What is education for?

The student protests in London over the issue of tuition fees prompts again the question of the purpose and value of education. 

Over recent years, we have seen the question answered in an increasingly reductive way.  You get educated so that you become better able to get a good, well-paid job at the end of it, thus securing for yourself a better life.  Education has increasingly become defined in purely instrumental terms; the principle of utility has become paramount.  Education is no longer intrinsically valuable; it is simply the means to an end.

The establishment of this principle allowed the Blair government to replace a system of grants with the requirement for students and their families to pay tuition fees, a policy now extended by the present government, in spite of its claims to a greater progressiveness.  The policy is predicated upon two assumptions:  firstly, that graduates can be expected to earn better salaries and so be able to pay the fees back as they embark upon their working lives; secondly, that the only beneficiary of the education provided is the person who has been educated, in spite of the fact that Blair repeatedly said that 'the country' needed to have a greater number of graduates and hence the expansion of the university sector.

This extreme individualism hasn't always held sway.  In times past, there was something of a sense of education conducing to a notion of the public good.  There have always been those who have seen education as being mainly to do with an end product defined in terms of comparative material prosperity; and indeed, seen like this, it has provided pathways out of poverty for some.  But we seem today to have lost any widespread notion that education has an inherent value, and that a good education system makes a country a better place.

Now education has been reduced to something of merely economic worth, oriented towards providing the educated with a greater capacity to consume (and thereby in their turn made instrumental in the perpetuation of liberal capitalism), we see 'useful' subjects (defined as those which produce material wealth) preferenced over 'useless' ones in the arts and humanities.  Yet these latter subjects produce greater civility and humanity in society.  Their value cannot be stated in economic terms, yet they help to foster the healthy societal ethos which we have already largely lost, but which must be restored if people in this country are to rediscover a real sense of the shared or common good.