RSA Networks

These were the notes I presented based on:

"In from the cold- the rise of vocational education"

Professor Sir Graham Hills

project champion of the RSA's Visions of a Capable Society programme

November 2004

In 1985, an RSA report entitled 'Education for Capability' concluded that:

• "A well balanced education should, of course, embrace analysis and acquisition of knowledge. But it must also include the exercise of creative skills, the competence to undertake and complete tasks and the ability to cope with everyday life; and also doing all these in co-operation with others.'
• "The collective will of the universities, old and new, to reproduce their kind, has meant the perpetuation of the single-subject honours degree, its A-level precursors, the academic criteria of the Research Assessment Exercise, indeed every aspect of the tradition of knowledge over everything - to the detriment, of course of skills, training, work experience and all the other components of capability."
• "Flaws in the Academic Ethos:
  1 Fragmentation of knowledge
  2 Internal referencing, peer review, cronyism and social corruption
  3 Absence of context, flight from reality
  4 Objectivity taken to extremes, dehumanisation of science
  5 Authoritarian attitudes to knowledge and behaviour
  6 Competition between knowledge bases leading to internal uniformity and external conformity"
• "The World of Reality and Technology, outside Academia"
  1 Holistic, not reductionist
  2 Context driven, not subject driven
  3 Mission-oriented research, not blue skies
  4 Teamwork, not individual scholar
  5 Multi-authored publications, heteregeneous knowledge bases
  6 Divergent not convergent thinking
  7 Reflexive philosophy rather than objective statements
  8 Decisive criterion: does it work?"
• "... capability, the ability to act effectively in the face of new circumstances, is as epistemologically respectable as any other kind of knowledge."
• "The best way to connect the world of industry to  academia is to people it with students"
• "The idea that learning can only take place in a school or university is absurd."

Can't we aspire to earlier university entrance rather than raising the school leaving age?