Degree apprenticeships, the ‘joy of learning’ excellence framework, and the common good

Abstract

Degree Apprenticeships are fairly recent in the landscape of UK Higher Education. As is often the case with initiatives that try to build bridges between the world of work and the world of university education, there is suspicion that in such relationships higher education becomes servant to the needs of business and industry. Alternatively, Degree Apprenticeships perhaps offer a way for Higher Education to add value to the students’ working life. In our paper we try to argue for ways in which the value of the University-side of the provision within Degree Apprenticeships might reflect something of the value of the common good, and of the value of the joy of learning. Leaning on the venerable history of the triangle in the Western philosophical canon, and in Plato in particular, we demonstrate ways in which Degree Apprenticeships and Plato’s famous example of education as the journey to and from the cave can be brought together. In passing, we are claiming that Higher Education in all its forms would do well not to lose sight of its responsibilities to education as a servant of the common good, and above all, to the joy of learning.

Keywords:

• Liberal Arts
• Degree Apprenticeships
• common good
• Plato’s cave
• joy of learning

Notes

1. C. S. Lewis calls this ‘the Principle of the Triad’ (Lewis 1964, 43).

2. We should remember that this Platonic triadic conception underpinned the Norwood Report of 1943, and became the blueprint for the Tripartite system of schooling in the 1944 Butler Education Act.

3. Note that the introduction here of ‘return’ in both triangles displays a difference between the citizens and their rulers. The issue of elitism, much in the news recently, is not one we can pursue here.

4. See Plato (1992, 100).

5. It is now in our plans to introduce a core curriculum for all undergraduates, again in our attempts to retrieve the macrocosm of the common good and the microcosm of ‘individuals matter’ from their internment within the cultures of instrumentalism.