A key plank of Holyrood’s education policy is the response to the Commission for Developing Scotland's Young Workforce. While skills for the job market are clearly of vital importance to the profession, there are many aspects of the way this response is being shaped that should concern teachers.
First, there is the whole notion of industrialistsleading an education commission, since successful businesspeople effectively maximise the differential between their profit margin and their cost base - and workers are costs. While I don’t agree with a teacher friend who said that consulting business on what is best for young people is akin to wildebeest asking a hyena what the safest migration route is, we should remember that if the intention is to get more young people working, ‘rich people don’t create jobs’, and ‘hiring more people is a last resort for capitalists’: and that’s not my view, that’s the analysis of billionaire capitalist Mike Hanauer.
It doesn’t help when the Federation of Small Businesses asserts that ‘the primary purpose of education at all levels is to equip learners with the skills they need to succeed in the job market’ (TESS, 1/5/15), arrogantly dismissing centuries of the educational philosophy of Rousseau or Dewey or even Illich in favour of the self-interests of its members. And the language of the Commission’s conclusions also demonstrates this tendency to self-interest: indeed, many of the recommendations for business are actually costly action points for the public sector.
Engagement with the notion of a civic society in which employment is not just an economic activity but a socio-political one seems to be lacking in the Scottish Qualification Authority’s Developing the Young Workforce project, and the assumptions underlying the draft Career Education Standard are worrying.
Alarm bells are rung by ‘I can’ statements at the broad stage which suggest students should ‘demonstrate the behaviours an employer looks for in a good employee.’ But are studentsrequired to demonstrate the behaviours an employee looks for in a good employer? How can future entrepreneurs learn to accept the ethical responsibility to pay living wages, offer incentives such as meaningful contracts, board seats or share options to workers, or pay their fair share of taxes? And, in a burgeoning Rights Respecting agenda in schools, where are pupils empowered to say ‘I can assert my rights in the workplace, both individually and collectively’?
While we should all do everything to ensure that our young people are fit to work, we must also ensure that they are fit to engage with the politics of work in a transformative way. We have to defend education not merely asan economic means of escape or advancement, but of intrinsic betterment.
Raymond Soltysek lectures in ITE and is Coordinator of the Scottish Association for the Teaching of English.The views expressed here are his own.