How and why we educate
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Universities are counting the cost of COVID-19. They’ve lost revenue from international students, they’re struggling for investment and some of them are finding it hard to meet their pension commitments. As many as 13 of them may no longer be financially viable, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The question of whether or not cash-strapped universities should be bailed out is moral as well as financial. It summons conflicting arguments about the social value of these institutions and the role they have in wider education. In the 1970s and 1980s between 8% and 19% of school-leavers went on to higher education; today it’s 50%. Should we be proud that at least half our young adults are engaged in self-directed learning? Some say yes, it’s a moral achievement and well worth holding on to. Others observe that whereas we may now have more graduates than ever, never before have their qualifications been worth so little. How we view universities has implications for schools, where hitting grade targets is the de facto measure of success. The pandemic has exposed the weakness of this approach, according to its critics, because it relies too heavily on testing as an end in itself. While some decry the lockdown as a disaster for a ‘lost generation’ of young people, others see it as a once-in-a generation opportunity to re-think not just how we’re educating our children but what education should be aiming to achieve. With Nick Hillman, Sir Anthony Seldon, Niamh Sweeney and Tim Worstall.
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. You can download many more BBC Radio 4 programmes for free. |
| 0:07.7 | Find these at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4. |
| 0:12.8 | Good evening. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies this week, as many as 13 of our universities could go bust in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. |
| 0:21.9 | They are, as the IFS delicately puts it, mainly the less prestigious institutions set up in the |
| 0:27.5 | drive to achieve the target of a 50% of young people going to university. Just as that |
| 0:32.6 | target's been achieved, it's being abandoned. The Education Secretary says we are training people for jobs that |
| 0:38.5 | don't exist, and a significant proportion of young people failed to gain much advantage from going |
| 0:43.9 | to university at all. In fact, he said, those who did a paid two-year technical apprenticeship |
| 0:49.4 | ended up, on average, earning more than those who did a three-year bachelor degree |
| 0:54.4 | that can cost upwards of £30,000. Others say sending half our youngsters to university |
| 1:00.2 | is a great social and moral achievement, as well as an educational landmark, and that education |
| 1:05.6 | is about more than grades, acquiring technical skills and being useful to employers. |
| 1:13.6 | In response, the critics say the country is losing out. |
| 1:17.3 | We have half as many technically well-qualified people as Germany. |
| 1:18.6 | And so are our youngsters. |
| 1:21.6 | We're pretty much the only developed country in the world, |
| 1:26.9 | where young people's literacy and numeracy is no better than the over-55s. |
| 1:31.1 | What's education for, and who should do what and how? |
| 1:35.1 | That's our moral maize tonight, the panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times, |
| 1:39.5 | Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and inter-religious studies at Edinburgh University, |
| 1:42.1 | and McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, |
| 1:45.5 | and the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor. |
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