Class Struggle

About this programme by Peter Day

One of my most memorable encounters was with Lord Young of Dartington, the late Michael Young, sociologist and amazing social entrepreneur.

He was in his 80s when I went to see him in 1997 in his eyrie in Bethnal Green, a part of London he had made his own through decades of investigation and inspiration.

After a lifetime of inventing things such as the Consumers Association and Which?, the Open University and the University of the Third Age, he had just launched the School for Social Entrepreneurs.

It is an institution which I am pleased to say flourishes to this day.

Michael Young had the reputation of being a little bit “difficult”. So by way of small talk I mentioned what is probably his best-known innovation, the Open University, the distance learning institution set up in Britain in 1969 and much imitated now all over the world.

Of course, I said, overenthusiastically, technology has pushed things very much your way, hasn’t it? Who needs bricks and mortar universities any more?

Michael Young put a long finger in the air by way of rebuke. “You’re forgetting one thing,” he said, solemnly. "Sex."

Distance learning was all very well, especially for mature students.

But learning was also about growing up, and for that, nothing could replace physical interaction. Don’t get too carried away with new ideas, even if you have invented them.

I thought hard about this observation while we were making this week’s programme on education. It has been the key lever pulling people out of ignorance and lack of opportunity for centuries. But in a world of ideas education is even more vital … in every part of the world.

Curricula
And yet - wherever I go - there is much dissatisfaction with the way that education is done in many countries and cultures … in India, Germany, the USA, Britain, and many other places as well.

There is dissatisfaction about standards, teaching, curricula, discipline, relevance. Dissatisfaction from parents, politicians, teachers … and the students themselves.

At the same time as this chorus of disapproval, technology is inching its way into the classroom as it is almost everywhere else.

Private suppliers are going online to make up for perceived deficits in public education. Indian tutors are working face to face with pupils in the USA. Another big Indian company is finding ways of intensifying and expanding learning on line.

Elsewhere, fast-growing technology companies are frustrated by the difficulty of recruiting newly graduated employees with the insights and qualifications they need. They are also dissatisfied with the way that technology is taught in schools.

So there is some kind of assault on the traditional ideas of teaching, and what education means.

Some of this is familiar future gazing, Ever since the coming of movies and the radio, educationalists have been predicting an end to the classroom, teacher-based system of instruction and learning.

At one stage television seemed to have even greater educational promise. But even so the supremacy of the classroom teacher has been barely touched by high, medium or even low tech.

Maybe quite right, too, when you think about Michael Young’s wider view of what education is all about.