Information Research Weblog

I was checking on the e-mail address of an old friend in the USA - Dan Carter, at the University of South Carolina, and I followed a link to a lecture he'd given. I recommend the whole of it, but this paragraph struck me as very relevant in the UK, where higher education is becoming more and more a factory system and where the question has to be, To what end?

At the same time, even as we make the argument that higher education can help in raising the standard of living in this state, we should not lose sight of the notion that education is more than simply an avenue to making money and competing economically. We hear much about the value of creating a skilled and technologically proficient pool of workers for the new economy and that is certainly true. In an educational system that works as it should, students will learn how to engage in rigorous analysis, to think logically and sequentially, to speak articulately and to write good prose. Those skills undoubtedly make them good workers. But the inescapable reality is that-in the not too distant technocratic future-we will need only so many people to run the information economy; many of the rest will be marginalized and sidelined in the "service" sector with little need for highly specialized technical education. If we concentrate entirely on the utilitarian value of learning we open the way to creating a society in which there is little purpose to educate this half of the population.

Read the whole piece here