THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME: VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN
THE SECOND MACHINE AGE
Philosophy of Education Seminar, Institute of Education 10/12/14
Patrick Ainley, Professor of Training and Education at the University of Greenwich School of
Education and Training (as was)
Original outline
Whereas Michael Gove’s delusion that ‘a grammar school education for all’ would restart the
limited upward social mobility that existed after the war (while Harold Wilson was merely
being devious in suggesting that comprehensive schools would sustain it), the new policy and
professional consensus that has succeeded it is equally delusional in seeing apprenticeships
creating a productive Germanised economy. So-called ‘apprenticeships’ are accompanied by
expansion of University Technical Colleges and technical diplomas from 14+ leading to
Foundation-style degrees in rebranded FE colleges under One Nation Labour’s two nation
education and training proposals. These attempt once again to ‘rebuild the vocational route’
in a Second Machine Age of increasingly fungible labour and mass downward social
mobility. Instead, a general education in schools is proposed, while in ‘thick HE’ (Silver
2004), paradoxically, the vocational nature of training in the most prestigious subjects at the
most elite institutions needs to be refound, especially by an academic vocation dedicated to
research and scholarship. Undergraduates can then contribute to that continuing cultural
conversation, giving them a sense that many have lost of what higher education is supposed to
be about. This might indeed Reboot Robbins.
‘Philosophical’ bit
As can be seen from the original introduction above that I sent when first asked to present
this paper, this is basically a policy piece. However, there are many what might be called
‘philosophical’ implications to it, not least the nature of education or mainly training that
might be offered as part of the new consensus above. Nietzsche’s strange and, it now seems,
scientifically implausible notion of ‘eternal recurrence’ only indicates the tired nature of that
policy and professional consensus for which a more appropriate epithet might be the
definition of insanity attributed to Einstein: ‘doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting different results’. However, philosophical considerations are obviously warranted
in any consideration of ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’ and how this is handed down the
generations. For, ‘It is a thought overwhelmingly strange that’, due to the uninheritability of
acquired characteristics, as Sir Geoffrey Vickers wrote in his 1965 The Art of Judgement, ‘the
whole expanding corpus of human knowledge must be relearnt about three times in each
century’(108). So that ‘our little life is’, as Prospero says, ‘rounded with a sleep’ but our
collective and more than individual experience is contained and preserved in culture or, more
largely still, in the notion of the ‘noosphere’ developed by Teilhard de Chardin and described by
Bateson (1973, xxx following Pierce) as ‘the growing body of cultural knowledge representing
humanity’s acquired experience in symbolic form’. It is this, as far as we know, unique heritage
of reflection by self-conscious organisms that is at risk both immediately, since what Jeff Nuttall
called ‘the suicide programme’ is ‘still uninterrupted and well under way’ (1968, 56), and
more insidiously by the reductions to its critical transmission that are being effected in the
institutionalized forms of education.
So to the policies
It is too little appreciated that with the raising of the ‘participation age’ (in education or
training in or out of employment) to 18 next year, all 18+ year-olds have been divided into
just two officially approved categories: either ‘apprentices’ or students with – as in New
Labour’s New Deal – ‘no fifth option’ of remaining on benefits for 18-25 year-olds. This had
been predicted by Jones and Wallace in 1992 but was officially announced in 2011 (DBIS
press release 8/12) by then-‘Skills Minister’ Matthew Hancock who declared that, in order to
‘rebalance’ school-leaver destinations, ‘university or apprenticeship will be the new norm’
for all 18+ year-olds. Cameron and Osborne subsequently repeated impossible pledges of
three million ‘apprenticeships’ that young people will be forced onto by scrapping their
benefits. This ‘end to youth unemployment’ was echoed by Chuku Umunna’s shameful
promise on Newsnight (18/6/14) to cut Job Seekers’ Allowance for under-25s ‘to plug the
young unemployed into the global economy’! ‘Rebalancing’ was then restated by Ed
Miliband at his last Party Conference. It is not going to happen, if only because students are
currently 40% of English 18-21 year-olds (c.60% of them women) while apprentices can be
generously estimated at c.10% (also c.60% women but many of them older) (Allen 2014).
Nonetheless, Shadow Education Minister Tristram Hunt, has followed up with proposals for a
Technical Baccalaureate for the half of 14+ school students who don’t make it onto the Alevel route with which it once again claims ‘parity of esteem’. Technical baccalaureands will
graduate to FE colleges rebranded as ‘Institutes of Technical Education’ with new part-time,
two-year ‘Technical Degrees’, reinventing Foundation degrees. This bipartism could thus
bring back not only secondary technical schools with Lord Adonis calling for 100 more
UTCs but also polytechnics! Only without the Council for National Academic Awards to
maintain parity between what are now independently self-validating institutions so that, even
without uncapped and thus differentiated fees, it is apparent that what the editor of Post-16
Educator, Colin Waugh, warns of is already happening:
‘nominal HE is being differentiated (for example, by the concentration of research
funding) into a posh bit that workers’ pay for from their taxes but from which they are
largely excluded as students, and another bit which is increasingly vocationalised and
privatized and, also, for those reasons, pushed into what is in effect a single FE (or
nominally FHE) sector.’ (email 1/12/14 but see also Rust 2014)
This brings into the mainstream what under Gove was a minority counter-current for schools
represented by Thatcherite revenant, Kenneth Baker. For it seems unlikely that Michael
Gove’s attempted ‘grammar school education for all’ will be revisited. Nevertheless, it is as
fantastical as his delusion of restarting upward social mobility through ‘grammar schooling
for all’ that aimed to give all school students equal chances of being unequal. Now
young people who fail to embark on the academic route – or who fail to complete it to
graduation and often beyond – will still be at risk of marginalization. This is because the
persistent vegetative state of the youth labour market and the wider economy undermine the
policy goals of restarting social mobility through academic competition and of regenerating
productive industry through ‘German-style’ apprenticeships. Both these policies are ‘magical
solutions’ to a real social problem: the reverse of minority upward social mobility in the midtwentieth century into mass downward social mobility in the twenty-first and the fact that the
latest applications of new technology in employment obviate the need for apprentices along
with the ‘skills’ supposedly indicated by qualifications. Both measures should be recognized
as typical of the impression management that increasingly substitutes for government in a
new market-state.
This paper therefore opposes the political and professional unanimity in favour of yet again
trying to rebuild the vocational route. It recalls repeated past failures to do this since the
collapse of industrial apprenticeships in the 1970s to see education and training substituted
for employment as the UK economy opened to global competition in the 1980s. This has
contributed not only to ‘prolonged youth’ (Bynner 2013) but also to an ongoing process of
social class reformation in which widening participation to higher education has been
presented as professionalizing the proletariat while disguising a proletarianisation of the
professions, notably the academic profession. This is reflected in widespread public
apprehension of an ‘Americanized’ class structure in which a new middle-working/ workingmiddle class is divided from a marginalized so-called ‘underclass’, shadowed in electoral
pronouncements about ‘hard-working’ as opposed to (by implication) not hardworking
people. In fact, following the prolonged recession from 2008, rather than a permanently
marginalized minority, a reconstituted reserve army of labour has been rachetted up to
include perhaps half the labour force in permanently insecure, unskilled and low-paid jobs
(Ainley 2013). This leaves many young people seeking job security by running up a downescalator of inflating qualifications. Earlier specialization for narrow vocational and academic
disciplines are a peculiarly inappropriate preparation for such a situation. Instead, entitlement
to work and to learn about work – and not just to work – is proposed as part of a process of
cultural and political emancipation in an alternative economic framework of job creation to
generate real employment opportunities to meet real human needs in what has been called
The Second Machine Age.
The Second Machine Age
The Second Machine Age, Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant
Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee returns us more directly to
philosophical questions even though it is one of those admirably readable US business books,
academically well supported by a range of reference across the various disciplines that
modern Business Studies brings together if not integrates, whether at MIT – where the
authors work – or in the wider arena of global Business Study that much of internationalised
higher education has become. It is predominantly upbeat and optimistic in the way that those
supportive of global business have to be but still draws attention to drawbacks that have to be
overcome if – as the authors recognize – that business model is to survive. In this respect it is
a welcome antidote to repetitive and pessimistic condemnations of neo-liberalism – usually
from a Foucauldian perspective of unrelieved obscurity – that constitute the opposing
academic orthodoxy in the remaining human sciences and humanities outwith university
departments of Business Study.
Brynjofsson and McAfee’s thesis is a simple one that we have heard before: The Second
Machine Age follows the first industrial revolution, automating mental rather than manual
labour. It is still in its early stages of bringing together and standardising various aspects of
the new digitising technology in dynamic synergies. The book is packed with mind-boggling
facts and figures showing how fast this is occurring, particularly as sensors are attached to
various machines causing a veritable Cambrian explosion of diverse developments, not all of
which are destined to survive. The authors are particularly taken with the driverless
Googlecar that carries them safely through the traffic of a Californian freeway. This seems
the paradigm case for them of an activity that can be digitised and automated; indeed, they
mentioned it when talking about their book at its publication on BBC Radio 4’s Start the
Week earlier this year. They gave it as an example of their habit when walking around any
busy place of looking at the various service and other workers to see which of them could be
more or less easily replaced by machines. This, despite the still to be overcome limitation of
Googlecar that it stops dead if confronted by someone flagging it down, like the emblematic
protester stopping a tank in Tien an Men Square 25 years ago.
Brynjofsson and McAfee are hip to the potential downsides of such developments, both
social and psychological. They recognise the dangers of being Alone Together (Turkle 2011)
in a world of Mediated sensations that cut humanity off from its real experiences (de
Zengotita 2005) but imply that these are no different in kind to the distancing of
consciousness in an interpreted world that comes with the use of tools and symbolic speech.
They cannot cover everything so doubtless some other of their MIT colleagues are similarly
bringing together the dramatic developments in bio-technology that will find solutions to
impending climate catastrophe and the superinfections of our own bodily biospheres that The
Second Machine Age mentions only to ignore. (Actually, it mentions the former but not the
latter, nor does it pay much attention to the dangers of digital surveillance.) Like Dickens’
Mr. Panks, the authors are committed to relentless busyness, and so cannot afford to wallow
in the negative pessimism, as they would see it, of their more traditional academic colleagues,
perpetually worrying about being trapped in Foucault’s version of Weber’s iron cage.
Besides, they have a solution to bring together the routinized mental performances of
machines with the human imagination that machines lack. It is, predictably, to be found in
education. Like nearly everyone else except Michael Gove, they acknowledge that the mass
schooling that was created as a consequence of the first machine age has been made worse by
returning it to competitive teaching to the test to measure – as a letter to The Independent put
it (8/7/14) – ‘a ticksheet of facts in a daily confinement of eight hours or more in an
underfunded prison of partial knowledge’. They acknowledge with Diane Ravitch (though
they do not cite her) the original strengths of the Great American School System but, unlike
her, they do not recognise its Death. Instead, they refer to papers showing the ‘strong
relationship between improved test scores and faster economic growth’ (p.211) and that
‘students assigned better teachers (as measured by their impact on previous students’ test
scores) earned more as adults, were more likely to attend college and less likely to have
children as teenagers’ than the rest of 2.5 million US schoolchildren (212). So the way to
catch up with Singapore and South Korea in the PISA rankings that to them indicate
scholastic success is ‘simple… longer hours, additional school days and a no-excuses
philosophy that tests students and, implicitly, their teachers’ (ibid). This is to be achieved
through a Goveist-Murdochite NewsCorp/ Pearson diet of MOOCs and teaching machines,
whilst not forgetting to boost ‘hard-to-measure skills [that ubiquitous word] like creativity
[not a skill, by the way] and unstructured problem solving [that] are increasingly important as
machines handle more routine work’ (213). This will produce ‘Highly motivated self-starters’
who will be the entrepreneurs of the future, putting together the latest applications of new
technologies, shared freely across the world wide web to ‘increase the bounty’ by becoming
the market leaders in a blaze of Schumpeterian creative destruction. This is clearly also
magical thinking.
Human-centred technology
None of these ideas are new, however a very different version of them was advanced by Mike
Cooley in his self-published 1980 book which posed the alternative of Architect or Bee?,
recognising with Marx that although ‘a bee puts to shame many an architect in the
construction of her cells… what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is
this, that the architect raises his structure in his imagination before he erects it in reality’. This
quotation from Capital (Vol 1 p.157) indicated that, as Anthony Barnett wrote in his
introduction to the 1991 Hogarth reprint, ‘Cooley is a socialist who offers no easy answers
but has a simple and hard-headed sense of direction’. As Chair of the Lucas Aerospace
Combine Shop Stewards’ Committee, he contributed to the Lucas Workers’ Plan for Socially
Useful Production when the company stopped making Concordes. It is a similar alternative
for Socially Useful Education that is now required and creating it would be an education in
itself for those teacher trade unions and other associations, including those of parents and
students, who might be involved in this process. Martin Allen and I made a start towards such
a project with our book last year Education Beyond the Coalition, which collected chapters
covering all sectors of education from primary to post-graduate schools. In his call for
contributions, Martin was insistent that each contributor produce positive alternatives to the
existing situation and not limit their chapters to critique so that, while these did not add up to
a coherent programme across education as a whole, they did suggest ways forwards in each
of their fields of primary, secondary etc. and left their integration open to further
development and discussion.
For FE, Robin Simmons argued in his chapter for a return to the integrative principles of the
1980 Macfarlane Report, rejected by Thatcher despite the economies that its recommendation
of 16+ tertiary colleges would have entailed. This proposal can now be related to the need for
regional devolution revealed by the Scottish referendum. Apart from Scotland and Wales
though, which are national regions, there are no natural regions in England like those in
mainland Europe and they will not be constituted by ‘US-style directly-elected mayors with
cabinets’ which Peter Latham (2011) describes as ‘the optimal internal management
arrangement for privatised local government services.’ (p.2 and again p.15) Instead, F&HE
remains a potential lynch-pin around which to reorganise a learning infrastructure linked to
local and regional economies in what Ken Spours and Anne Hodgson called in 2012 A
unified ecosystem vision of schools and colleges in relation to universities.
Also, further and continuing adult education – despite what has become of it – retains (at
least historically) an ideal of education that is comprehensive without being uniform, not
necessarily vocationally related but also recreative and rehabilitative, and which prided itself
on never turning away any applicant for study but found a place for them in a range of
provision from entry to post-graduate level with everything in between and from which
students could progress (should they so wish) without fear of failure. Indeed, Bill Bailey and
I recorded in 1997 that it was an important element in the professional identity of FE lecturers
that colleges (unlike schools) never failed anybody and (unlike universities) did not turn
anybody away. So, while employers continue to demand government subsidy for general
training they are unwilling to provide in-house because of their perennial fear of ‘poaching’ in
an unregulated market, FE maintains its potential for that provision, despite the distortions of
warehousing and ‘learningfare’. At least in historically recoverable retrospect, because perhaps
now the Brilliant Technologies of The Second Machine Age are finally encroaching upon it. As
they do so, as Cooley wrote,
‘The feel for the physical world about us is being lost due to the intervention of
computerised equipment and work is becoming an abstraction from the real world… [so
that] human beings increasingly work with models of reality rather than reality itself.’
(p.24)
This is also a new division of knowledge and labour, just as in the first machine age when
‘skilled manual work… was subjected to the use of high-capital equipment’, so today ‘we are
repeating in the field of intellectual work most of the mistakes already made… at an earlier
historical stage’ (p.9).
For in The Age of the Smart Machine when ‘Work becomes the manipulation of symbols… the
nature of skill is redefined’ (Zuboff 1988, 23) – as competence, it can be added; just as
knowledge is broken down and reconstituted as information in McArdle-Clinton’s 2008 Capsule
Education. We are now all in it together as large parts of HE turn into FE as Waugh suggests.
Business-Studies-ification with its collection code of modules guided by ‘student choice’ that
have no coherence beyond their possible vocational relevance accelerate this process (Brady
2014). It collapses the distinction made by Silver (2004) between ‘going further’ and ‘going
higher’; the logic of the former being a horizontal collection of equivalent competences while
that of the latter is vertical towards a knowledgeable overview from the top of an ivory tower.
Dame Ruth Silver, formerly Principal of Lewisham College (now merged with neighbouring
Southwark College as LeSoCo – or LeTESCO, as it is known locally!), suggested that, at the
same time as students at Lewisham’s partner universities of Greenwich, Goldsmiths and
South Bank aimed higher, they should also go further by attending Lewisham to acquire the
practical competences employers always complain are missing in graduates who have only
theoretical ‘book knowledge’ without practical application. This would combine ‘higher’
with ‘further’, education with training and ‘deep’ with ‘surface’ learning, or theory with
practice. This is not to denigrate ‘lower level’ training but to recognize that ‘higher level’
education is impossible without it (whereas it is quite possible – and increasingly common –
to have training without education). What Silver called ‘thick HE’ would thus unite practical
competence with generalized knowledge. Unfortunately the idea never caught on! It could
perhaps now find an opportunity to do so if HE is not reduced to FE but combined with it.
Conclusion: on not rebuilding the vocational route and instead revocationalising the
academic
Given the intensification of the ‘low skill equilibrium’ first characterised by Finegold and
Soskice in 1988 with the deregulated, post-industrial, largely service-based economy of the
UK, repeated efforts to cajole and bribe employers into subscribing to training and
apprenticeships they do not want or need are wasted. Especially since the collapse of
industrial apprenticeships, rebuilding a vocational route with ‘parity of esteem’ to the
traditional academic one was a lost cause. From the first raising of the school leaving age in
1972, through the sorry history of Youth Training (Ainley 1988), to widening participation to
HE, this has functioned to sustain illusions in worthless vocational qualifications (Wolf
2011), warehousing and tightening social control over youth.
At the same time, the limitations of academicism also need to be recognised, rather than
being shored up by a new curriculum of ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young 2013), which can
only emphasise the role of cramming for largely literary tests of academic ability as proxies
for more or less expensively acquired cultural capital in a competing hierarchy of semiprivatised and state-subsidised provision from primary to post-graduate schools. This
competition has the effect of sorting out students according to their parental background by
the differential discourses they acquire in largely arts and humanities degrees in hopes of
entry to what has become a hierarchy of ‘graduatised’ employment. Nevertheless, they are
distinguished from non-graduate entry jobs to which the other Half our Future (1963) with
inferior vocational or no qualifications have been relegated. Instead of this division between
academic and vocational, the vocational nature of higher education should be recognised as
extending to the most prestigious of subjects at the most elite institutions, as in the ‘original
vocations’ of Law and Medicine. This includes an academic vocation dedicated to learning
critically from the past to enable change in the future. All undergraduates can make some
contribution to that continuing cultural conversation as the final degree demonstration of their
graduateness. Such development will widen the still available critical space afforded by
higher education in which a defence of the public university can be conducted (Holmwood
2012). This should bring together staff and students not antagonise them, which is the effect
of putting customers/ Students at the heart of the system as the 2011 White Paper claimed.
Meanwhile, general education in schools should also be informed by the discussion, research
and scholarship preserved and developed in post-compulsory further, higher and adult
continuing education in a process of critical cultural transmission, creation and recreation. A
general diploma should thus be available for everybody on the US High School graduation
model. Or, like Scottish highers which have helped deliver a higher proportion of school
leavers to further and higher education in all the time England has been sorting pupils into
CSEs and O-levels followed by further specialisation into The Two Cultures (Snow 1959 and
Morgan 2014!) of science or humanities A-levels.
Fundamentally however, the perception of ‘the problem’ needs to be changed: from being
seen as one where young people have to become much better prepared for ‘employability’,
either by schools, colleges or universities providing ‘pre-vocational’ general, further or
higher education, or through government-backed pseudo-work placements, bogus
apprenticeships and endless internships. An alternative economic framework of job creation
in which Local Authorities and public/ voluntary sector alliances generate employment
opportunities is required. Without this, the changes to apprenticeships funding, proposed by
Richard in 2012 and now being drafted by government could, Martin Allen writes (in Allen
and Ainley 2014, 19), actually result in a large reduction in the number of apprentices.
Initiatives need to focus on job creation, rather than following the neo-liberal human
capitalism that ‘upskilling’ the workforce will generate new employment opportunities. The
current ‘austerity’ measures of the Coalition and the EU should be rejected in favour of
significant increases in public spending as the basis of an ‘old fashioned’ Keynesian reflation.
For it goes without saying that ‘supply side’ policies by themselves will be inadequate to
challenge the structural (demand-side) weaknesses of the UK’s ‘declining’ – if not
‘moribund’ – economy (Ainley and Allen 2013). As argued above, the UK continues to lack
anything which resembles an ‘industrial strategy’ and, ever since the dissolution of the
Department of Employment in 1995, relies on ill-conceived education policies to substitute
for one. For example, rather than attempting to mimic aspects of East Asian school systems,
it should be recognised that, as in Germany and despite differences in both emphasis and
operation, the national state apparatus as much as the market continues to play a leading role
in the economy. (See ‘Why can’t we do it like the Germans?’ in Allen and Ainley 2014.) As
in the USA, France and, to a lesser extent, Scotland, the starting point should be one of
entitlement. This is not ‘the right to work’ under which the traditional left continues to
operate within a post-war collectivised model of the labour market. Rather, the possibilities
of flexibility have to be confronted while avoiding the current situation in which there are
more people in the workforce but they are paid less for unregulated employment.
Eternally recurrent attempts to rebuild a vocational route with ‘parity of esteem’ to the longestablished academic one have ended in failure time and again and will continue to do so.
Within higher education also, particular subjects like Law and Medicine (mentioned above)
have always been oversubscribed, but young people now sign up in their thousands for newer
areas like Business Studies; UCAS data showing over 220,000 UK applications by March
2014 for undergraduate Business and Administration courses starting in September, a 5%
increase on the previous year and representing 10% of all applications = 20%+ of all HE
students (http://www.ucas.com/system/files/march-2014-deadline-analysissubjects.pdf). A
high level of applications for courses that are perceived to be directly vocational is
understandable given the current economic climate and the increases in student fees.
However, as the National Centre for Universities and Business predicts, only 53% of
graduates will gain ‘graduate-level’ jobs in the next five years, while the Lawton 2009
recorded 7 million jobs needing no qualifications at all! This is worse for those from the more
vocationally inclined post-1994 universities and includes many who opt for science and
technology subjects elsewhere but find that, to avoid relegation to technician-level lab work,
they have to proceed to post-graduation. This is further turning still larger parts of HE into FE
and squeezing what remains of FE engineering, for instance, out of FE and into HE, as
employers prefer graduates to apprentices for increasingly routinized technical work. At the
same time, leading graduate employers continue to recruit more from a small number of elite
institutions than they do from specific subject disciplines.
Raised and differentiated tuition fees can only increase the commodification of student
experience and heighten differences amongst students and between higher education
institutions, as well as between ‘students’ and ‘apprentices’. Reductions in fees are necessary
but there should also be an emphasis upon the contribution to knowledge that students can
make in their chosen field of study. This is the way that higher education can recover itself in
connection with further training to recognise and build a ‘thick HE’, one that is both
theoretically informed and practically competent. This involves thinking through what a
general schooling could contribute to ‘fully developed individuals, fit for a variety of labours,
ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions they
perform, are but so many modes of giving free scope to their own natural and acquired
powers.’ (Marx o.c., 494)
c. 4,626 words
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