This is quite an interesting thread. I was a secondary English teacher for many years, then became a teacher trainer. One of the spin-offs was that I also became a Media Studies lecturer. I was initially sceptical - I'm an English teacher - but I really enjoyed it, simply because it was a subject that had taken over the criticality, the questioning, that had been at the core of A Level English teaching, and which just isn't there any more. In terms of teaching young minds to question and to challenge, there was nothing to match it.
However. This more or less coincided with the last government's ambition to see 50% of the age group in higher education. That was bonkers. 50% of that age group aren't going to benefit from education at that level. 10% might. One of the downsides was the creation of Mickey Mouse courses in areas like Refuse Management or Golf, simply to cater for the less able.
A degree, in anything, should be an opportunity to learn how to think and how to communicate. It is not a passport to a good job, as so many kids have found out, to their and to their parents' cost.
The other downside is the devaluation of the apprenticeship. I was lucky enough - this is 20 years ago - to have had a short secondment to Rover, before they were asset-stripped. They were very much in bed with Honda at the time, so there was lots of TQM )Total Quality Management), and it was all very positive. For example, every employee was given cash to spend on learning. It really didn't matter if, as some did, you wanted to spend the money on learning fly-fishing. The point was, they were encouraging people to learn.
That was supported by terrific educational opportunities within the company. You could start as an apprentice, but, because the assumption was that you would succeed if you could show that you were a learner, there was a pathway that led to a Warwick University accredited degree - open to all. Some of the research was fascinating - using light and polymers to create utterly accurate casting patterns, for example - that would match work in many university departments.
The other telling point was what one apprentice manager said. This was when D & T became more about designing packaging than about learning to cook and working with 'Resistant Materials' (how wrong-headed is that as a term?). Yes, he said, we have robots now, but we still need people who can file square, because someone has to fit them.
(One of the nicer features of the robotised assembly line, which all visitors were shown, was a giant plastic spider on a string. When visitors were being encouraged to display awe and wonder at the cleverness and precision of the spot-welding robots, the spider would be lowered into their eyeline. Nicely subversive.)
I like this forum. It's a good corrective to most of the very dodgy values that kids are asked to accept as normal nowadays.
And, yes, I am one of Jacob's fans. Long may he continue to promote the kind of commonsense that rooted in experience and in the rejection of passing fads.
