Education should be about progress, not prostituted as a means to earn more

Universities being allowed to buy graduates’ student loans is another blow to society’s collective forward motion

- Alex Andreou
- theguardian.com, Tuesday 29 July 2014 06.23 EDT
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Students throw their hats in the air at their graduation ceremony — 'Critics fear this will encourage universities to concentrate on degrees with high earnings potential at the expense of degrees that may be beneficial in more diffuse, but no less significant, ways.' Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Proposals have been drawn up to allow universities to buy a graduate’s student loans. The idea is the brainchild of former universities minister David Willetts, who was recently shuffled out of his position, and it seems to be gaining traction.

Willetts explained on Monday’s Newsnight that “the main point of the idea is to give universities a stronger incentive to focus on the jobs and the earnings prospects of their graduates”. Critics fear this will encourage universities to concentrate on degrees with high earnings potential at the expense of degrees that may be beneficial in more diffuse, but no less significant, ways.

This development is unsurprising, but deeply worrying. It is unsurprising because it is merely the next step on the damaging trajectory of education being viewed as a glorified form of job training. It is worrying because it relies on the idea that individuals are mere economic units, there to serve the economy, rather than the other way around. Education is no longer formulated as the question “what would you like to be when you grow up?” It is expressed as a requisition order by industry for x number of fully trained IT engineers or pharmacists.

To disincentivise the more general, but vital, benefits of education as a humanising process that fosters critical thought, tolerance and equality, is deeply regressive. It is the expression of a state that wants people who can work, not people who can think. It goes hand in hand with a growing distrust of “intellectuals”; a nexus that includes everything from dismissing Ed Miliband as a cerebral “geek”, to criticism of London by Ukip as “too sophisticated”. This is a nexus that in the past has led to South American juntas targeting academics or – its most chilling and extreme manifestation – the Khmer Rouge shooting people who spoke a foreign language or wore glasses, because they were deemed to be spending too much time reading rather than working.

The Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis once said that antisocial and anti-human behaviours (including everything from totalitarianism to criminality) were the result of “the beast within” against which the “only antibiotic is education”; the kind of education that is not favoured by governments, “because it produces free and non-submissive citizens, who are of no use to the lowly game of party politics”.

University, of course, is but one route to an education in the broad sense. I am not suggesting that a formal higher education is the only way to achieve personal enlightenment. I am rather suggesting that providing the tools to personal enlightenment ought to be one of the principal aims of a formal higher education.

When measures like this are announced, with the specific aim of “reducing the burden on the taxpayer”, the message is very clear: educating the next generation – our children and grandchildren – is a burden, rather than an investment in our future. Such policies prostitute education as a means solely of achieving a pre-determined salary, rather than a means of creativity, thought, civilisation and ultimately evolution. We declare, as a society, our intention to train individuals for competitive upward mobility, rather than to educate a generation for collective forward motion.