much of the government discourse on this, but it's got this great title. It's all about work and the technical education of conservative like governments.
According to the House of Commons Select Committee, we pay 1 billion pounds on making it happen. Later, I've got some data about how many people that billion pounds last.
And yet at the same time, we've had a process where further education institutions have been blamed for all of the difficulties of young people's transitions into work. And we've actually had a reduction in the funding of further education in England.
And yet at the same time, this policy has positioned further education or technical education I should say, as an alternative to higher education or as a route into or as a hybridized form. It's a bigger picture then, than simply about further education itself. Those series of what you might like to call assumptions or you could call them claims that underpin these policies and to some degree underpin the policies of different countries, especially in Europe. The idea that VET provides inclusion only by supporting transition to employment. Of course that's important, that skills to the employers prerogative. Even Busemeyer and Trampusch are political scholars who say employers provide skills. And that's a unique contribution in Germany.
They say there's much learning, although we'll talk about what's learned in a bit, should take possible, in work as possible, and that procedural knowledge, the kind of powerful knowledge that some of my colleagues like to talk about, should only happen when it's justified by the occupation that faith isn't, I've already said, can blame on I mean institutions, that's all there in the government skills plan from 2016.
They are all the assumptions, they are all the things that we are led to believe, are the most important. All this other stuff that you might think was important to young people's education, the crisis facing the world: war, climate crisis, the rise of populism, they're all incidental.
And as long as we concentrate on getting there, that alright. So what we know that these pathways a bit, you know, are a bit gendered some standards are you know but that's how the labour market works. Here's the thing: the pathways on which some people study don't just determine what jobs they go into. They affect the whole of their life chances.
They affect the length of their lives, they affect their health. They affect a whole number of other things that are more significant than them simply getting a job. So why is that a skills revolution?
I'm not going to read those figures out but you can see how many people have taken part in the government's T-levels. Eight years on, we've had 3,500 T-Level students, of whom three quarters would go to the higher levels. We had problematic routes into it.
Bless me, 15% of the people doing the T-Level foundation year, they now call it, 15% passed out of the first cohort 8% out of the 2nd cohort people were on a merry-go-round as the college principal used to flog it to me, trying to get particularly English and maths qualifications, not get in with the grades with when the possibilities of their vocational earnings.
Now what's this about? Is it a kind of discursive alternative that policymakers used to present an alternative to investment in schools and universities, or is it about the creation of an alternative form?
At one point, I toyed with this idea. We talk a lot about universities, institutions, maybe about colleges as institutions. Is it possible that this is about a technique something that is described by scholars as layering? We create something new, and it changes the nature of everything that's there. Actually, we decided it wasn't. It's about something else.
Let's just have a look at the data for some earlier studies. So I was involved, a couple of other colleagues too, in an evaluation that the DFE conducted to try on work placements, on the T-Levels and I co-wrote this report - these are simple statements about what was going on, the preparation programme offered by the national support organisation - it's no secret they gave the National Citizenship Scheme people the challenge to design new placements... they focused on employee preparation, employability skills and attributes. This kind of thing is still going on later, you can see it in the bottom quote as well from something that Liz Atkinson and I did. People still saying the same things, we do mock interviews, we've got CV writing, what to expect, what does work look like? What does work look like? Attitudes, behaviours, things like that a 12-week course.
Now, isn't this one of the major problems behind this policy? And anyone I know who's listening tonight, who works in further education colleges, has heard me hold forth about this. What happens is we tell young people how to turn up on time, if they're on a work placement, how not to let the college down, make sure they’re wearing the proper clothing, just wear the right stuff, bring your lunch with you. Do everything you need to do to go to work.
The trouble is, most students already have part-time jobs. They may be at college three days a week, they know how to go to work. What we need to tell them is how to learn work. We don’t tell them what questions to ask. We don’t tell them who to talk to. We don’t tell them a thing about how they can relate what they're learning at work to what they're studying others while they’re studying in college. And I see that this issue is attracting some government attention this week.
That’s exactly what we found in this study. This is still on the Gov.uk website, so it must be true. Six years later. Some employers are needing learners to come with technical skills, they expect this. They need to know a bit about it - a tree surgeon needs to learn how to use equipment.
They want students to work. This whole business of how learning at work indeed should be about how to learn these skills, apply them, and of course there are several dimensions to it, about learning to work with others. But the truth is, in good old neolithical Britain, the expectation is that we send people to learn how to behave, and we send them to learn how to work.
So, what on earth is this about? Well, here’s Professor Wolff. You’ve already seen her picture once. Okay. Baroness, Professor, this is about a session she did, about a year ago, at Manchester Met. The government is overseeing the destruction of long established vocational education systems. She argued that countries shouldn’t be investing in universities; they should be investing in vocational education and of course, she’s made a big contribution to policy in that area.
I couldn’t help noticing that this poses this as a low-cost alternative for university degrees integration, with for the whole system. But I also noticed that it kind of differentiates Baroness Wolf herself. Wolf is the Savoy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management, she sits a cross-bench peer. This could be your post-16 or post-18 education, and don’t get thinking it's mine. And actually it's a bit of a pattern that we have for vocational higher education offers generally.
I’m going to come back to this, but the way that policy has proposed this complicated diagram drawn by the DFE, suggests that you can go down any of these pathways and you can relatively unproblematically cross from one to the other with a bit of bridging provision.
So, you start out during your transition year. Hopefully, you’ll be one of the 8% who pass. Okay. And you might decide you want to go into higher education, and you might decide you want to do an undergraduate degree. If you can design some bridging provision—I've got to say, I got that job from the Gatsby foundation of design and bridging provision.
You know, I came back with the best I could and they haven't done much with it, because it’s enormously problematic. These routes have a different rationale, but I have a bigger question. And it's this - Are these routes about improving access, or are they as Brint and Karabel says nearly 40 years ago in the United States, are they a diversion? Are they a way of saying to people, “You don’t need to go to university. You don’t need the complexities of higher levels of study. Do something else”? All these things have a different title every time we've introduced vocational higher education qualifications. In the US too, associate degrees are an American thing but in the UK, every time they come out with something new. So now we've got higher education qualifications NVQs because no-one had heard of the other things before. We’ve had foundation degrees since 2000, and before that, we had CNAA degrees because the polytechnics weren’t allowed to award their own degrees for quite a long time, the Colleges of Advanced Technology, places like Bath and Loughborough they had diplomas of technology and in the end they got degrees.
Then we had the Higher National certificate and this has been going for a hundred years, but they conveniently label these people with something different. You know what HND stands for don't you? Has no degree. But I said it wasn’t a new invention. Before that the University of London was allowing degrees to college applicants, they had to sit the exams as far back as 1873. But they called them external degrees. Do you see the pattern?
So when did we set these things up, but then only have this kind of discourse of delineation? This is kind of where I didn’t hear these people, who we call technical elites. Is this about playing to the strengths of these institutions? Or is this about something in the higher world?
In this study, I listened to these guys telling me about how many people had doctorates and how many people had master's degrees, and what great academics they were. I was doing an interview with these guys, who were doing an HNC course in construction. There was this guy doing a dissertation, one of several. They do a dissertation every year. When I got to the end of it, I said, “This was in a specialist, cutting-edge system in building. I won’t go into the details.”
Also, we must know a lot about that because, you know, you’re in the industry and on a lot of high-level projects. He said, well, “You learn a lot because of the amount of research you do.” Oh, admirable. I said, “Yeah, its a lot of reading great.” I asked, “What about researchers in industries?”
One of our lecturers he's an expert, you know, it's quite a useful person speaking and I said, “You’re doing this upside down. Instead of building on advanced expertise in the field, you’re prostrating yourself before the trappings of higher education. You’re disengaging from the higher-level learning opportunities at work.” Somebody in this room, said, well, what do you call these people, the technical elites? They maybe on a more advantaged pathway compared to people heading for a career in child care. But this isn’t anything elite. No. Long, long ago, sociologists, realists, and a few other things talked about the technical elites, he said. This will never be the case – the technical elites will never disappear with all this money through the strategic technologies that are emerging now. They’ll never replace the consecrated elites – the people whose advantages are inherited from birth. Education is the way these people maintain their advantages.
Okay, so how can we respond to these difficulties?
Well, a lot of people in education like to differentiate between vocational and general education in terms of the principles that guide it and suggest that these should change. The philosopher Wilf Carr talked about a general education and vocational education paradigm. One's democratic, egalitarian, with participation and the other is technocratic and guided by economics needs and enterprise.
And in a sense, he's right. For many researchers, the hope for vocational education and training is to draw closer to this liberal ideal. People like Pring and Raffe talk about trying to find a middle ground between liberal and vocational education. It's the biggest problem is that many young people have already been rejected by conventional schooling or they've rejected it themselves.
We were talking about it earlier this week, England now has nearly 1 in 20 students being suspended – a small percentage at the moment 3%, last year and at this rate there'll be more people out than in. And for people who’ve been rejected by conventional schooling. They value the opportunity to be something that gives them a meaningful life and identity.
The problem is that the way the vocational paradigm that we have, how do we respond to all the social issues we've talked about permanently, do we get rid of it, or do we find some way of emancipating that route?
Okay, and so the response of educational theory, is to actually kind of neglect that a bit, to think of it as something not worthy of attention. It's not really something for us to write about.
You know, there's been a revival in an interest in reproduction and outsources translation. In reality people in 2014 were writing about this work but very few of these writers on reproduction, who have the ability to explain it in great depth the the reason that young people are drawn into these pathways and the way it effects their later life, they're going to write about it.
It's like a Greek tragedy, you know? For those who don’t know, the action is always offstage. Somebody comes on and says to another person in the room, "You know, my son’s eyes have been cut out, my Mother has been strangled. My Daughter has been enrolled on the BTEC National in Health and Social Care. We never see the scene of the action. So this, to an extent, the sociology of education in particular, has neglected some of these understandings.
I hesitate to go into in-depth analysis about this, but...
Where need range theory is dominant in our fieldwork, where people tend to discuss educational institutions or sectors as institutions. It suggests a certain degree of agency for the people who work there, but less autonomy, as I say, from the economic foundations and it suggests that they can somehow rise above but we should think of these things independently, opposed to the economic structures of life. But I find that quite problematic, I find it quite problematic when people talk in broad, using sense, about a field in which there are actors who are relatively autonomous, the external core the economic field is big in the vocational sphere. How could it not be?
And so that makes it problematic for us to theorize the future of that in quite the same way.
To theorise where this sits in relation to higher education, now there's an international discussion about firms, particularly permeability. And here we are talking about it in China. It's so often that Germans and Chinese colleagues talk about permeability.
Is it the possibility for young people to make transitions from vocational to more traditional higher education institutions? Or is it about the creation of the institutions? And then when we create those institutions, are we adding to the degree of stratification both in the higher education system and actually in VET as well.
We’ve been having these debates for a while. You know, we can go back to Trow who first wrote about mass higher education. When I said nearly every country has a vocational pathway, well the Americans don't. Everything is higher education to the Americans. It's just that there are certain routes that don't take you into professional jobs. So, we talked about that's the movement toward mass and universal higher education as we start to recruit non-traditional students. We’ve got a new institutional type – the junior college or community college, as we usually say nowadays.
The trouble is that with all these high participation systems are multiplying the inequalities within that system. And here's the problem – the people who are in the top layer of those stratified systems, the elite universities, are the people who define what is of value.
Gale has written about this quite recently, the way he draws on board his work on cultural space – the same people who define what’s is of taste are the ones who are producing the tasteful products. In this case, it’s the people in the oldest universities that determine what’s good, and everyone else feels obligated to go along with that. Something I think we need to move away from.
So how do we make sense of this kind of stratification? That’s why lots of the bits are in that. And now we're starting our journey back in time. We’re starting in the present day to try to explain what's happening. My explanation is that we can't understand what’s taking place in higher education boundaries, with VETs without understanding how both education and work have been changed by neoliberalism.
This isn't just a lot of us thinking about different techniques or pedagogies or the potential of learning. Work on all these things have their possibilities.
But the idea that we’re going to learn incidental learning, that’s a popular phrase nowadays. The idea that we might learn something while working – well, that’s not vocational learning. It doesn’t determine your ability to carry out any occupation. It’s pedagogic because there are no intentional acts of teaching and learning.
Instead, we need to understand how, first of all, under neoliberalism, we have a commodification of education. We think about education as a market. And now we’re going to make more education take place outside those educational institutions that try to give people a standard and a common experience.
We talk about the common school. We’re going to enable people to access learning opportunities through the labour market. What that means is the people who have the right connections who are able to get themselves the right placements or jobs will be able to secure the more advanced learning opportunities.
And so, all the inequalities that people have written about in relation to the way schools favour people who already have certain cultural experiences from their family backgrounds will multiply that in a more unequal environment. It’s happening not just because of schooling policies, but because we’re in a more polarized world. Polarization of income. There’s polarization of wealth. There’s also a polarization of skills.
It’s not the case that capitalism de-skills everyone. It might de-skill some people but some nations and groups need more advanced skills. They're the middle layers to which a high standard of education aspires to draw people but it is not very successful yet and the converse of that is at the same time it creates new inequalities within vocational education.
We’ve talked about the technical elites already, we've talked about welfare vocationalism, we've been talking about it this afternoon, so apologies to those who’ve been on that VET train all afternoon. I’m not going to repeat that discussion much.
Well, my colleague Liz Atkin’s, my co-author, has said that in further education, nothing has changed, well I thought everything had changed. But the truth is, the bits that Liz is interested in haven’t changed, because it’s about the way that disadvantaged young people, especially young women, are provided with generic skills, are provided with socialisation into work, are not provided with knowledge and skills they can use in the labour market, which takes us back to the kind of education the UK and the US had in the 1980s. We replaced meaningful vocational programs or technical education with a generic system that geared towards the young, unemployed.
Further education colleges, 40-plus years ago, were geared towards part time study by young people who were at work - many young men it has to be said. Then, they became the places where the unemployed were trained or were schooled in the kind of behaviours and attitudes that would make them employable, should the opportunity arise. In many ways, we’re repeating that today.
So, a bit of a flashback to that. Most of the literature in our field is about this so don’t let me go on. But it’s not just about access to powerful knowledge, which again others have written about much more eloquently than I. It’s also about the cultural dimensions of vocational learning.
When we went onto this competence-based education, when we became can you perform these tasks? Can we tick these boxes and give you a National Vocational Qualification? When that became the dominant mode of further education, and its also spread throughout these institutions, we didn't only know of the technical aspects, we got rid of something that had been there since the 1950s – a complementary cultural element, the liberal and general studies that provided our staff with non-technical expertise was introduced in the 1950s.
We came across all this stuff all over again when we carried out our studies of enrichment over the last four years - what are the cultural elements? And here's the amazing thing. We studied both further education colleges, we studied sixth form colleges, which is the more general education-based institutions.
These cultural elements they are alive and well in the enrichment programmes of six form colleges and do you think they're doing something abstract, do you think that they're going to the theatre to watch Greek tragedies' for example? They’re doing practical vocational things. There’s science students building green cars. They're English students producing a college journal, they’re putting on a performance. They’re doing something practical, but they’re doing it in the context of a broader education. And it has meaning as to what they do and enables them to say something when they go along to their university interviews and want to show how cultured they are.
Further education with good support activities. We met some fantastic people working their socks off doing wonderful things to support those students and keep them on that course and keep them sane. We didn’t see them doing things that enriched their outlook and let them think about their field more broadly.
And people are still writing about all this, the disciplines, the studies, they've brought out a couple of reports this year we’ve written about it in papers. The post-16 indicator is alive and well. Was the magazine of the Association of Liberal Studies of and the Liberal Studies section of the college lecturers union is still going on. It’s just published an archive of all these issues going back to 1988. It’s a great research opportunity for somebody. And where have it has been recommended that these things be integrated into the mainstream, that never happened, okay, in the NVQ model curriculum, okay.
We start to call this a bygone age. What what what are the technical, what’s this technical education language about when I left school it weren’t called technical education. It wasn't called technical colleges anymore in the course and in the further bygone age, got a few harmless things that came into possession after a long period. What a revelation some of them were.
And for them, most male steel workers, your learning took place at work. The lucky ones got to attend evening institutes and until the 1890s, even that had very, very weak institutional foundations, local authorities met the resistance of employers who didn’t want institutions that will give away the secrets, their trade secrets, and teach people who didn’t work for them, and how to do the jobs their workers had in cash. They wanted to see those jobs with somebody else. Not until the start of the welfare state did we start to move on from that.
Here’s an old record of his learning. These are just the machines he worked on. And, over four years. There's his apprenticeship papers in the corner and cost his parents 5 pounds. He got five old pence an hour. Worked as an apprentice. And, you know, most of the time their learning took place in the not very convenient, circumstances. But nonetheless, it did something for them. And it went from the lowest levels to the highest levels. And were we had the early polytechnics, the ones that now become universities today. Well, some of them have but the polytechnics we had at the end of the 19th century, that the London Education Board supported they wanted them to degree level again, there was tremendous resistance and they were tiny and they gave access to, to education for tiny a number of people. And I don’t want to overstate it. Also let the term by Herbert Schofield or anybody from Loughborough University recognise that name. This guy who the pioneer of, Loughborough college advanced technology and then Loughborough university - when he started work, he was one of two full-time employees at the college. When you wrote that letter, you’d been there two years. It was it was relatively tiny.
Or his the more remarkable thing, there were few options, even for boys. They were constrained by culture. When my Dad died and when my Mother died and I inherited all his educational documents. Because, you know, they they hold these things for a century or so. I see, you know, no withstanding his 11 plus, he had to go to the board school. There’s a story and he had to study these handicrafts, machine drawing. If you looked at his results. Well, very good at those things. He’s pretty good at English language and English literature, he was top of the class. French, he was top of the class and I never heard him speak a word of French in his life. At least not that kind of French.
But for young people like him it was unthinkable that they would be able to build on that kind of knowledge and, that kind of orientation and so he went off to study his higher nationals in the 1950s, I read what the pass rate was in a thesis, because it was quite hard, they had to bring in one year qualifications for managers because the pass rate was 8%.
Okay. Now comes up a lot in this, lecture. That's the only valid route for people of that kind so its a bit narrow. And really throughout the whole of the history of learning for work there’s only been one period from 1964, where you could say you had social partnership on the lines favoured by the European Union. And for a long time employers have not been the people who've been doing a great job, putting it mildly and have been people who have resisted this.
Now somebody said to me, why is this about half education and forgotten half? Because it’s half the 16 year olds. Is it about to help us build on? I think what was in my mind was this, half time education. Okay. We used to have this thing before we had universal school. You could go to school on the employers premises. Okay, so you work for ten hours and then go to school. It’s called half time education. And the good thing is, if you didn't behave in the workplace, you could be punished for it in school, it was quite convenient.
Silver wrote the history of the CNAA. And a lot of his data is drawn from evidence, in particular the Newcastle Commission, which is full of the evidence of young people describing how exhausted they were when they went into school, after they’d been working all day and barely keep their eyes open. They hadn’t eaten properly. And, quite moving stories. The same Newcastle Commission reports, I've read them and they're in capital and the reason they're in capital is because Marx, he had a chapter about aversive surplus value, that’s about how the capitalists make more profits by increasing productivity. But there’s also a chapter about absolute surplus value. That’s how you make more profit, more surplus value by extending the working day. And so it’s full of all these moving accounts of the suffering of working people from the mid nineteenth century. And certainly a lot of them were taken from these accounts of the schooling of the day. You’ve heard the slogan, I think earning while you learn. Okay.
I don’t want to oversimplify this and make out that this is just about the of struggle between capital and labour and these two models. These models are just learning the but infinitely older and that's truth of the matter. They date back a millennium.
We’ve had a form of schooling that involves the manipulation of symbols that involves abstraction. As long as we’ve had administrative power, people who advise administrators, sometimes from a religious construct to we’ve come back on formal education for thousands of years. And then we’ve had the skills of priests, people, very special. The learning is more informal. They’re intimately connected with places, materials, senses, tools.
But their own code they’ve uncovered before and, yes, and, damaged my own code, which is one of the pigment in field of archaeology. That stuff is best because from understanding the products there, then look at the holes that they then try to extract an understanding of the whole society. They talk about the sign off or tour the chain from the mining of stone or whatever raw materials and its eventual consumption, and from that they should. And so that they use the existence of systems of apprenticeship. It’s been around a long time, and I think those two models both live on, and they both have their merits. Then they can contribute to something, just people’s aspirations to something better and a better future.
But also they can contribute something to the desires of those people who don’t want to spread that about too much. So this is a rather crude slide. I was going to put it at the start, but I thought I should set the tone. A little better. So, you know, here’s something I had asked saw. And asking myself, can we reframe the skills debate that we've been having in Britain for 10 years.
Oh, this picture, this is Philip Hammond announcing the money or the tea lovers. No one ever said he was the across and moving at 10 million. A billion.
It said, you know, I wanted to get that money back by squeezing out of that education. Yes. We’ve gone from learning about work to learning for work to learning at work and to learning is work. But how can we think about ways to connect to education and work differently?
So I’ve not come here to say the vocational education is a terrible thing. I hope I’ve given a vision of both sides of it and its positives, as well as some of the problematic aspects of it. Let’s come back to Carr and those paradigms he talked about.
He also asked the question. Well, what if you can employ the discourse of general education to talk about vocational subjects?
And you should say there are always opportunities for a reflective understanding, critically examining the values and cultures and joy of work and what industries are for. What are we doing? What are the things, what are the ethical implications or what real difference will it make to the lives of people who work in them and in the communities that are affected by them?
How are they affecting the past, the future, the possibilities of the planets? We might not know. You can look at vocational education in that way. We found a bit of it in our project on education. Or you can employ the discourse of vocationalism to assume that we teach them an education in ways that emphasises market value and yes, folks, how to get a job scanning shopping poor. My goodness. Of course it is. But here’s my suggest. Forget all this stuff. And I’m sure you seen about David Graeber. Bullshit jobs. I know you know, these tends to diminish the value of modern day work.
Yes, I’m sure there are some jobs that are a bit of a waste of time, so they don’t apply to anybody here. So they don’t apply to many of the millions of people David Graeber thinks that applies to, these guys who have a book I think came out last year in France, 'Giving back the meaning to work'.
So why can’t we have a vocational education? And work that are education. Why don't they stop making schools and colleges look like the workplace and start trying to make work look like a place of genuine, meaningful learning. Now let’s go flesh the press office who were kind enough to come and talk to me and try and find out what this was about. Some very interesting discussion. And they said, well, can you tell us where you found do you think that great?
But, I was in Valencia last month. It was very sunny. I was at a conference and I came across this plaque. Its one of the plaques that they have around the town, commemorating things that happened in the civil war in the 1930s and in, on one of the main streets, there’s a plaque to one of the feats that they took over during, the Civil War.
And in a country where literacy was less than 50%, they said about this institute of, workers' children and according to who you believe, they were doing degrees in 2 years, a really intensive programme. Forget all that breath makers stuff. I don’t I only said it. I mean that there were buff reports, people talking about vocational ism as an easy option. These people had a programme that went in to the evening. They live side by side with their tutors, their tutors were some of the most noted academics in Spain.
Down the side of this poster, there’s some pictures taken by Otto Reuter. And then you can see the, the canteen with these academics. They had a curriculum and a really intensive pedagogy, we might say was this just a propaganda vehicle, the something they were doing during the war? Well, there's a little poster that I found online, The Ministry of Public Instruction has created a workers' institute, workers children can become engineers, doctors, architects. The Popular Front governments opened the doors to higher education. Defend your children's education was driving fast. Isn't the death okay?
There they are in the library. At the end of it, nobody graduated. It took place during the Civil War which ended with a 40-year dictatorship, which was dedicated to putting education back in the hands of the church.
So, getting rid of the popular pedagogy around the so-called modern school.
So, the battles have taken place in that country, building in formal education by the state, providing all of those things, with all those things were destroyed.
And we had a 40-year dictatorship from which we emerged with literacy not much higher than 50%.
We can only really in Spain say about formal education from the 1990s and in which that played a considerable role.
And over the 1980s, after 50 years, the people who attended these experiments... People still get hold of them, collect data, gather their accounts.
And they understood they said that it wasn't possible for them to graduate.
It had been a very busy period for many people, you know, we should have a sense of proportion.
It's easy to look at a newspaper, read about Donald Trump sweeping away the Department for Education, to read about some of the neoliberal reforms taking place in other countries.
And I wonder what the future of education really is.
But let's have a sense of proportion. These people suffered.
You know, these people suffered a serious defeat and a real setback that affected the whole of their lives, many of them for their own reasons.
They suffered serious depression, during that period but some of them said in these interviews, they wanted to say that the education they had had the potential to be the education of the future.
It was incredibly powerful.
And, you know, you might think of all the struggles that are taking place. Why talk about something from so many years ago?
And the reason, as has echoed with me, is because those ideas lived on in those people for 50 years.
They understood the possibility that we could construct an education without hierarchy.
This enables people to find meaningful work, to have meaningful and fulfilling working lives, and contributes to a richer society, to a more just society, and to a sustainable planet.
And for those younger researchers who've spent all afternoon talking about these things, I hope it'll continue to motivate you too in your research careers from now on.
Professor Bill Esmond's Inaugural Lecture: Emancipating Education's Half-forgotten Half video
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