The aims of education have shifted over recent years. Announcing radical new school curriculum changes, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s Mick Waters explained that ‘We live in a changing society… so the role and organisation of schooling will need to change too… The skills young people will need… are very different from those that were seen as essential when mass schooling began in the late 1800s or even when a curriculum for the nation was established in the late 1980s’. Similarly, the aims of universities have shifted to accommodate mass access and the supposed demands of a globalised economy. Even in the ivory towers, the pursuit of knowledge is less of a focus than gaining skills relevant to the knowledge economy. Subject disciplines are increasingly seen not as valuable in themselves, but as a flexible resource, ‘responsive (to) revision… in a fast changing world.’ Traditional divisions between disciplines or indeed between ‘interpreters’ and ‘performers’ are described as over rigid, even snobbish.
It is telling that Gordon Brown has split the old Department for Education and Skills into the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Blair’s ‘education, education, education’ has been deleted even from the formal organisation of provision. Whether primary, secondary or university, educational establishments are being reorganised around a range of tasks not previously associated with education. New demands, from economic regeneration to social inclusion are now placed on the ‘sector’. In schools, a the transmission of knowledge seems to have been sidelined in favour of such aims as teaching pupils social and emotional skills, with lessons on manners, respect, Britishness, recycling, diet and ‘economic wellbeing and financial capability’ now on the timetable. In universities, knowledge for its own sake is derided as ‘dodgy’ and the search for truth often dismissed as elitist; employability, application and functionality are the new mantras.
In this context, it is important to take a step back from policy diktats and ask ‘what constitutes education and what is its purpose?’ Is it right to break down the disctinctions between educating and socialising children, or between universities and business? If knowledge becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself, do we open up the doors to philistinism? What - ideally - is education for?
 | Keith Bartley chief executive, General Teaching Council for England |
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 | David Willetts MP Minister of State for Universities and Science; author, The Pinch: how baby boomers took their children's future - and why they should give it back |
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 | Malcolm Grant president and provost, University College London (UCL); chairman, Russell Group |
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 | Professor Frank Furedi sociologist and social commentator; author, What's Happened to the University?, Power of Reading: from Socrates to Twitter, On Tolerance and Authority: a sociological history |
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 | Claire Fox director, Academy of Ideas; panellist, BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze; author, I Find That Offensive |
| Claire Fox director, Academy of Ideas; panellist, BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze; author, I Find That Offensive | |
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 | recommended by spiked |
