Well here it is, the green paper explaining the Government's reasons for making education compulsory until 18:
Raising Expectations: Staying in education and training post-16
I've read the executive summary and it all sounds logical and well meaning, but I'd suggest it's just more of the same to bring 16 and 17 year olds into line with the rest of the compulsory skills agenda that this administration loves: they wish to "provide young people with exciting and valuable opportunities to develop skills that will set them up for life ". They really didn't read Kennedy at all did they? What about learning to learn? What about a learning society? How, exactly, do skills help someone live? The Government's thinking is still entrenched in industrial revolution thinking - How do we build a better worker? Given that most of our problems are social, surely it behoves us to ask how do we educate a better person?
So the Government will keep all 16 & 17 year olds "studying for recognised qualifications". All well and good, but that's just paper. It won't help people live more creative and fulfilling lives and compulsion is NEVER a good way to motivate learning - B.F. Skinner told us that. Even the behaviourists, and I'm not suggesting that human learning can be so easily quantified, recognised that to modify behaviour you need a reward schedule and that small but close rewards always work better than distant, long term benefits. So what's better? Punishing teenagers until they learn - and the disaffected minority will see this extra two years as punishment, promising £100,000 extra income over 50 years of labouring, or perhaps something a little less conservative (and yes, Conservative while we're at it), a bit more radical, a little more high tech, creative and forward thinking.
Let's throw out the certification and teach teens to think, to create and to work. Rather than making them wage slaves at 16, and poorly waged at that, why not give them the chance to create their own economic start-ups? Two years to make it in business, or creative media or whatever else they are good at. If the taxpayer is funding them, let's fund them to use the talents they excell at rather than spending two years trying to fit a square, and very resistant peg into a round hole. Yes, it will be challenging. Yes it will need some really open minds. Yes it's going to take time and money and resources to do properly and it has to be done properly - this is not a cheap fix. Yes, you ARE going to have to ask these young adults for their ideas, their thoughts, their opinions and their co-operation; you might even have to start treating them as people and not just numbers. But, if you have the will and the vision this could be the gateway to tomorrow that compulsory stills for all most definitely isn't.
Raising Expectations: Staying in education and training post-16
I've read the executive summary and it all sounds logical and well meaning, but I'd suggest it's just more of the same to bring 16 and 17 year olds into line with the rest of the compulsory skills agenda that this administration loves: they wish to "provide young people with exciting and valuable opportunities to develop skills that will set them up for life ". They really didn't read Kennedy at all did they? What about learning to learn? What about a learning society? How, exactly, do skills help someone live? The Government's thinking is still entrenched in industrial revolution thinking - How do we build a better worker? Given that most of our problems are social, surely it behoves us to ask how do we educate a better person?
So the Government will keep all 16 & 17 year olds "studying for recognised qualifications". All well and good, but that's just paper. It won't help people live more creative and fulfilling lives and compulsion is NEVER a good way to motivate learning - B.F. Skinner told us that. Even the behaviourists, and I'm not suggesting that human learning can be so easily quantified, recognised that to modify behaviour you need a reward schedule and that small but close rewards always work better than distant, long term benefits. So what's better? Punishing teenagers until they learn - and the disaffected minority will see this extra two years as punishment, promising £100,000 extra income over 50 years of labouring, or perhaps something a little less conservative (and yes, Conservative while we're at it), a bit more radical, a little more high tech, creative and forward thinking.
Let's throw out the certification and teach teens to think, to create and to work. Rather than making them wage slaves at 16, and poorly waged at that, why not give them the chance to create their own economic start-ups? Two years to make it in business, or creative media or whatever else they are good at. If the taxpayer is funding them, let's fund them to use the talents they excell at rather than spending two years trying to fit a square, and very resistant peg into a round hole. Yes, it will be challenging. Yes it will need some really open minds. Yes it's going to take time and money and resources to do properly and it has to be done properly - this is not a cheap fix. Yes, you ARE going to have to ask these young adults for their ideas, their thoughts, their opinions and their co-operation; you might even have to start treating them as people and not just numbers. But, if you have the will and the vision this could be the gateway to tomorrow that compulsory stills for all most definitely isn't.
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