Pressures in the Ivory Towers . . . (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

As ever when the A-level results appear in the middle of August, there was a mad scramble by would-be students to get onto the university course of their choice, or at least the best compromise between what they wanted to do and what their exam results would enable them to do. But this year it wasn’t just a matter of students fighting to find a university and department that would accept them. Universities, too, were desperate to attract enough students to get the maximum income from their paymasters. From newspaper and TV adverts to teletext announcements, universities vied to publicise themselves and those of their courses that still had vacancies.

The government boasts about the expansion of university education, but as usual what lies behind such assertions is more revealing than the claim itself. In part the “expansion” has been achieved by simply renaming polytechnics and some colleges as universities. The growth in numbers of students to over a million (double the figure 15 years ago) has not been matched by increases in university funding, meaning accommodation shortages, larger classes and overcrowded libraries. Most significant of all, student grants, which were never exactly generous, have been replaced by a mixed system of grants and loans. With the recession meaning that vacation jobs have all but dried up, and with restrictions on the claiming of benefit, students are now in a really precarious financial situation. Half finish their courses with a debt of £4,000, while one-in-five have considered giving up their courses because of financial problems. One-in-four take part-time jobs during terms, which is bound to affect their academic performance

About one student in eight now fails their course or drops out “voluntarily”. This is due in part to financial pressures, and in part to the increased staff-student ratio, which means less individual attention. Also many students end up in the rush for a degree place by taking courses in which they have little interest but which still have vacancies. In the recession a degree is no guarantee of a job ( not that it ever was) but it is still a qualification that many employers demand. One simple sign of the extent to which job requirements have invaded the university system is the number of courses with “Applied” in their titles: everything from Biology to French or Social Sciences can now be “applied” (to the real world of profit-making, of course).

The government decision to expand higher education was intended to provide a supply of trained graduates for a technological society demanding a high level of scientific and managerial skills. As we just said, this was to be done on the cheap, with the cost per student being drastically reduced. The teaching year is gradually being increased, and the pressure for two-year degrees is mounting. Universities were instructed to pile-’em-high, with financial penalties for not reaching their quota of students. The high drop-out rate is a complete waste as far as the government is concerned. The recession put paid to the need to carry on increasing the supply of graduates, but student demand for university places continued to rise. This seems now to have reached its peak at 400,000 applications for 270,000 places.

Since they ceased to be privileged enclaves where the sons of the ruling class could study Classics, universities have never been ivory towers. Rather they have come more and more to resemble factories with production lines and quotas. Money and the demands of capitalism are the vital criteria, while educational considerations take a back seat. 

Paul Bennett

The teaching business (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

You may have seen adverts for those very exclusive sounding little "tutorial colleges", private cramming colleges, places which seek to guarantee urgently needed A-level or O-level results in a hurry, in return for a suitable fee. All very discreet and polite, very popular perhaps with young students whose parents have got a few quid to spare and who forgot, during their two years of working for A-levels, that that was what they were doing. No Arthur Daleys here, you might think. This is the world of education, and the people who run these colleges must be fine pillars of the educational establishment, devoted to enhancing the cultural tone of life in the 'eighties and getting those diligent pupils through such very noble examinations.

Well, don't you believe it. Having just been employed by a private tutorial college for the past year. 1 can assure you that such colleges measure their so-called educational achievements in pounds and pence from start to finish. Let us start by looking at the glossy prospectus which publicises the college. We are dealing here with a business, a company, an enterprise. The fact that it is supposed to be a question of learning means nothing. Education, like every other human activity, has to be debased by capitalism into a crude transaction, an exchange fraught with fraudulence. The prospectus is distributed mainly in Hong Kong, parts of Africa and the Middle East, as British universities are popular with students from those areas, and to be eligible to take A-levels in local authority colleges you need to have lived in Britain for some time. The prospectus displays an attractive photograph of the London University Senate Building (which, incidentally, was taken over by the government during the second world war for use by the BBC misinformation service. George Orwell worked there and used it as the model for the Ministry of Truth building which he describes in 1984). In very small print it is stated that the college which the prospectus is advertising is round the corner from this imposing building.

Union organisation among the teachers in these colleges is (so far) virtually unheard of. although facilities and conditions for the teaching staff are in many ways particularly poor. The teachers' unions negotiate nationally with the association uniting local authority employers, whose agreements are not binding on this private sector. Pay is strictly by the hour. There is no pay at all during any holidays, bank holidays, absence (even through illness) and so on. Students pay approximately £600 for every O-level they are taking, and £800 for every A-level. Courses in English as a Foreign Language often cost well over £1.000. The college I have been working for has over 300 students registered. I had the opportunity on one occasion to see a note in which the owner has been totting up the accumulated income from these students, which ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Towards the end of the year, some students were complaining that they had not been warned against being over-ambitious in taking on too many subjects at A-level at the start. Standards of teaching are not properly monitored, with teachers being pressurised into teaching subjects which they may not be properly qualified for, rather than turn away potential fee-payers for a possible course. Some teachers, anxious to save some money for the holiday periods when their pay will abruptly cease, take on so many hours of teaching that they cannot possibly hope to prepare all their lessons properly. All of this, combined with the fact that a majority of students have been thrust too rapidly into writing exam papers in English even though it is not their first language, leads to a very poor level of results in many cases. The owner confided to me in an oddly candid moment that an appalling set of results has become the annual expectation. This situation is tolerated as long as it does not form into such a widespread bad reputation that there are no further queues of candidates.

Finally, the payment of teachers is carried out with a penny-pinching obsession which defies comprehension. I have personally kept (and framed) pay-slips which include deductions for "lateness" measured minute by minute, penny by penny. "Teaching" is regarded as a mechanical process, and if a moment passes when that process is not "happening" then the teacher must not be paid for that moment. The terms of the contract of employment are quite draconian: "a teacher who fails to attend any class . . . is liable to instant dismissal. Breach of College Regulations renders the teacher liable to instant dismissal" and so on.

No doubt Kenneth Baker would find all this very inspiring. After all. even the state education system is dominated by commercial considerations, ranging from the poor provision of facilities, understaffing and the present conflict over pay, to the underlying aim of turning out model wage-slaves (who should be expertly adaptable to the art of dealing with the DHSS for long periods). In either case, it is safe to assume that real education. the free process of social learning, has hardly begun.

Clifford Slapper

Cuts in Education (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again capitalism is going through a pretty severe crisis. There is of course nothing new in this. Nor is there anything unusual. On the contrary, it is merely evidence of the normal working of capitalism; a society in which crisis is as endemic as weeds to a flower bed. Marx pointed out over a hundred years ago, that capitalism would inevitably move in phases, one of which was crisis which is what is happening now. When capitalism in Britain or elsewhere gets into a financial crisis its government must turn to anything which offers a prospect of saving the situation, one vulnerable arm of expenditure is education. The direct benefits of investment in education are not as evident to all the capitalist class as is investment in plant or machinery. It takes some considerable time to get any return on the expense of getting children ready for “the work of life” (one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of education); at least ten years in school to make a labourer, considerably longer for a worker with a technical degree, even longer for a scientist capable of inventing a new type of warhead. So capitalism cuts.

This cannot be in the long-term interests of capitalism. Advanced capitalism needs well-trained labour. Without it, the individual capitalist state may fall behind its competitors in world markets. But long-term interests seldom enter into it. To make his workers redundant, close his plant etc. means less profit for the capitalist, yet nevertheless the capitalist class finds itself doing just that. So also with education. The dictates of this crazy system do not allow for common-sense (even from the point of view of capital). For one thing there are no jobs available for all those expensively-trained students (especially those coming out of so-called higher education). The Times reported (16th January 1976) over 1750 vacancies in colleges, universities and polytechnics which could not be filled in the south-east alone. From the point of view of the capitalist class, with a situation like that, why not cut?

So the hatchet men of the capitalist class (currently the Labour party) start looking for ways of saving the capitalist class’s money. Apart from straight cutting, a future hatchet “person”, Mrs. Thatcher has been suggesting one way for the capitalist class to have its cake and eat it. The method? Easy; you have more colleges, universities etc., without the State paying for them. Which is in effect what she recommended when she open the new University College of Buckingham. This was launched in February of this year as the first "private” university to be started this century in the UK. It is private because there are no direct “public funds” being used for its establishment and maintenance as distinct from other universities in the country. Of course in the long run if this experiment survives, most of the money will come from the capitalist class anyway, but for the moment the state is not being asked to fork out directly. Which is what Mrs. Thatcher meant when she said that she hoped in the future universities would be “encouraged to take their destinies more into their own hands and to embark upon institutional adventures which do not involve the lobbying of public opinion or government departments.” (Times Higher Education Supplement, 13th February 1976). She means of course those that do not require direct public funding.

But apart from this limited possibility, the capitalist class must look at the situation as it is. It must have been clear to the capitalist class what education was costing them. In the financial year 1975/76 for example the total cost of education (admittedly including “libraries, science and arts” government figures) will be £6,164 million. The only item of government expenditure which would cost more this year is the one misleadingly called “social security”. The remedy was to cut £618 million for next year and £1,000 million from the education budget for the following two financial years.

The effects of the cuts were predicted in the run-up to the publication of the government White Paper on public expenditure. One result forecast by the Times education correspondent (23 January 1976) was a large number of staff redundancies; hardly a difficult prediction since there was a serious unemployment problem in the teaching profession before the cuts were introduced. Among the other estimated effects from the cuts are higher school meals charges, reductions in the numbers of students undertaking higher education courses from an estimated 800,000 to 600,000 in the year 1981, a standstill on staff appointments, a reduction in the target for the number of teachers, a standstill on the numbers of children able to attend nursery education etc.

The reaction of the teacher unions was as predictable as the results of the cuts themselves. Fred Jarvis, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, was typical. He complained about the wastage: it had cost millions of pounds to train teachers who were to be made redundant. “The amount of public money wasted in training them would be about £50m. ‘This is the economics of Bedlam’, he said.” (The Times 20 January 1976.) But it is the economics of capitalism, which unfortunately he and most of his members continue to support. Most of the unions talked of “action” to oppose the cuts. Teacher unions received motion after motion with “demands” for no cuts, opposition to redundancies, opposition to closures, etc. The National Association of Teachers in Higher and Further Education for its 1976 conference has a list of 111 motions almost all of which relate to opposition to the cuts, or financing and salaries. All about as effective as trying to stop Concorde by throwing paper darts at it.

In all the loud and useless flannel of the unions, there are few signs of any realization that the chaos in their lives and those of their children is the result of the capitalist system. For example the Technical Journal for December 1975 when commenting on the disastrous effects the cuts would have in higher education grudgingly acknowledged that as the funding of much of further education “is closely linked to industry, this sector of education has always encountered the occasional potential redundancy situation due to such factors as a declining industry.” Although that could qualify for the understatement of the year, it nonetheless demonstrates something of an awareness (as yet alas, dim) that anarchy in production must lead to havoc in human existence.

Of course it often used to be possible for expensively trained teachers who were suddenly made expensively unemployed to leave the UK and find work abroad, at least in some of the Commonwealth countries. But just as capitalism is world-wide, so also are its periodic crises and so also therefore is unemployment. The Observer (8th February 1976) reported that it is no longer possible for British teachers to get jobs abroad. It even warns teachers against accepting jobs if lucky enough to be offered them. The article ends by pointing out that in the USA teachers can find education authorities running out of money and not having sufficient to pay the wages! So much for “successful” capitalism.

The SPGB is not joining in the campaign to oppose cuts or redundancies. It is pointing out to workers instead, that the cutting down in teachers and resources, while schools are short of both, is yet another of the endless dilemmas created by a social system where cost is paramount. The dilemma in this case is for those who protest at cuts but cannot suggest where the money is to come from, and will go on supporting capitalism which creates such problems.

Ronnie Warrington

Universities Challenged (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Government White Paper on Higher Education (HE) entitled ‘Students At the Heart of the System’ has created controversy since its publication in the summer. As the new academic year begins, we take a look at its likely impact.

The White Paper is to form the basis for a new Higher Education Bill in 2012, after the current consultation period ends in a few weeks time. In truth it is the latest in a rather long line of papers and reports setting out a future for HE in the UK since the 1960s. In particular, it follows in the footsteps of the Robbins Report of 1963, the Dearing Report in 1997 and then – most recently of all – the Browne Report of 2010 commissioned by the Labour Government.

During this time, HE in the UK has seen developments that have been similar to those affecting university sectors in many other parts of the world. In particular, there has been a massive expansion in student numbers  – impelled by, among other factors, the conversion of former polytechnics and colleges of HE into what are sometimes termed the ‘post-1992 universities’ and the increased government funding that then allowed them to rapidly expand. There has also been a significant expansion in vocational HE beyond traditional areas of engagement like teaching, law and the ministry. This has been reflected in the growth of what some have considered to be more esoteric subjects like sports management and herbal medicine, and particularly in the development of Business Schools, which only grew to be of any significance in the UK in the 1980s but which are now commonly one of the biggest discipline areas in universities of all kinds.

Unsustainable

The previous Labour government famously set a target of 50 percent of school leavers going on to study at university and while this has never been reached, decent enough progress was nevertheless made, prompting some to complain of a ‘dumbing down’ of entry standards. In 1955 less than 5 per cent of school leavers went on to study in HE, a proportion that had risen to 12 per cent by 1980, to 19 per cent in 1990 and then to over 35 per cent for most of the years in the last decade.

This growth, like many things in the market economy, has happened for a reason. As capitalism has developed and its operations have become more sophisticated, the working class of wage and salary earners who operationally run capitalism from top to bottom have needed to have a different and often more developed set of skills than was required, say, a hundred years ago. While the economy of course still needs production workers, miners and other manual and physically skilled staff, capitalism has developed a vast administrative apparatus around buying and selling, the service economy and the state sector which is needed to ensure that this all runs smoothly.

Figures from the Office of National Statistics have shown that the percentage of workers in the UK employed in manufacturing and construction fell from around a third in 1983 to just under 20 per cent in recent years, confirming a long-term trend. At the same time there has been a significant growth in the service sector, in particular. This has necessitated government encouragement for more young people to seek out the type of education and skills supposedly provided by a university education. The problem has been that in doing this, the government has created a huge amount of additional expenditure to be funded out of general taxation, and as we have seen on a range of fronts in recent times, state expenditure tends to have its limits – especially as the burden of taxation has ultimately to fall on the profit-generating sectors of the economy (i.e. the private sector).

As more and more students have entered HE the cost of their tuition as well as contributions towards their living costs have become too burdensome for the state. This has over the last two decades led to periodic attacks on what many students of earlier generations took for granted. These attacks have included the removal of the right for students unemployed during the holiday periods to claim benefits for this, through to the full-scale assaults on the student grant system and the highly controversial introduction of tuition fees (with students loans to pay for them) mooted under John Major’s Tory government but carried out by Labour under Blair.

In this respect, the Government White Paper is but the latest in a long line of initiatives with a common thread and a common purpose.

Main features

There are several aspects to what is proposed currently and little if any of it is genuinely new. Indeed, what is most striking about it is how it usually develops existing approaches or applies other approaches already implemented by government in other fields. The main features of the proposals in this respect are these.

• Increase debt and reduce (or disguise) the burden on taxation. This is a continuation of what occurred under Blair and Brown when tuition fees and student loans were introduced.  The approach this time is more radical (if radical be the right word) as tuition fees will rise hugely from £3,375 to between £6,000 and 9,000 a year, depending on institution. This is to make up for the fact that in England at least (Wales and Scotland will stick to variations on their existing systems for now), the funding that government gives to support student tuition is to be removed almost completely. This will happen to all subjects except those already in receipt of higher levels of subsidy from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) because of their elevated cost levels e.g. science subjects, medicine and engineering. To achieve this change, a modification of the student loan system is to be introduced whereby those earning over £21,000 after graduation will begin to pay back their loan through the taxation system with interest charged at RPI plus 3 per cent. In many respects, this is becoming ever more like a disguised graduate tax, with the advantage for the government that those leaving the country after they graduate will still have to pay it back. Like most taxes – whether disguised or not – it  will eventually mean that wages will have to rise, other things being equal, so that people can pay it, in this way cutting into employer’s profits in an indirect and more subtle way.  Furthermore, the attitude of government to the huge (and about to become even bigger) student loan book is also revealing, as they estimate that the amount borrowers will be liable to repay will have risen to £70 billion by 2016-7. Few seemed to have noticed that the government has just asked Rothschilds to develop a plan for ‘how to monetise the loan book’ including ‘selling [the loans] outright to financial investors, or selling loans to one or more regulated companies set up to manage the loans’ (White Paper, p.24). Clearly the recent financial crisis and its causes has been forgotten already.
• Outsource/privatise where possible, introducing ‘competition’. Until recently, the only private-sector university in Britain was the University of Buckingham, though now BPP University College of Professional Studies (owned by the Apollo private equity group) has acquired taught degree awarding powers and others are lining themselves up to be granted university status. This is in part an attempt to provide competition so that existing universities don’t all charge fees at the higher end of the permitted range (as most are proposing to do at present) while being a philosophical nod in the direction of ‘free markets’. The main problem here is that fears about the quality of academic provision declining in these circumstances have some substance. The proliferation of so-called ‘degree mills’ in countries like the US and Canada has long been an issue (where students can effectively buy a degree) and the largest private university in the world by most counts, Phoenix University, Arizona, has seen its applications plummet in the last two years because it has been subject to legal action by no less than 10 Attorney-Generals in different states over its ‘deceptive practices’. Coincidentally, and perhaps unfortunately, it is also owned by the Apollo private equity group.
• Increase links between the universities and the private sector, binding the two ever closer together. Again, this has been happening for years and it is standard practice for universities to check when they are validating new courses that they meet the needs of relevant employers. However, the government is concerned by the recent decline in ‘sandwich years’ for students with business and in internships, and wants to see these encouraged. It also wants to see the links between research and private business developed and commercial opportunities exploited to the full. Interestingly, postgraduate courses already receive little by way of HEFCE funding and have had higher fees to make up the difference as it has long been assumed that much postgraduate study is sponsored by employers (something the government would like to see extended to undergraduate study too, wherever possible).
• Target state support rather than universalise it. Student grants to help with living costs will be targeted at the poorest families only and the old education maintenance allowance for 16-19 year olds studying before they get to university is to be abolished on the grounds of cost. Similarly, HEFCE funding is only likely to remain for those high-cost courses that students couldn’t otherwise pay for themselves out of their loans, and which employers would be reluctant to sponsor as this wouldn’t be appropriate or they would be too expensive, such as medicine, veterinary science, etc.
• Set up a complex regulatory framework to oversee it all. The Browne Report had recommended uniting HEFCE, the Quality Assurance Agency for HE (the university academic quality watchdog) and two other related bodies into the one organisation dealing with the oversight of HE. This will not happen now, and the complexity of the proposals, the loans, the targeting and the new entrants to university status means that the regulators will clearly have their work cut out.

The devil is in the detail

The details of much of this could change and probably will, but the general trajectory is clear: a business-led HE sector; an expansion of vocational courses; students in debt for most of their lives, wedded to wage-slavery just to pay off their loans (and that before any consideration of mortgages and likely personal debt). As there are over 120 universities currently in the UK it is likely that some will go bust (and the government has explicitly stated that it will not ‘underwrite’ the finances of the existing HE providers), especially given the likely falling away of full-time student numbers consequent on higher fees. And the drive for ‘efficiency’ in the HE sector will be pushed ever harder, with the government setting up the Diamond Review into how universities can be run more efficiently (if this doesn’t entail recommending that universities ‘outsource’ much of their central services like Finance and Human Resources it will be a surprise).

The most obvious and predictable effect of these changes is likely to be a move away from full-time HE by 18-21 year olds, reversing the decades-old trend for more school-leavers to go to university. The precise extent of this is likely to depend on the buoyancy or otherwise of the job market, with those who can often choosing employment and relevant training over university and a lifetime of debt. It is also not difficult to predict a rise in the coming years of students studying part-time and flexibly alongside their employment, in many cases linking one to the other through programmes of negotiated work-based learning, for instance (another one of the growth areas in HE in recent times) where people receive academic reward for their personal learning in and through the workplace.

A sane society

It is clear that many potential students have already been put off university for life. But of course, as the old saying goes, it doesn’t have to be like this. Education should be available for those needing it and people shouldn’t expect to have to commit themselves to a lifetime of drudgery to pay for it either. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with studying a subject like history or art simply because you are interested in it, but this has become more difficult in recent years and will now be more difficult still as pressures from business and through the job market dictate that students have to study what will make them employable.

Nevertheless, one of the more interesting developments in the last ten years or so has been the whittling away of some of the old snobbishness and elitism that has existed in universities across the country. An unintended consequence of the rise in vocationally-oriented courses has been that some have discovered that what is often called the ‘knowledge capital’ of society exists mainly outside the Ivory Towers. To many professors this is a frightening concept that challenges their very legitimacy as ‘the experts’. But experiential learning – that is learning by doing, typically in the workplace – has started to come into its own, along with reflection on how people work and learn together this way. The deliberate division between learning passively in a seminar room or lecture theatre and learning through doing has sometimes been necessary but when reinforced systematically as has been the case in HE until recently it became a strangely lopsided way for an education system to operate – the ‘University of Life’ is indeed a valuable and important place and universities were in denial about it for quite some time. Stripped of the functionalism required by employers and the market, this could be a useful educational development.

We can certainly add to this that a co-operative society of the future would seek to ensure that a university education would be genuinely meaningful – not just for the participants but for society as a whole, being finally freed from the narrow constraints of the market and money, loans and liabilities. Situated within a society of common ownership and with common purposes for the dissemination of wealth and happiness it could indeed, finally, be part of a rounded University of Life.

Dave Perrin

Dons on the dole - part 2 (1981)

From the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

(In the June Socialist Standard a correspondent who is also a university lecturer reported on the financial cuts being planned for universities by the government’s University Grants Committee (UGC). The measures have now been announced and our correspondent looks at their effects.)

The statistics have already had detailed coverage in the media. Roughly they add up to the loss of 3,000 lecturing jobs and 20,0000 student places over the next three to four years. The Association of University Teachers (AUT) said the government had tried to give “academic respectability to a savage cut”. The National Union of Students called the measures “crude educational vandalism”. The pro-Vice Chancellor of one of the worst hit institutions, Salford University, said: “We are shocked, appalled and dismayed”.

In my own university we are still unclear on precisely what is going to happen. Our overall reduction in grant is smaller than most of us expected, but some departments, including my own, have been recommended for “concentration” with corresponding departments in other nearby institutions. Talks among the authorities of these institutions and my own will decide in which university each subject will be concentrated and whether “concentration” will mean losing jobs or just moving house for those of us whose subjects are_transferred.

The local AUT’s view is that the university will take the course that it sees as being in its best overall interest and that we must therefore be prepared to resist if necessary. What has appeared to make Union resistance more possible now than it seemed before is that the UGC had a last-minute change of heart and, instead of telling universities in precise detailed terms how to achieve their economies, simply issued figures of percentage cuts for each institution and told each one in only very general terms as to where its cuts should be operated. The AUT claims that its own representations to the UGC were responsible for this change of emphasis and that Union pressure can also therefore bring unhoped for changes of emphasis (from individual universities). This may be so, but it’s still hard to see how saving one lecturer’s job in one subject will not automatically result in another lecturer’s job being lost in another subject. No matter how much juggling is done, money will only be there for a certain number of salaries. What the UGC have not yielded on is the cuts themselves. They are allowing individual universities more flexibility in distributing their share of the cuts but have made it quite clear that, whatever the attitude of the Union and the universities, the cuts will have to be made.

What surprised most people was not the extent of the grant reductions but the way in which they were spread. A minority of institutions have been particularly hard hit, while the majority are suffering rather less than expected. The Sunday Times (5/7/81) explained this by pointing out that “what really lay behind the UGC’s decision was . . . cost-effectiveness”. In other words the main factor in assessing where the axe should fall was the cheapness with which universities had shown themselves capable of operating their courses. Those whose unit costs were expensive were most heavily penalised. Those whose cost per student was low came off best. As the Vice-Chancellor of the least affected university of all, Bath, was proud to point out: “We’re getting better results for a lower investment” (Sunday Times 5/7/81).

For a number of years now both Labour and Tory governments have talked about the need to make universities more receptive to the “needs of society”. For, although education has grown up in response to the ever increasing needs of the profit system for an increasing number of educated intellectually flexible wage slaves (which is what politicians mean by the “needs of society”), the university sector, because of its traditional “independence”, has been more difficult to mould to capitalism’s requirements and has developed in a more willy-nilly and more expensive fashion than the rest. Governments now want to bring the universities into line, to make them respond more efficiently and more cheaply to the economic needs of capitalism. And what better time than in a period of depression when cuts in so-called “public expenditure” seem especially justified and when so many people in other occupations are losing their jobs.

It’s possible of course that the government is being short-sighted and that, if the depression doesn’t last, employers in Britain will soon find themselves short of the skills of university graduates and will find it difficult to compete in producing and selling their goods on an expanding world market. But capitalism is nothing if not unpredictable and governments committed to running it have to take chances—even if this means wasting human talents and energies on a large scale and having, as a possible end result, increased economic chaos.

The cuts also highlight another kind of wastage of talents and energies that has arisen out of capitalism’s unmanageability. During the 70s universities throughout the country were told that the only way to keep their staff was to increase student numbers. With competition from the polytechnics and a decreasing number of 18-year-olds in the population it was assumed that universities would not be able to do this and that the government would be able to point to this as a reason for making cuts in finance. But a different thing happened. Instead of waiting for students to come to them, (as in the past) universities started to recruit vigorously. Academics put an enormous amount of time, energy and ingenuity into finding ways of attracting new students, and many students were found where before they seemed not to exist. Then came 1979 and a UGC visit to universities told the academics that they’d been finding too many students and they would have to cut down. Now in 1981 they’re being told even more forcefully that all that time, energy and ingenuity has been wasted and that they should have been looking for ways of saving government money not spending more.

The UGC’s letter to universities announcing the cuts said: “Reductions in resources are being imposed at a time when demand for university educations is still rising”. And this was an unwitting admission of the kind of society we live in—a society in which goods and services, including education, are not there to satisfy people’s needs but are only available when the needs of the profit system decree they will be available. The highly educated people at our “centres of academic excellence” should think hard on this and ponder on whether there isn’t a less irrational more harmonious way of organising human affairs.

Howard Moss

Universities and the working class (1966)

From the September 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

"But let them not babble of Greek to the rabble,

Nor teach the Mechanics their letters;

The labouring classes were born to be asses,

And not to be aping their betters."

This mean scrap of verse was produced over a hundred years ago, as a protest against the schooling of working-class children. But its vindictive composer might as well have saved his breath; industrial capitalism demanded an educated working class and it is against this background that the education reforms of the 19th century can be understood. Not only did these reforms involve a national system of elementary schools, but the universities were overhauled, too. New colleges were established in London in the eighteen-twenties and in the following decade Durham University was founded. Oxford and Cambridge were reorganised as well. The explanation is given by G. M. Trevelyan, in his British History in the Nineteenth Century, when he points out that the impotence of the ancient universities “must eventually have ruined the country in peace and war, when matched against foreign rivals who valued scientific and educational progress. The timely reform of Oxford and Cambridge by Act of Parliament saved the situation.” Nevertheless, it was still the case that only a handful of brilliant working-class boys stood any sort of a chance of getting to a university—and this remained the case until relatively recent times. But since the Second World War there has been another bout of reforms to meet the changing needs of the capitalist system. Along with the development of so-called “comprehensive schooling” the universities have been greatly expanded. Whereas the number of full-time students in Britain was only 50,246 in 1938-39, this number had leaped to 85,421 by 1949-50. Since then this trend has gathered momentum, so that in the nineteen-sixties it is accepted as normal that tens of thousands of young workers should graduate every year. But why has this situation developed? Obviously it is not because young people are cleverer today than previously; nor does the comfortable notion that we now live in a more egalitarian society hold water. It is simply that, in order to survive in a competitive world, British capitalism needs a growing supply of scientists, technicians and engineers. The Times Educational Supplement (March 15th, 1957) summed up the ruthless economics of the education business:

Education is a weapon of war . . . It is something along with the stocks and shares and the production belt which the hard-faced men realise is necessary to the survival of this nation . . . Education is something we invest in as we once competed in dreadnoughts.

Once more there are conservative academicians to lament the new developments and teaching methods. Take, for example, Professor J. MacMurray, speaking at the Sixth Congress of Commonwealth Universities: “Cultural institutions, such as universities . . . begin to be looked on as subordinate mechanisms in the general technology of the state—their function being to produce technicians and specialists necessary to ‘run the country’." Again he is wasting his time to hark back to the days when the universities were autonomous “cultural institutions” where the sons of the rich could idle away a few leisurely years. Industry now requires a real army of the most highly skilled workers and their education has become such a vital issue that more and more the capitalist state is forced to intervene in this sphere. Between 1945 and 1957 the national grants to the universities rose from £2,000,000 per annum to £35,000,000 every year. Over this period the total grant came to something like £232,000,000. Only the state, representing the general interest of British capital, can provide the vast sums of money required and therefore, over the years, state control of the universities has advanced as the figures below clearly show.

Some people have been inclined to look upon this trend as “creeping socialism” or even as a series of concessions wrung from the capitalist class. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The process is comparable to that of nationalisation, where other essential services are taken over by the government and run along lines which seem most advantageous to British capitalism. Clearly, it has nothing to do with socialism.

And what about the university students themselves? As the colleges come to resemble more and more mere teaching factories it is worthwhile considering to what extent the undergraduates are provided with a rounded education. When they come off the conveyor belt at the end of a three- or four-year course, how many feel equipped with a broad and useful span of knowledge and how many that they have been churned out as yet another mass-produced doctor, chemist, teacher or mathematician? Perhaps the best that can be said for the universities is that they provide an artificial environment where, for a few years, one can scrape by on a meagre allowance without having to sell oneself for a wage. But when the student finally leaves his college he is faced with much the same prospects as any other working man—a lifetime of selling his labour power to the owners of the means of production, the capitalist class.

Students often fancy themselves as being more alive and socially aware than the bulk of the working class. Superficially there might seem to be something in this, since reformist organisations of all kinds flourish in the universities. But unfortunately the conventional image of a politically conscious student population is no more than a myth. The vast majority stand for the continuation of capitalism with all its humiliations and misery. Although they are often a fairly vocal section of the community the fashionable battle-cries are rarely more penetrating than “Hands off Fanny Hill” or “Hands on Ian Smith".

Yet the outlook is not a black one. As capitalism develops the working class constantly amasses more knowledge and experience. The advances in the formal education which workers receive are only one aspect of this process. As working men and women become trained in the scientific techniques of production so they are more likely to examine society from a scientific position. They are struck by the discrepancy between the individual factory where order and planning can be enforced and the overall chaos of a class-divided society. The educated working man is a force to be reckoned with by the capitalist class. He is less inclined to be taken in by the crudest propaganda or by religious superstitions. He is, in fact, the grave-digger of the capitalist system.

John Crump

Open letter to students (2000)

From the October 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to higher education: just another few years before you have to put yourselves up for sale on the labour market

When you finish your university studies, the time will come to put yourself up for sale on the labour market. This means becoming a wage slave (or, if you’re a snob, a salary slave), working for other human beings who happen to own or control enough wealth to be able to be an employer of labour.

A not very dignified position, but something all those whose fathers who are not millionaires (whether great landowners or City crooks) have to do at some stage. Most people have to try to sell themselves at a much earlier age—at 16 or 17—and many fail to find a buyer.

Some, like yourselves, put off the evil day for another five or so years while acquiring additional skills that will, hopefully, enable you to command a higher price on the labour market. In fact, what you will be doing over the next three years is enhancing the value of what you will be selling—your mental and intellectual skills.

Some of you, too, won’t find a buyer, at least not for a few years. But then that’s the lot of the wage slave: to be dependent on finding an employer in order to have anything other than a miserable standard of living on some hand-out from the State.

The best-paid jobs available to university graduates—lawyers, accountants, advertisers—tend to be those which are the most useless from the point of view of serving human needs. Even those of you who will have useful skills—such as scientists and computer experts—will find that the best-paid jobs are doing research connected with military or commercial ends. But that’s the fault of the system and nothing can be done about it till the whole money-wages-profit set-up is done away with.

Dons on the dole as well (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m one of about 35,000 university lecturers in this country. That’s too many and too expensive, says the government. Between three and five thousand of us will have to go.

So a lot of us are pretty uneasy at the moment. Will we find anything else if we’re made redundant? Teaching in the schools comes to mind. But there’s not much chance there. Even though we’re qualified to teach at university level, not many of us have the right qualifications for teaching school children. In any case the subjects' a lot of us specialise in (philosophy, psychology, engineering, and so on) aren’t school subjects at all. And anyway there are hardly any school jobs about.

Few of us thought it would come to this. True, for quite a few years both Labour and Tory governments have been telling the universities to tighten their belts. They’ve been telling them that they’re too costly to run and not good value for money. And the universities have cut down. They’ve spent less on things like stationery, grants to staff and students; equipment. They’ve tried not to replace staff who’ve left or retired. But they’ve not saved very much-you can’t by economics of this kind. The only way you can really save—the universities know it and the government knows it—is by having fewer people on your pay roll. Because that’s where most of the money goes—on wages.

Yet, somehow, the universities thought, or at least hoped, that everything could carry on as before. Maybe enough people would retire or leave of their own accord to allow “natural wastage” to make the necessary cuts. Maybe the next government would be more sympathetic to the universities than the last one (didn’t the Tories say they would be when they were in opposition?). Maybe the country’s economic situation would look up and cuts in university spending be seen as less necessary. After all University lecturers did think they were a cut above most other workers. They did think their work was particularly important and that their status guaranteed them immunity from the vulgar business of redundancy.

How’s the government going to decide which of us are to go and which to stay? It’s a difficult one. In the past university jobs have been considered as held for life and usually that’s the way it’s been. You only got sacked if you went out of your way to get on the wrong side of your Head of Department in your first three years (your “probationary” period) or if you committed serious (very serious) moral indiscretions with a student (“moral turpitude”, it’s called). Now, suddenly, ways have got to be found of quickly getting rid of people in large numbers. The government knows the universities aren’t going to be able to solve it for themselves, so it’s going to tell them (“advise”, I believe,is the official terminology) who’s got to go.

 

Not that the University Grants Council — the government body that deals with the financing of universities — will be naming names. It will be “advising" universities to cut out certain departments or faculties and telling them that, whether they do so or not, they’ll no longer receive funds for their running. The surplus staff will then be declared redundant and their students distributed among other Universities giving lecturers who have kept their jobs there an increased work load.

What about the situation in the university I myself work in? It’s one of those, so rumour has it, which are most likely to be heavily affected. The University Grants Council has said it will be sending out letters in June with details of where to make the cuts.

This leaves plenty of time for rumours. And at the moment, with the summer term barely a fortnight old, it’s all rumours. We’ve all already heard half-a-dozen quite different “leaked” versions of what’s going to happen. On the cards, according to a sober senior academic, is that the whole university will close. Another rumour is that it’s only one faculty, Social Sciences, that’s going to shut down. From other quarters there’s talk of medium-sized departments such as languages, philosophy and classics bearing the brunt. Others predict less drastic cuts with the extinction of just small lightly staffed departments—such as Art, Statistics, Music and my own.

How are we reacting to this unprecedented state of affairs? In various different ways. Some linguists, for example, have thought about using their redundancy money (will there be any?) to set up a translation agency in the town. But is there a market for one here? Doubtful. English lecturers talk about writing their long dreamed of best seller. Other colleagues are offended that they haven’t been “consulted”. Some are confident that the University Grants Council, who after all are only academics themselves, haven’t got the power to force sackings on the universities.

What about our union? Won’t the AUT (Association of University Teachers) give us any protection? The AUT moved from being a professional association to a fully-fledged trade union several years ago after a ballot of its members. The idea was that under the collective TUC umbrella, we’d have more protection more bargaining power. Since then the AUT has managed to negotiate wage rises at about the same rate as inflation which, some would say, is no mean feat. It uses tough language too and until recently has refused to even contemplate the possibility of redundancies. Now, though it still says it will fight hard against redundancy proposals, it’s yielded to circumstances by admitting that redundancies are possible and even likely. And when the government axe falls it’s difficult to see how the AUT will be able to help us. It’s likely to take a test case to the courts to determine whether universities are legally empowered to dismiss employees who, according to contract, have life tenure. But most of us agree that this is unlikely to resolve things in our favour.

So perhaps by the time you read this, the affair should have been settled. And you’ll be able to read in a future issue of Socialist Standard how the famous University Grants Council letter has affected the jobs and lives of this writer and his colleagues.

Just a final word. Why is it happening at all? Many people in the universities would say that it’s because we’ve got a reactionary philistine government in power which is determined to spend as little money as possible on education and public services. There may be some truth in this. But it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. It was the last Labour government which started to make serious cuts in the education budget, which caused many redundancies by shutting down Colleges of Education, and which began to talk about and pave the way for redundancies in the universities. So, in government, both parties have moved in the same direction. The continuing recession in world trade has forced them (as it’s forcing governments elsewhere) to limit investment in the training of skilled manpower which is what universities are about. The end result of this had to be unemployment.

This brings me back to those of my colleagues who wanted to be “consulted”. When it was pointed out to one of them that workers in many other occupations were being sacked without being “consulted”, the reply was: “Yes, but we’re not down the mines”. This nicely summed up the view long held by most university lecturers that they’re a kind of privileged élite with special status and nothing to fear, that they’re somehow in a different category from workers in other jobs and that their employer, recognising this, will somehow treat them in a special way.

In fact university lecturers, whatever their image of themselves, are just as much members of the working class as anyone who, in order to live has to sell his energies to an employer for a wage or salary. He will also tell them that, in times of economic crisis, “status” doesn't make their job one bit more secure than that of their fellow wage-slaves “down the mine”. Universities are an important part of the profit system, giving to a section of the working class (the students) the intellectual skills that their future employers will need and will buy from them. And their employers will be in business for one reason alone—profit (or, if the government’s the employer, to provide the employing class with the services necessary to realise that profit).

Here’s hoping that the present shake-up will at least shake some of my colleagues out of their comfortable self-satisfied view of the world. Here’s hoping that their first direct taste of working-class insecurity will make them use their intellectual skills to look closely not just at their academic specialities but at how present-day society works. Here’s hoping that they'll sec its absurdity and come to the conclusion that social sanity means the end of the wages system and the end of production for profit. There is no other way of ending that terrible ever-present wastage of human skills and energies known as unemployment. 

Howard Moss

Candidates are reminded . . . (1988)

From the June 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's Summer, Ian McCaskill has once again, for a brief interval, been recast from a harbinger of gloom to a relatively welcome informant. Six hundred and fifty MPs are preparing to go on holiday for a couple of months and leave the profit system to run itself while slow-paced, deep-voiced cricket commentaries, emanating from every media outlet, provide the season's soundtrack.

One place that soundtrack does not intrude upon, though, is the silence of the large, wooden-floored hall in every school and college where thousands of young people every year sit exams. Every summer tens of thousands of students from High schools and colleges step off a convey belt and into a quality control unit — the examination. Like cassette players or cars which carry a 'Tested—Okay' label, some candidates will leave the process certified as competent to perform certain roles in the commercial system or pass on to the next stage of training. Others will be sent back to the drawing board or invited to quit the process.

In Victorian times the education system prepared young people for wage-slavery in a blunt and blatant fashion. In Hard Times, Charles Dickens describes this operation with vivid detail in a chapter called 'Murdering the Innocents'. Here children are being knocked into uniformity and docility by one of a new regiment of indoctrinators. The teachers were made by much the same method as they were now using on their victims.

. . . Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.

Some of today's educationalists would say that things are drastically different now. But are they? The same class-divided social system operates today as operated in Dickens' day and it has the same demands for a workforce which is disciplined, respectful of authority and implanted with the same fundamentally fallacious assumptions about society, class, competition and "Human nature" as its Victorian predecessor.

Examination Halls are once again filling up every morning and afternoon with hundreds of worried people. Once inside the Halls, the candidates, whose only identification for these purposes is a number, will be ushered to their respective desks the regulation three feet from their neighbour. They will be briefly addressed in a detached, impersonal tone and then will follow two or three hours of occasional coughing, sporadic fidgeting and the trail of invigilator's footsteps. College lectures have been described as the process by which lecturers' notes are passed to the notepads of students without really passing through the minds of either. Spilling out the same stuff on an exam script in a similar fashion is often the next stage in the game. I have been a participant in this rigmarole for 17 years: eleven as a student at various schools and colleges and now six as a teacher and examiner. The more familiar you become with the whole process, the clearer its main purpose becomes. Vainly describing itself as 'Education', the training programme delivered to people between the ages of 11 and 18 is little more than preparing people for the job market. Students are encouraged that the later they leave the process. the more attractive will be the job application form available to them.

Training Workers

The burden of cost for education, so-called, lies with the ruling class — the small minority of men and women who own and control the world's wealth. Education is. with most governments around the globe, the second largest budgeted expenditure after "Defence" (War), such is its importance in moulding a working class generally compliant to the hardships and insecurities of the profit system and tailored to the requirements of its work.

It is true that widespread literacy and numeracy are a pre-condition for the democratic operation of world society but we have already reached that stage. Since the early nineteenth century, the commercial system developed the need for a better educated workforce and then, later on,, for increased technical skills. Syllabuses and examinations have developed broadly in accordance with what the profit system needs. One recent development has been the move to experiential learning techniques and corresponding methods of testing those skills. The Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) and General Certificate of Education (GCE) O’ level have now been abolished and replaced by the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) syllabuses which purport to provide a better "education" for those leaving full-time education at 16. One important factor in the design of these new courses was the way they would help to improve the organisational skills of prospective workers. According to a recent publication from the Department of Education and Science. GCSEa Guide for Employers,

Many employers have long been in favour of GCSE. It was, after all, developed in consultation with employers and other interests. (HMSO Educ. Jo. 243.1988)

In Britain about 4,000,000 people work in offices and there is a growing concern amongst employers, as commercial competition becomes more intensified, that their workers may not be up to date with the latest technology. The main purpose of the "A" level exams is to provide an entry ticket for the arena of "Higher Education", or entry into wage (salary) slavery at a "higher" level. Although some people climbing these rungs of the ladder can give the impression that the altitudes are enough to cause giddiness, their clamberings are not even visible from the heights of wealth and power occupied by the ruling class. Back at street level, even several of the "A" level syllabuses are being revamped to include more "practical" components. The Business Studies "A" level, for example, now incorporates a period of "work experience" where the student contributes a few weeks work to a local firm for nothing or next to nothing. Clearly a nice little perk for the owners of the local firm but less clearly a useful experience from the student"s point of view. Arguably the best result that can come from this episode is for the student to work his or her guts out during the "experience". not make any inquiries about a union and act with the right sort of servility to the right people — then they just might be hired by the firm on a "permanent" basis.

Learning the Rules of the Game

Recently, the courses run by the Business and Technician Education Council have become more prevalent in colleges around the country. The BTEC courses at "First" and "National” levels roughly parallel the more theoretical GCSE and A" level courses. They are based, almost exclusively, on a learning-by-doing principle and students' progress is monitored by continuous assessment of "assignments'". The BTEC National course (the "higher" of the two), though, has an examination at the end but because the ethos of academic exams runs against the ethos of the BTEC, their exams are not called exams but "Time Constrained Assignments".

Students on these courses are frequently asked, as part of their assignments, to assume the role of a particular type of employee and then, presented with a "scenario", are invited to complete a number of "tasks". You can see why the owners of industry and commerce must find this sort of thing a real boon. For one thing, it must cut the cost of their own training schemes, either in-house or the type they pay their workers to attend. Education in the commercial system, capitalism, has always been geared to shaping people for the role that their class demands from them. The children of the wealthy owners of society are sent to expensive, exclusive, elitist schools where they are trained in the ways of being patronising members of the ruling class. Conversely, ninety per cent of us attend schools where they teach you (or try to) how to work and to be on the receiving end of orders from the boss. The element of these BTEC courses which is a new departure is the open starkness with which the "students" are being apprenticed to types of work in the setting of a college; not just the skills and procedures required in different types of work but also the way in which they are encouraged to adopt The Right Attitude.

Consider one example of an assignment for students on a BTEC National course designed to prepare them for low levels of management. Details are given about an imaginary company, Fuelsave Ltd. based in Cricklewood with a workforce of eight, three of whom are part-time. The company produces a petrol saving device. A full report on the company is also given, " . . produces between 225 -275 Fuelsavers a week . . . gadgets retail mainly through garages in the South East for £80. . . Fred Smith the founder and majority shareholder wishes to increase production but expansion at the current site is impossible. . . Fred calls a Board Meeting to discuss expansion ". Students are then asked to put themselves through a succession of different roles in furnishing the firm with advice about relocating in two sites, raising new sums of financial capital, suing other firms if they try to use the technology of the fuelsave device (which has been patented), and the "best" way to make workers redundant. Other assignments in this course entail the students casting themselves as clerical workers, estate agents, insurance officers and local government workers.

The remodelling of education on more commercially related lines has also begun to percolate into higher education not only by the innovation of degrees in subjects like "Business Administration" but also in attempts to trim out of existence those research projects which do not appear to be useful to the actual workings of capitalist society and its constant quest for profit for the few. Higher educational institutions are also being seen as places which could be more concertedly used by the owners of industry to cultivate greater numbers of their highly skilled workers. Speaking recently to a conference in London, Lord Prior, former Employment Secretary (before he disagreed with Thatcher) and now collecting a little spending money as Chairman of G.E.C. (£200,000+) said that Britain is too snooty about its universities and this is "depriving industry and commerce of highly-trained brains". He suggested that universities and degrees should not be seen as ivory towers offering glittering prizes. “They should be seen as places which produce a highly-trained workforce for the market place".

(London Evening Standard, 30 April 1988).

If you are taking exams this month, or have children who are, or are teaching towards them or marking them, then you may well be familiar with the little blurb at the top of exam papers which proclaims that "Candidates are reminded of the necessity for good English and orderly presentation in their work . . ." A fully honest preamble would also tell you that "this exam is a necessary part of a competitive and uncivilised social system. It has virtually nothing to do with genuine study and knowledge . . ." One final point, in fact an alternative exam question: Imagine you are living in a society which has abolished class division and operates on the principle "from each according to ability to each according to need". Explain how your life is different from that of one of history's wage slaves!

Gary Jay

The Pierian Spring. (1922)

From the August 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Addressing an Educational Society meeting in London at the end of March, Lord Haldane, as reported by The Scots­man, said that “he did not think we would get a fully intelligent nation and, as a consequence, a fully intelligent Government, until we got the influence of the University student permeating the whole nation. The Universities were to-day rising to a new function. . . A great change had come over the people. . . The working classes were becoming keen about the higher knowledge. They thought nothing too difficult to learn, from Einstein downwards.” (Down­wards to J. S. Nicholson, we presume.) “He saw in the future a class of University student who would find a career in the missionary effort of going into the industrial centres, and preaching the higher knowledge to the workers. It would be a new kind of work, akin to that of the clergy, but would be pursued from the standpoint of the University.”

We like this vision of Lord Haldane’s. We like it immensely. We thrill to the thought of the young venturer answering the call : “Come over into Manchester and help us.” We follow him in spirit into the wilds of Barrow and Luton, clad in the decorum of Eights’ Week as in a garment, and luminous with Higher Knowledge. Wondrous gospel and full of promise !

What constitutes Higher Knowledge? We do not know. But be sure it embraces whatever concerns the upward march of man. Its apostle will first make known to the workers that there is no longer any reason why they should be starved either of learning or of bread. That without their toil there would be neither for any man. That the whole history of human kind from the first slaves till now is the story of the many, ignorant and meanly provided, serving in different ways the few, privileged to wealth and culture. That they are the last to win their freedom, and when they resolve to produce for themselves, instead of their masters, neither physical or intellectual hunger will go unsatisfied.

Oh, be sure the Higher Knowledge must begin with this—the setting of the workers’ feet upon the road to universal culture, the Pierian spring at which all may drink and rejoice—well, perhaps not quite that. “With an educated democracy, such as he had in view, the workers would not only earn better wages, but there would be fewer strikes and lock-outs and disturbances, and the productivity of the nation would increase as the result of its system of higher educa­tion.”

So the highest blessings of the Higher Knowledge is, after all, only to make more efficient wage-slaves. No, on second thoughts, there will be no reason to abandon socialist teaching even if Lord Haldane’s dream shall come true. There will still be need of knowledge, simple and unexalted—knowledge with a small k.

A.

Aspect: Capitalist education (1970)

The Aspect column from the February 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have no illusions about the role which institutions like the universities have to play in class society. Like the government and the churches they serve the interests of the ruling capitalist class.

The basis of modern society is the ownership of the means of production by a section only of society and their consequent use to make profits for those owners. The rest of us, cut off from ownership, have to sell our mental and physical energies in order to live. We, who make up over 90 per cent of the population, alone produce all the wealth of capitalist society.

The time has long since past when the capitalists themselves took any part in production. They have long since become redundant parasites, employing specially trained wage-labourers to perform the jobs, in the administration of the State and the management of their businesses, which when capitalism was younger they used to do themselves.

Modern society and industry is now run from top to bottom by paid members of the working class. All the jobs in the administration, planning, production and distribution of wealth are carried out by workers.

The glaring contradiction in modern society is between large-scale social or co-operative production and the outdated sectional ownership of the means and instruments for producing wealth. Class ownership has become an anachronism that is holding back the use of society’s wealth to provide plenty for all.

So what have we got? A modern technology capable of providing abundance. Workers capable of operating this highly-developed industrial system, yet doing this in the interests of a non-working, owning class who want their means of production geared to profit-making. But whether these are used to make profits or to satisfy human needs the technology is the same. Thus, the owners face the problem of training workers to administer and operate modern industry.

At one time the task of schools was merely, by means of religious indoctrination, to break in the children of the working class to the sort of discipline and hard work they could expect when they went into the factories and mills and mines. But with the growing application of science to production the employers required more and more specially-trained workers. In 1870 the State brought in compulsory elementary education. More money was spent on technical schools. Soon, a three-fold division emerged in education: Elementary schools turning out factory workers; secondary schools turning out clerks; and the public schools teaching the children of the ruling class to be the rulers. This division was recognised and enshrined in the 1944 Education Act which made secondary education compulsory.

Compelled by economic necessity to spend money through the State on education, the capitalists came to expect more of schools than mere indoctrination. They wanted to turn out workers who understood what they were doing in the factory or office. They wanted, in other words, an educated or rather a trained working class.

Hence, in capitalist society, money spent on education comes to be seen as an “investment”, the return on which can be calculated in commercial terms. The educational system becomes the “education sector” of the economy or the “knowledge industry”. Thus Lord Butler, former Tory politician now an academic, can write about students “as the type of capital investment which will accrue with every year” and which has “enormous value” (The Times, 20 November 1968). Labour Ministers are not different. Gordon Walker, who used to be Education Minister, wrote in the Financial Times (11 March 1968) about the colleges of education achieving “a striking increase in productivity”, that is, turning out more teachers per £ invested.

People like to think of education as something outside the commercial world where human rather than commercial values are taught and learned. Thus all this talk of “investments”, “industry” and “productivity” in connection with education seems offensive and cynical. But Butler and Gordon Walker are being realistic. They are telling the truth. What is called education is today prostituted to the service of capitalist industry and its profit-making, pandering to its manpower and research needs. Education today really is an industry, a sector of the economy turning out a certain kind of product, whose performance is judged on the rate of return it brings on the capital invested in it.

This, of course, applies equally to the universities—though how they were captured by Big Business is another interesting story.

For universities existed before the rise of capitalist industry. They came into being in the Middle Ages as centres of religious learning where people could study theology, law and medicine. Indeed up until the end of the 18th century nearly all graduates were Church of England clergymen and until 1871 acceptance of the 39 Articles was a condition for going to a university (the poet and revolutionary Shelley was expelled from Oxford in the 1820’s for being an atheist). In the last century Oxford and Cambridge, the main universities, were institutions turning out Anglican clergymen and top civil servants. Since at that time the governing class still managed its own affairs, their role was to train the ruling class to rule.

Capitalist industry was faced with the problem of turning these bastions of aristocratic privilege into the knowledge industry, of driving out leisurely learning for its own sake and replacing it by business and technical training. Many of the early manufacturers were non-conformists and so were barred from Oxbridge. They therefore used their money to set up their own rival institutions—the redbrick universities—where the emphasis was on science and commerce rather than on Latin and Greek. The capitalists denounced the old universities as “a collection of books” and “a place where nothing useful is taught”.

This was an ironic situation. The mediaeval origins and traditions of these old universities, geared to serving a leisure class, made them value learning as such and resist the capitalist pressures to reduce them to the simple task of training managers, engineers and technicians for capitalist industry.

Traditionally, then, the universities were attended only by the sons of the rich, and especially Oxbridge by the idle sons of the idle rich. This is no longer so. Part of the money invested in education goes to provide grants for children of the working class to go to college. 90 per cent of students are the sons and daughters of workers maintained at college out of local authority grants. When after three or four years training they leave university, they enter the labour market just like someone leaving school at 15. Thanks to the capital invested in them, their ability to work is more valuable and so they can get a higher wage. But wage-workers they still are. The labour market for graduates is conducted partly through the advertisement columns of papers like the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday Times and the Observer, but now increasingly capitalist firms are entering the universities and trying to sign up students even before they graduate.

Make no mistake about this: students come from the working class and are merely being trained as special high-grade workers who still have to find an employer to live. Most students come from the working class and are being trained to fill the top posts in the State and industry.

Universities are capitalist bodies geared to producing valuable graduates for the employing class to exploit. So it is not surprising that these students who have seen this can only regard as hypocrites those academics who proclaim that the universities are “republics of learning” or “communities of scholars” dedicated to seeking after Truth. Students have every right, like other workers, to protest about being treated as an “investment” and judged merely from a profit-making point of view.

Adam Buick

The Open University (1980)

The Briefing Column from the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Open University offers home-based higher education for adults. It demands no entry qualifications and offers places on a first come-first served principle. Since 1971 it has admitted roughly 20,000 undergraduate students each January, and a growing number of associate and short course students. It has a total student body of over 70,000; and over 40,000 still apply each year for places.

Undergraduate students build their degrees on the ‘credit’ system, choosing almost any combination from over a hundred courses to gain six credits for an ordinary BA and eight for honours. Courses are offered in the Arts, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Science, Technology and Education. The average student can manage the work of about one credit a year by doing about fifteen hours study a week. The bulk of the reading is from well prepared correspondence texts which are also on sale in bookshops. This is supplemented on most courses by radio and television broadcasts or tapes, tutorials at a local study centre, and a week’s summer school held at one of the campus universities in the long vacation. Examination is by a combination of continuous assessment and a final three-hour paper for each course.

Undergraduate fees are government subsidised but still cost the student £67 for a full credit course. The cost of set books varies, but is additional, as is postage, travel, and some items of equipment such as calculators. The expensive home experiment kits used in some courses are loaned to students. Summer school costs £62 this year but many local education authorities and some employers pay this plus travelling expenses. The University itself has a financial assistance fund for students who cannot afford the fees.

The headquarters of the Open University is in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. This is largely a course production and administrative centre, despatching about 62,500 packages a week to students. There are thirteen regional offices in the country providing local services and personal contact. Tutorial and counselling support in the regions is provided by more than 5,000 teachers employed part-time.

Of the students who sit the end-of-year examinations, around 90 per cent pass; but a gradually increasing percentage are failing to get as far as the examination on post foundation level courses. In 1979 only about 60 per cent of those who paid their fees for these courses gained credits. There may be a number of reasons for this: decreasing educational preparedness in the people now applying to the OU; increasing economic pressures affecting workers’ jobs and family life; or the decreasing level of personal support provided by the University as government economies bite deeper.

The Open University is not expected to show a profit, but it is expected to be ‘cost effective’—cheap to run. Those workers who had an inadequate school education; who have great difficulty in sparing the time and the money for courses; whose family problems, shift work and short holidays make them too tired and harrassed to devote their minds to study, and who lack the nerve and the know-how to demand their money’s worth when they do—these are the ones who ‘drop out’.

About 40,000 students have now obtained degrees through OU part-time study, in spite of the difficulties. This is an indication, not only of the amount of enthusiasm that exists among workers for rigorous intellectual effort, but also of the amount of unrecognised brain power that still lies dormant in a class which seems to think that it does not have the intelligence to set up and run a social system in its own interests.

Ron Cook

The educated working class (1971)

From the July 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Yes, I agree with your arguments, but how are you going to get everyone else to?” This is a common reaction of people when the idea of establishing Socialism is put to them. Ninety nine out of a hundred agree it would be pleasant to live in a moneyless world where they had free access to everything they required, where threats like war and pollution no longer existed, where work was not something they were forced to do and therefore disliked, but something they did out of choice and took pride and pleasure in. Yet when we have satisfied them that the world’s resources, if exploited with a view to use and not to profit, could satisfy all the needs of all human beings, and when they have accepted that it is not against “human nature” for people to live together in harmony, to associate rather than to compete: then they are inclined to say that this is all very well in theory, but how are you going to convince the majority of people that Socialism would be best for them?

How indeed? Firstly let us take a look at today’s working class (all those who live by selling their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary). More than ever before workers are skilled workers. They need to be to meet the requirements of advanced capitalist production. In the 1965 Senate Hearings before the Clark Subcommittee on Manpower and Education it is stated that “the market for the unskilled is shrinking” and “unskilled, semiskilled and service jobs which together accounted for 56 per cent of the labour force in the 1960’s will by 1970 decrease to only 25 percent of the labour force.” In today’s technology relatively fewer people are needed to do such jobs as digging roads, cleaning sewers and unloading ships. Mechanisation already dominates these fields. Conversely more and more are needed to research into new methods of producing cheaply and competitively, to build and maintain sophisticated machinery, to administer the complexities of international finance and commerce, and to train workers who will do these jobs.

Hence the vast sums of money capitalism is spending on education to enable workers to operate its highly complex technology. The Plowden Report (Children and their Primary Schools, 1967), in the section entitled “Economic yields of Primary Education” talks about “American attempts to calculate a rate of return on successive years of primary and later education” (par. 1173) and tells how in the United States “data have been presented to show that the total amount of education received, and hence the stock of educated human capital, is growing faster than that of physical capital and estimates have been made of the contribution of education to economic growth. From this work it is clear that investment in education in Britain could make a substantial contribution to faster growth” (par. 1171).

But how do these developments help to clear the ground for understanding Socialism? The answer lies in the type of education capitalism is forced to offer to produce skilled wage labourers. Modern capitalist education is far from being the highly specialised thing that many people imagine. It is quite true that in higher eduaction, for example, most students take just one or two subjects. But these studies are not aimed at specific jobs. Students, after graduating, invariably have to undergo some further form of training course for the profession they decide to take up. And the jobs people do often have no direct relation to their studies. What higher education has done — or aims to do — is to educate future workers to think clearly and critically about their subject in order for them to be able to apply the critical capacity they thereby acquire to their future employment. It would be impracticable for capitalism to educate people for one specific job. The capitalist system, by its highly competitive nature, is so dynamic and so susceptible to creating obsolescence of employment that workers need to be able to adapt quickly to new jobs when old skills have been surpassed by the development of cheaper and more efficient methods of production.

Dr. James E. Russell of the Educational Policies Commission of the U.S.A. National Education Association said in 1965 “. . . we are facing a situation where we cannot tell whether a given form of training will carry a man as much as 10 years in time.” (quoted in The Manpower Revolution, ed. G. L. Magnum). Stress is consistently laid upon the need to produce versatile minds in order to cope with the ever-changing technology of modern capitalism.

Industry has the last word on this with the warning of Leslie Williams, former deputy chairman of ICI, that science graduates in industry would need "flexibility of outlook and capacity to deal with a great variety of problems”. He therefore called for courses providing “an adequate scientific education and more opportunity for development of creative qualities”. (The Times, 24 November 1970, report of a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts).

A good deal of what has been said so far relates exclusively to what many people regard as the elite realms of higher education. So an objection might now arise on the lines that since those who pass into higher education are a relatively small percentage of their age-group, our previous observations and conclusions do not apply to the majority of the population.

In Britain at present the number of people in the age-group in higher education is indeed a minority (although, at over 20 per cent a bigger one than most people think). However from 1959-60 to 1968-9 the number of people on student grants trebled and from 1961-2 to 1968-9 expenditure on higher education doubled to £l,853m. (Statistics of Education No. 1969. Vol. 5. Finance and Awards). Then Education Planning Paper No. 2 on Student Numbers in Higher Education (Oct. 1970) projects conservatively that by 1981 there will be 835,000 full-time students, more than double the present number and a full 28 per cent of the age-group. This is not an arbitrary development. For the reasons we have already seen, capitalism needs trained minds and more trained minds. In America over 40 per cent of the age grade attends one of the 2,500 colleges and universities, and proportions are steadily rising.

There education is the biggest single employer with almost 30 per cent of the whole population working in what has been termed the "knowledge industry”. California already sends 80 per cent of its high-school students on to higher education and in the words of Californian educationalist, Dr. Martin Trow, "is wrestling with the transition from mass to universal higher education”, (from an article in The Times by Stuart Maclure, 13 January 1971). Russia too, world’s second biggest capitalist power is not far behind America in its higher education programmes. These facts coupled with the vast expansion programmes going ahead in British education (by 1964 12 per cent of the population was already engaged in full-time educational work — The Education Industry, by W. K. Richmond) gives the lie to the common conception that the college-educated are just a small elite group.

Reform of primary education, comprehensive schools and continual raising of the school-leaving age are giving to more and more young people the chance to develop that "flexibility of outlook”, that adaptability and open-mindedness which capitalism requires of them. To aid this process there is greater encouragement than ever in the upper school for people to study seemingly incongruous combinations of subjects; the "crank” or "leisure” degrees like psychology, sociology and philosophy are among the most favoured in many universities and colleges; inter-disciplinary' courses arc becoming almost commonplace, and the polytechnics and new Universities have tended to adopt those broad-based, American-style syllabuses in which “educational and occupational flexibility go hand in hand” (Senate Hearings before Clark Subcommittee, p 387).

What so far has been the result of the spread of education and the information explosion in the advanced countries of the world? Have people been generally satisfied with the additional purchasing power that their skilled, more highly remunerative employment has given them? Let us look at the situation in various countries.

In terms of man-hours lost to production, 1970 marked the highest point of working class discontent in Britain since 1926. Yet the panic this has inspired in the present government seems hardly justified when we consider that in America average strike rates are two and a half times as high!

Workers in France, in the first months of 1968, were enjoying the highest standard of living in their history. Then came the shock of the May events. The developments which have taken place in Italy since 1960 have been called the "economic miracle”. Living standards have risen steepily, yet since this date social unrest and strikes have been seen on an unprecedented scale. The same pattern has been discernible in Eastern Europe. The Czechoslovakian crisis, strikes and riots in Poland and dissident movements in Russia all spring readily to mind.

Recent years have also marked the rise, in the West, of strong, hard-bargaining unions and associations of professional workers. Student protest has engulfed all the advanced capitalist world, East and West alike. So-called affluence (i.e. highly sophisticated misery) does not make workers more satisfied with their lot. In a society where men must sell their labour-power for a wage in order to survive, the class war at both ends of the wage scale is as bitter and as real as ever.

Capitalism has given, and is giving, people the weapons to destroy it. At the moment people are thoroughly dissatisfied with all that capitalism involves (unpleasant work, rationing by wages, intolerable social and psychological pressures), but seeing no alternative still continue to support it. Hence, whilst being increasingly aware of the fact that they are deprived, they either limit themselves to demanding a slightly less minute share of the capitalist cake, or their frustrations explode into violence. But neither course of action leads far. Before we can get rid of a system we must understand the nature of it and have another system to put in its place. It is unconvincing to attack capitalism without being able to propose an alternative to it. That alternative, Socialism, is what we propose.

So how are we going to get a majority of people to agree with our arguments? In brief, social forces within capitalism itself are pushing people in that direction. Capitalist education, as one of these, is forced to give workers the mental tools which enable them to see their fundamental predicament. We simply aim to clarify things. We point out how all the things wrong with the world are rooted in the social system people put up with. We explain what Socialism means and how it can be achieved.

When the working class evaluate the Socialist proposal on its merits there will be no bar to the establishment of a world of free access. The understanding process is continuous and, if we exclude distinct possibilities like nuclear war and mass pollution, the continuing development of capitalism with its ever-recurrent problems and crises can only accelerate it. Socialism is not for the distant future. All the material conditions for it exist already. Once the pressures of coping with capitalism make people fully responsive to Socialist ideas, World Socialism will be a certainty.

Howard Moss