Paul wrote:
In this sense, I think the pressures for the commodification of the
educational process (of which testing is an example) can be pretty strongly
linked to the systemic requirements of the global capitalist system as
mediated through national educational policy.
In the UK there is currently a major government effort aimed at
making all of us 'lifelong learners', which has a particular
resonance for Higher, Further and Continuing Education. Below
is a copy of a posting I made yesterday to a UK educational
development list which is discussing what it actually means
to be a 'lifelong learner'. So far the discussion has focused
on metacognitive skills and 'learner responsibility' - for
anyone interested this gives a flavour of the current UK agenda.
The Government Green Paper referred to, which is an abject lesson
in what Paul describes above, can be found at
http://www.lifelonglearning.co.uk/greenpaper/index.htm. The Dearing
report was a major 1997 report into the current state of Higher
Ed in the UK. FOFO, for the uninitiated, is shorthand for the new
'learner responsibility' ethos and stands for 'Fuck off and
find out'.
Helen
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I think like many agendas of the current government there are two
forces at work here which it might be interesting to distinguish:
on the one hand the communitarian impulse and on the other hand
the impulse towards individualism and consumerism.
At its best the lifelong learning agenda seems to be about participatory
citizenship. 'Education, education, education'
is the solution to all our collective unhappinesses: unemployment,
the loss of family and community values, even old age (see paragraph 8
of The Learning Age if you don't believe me). Dearing wanted Higher
Ed. to be about providing 'leaders' in the new knowledge society, by
which I take it he meant not just economic leaders but also good citizens,
helping their local community centre connect to the Internet and cyber-
canvassing for their local labour party before the 2008 general elections.
On the other hand once you get beyond the introductions of these shiny
government documents there is a lot less emancipation of the creative
intellect and a lot more 'having the skills needed by employers' (Green
Paper on Lifelong Learning para 6). The learning agenda of lifelong
learning is very clearly about making *employees* responsible for their
own learning - in other words not only had you better equip yourself
with the skills employers need today, but you'd better be ready for the
next take-over/economic melt-down/technical revolution tomorrow.
From the groves of academe we can rationalise this -
we talk about learning skills, meta-cognition and equipping students for
endless change in a supercomplex society. All this matters to the individual
student. But at the end of the day, isn't all this talk about individual
responsibility just a little bit ... Thatcherite? What about the fact that
students come to us with very different experiences and sometimes very
little
cultural capital to invest in making sense of the 'opportunities' we present
to
them? Where are the critical skills and what Ron Barnet calls 'critical
being'?
What about the fact that *some* of our students might not actually want to
work
for one of the top 10 graduate employers but write poetry/get buried at
Newbury bypass/become the next labour PM/change the world?
In HE, at worst, we have the fofo approach which means more
time for research and never mind those tedious educational interactions.
But from outside academia the learner-driven model can be even more
insidious.
If people don't take advantage of the opportunities that are now (thanks to
the
Internet) all around them, surely that's their fault! The uneducated
will by definition be undeserving.
It's the change from a 'push' model of education - fill'em up with it in the
early
part of their lives - to a 'pull' model - give it'em when they ask for it.
Of course those who lack the cultural capital to ask for it, or ask in the
right way, or make sense of 'it' when they get it, are going to lose out.
The 'push'
model was all wrong too. But when David Blunkett's foreword to The
Learning Age mentions 'human capital' twice in the first seven lines... I
tend to think lifelong learning must be capitalism with a human face.
Sorry for the rant. I'll get back in my box now!
(An earlier but more considered response I wrote to the Lifelong Learning
Green paper is at
http://www.cti.ac.uk/links/lifelong/lllresp.html)
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