Product Description

"Education, education, education" has become an obsession for politicians and the public alike. It is seen as an economic panacea: an engine for growth and prosperity. But is there a link between increased spending on higher eductaion and economicgrowth? Professor Alison Wolf takes a critical look at successive governments' education policy and challenges many of the tenets of received wisdom: there are no economic reasons for spending more on higher education in order to stimulate growth. The conclusion of this devastating book is that a large proportion of the billions poured into vocational training and university provision might be better spent on teaching the basics at primary school.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70811 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

TES, 14th June 2002
'A withering critique of governmental and business attempts to support vocational education ... in the name of the nation's economic progress'

TES, 14th June 2002
'I can see Estelle Morris spluttering into her latte'

The Economist, 8th June 2002
'One of the bravest, most interesting and most valuable books about economic policy to have appeared of late'

Customer Reviews

Revolutionary insight
In the same way that we are sometimes surprised, these days, when someone actually thanks us for holding a door open, Alison Wolf's book is a continuous surprise for being so unexpected. She writes from inside an educational establishment that usually closes ranks when outsiders question whether the whole edifice is really being operated in the right way. This book is little short of revolutionary. It is one of a very few such treatises that turn the traditional arguments on their heads. She sees the Emperor has lost his clothes while most Government Ministers and civil servants are still pretending to themselves that spending even more public money on fancy educational initiatives will somehow "educate" us and that more and more educated Britons (read Britons with silly qualifications) will automatically mean economic success. Anyone who wants to see the whole picture on the question of education should read this book - but then they should also start to wonder what it means for other areas of received Government "wisdom".

Education is for the economy
A question that is always likely to generate debate, the purpose of education is at the centre of this book: the best investment for modern societies' economies is generally regarded to be education. This book explores the true relation between education and an effective economy, including plently of figures and well reasoned arguments. Issues of particular interest are the public perceptions of vocational education, and the stigma often attached to this, and the influence of business and industry upon what our children are tuaght. Not too dificult to read, and extremely useful fo anyone studying economics, education, or politics.

Exploding the philistine view of education
Most educated people assume that a degree is a passport to a well-paid career. Nearly all politicians believe that education is the key to a nation's economic virility. One would assume that Alison Wolf, who is a professor at London's prestigious Institute of Education, would support these ideas: after all, they underpin the rapid growth of the education industry in Britain and elsewhere. However, the facts are not so simple.

Although it is true that basic literacy and numeracy skills correlate highly with stable, well-paid employment (even after controlling for levels of formal educational awards), our universities are turning out far more graudates than the job market can absorb. After two years, one third of all grads in Britain are either unemployed, or doing a job that doesn't require a degree--a fine reward for taking on a huge burden of debt. 'Mickey mouse' degrees from Britain's newer universities are all but useless in employer's eyes. After all, one of the main advantages a degree confers is the ability to network with the 'right' people, and you sure aren't going to meet these at Greenwich University.

Even good degrees in hard subjects are no guarantee of a job. The stats belie official propaganda: we have far more science and engineering grads than we need. The global economy has created a global market in these skills, and China and India have been turning out huge numbers of scientists and engineers for years. One stat that I turned up in the course of my own research is that only 7% of British students awarded a BSc in Physics in 2002 actually found a job in R&D. The only physics grad I know personally never got a job at all--after 3 years of working in call centres and busking, he finally trained as a teacher.

The next time a politician bleats on about how we need more education to prepare our kids to compete in the information age, bear in mind that only 25% of ICT grads find work in their field. That's from our official careers website. The only true measure of any nation's economic competitiveness is how easy it is to start a new business, and how low the taxes are. Raising taxes to pay for ever-more education is the worst way to go about it.

But perhaps the worst of it is that we have lost sight of the true purpose of education. The West created the most remarkable civilisation the world has ever seen--one which triumphed over all--one which flourished equally in the arts and sciences. It is said, with some truth, that in early colonial days, every settler's shack has a copy of Shakespeare. In both Britain and America, ordinary people were educated without the slightest interference from the state--whereas in Prussia and France, schools were a tightly-controlled government monopoly. Prof Wolf is a liberal, and many of her colleagues may regard her as a traitor for failing to support the great greedy tax-eating machine that employs her. But she is true to the real purpose of education. And, I should add, she writes extremely well--this is not a dry book for the specialist. Buy it.