teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

This week the Education minister, Bill Rammell, was quoted as saying that it’s no bad thing if students drop subjects such as Philosophy and History in favour of more vocational courses. Now, having a degree in both of those subjects, I couldn’t really let that pass without comment…

A.C. Grayling in the Independent also picked up on this story and has written an article with his opinions on the matter.

Grayling starts off with a statement of her position which will look familiar to those who have read my musings on the purpose of education:

If you train people to drive buses or operate lathes - the vocational option - you get skilled workers who can do particular jobs. But if you teach people to think, and provide them with wide horizons, they can do many things; they can train and retrain in different positions, they can be flexible and adaptable in exporting their mental skills from one job to another, and in general they can provide their employers and the country at large with the advantage of being an educated, and not merely a trained, workforce.

It’s that old chestnut of education versus training again! Those who dismiss subjects such as Philosophy and History as being irrelevant to 21st century life and work don’t really understand what the benefits gained from such study. It’s not the outcomes of studies which determine their value: studying Philosophy is unlikely to lead to a specific job, but it does lead to what Socrates would call the ‘reflective life’ which is the only one worth living!

Grayling goes on to think about the Education minister’s statement in the context of recent government policy, and notices that it doesn’t quite line up:

Oddly, Mr Rammell’s views about education are at odds with the rest of government policy as it applies to fostering social cohesion and greater mutual understanding within society. This task requires not just an increase of factual knowledge, but reflective understanding of what it implies, and why certain things matter so much to different community groups.

Few kinds of vocational training would equip people to listen to points of view alien to their own, to learn how to sympathise with them, to give others space to live their lives in their own way, and to stand up in a principled and constructive way for their own choices and rights likewise.

The skills required for all this are paradigmatically philosophical ones, because they turn on grasping what is at stake in someone else’s outlook, evaluating it, thinking about one’s attitude to it, and adjusting one’s behaviour and choices in the light of it. Government policy encouraging mutual understanding is a de facto endorsement of philosophy, from which it follows that there ought to be more philosophy in education, not less as Mr Rammell thinks.

So really, we should be encouraging more people to study such subjects as Philosophy and History, not less. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that everyone sit around doing armchair ‘thought experiments’, but I do think that a little critical thinking built into courses both in compulsory, further and higher education, would go a long way towards creating the society that Mr Blair and his government want to create…

Related links:

• Stephen Moss - All You’ll Ever Need To Know About The Arts (tongue-in-cheek - I hope!)

Anthony Grayling’s The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to 21st Century looks at questions of personal ethics and the problems of the contemporary world, as well as the lives and ideas of great thinkers, the role of the arts in civilisation, and the need for reason everywhere.

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