Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 30, No.

1, 1996

The Aims of Education Revisited

I THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ISSUE

Any healthy public system of education needs to maintain accountability. An
organisation is accountable if it is possible to determine whether or not it fulfils
the purposes for which it was set up. So accountability can be exercised by
checking to see whether it is fulfilling its purposes and how well it is fulfilling
them. In order for accountability to operate, the purposes of the institution
must be stated or at least agreed to by the interested parties as aims; otherwise it
will be difficult to divine those purposes, thus threatening the whole exercise.
It follows, therefore, that if public education is to be accountable, then either it
must articulate its aims or its aims must be agreed to in a consensual way by all
concerned.' Furthermore, in order to assess quality (in whatever sense) it is
necessary to measure performance against agreed aims.
When the major aims of education are not clearly agreed upon, there is a
danger that covert aims may become the most influential in determining the
operation of a public education system. It is likely that these aims will be set by
the most influential groups operating both within and outside the system.
Because there will have been little or no public debate about aims, it is likely
that the interests of some will receive scant attention and may even be harmed.
If a society does not have clear and agreed aims for its education system, there
will be a danger that not only will it fail to have a healthy system that is
respected and functions well, but there will also be widespread and damaging
discontent among those groups whose interests are not well served.
This seems simple enough and it ought to be possible to go ahead and
institute accountability through the requirement of an articulation of aims.
Unfortunately it is not as simple as that, particularly in a large and complex
society. It is possible to do it, however, under certain conditions. But, unless
these conditions are recognised, it is likely that the articulation of educational
aims will remain incomplete or non-existent. Perhaps the most obvious way of
articulating aims for education is to ask what education is requiredfor. Having
answered that question it should then be possible to formulate aims that
articulate those purposes. Then the rest-institutions, curriculum, pedagogy
and assessment-will be designed in order to serve those aims. The analogy here
is with an individual who decides that he has a need, for example, to mow his
lawn: he then formulates an aim, namely to get his lawn mowed, and then
purchases a lawnmower which is fit to achieve his chosen aim. The quality of
the lawnmower can then be assessed against the two criteria of whether or not it
does mow the lawn and how well it does so.
Some social change can be described reasonably accurately according to this
technical model. For example, the behaviour of car drivers can be affected by
making alterations to the road surface, thus causing the drivers to go slowly.
But even this technical kind of change needs some kind of involvement on the
part of those affected if it is to succeed fully. Otherwise individuals will fail to
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34 C. Winch

co-operate with change and all kinds of unforeseen circumstances may arise
which thwart the aim of getting drivers to change their behaviour.
But in any case societies are not mechanisms composed of institutions that
carry out discrete functions. They are interconnected sets of institutions with
histories, cultures and networks of rules that affect all aspects of the lives of
individual members. The different aspects of a society affect each other.
Changes in one aspect are likely to affect the way in which another aspect
carries on. Thus changes in education are likely to affect the way in which the
economy or the judicial system works. Since educational change is likely to
affect the whole or a large part of a society, it cannot be just a technical matter
for a few experts in education to determine, but ought at least, if the change is
going to be a healthy one, to involve the representatives of all those affected.
Any education system will have aims of some kind even if they are concealed
and/or implicit. A society that fails to articulate or even to get clear about the aims
of its education system will most likely enjoy a second-rate one, because some of
the most substantial interests in society will not have a chance to articulate what
they want from education, thus losing the chance that their interests will be
represented, leading to a danger of disillusion and contempt for the institution of
education itself. The formulation of aims for public education systems is,
therefore, a vital task for any democratic society which aims to have an effective
education system that commands the confidence of all sections of the population.
Furthermore, education is intrinsic to any society, since any society that has
ever existed or will ever exist has to prepare the young for adult life. Education
is a practice as ancient as the human race. This means that it carries with it an
enormous cultural tradition which runs back to the roots of any society. Any
change to education has enormous implications for the cultural identity of the
society in which the change takes place. As an ancient institution in any society,
education will have its own traditions, rituals and practices that will, to some
extent, determine how it operates whatever the external influences on it might
be. In the absence of externally determined aims, it will develop internal,
sometimes implicit but often, and most damagingly, covert ones which will
depend largely on tradition, on the interests of those involved in education and
on influential individuals within the education system, as well as other
influences from the wider society.
Any proposed large-scale change to a system of education has two different
kinds of implication. The first is the effect that it will have on the rest of society.
The second is the effect that it will have on the institution of education itself.
Unless both of these are understood, it is likely that the changes made will have
unexpected and possibly undesirable consequences. Setting out, clearly
articulating or changing the aims of education are three of the most
fundamental changes that could be made to any education system. There is,
therefore, a great temptation on the part of politicians and indeed of society as a
whole to avoid or to put off such a discussion. The temptation is made all the
stronger where it is known or suspected that there will be widespread and
substantial disagreement about what those aims should be. However, if they are
not set through a process of discussion and negotiation then they will emerge by
default, most likely in an implicit form within the education system itself. This
need not be the result of malice or of a desire to avoid accountability but may

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stem from the natural desire of people working within an institution to develop
a point of view, to make sense of what they are doing and to make their lives at
work at least reasonably satisfying and congenial.

U HOW BEST CAN AIMS BE ARTICULATED?

There is no one answer to such a question: it depends on the nature of the polity
itself. In societies in which there is strong implicit agreement and low levels of
conflicting interest, little or no debate need be necessary. In such cases, implicit
agreement on aims may be possible with little or nothing stated in official
documentation. At the other extreme, widespread debate and protracted
negotiation may be necessary before the careful drafting of aims that are
reasonably congenial to everyone actually takes place. This is likely to be the
case if a society is complex and if there are opposing interests at work between
different groups, if for example there is a deep national or religious division
within a society.
One problem suggests itself at the outset. Education is about the preparation
of the young for adult life. It is therefore concerned with how human beings
should live. Questions of ethical value are bound up with educational aims.
Educational aims will partly articulate the values which a society considers
important, whether these be religious or moral values or both. But to say that a
person’s or a social group’s values could be the subject of negotiation is to
commit a solecism. Values are not the kinds of things which it can make sense to
say can be negotiated over. It is possible to negotiate about what should be the
appropriate conventions of address, but not about whether people should be
treated with respect. It is also possible to negotiate about the means by which
one satisfies the values in which one believes. For example, two utilitarians may
debate the likely consequences of a certain course of action. They both believe
in the principle of promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but
they disagree on which course of action will best promote such an aim.
It seems, however, that the values that we hold are held unconditionally.
However we amve at them, they are so much a part of how we see ourselves and
other people as well as how we see the world that they are part of our nature. To
attempt to negotiate about them would therefore seem to be a case of acting in
bad faith. If they are negotiable, then it is questionable whether we hold them
sincerely. To say all this is not to be committed to an emotivist or intuitionist
theory of ethics. Someone who believes that one’s values are expressed through
the exercise of virtues or who believes in the utilitarian position will be
committed to the same thing. Neither could a Kantian hold the principle that
rational beings should be treated as ends rather than as means, and
simultaneously regard that principle as negotiable.2
This appears to pose a difficulty for the very basis on which the discussion of
educational aims in terms of negotiation between different interest groups is
being conducted. If educational aims are about values and values are non-
negotiable then how could it be possible to negotiate about educational aims?
The whole exercise seems to be doomed from the start. The objection is not,
however, fatal to the political description of education that I have been
advancing, although it certainly indicates that what is being proposed is

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something that could be quite difficult. The reason that the process 01
negotiation is not vitiated at the outset is that there is no requirement that
anyone from any group should be required to negotiate their values. All that
they are invited to do in any such process is to negotiate about the
implementation of those values in the public sphere.
While this suggests that the exercise is perfectly possible, it also suggests that it
may be difficult in certain circumstances, demanding a great deal of patience and
tolerance, not to mention a willingness to settle issues by negotiation rather than
by other means. There must also be sufficient common ground for dialogue
within the society for negotiation to take place. If two groups are so out of
sympathy with each other, with one for example not recognising the legitimacy of
a negotiated settlement with the other group, then dialogue may not be possible.
Certain conditions have to be met before negotiation about the implementation
of values can take place. Where values are largely shared, then the problems of
negotiation are lessened. There may be differences about which values should be
given priority, but negotiation about this may not be too difficult if both parties
are agreed that the same sets of values should be enshrined in educational aims
and differ only about which should be given most prominence.
Again, when two sets of values differ but are not mutually contradictory, it
should be possible to incorporate both to some degree at least within the overall
aims of education. When two moral points of view are largely congruent but
derive from differing and mutually contradictory religious standpoints it may
not be too difficult to arrive at consensus either, so long as in the public sphere
those values are promoted in a secular or religiously neutral idiom. The greatest 1 I
problems arise when the moral values held by two groups are mutually 5

contradictory. The problem is particularly acute when these values are of central I

importance to both groups.

This suggests that negotiation is not always possible. At the limit a society
that cannot agree with itself on fundamental questions of value is not going to
have much scope for negotiation. This discussion suggests that negotiation
about the implementation of values can take place within a pluralistic and even
a multicultural society provided that different groups with varying values are
prepared to compromise on the implementation of those values and provided
that they see the outcome of the negotiation as a reasonably fair one. The
acceptance of a compromise does not merely presuppose a democratic and
tolerant outlook on the part of the different groups, it also presupposes a
willingness to submit to an external authority who can be trusted to put the
compromise into effect and to see that its terms are adhered to. These
conditions can be met by a modern society but it would be idle to pretend that
they do not lead to strains and tensions and that they are not sometimes
difficult to achieve. For some societies (the UK may be one of these) the effort
may prove to be too much and a fundamental lack of clarity about the values
embodied in and hence the aims of education may be the result.

111 AUTONOMY A S AN AIM OF EDUCATION

Education is primarily concerned with the preparation of young people for
adult life. In most societies and certainly in one like our own this implies that

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young adults become autonomous, able to live an independent and productive

life and to take responsibility for their own decisions. There are different senses
in which one can talk about autonomy. In a minimal sense the term implies the
ability to make one’s way in the world with a reasonable degree of independence,
but not in such a way that one is able to make the major decisions in life for
oneself. Someone who is autonomous in this sense may be so in relation to means
but not to ends. Most people in a democratic society would go further and say
that at least some of the ends of life should be capable of selection by someone
educated enough to make such choices sensibly. This sense of autonomy is
sometimes known as ‘weak autonomy’. Others would go further and argue that
in order to be truly rational someone would need to be able critically to appraise
the ends that society proposes as acceptable and to select those that are not
necessarily society’s own preferences in order for autonomy to be meaningful.
This position is sometimes known as ‘strong autonomy’.3
What do these various aims imply for education? At a minimum, all forms of
education require young people to receive a grounding: that is, to gain an
acquaintance with basic literacy and numeracy, a stock of historical,
geographical and scientific facts about the culture, together with enough
practical knowledge and skill to find one’s way about.4 In some societies such
grounding might constitute a minimum threshold of autonomy in the sense of
independence about choosing means, but this would not be the case in our own.
In a complex society, grounding needs to be extended beyond the primary
stage into general secondary education, so that young people possess knowledge
of the necessary breadth and depth in order to become productive members of
society. Finally, children will need to acquire generic and specific vocational
skills, knowledge and understanding in order to pursue their chosen occupation.
These considerations imply that it is vocational education of a liberal temper,
rather than liberal education as such, that is required to develop autonomy.
And if autonomy is an intrinsic good, then vocational education of some form is
one means to the achievement of that intrinsic good.
This is not to deny that liberal forms of education may legitimately have
autonomy as their aim. Much of liberal education is concerned with the
inculcation of knowledge in the breadth and depth that it is necessary to acquire
if a young person is to find his or her way in our complex and changing society.
But a liberal education that failed to make young people autonomous by
making them productive members of society would have failed in its aims. If
making them productive members of society requires an element of vocational
preparation to a greater or lesser degree then it is an essential element in any
form of education that chooses to call itself ‘liberal’.
This could be achieved without much addition to liberal education as it has
been traditionally conceived if knowledge in breadth and depth, together with
the skills acquired in the course of acquiring that knowledge, was sufficient to
hold down an occupation of some kind. Alternatively, if young people did not
need to be productive members of society, for example if they possessed
sufficient wealth to live without working and with no inclination to contribute
to the political, domestic, social or economic life of the society, then a liberal
education which did not have autonomy as one of its aims would be sufficient.5
But this would be a fatal concession for the advocates of mass liberal education

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to make, for their proposals would not allow the great majority of young people
to become autonomous, productive members of society, which is something
that most of them want.6
Vocational education is concerned with the development of knowledge, skill
and understanding insofar as these fit people for a particular kind of
employment or range of employments. A vocational education can be one of
a number of very different kinds of activity. In some cases it will look little
different from liberal education. For example, a postgraduate degree in
philosophy might be a necessary vocational qualification for someone who
wishes to teach the subject at the level of higher education. But the curriculum
and pedagogy of such a course need not, in any meaningful way, be
distinguishable from the curriculum and pedagogy of such a course pursued
with liberal aims. Yet the most common view of vocational education is that of
job training. This is a very distorted view of what vocational education might be
or actually is. It fails to take account of the wide variety of occupations that are
available. These include vocations properly so called such as writing or the
ministry, professions such as medicine or law, crafts such as cabinet making or
metalworking and trades such as carpentry or plumbing. All of these require
technical knowledge and skill, social ability and ethical commitment if they are
to be pursued in an effective and worthwhile manner.7 Making the choices
associated with the pursuit of a vocation is in itself making choices about ends.
Furthermore, there are values associated with the pursuit of an occupation such
as diligence, persistence, honesty, pride in the craft and its traditions, which
themselves are intrinsic values to be chosen along with the occupation itself. In
this sense, vocational education is associated with ‘weak autonomy’ and not
merely independence in relation to means.
There are various reasons why a particularly limited conception of vocational
education has come to dominate lay and professional thinking about the matter
in Britain and some other countries and it appears to be the case that different
societies have different views of the purpose, value and nature of vocational
education.8
Education for citizenship requires that a young person be prepared to play a
positive and constructive role in society. Moral maturity and the achievement of
weak autonomy appear to be prerequisites of this, as well as an ability to play a
role in society through work, whether it be paid, voluntary or domestic. There is
more to education for citizenship than this: for example, it may be necessary to
learn the practical skills and knowledge necessary to be a parent, a voter or a
local councillor. But it can hardly be maintained that there is no overlap
between the aims of education for citizenship and the aims of vocational and
liberal forms of education. Intrinsic and extrinsic aims need not be incompatible
with each other either.
A liberal education that provided no preparation for work or life as a citizen
would be intolerable to most people. Likewise, a vocational education that
provided no intrinsic or social satisfaction would be bleak and unrewarding. A
citizen with no cultural background and no ability to take part in the economic
life of the society would be only partly a citizen.
These reflections all suggest that the degree of commonality between different
forms of education is considerable and that they have some aims in common.

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 The Aims of Education Revisited 39

There will always be tensions in the degree of emphasis that ought to be placed
on one set of aims rather than another, but diversity of aims need not lead to a
loss of social cohesion if the aims complement each other and are arrived at
through a process of negotiation. There is plenty of scope for negotiation as to
which aims should receive priority and for the kinds of institutions that should
accommodate them. The contested nature of education should, in a healthy
polity, be about the relative importance that should be enjoyed by different
conceptions rather than about which conception is exclusively the correct one9
We have already seen how, although insofar as they are purposeful
institutions schools and colleges have aims, it is not always clear either to
outsiders or to participants what those aims actually are. It is difficult to avoid
the idea that there needs to be a minimal threshold of being educated which
defines the success of an educational system relative to the achievement of the
pupils or students within it. This may vary from country to country or from
culture to culture but there must be something like this for any education
system that one cares to mention. If there is not, then it is difficult to see how
one could begin to measure the success of the system as a whole. And if this
were to be the case, then the problem of accountability arises. How can an
education system that does not even set minimal standards of education justify
itself to those who pay for it and to those who spend time in it?
Grounding in the sense in which Letwin (cp. n.4 above) uses the term,
implying independence in the sense already described, seems to be indisputably
an aim for any educational system. It would appear to be what Letwin calls an
‘absolute duty’ for schools to provide this for their pupils. Nevertheless, not all
schools would recognise this as an absolute duty, holding perhaps that the
achievement of grounding was to be a by-product of the achievement of other
educational aims. Grounding pupils might be seen as a minimal aim, hardly one
that would be worthy of inclusion in a set of educational aims. This is not just a
theoretical issue; public awareness has been growing for some time of the fact
that standards of literacy and numeracy may be on the decline in parts of
America and Western Europe. This may in turn be connected with schools
having aims which presuppose or even deny the desirability of other aims such
as that of grounding pupils. It might, for example, be considered more
important for pupils to be creative than to be competent in secretarial skills such
as the ability to spell. The responsibility for grounding pupils is not clearly
located in many educational systems, nor is it always clear what the proper
limits of grounding are.
If grounding is an absolute duty of an education system, and liberal and
many vocational educators generally mean by ‘autonomy’ something more than
this, should weak autonomy be one of the major objectives of a publicly funded
education system? White’s answer would probably be ‘no’, for the reason that
the achievement of autonomy involves the achievement of the ability to
formulate a life plan and grounding may be a necessary, but is not a sufficient,
condition for doing that.IOSome might argue whether or not it is the business of
education to provide the ability to formulate a life plan. Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia in Samuel Johnson’s novel, did not seem to be able to do this by the
age of thirty, despite an extensive range of educational experiences.” There are
difficulties as well in saying to what extent preparation for autonomy in the

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choosing of ends ought to be the proper business of education. Would it be

proper for an education system to prepare young people to choose ends that
had not been sanctioned in some way by the society in which they live?’?
In a democratic society it is natural to suggest that preparation for life should
include helping young people to gain the ability to make important decisions
about how to live their lives within the framework accepted by society. In this
context it might be objected that in such a society the framework should itself be
the proper subject of critical appraisal. While a valid point, this does not imply
that no values should remain immune from critical appraisal or revision; the
framework of ends is arrived at through an established framework of
negotiation. Undermining that framework compromises the basis on which
that negotiation takes place. It could not be the role of a publicly funded
education system in a democracy to encourage young people to question
democratic values, although it could well encourage them not to take for
granted all aspects of those values and the ways in which they are implemented.
While autonomy implies that people become independent in various ways, it
cannot imply that they cease to be interdependent or able to function without
the assistance of anyone else. Autonomy implies the ability to choose from a
wide variety of socially sanctioned ends as well as the ability to make one’s way
in the various different spheres in life: economic, artistic, domestic, social and
political, for example. But the ability to do any of these things implies that
people are able to relate to each other and need to depend on each other in
various ways. If education helps them to do this then it implies the provision of
a great variety of curricula to make these choices meaningful ones. Such an
education cannot be a purely technical one: it needs to include within itself a
personal and social dimension if young people, whatever walk of life they
choose, are to achieve the right balance of independence and interdependence
which seems to be a precondition of autonomy in a complex and interdependent
society.

IV BRITAIN: A RADICAL LACK OF CLARITY

Britain is a good example of a society whose consideration of educational aims
has been settled by default. The absence of national debate on substantive issues
about the aims of education has been accompanied by a lack of consensus. This
has led to a situation where the culturally dominant concept of education has
set the aims of the system as a whole. Surprisingly, even the setting up of a
national curriculum for the first time in the country’s history failed to ignite a
substantial debate. The near-absence of any thought on the question is reflected
in the bland statement of aims at the beginning of the Act of 1988:

The curriculum for a maintained school satisfies the requirements of this section if it
is a balanced and broadly based curriculum which
(a) promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of
pupils at the school and of society; and
(b) prepares such pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of
adult life.I3

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All that this statement does is to express a very general concept of education,
giving no particular weight to any one conception. In relation to the
controversial character of the concept of educaton (see Chapter 2), no issue is
tackled. In practice this has meant that a liberal conception has dominated,
although to some commentators this bias has not been liberal enough. For
example, Gray writes of the National Curriculum,

It overemphasises the vocational dimension of education at the expense of its role as

an initiation into a cultural i n h e r i t a n ~ e . ’ ~

Because there has been no consensus about aims and because aims have not
been articulated, a general uncertainty pervades the whole system of education.
The institutions that educate, the schools, colleges and universities, reflect this
uncertainty. It takes two main forms: one about the place, if any, for vocational
education; the other about the role of social, moral and religious education. The
latter is a highly sensitive area in which there are competing views about what is
appropriate. Some schools are allowed to have a specifically religious and moral
ethos. These are the schools associated with particular religions. However, not
all religions that would like schools associated with them are allowed to have
them. In the secular schools the problem of what to do about religion, morality
and the social side of education is also acute. To take an example, there is a
requirement for a daily act of worship which should reflect the predominantly
Christian nature of the society. But such an act of worship need not be
conducted by believers and the majority of pupils may not be practising
Christians, many belonging to different religions altogether. The aims of
education in this area are not easy to ascertain at all. Christianity is allowed to
retain a vestigial influence by default. Whether that is a good thing or not, the
overall result is that religious, moral and social education lacks a clear focus.
The position of vocational education is equally unclear. The liberal
conception remains dominant throughout the compulsory phases of schooling
and the curriculum is a unitary one until the age of sixteen, although there are
currently plans to introduce vocational variations after the age of fourteen. It is
true that technology is now a compulsory subject but it is one that has been
purged of its craft element and largely turned into an academic, liberal subject.”
This lack of clarity is reflected in the institutional arrangements for education
which predate the 1988 Act. In effect, Britain has an accumulation of
institutional traditions in education with the liberal academic one being
hegemonic. Now it is unavoidable and desirable that education should have
traditions. But when the dominant one of these traditions does not accord with
the abilities and aspirations of a majority of the population then the place of
education is bound to suffer. The British are relatively uninterested in education
and the state of the education system both contributes to and reflects that
relative lack of interest.16
This lack of clarity of purpose ramifies throughout the system: each type of
institution at each phase of education betrays a lack of clarity about its
purposes, a lack of clarity which is usually resolved in some way in favour of the
liberal hegemony.

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Nursery education is neither compulsory nor universal in the United

Kingdom. Its advocates point to the long-term beneficial effects that it is
alleged to bring to children who attend and to its ability to compensate for the
deficient cultural background (particularly linguistic background) of some
families. It is also advocated as a form of child-minding although this cannot
convincingly be put forward as an educational aim. Nurseries in Britain are
largely dominated by the progressive tradition which sees the liberation of the
child as the most important aim of education. Progressivism is in effect a branch
of the liberal tradition, one which differs from traditionalism in its rejection of
the role of authority in education. Despite the fact that those nurseries which
are best at producing long-term effects have an ethos unlike the typical British
nursery and despite the fact that there is convincing evidence that the alleged
linguistic effects of nursery education do not exist, nursery education continues
much as it has done in the progressive tradition while its advocates continue to
claim effects for it which either it cannot deliver in its current form or it cannot
deliver at aIl.l7
Primary education in Britain has gone through many changes in the last 50
years, moving from the elementary schooling tradition of aiming for grounding,
towards the progressive ideal of personal liberation, ending up by staying
somewhat easily between these two traditions.'* The advent of the National
Curriculum has not really clarified the situation for these schools; if anything it
has complicated the picture. In the first place, the government-sponsored
struggle against progressivism has intensified. In the second place, there has
been an attempt to move beyond the elementary grounding tradition to a range
of liberal aims, stressing breadth and depth. Finally, a utilitarian pre-vocational
element has been introduced into the curriculum through the addition of
technology as a foundation subject. If primary schools were unclear about what
their aims were before the reforms starting in 1988, they are certainly no clearer
about them now.
The history of the aims of secondary education is equally chequered and
unclear. There has been a grammar school tradition of liberal education
preparing children for the professions. On the other hand, the central schools
aspired to continue the process of grounding begun in the elementary schools.
After 1900, a small number of Junior Technical Schools were created for the 14 +
age group. After 1944, a tripartite system of grammar, secondary modern and
technical schools was set up. The technical schools failed to compete against the
grammar and secondary moderns. The secondary modern schools never had any
clear aims, veering from liberal aims (the grammar school tradition), to extended
grounding (the elementary and central school tradition), to technical education
(the technical tradition) and pre-vocational education. It is not surprising that
they were not popular with parents. With the advent of comprehensive schools,
the dominant grammar school tradition with liberal aims re-asserted itself over
the secondary system as a whole, allowing the other aims (pre-vocational,
technical and grounding) a vestigial place in the school ethos.
Non-compulsory further education in Britain has, on the face of it, the aim of
providing work-related vocational education and training in the post-
compulsory phase. In some institutions the commitment to a particular craft
or trade is strong: there are colleges of building, catering and engineering, for

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example. Other colleges are more generalist, training for a variety of

occupations under the same roof: nursery nursing, catering, hairdressing,
bakery, meat trades etc. Others again combine work-related training with a
commitment to 16+ and 18+ academic education. Yet others have a
substantial commitment to higher education and degree level work. This
range of commitments makes it difficult not only to see what the generic aims of
the further education sector are, but, in many cases, what the specific aims of
particular colleges are as well. There is some evidence of academic drift from
vocational to liberal arts subjects and from 16 + to 18 + e d u ~ a t i o n . ' ~
Although higher education is a bastion of the liberal ideal, the universities
originated in the need for professional education for lawyers, clerics and
teachers. Professional education has always been an important part of the work
of universities, in Britain and elsewhere. Unlike some of the continental
countries, however, Britain has tended to shy away from providing specialist
schools to serve particular professions or groups of professions, being inclined
instead to provide the full range of liberal and professional education in one
large institution. The technical and vocational sector of higher education was
largely situated under local authority control until 1989 in the institutions
known as polytechnics, whose main work lay in professionally and technically
oriented higher education. Here also there has been a steady drift towards
providing a more liberal form of education, a trend symbolised by the granting
of university status to these institutions in 1992, thus allowing them to shed the
vocational image that they had once been proud to bear. Even within the
professional provision of these institutions, however, there has been a trend
towards making the courses more liberal in orientation. This trend can be seen,
for example, in the way in which courses in the professions allied to medicine
have incorporated subjects such as sociology into their curricula and have
diminished the amount of clinical practice necessary for professional
qualification.20
All of this suggests that British education at all levels is affected by a radical
uncertainty about aims, but is dominated, in the main, by the liberal tradition,
either in a traditional or a more progressive form. This uncertainty does matter
to the extent that it undermines the sense of purpose that sectors and particular
institutions have. There is no reason in theory why a stratum of education or
even a particular institution should not have a variety of aims. There is a
problem when the different aims are seen, rightly or wrongly, to be mutually
antagonistic. Then there is conflict and the dominant tradition tends to win out
to the detriment of other traditions.
This has led to difficulties for technical, vocational and professional
education. Not only is the ethos of the school or college rendered ambiguous,
but liberal subjects tend to crowd out the vocational ones. The domination of
liberal thinking, particularly in its progressive form, has led to a reduction of
emphasis on grounding and training at the primary phase as well. In fact a
healthy education system should have a variety of aims suited to the
implementation of different, but not mutually incompatible, goals. The
presence of antagonistic aims within one institution tends to sap the sense of
purpose which that institution needs, and this tendency is more pronounced in
fairly small, uncompartmentalised places such as schools than it is in large,

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44 C. Winch

department-oriented institutions such as universities, although it can be a

problem at this level as well. The British have yet to work out the variety of
aims which their public education system exists to support and the proper
relationship between them at both the curricular and institutional level. As a
result, a certain, historically dominant, tradition exercises undue sway over the
system as a whole, to its considerable detriment. The process of political
negotiation about aims has, despite many years of reform, barely started. James
Callaghan called for a ‘great debate’ on the future of education in 1976; it has
yet to occur in any substantial form.

NOTES
1. This latter proviso is necessary because there may be cases where a society’s educational aims may be
agreed and accepted by all without there being a written record of those aims. Conversely, they may be
written down in an authoritative way yet fail to command the consent of all involved. Written aims are
neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to agreement; having them is a convenient way of making
explicit the construction of a consensus which may have been arrived at implicitly.
2. None of this suggests that it is impossible for people to change their values or even to be persuaded to
change them. One may see a particular point of view about how life should be lived as appealing and then,
at a later date, perhaps as a result of a prolonged conversation with someone, come to see it as less
appealing. But this is not the same thing as negotiating about values.
3. See, for example, J. P. White, Education and the Good Life, 1990; R. Norman, ‘I did it my way’: some
reflections on autonomy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 28.1 1, 1994, pp. 2534.
4. Cf. Oliver Letwin, Education: the importance of grounding, 1988.
5. Indeed, if P. G. Wodehouse is to be believed, it is the valet of such a person, rather than the person
himself, who would need such an education in order to steer the individual safely through society. Bertie
Wooster does not need much of a liberal education in order to lead an exciting and full (if not productive)
life.
6. See endnote 4, Chapter 3, and cf. M. Sanderson, op. cit., Chapter 7 for evidence of how inadequate the
grammar schools were in preparing many of the children who attended them for an autonomous life.
7 . C. Winch, op. cit., 1995.
8. In this regard, it is interesting to compare Germany with the UK. See HMI, Aspects of Vocational
Education in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1990.
9. See Harold Entwistle, op. cit.
10. Cf. White, op. cit., pp. 25-26.
11. Samuel Johnson, Rasselus. Available in Charles Peake (ed.), ‘Rasselas’and Essays, 1967.
12. See, for example, J. P. White, op. cit.; R. Norman, op. cir.
13. Education Reform Act 1988, 1988, p. 1.
14. Gray, op. cit., p.27.
15. See M. Sanderson, op. cit.
16. Cf. National Commission on Education, op. cir., pp. 10-1 1; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 1957;
E. A. Johns, The Social Structure of Modern Britain, 1979, Chapter 4, esp. pp. 167-180.
17. For evidence on those factors which are thought to promote long-term non-academic benefits, see M.
Woodhead, Pre-school education has long-term effects: but can they be generalised? Oxford Review of
Education, 11.2 1985, pp. 133-156. For evidence of the effectiveness of English teaching in British
nurseries, see B. Tizard and M. Hughes, Young Children Learning, 1984.
18. See R. Alexander, Primary Teaching, 1984, Policy and Practice in the Primary School, 1992, and Innocence
and Experience, 1994. See also P. Mortimore, P. Sammons, L. Stoll, D. Lewis and R. Ecob, School
Marrers: the junior yeors, 1988, Chapter 4, pp. 52-55 for the perceptions of teachers within the system as
to what their aims are.
19. The evidence for this is to be found in the changing course profiles of the further education colleges: first
in their involvement in A-level work, and secondly in their involvement in tertiary education, often of a
not directly vocational kind.
20. L. Merriman, op. cit.

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