Exploratory learning versus the consumption of higher-education social science: challenging the instrumental narrative of teaching as a public good

Abstract

This paper asks whether higher education should primarily be about helping learners develop a general intellectual capacity in accordance with a libertarian-humanist conception of education, or whether it should provide training schemes for specific technical competences aimed at employment. Drawing on Lyotard’s ideas about narrative discourse, it argues that a revitalised and overtly instrumental narrative of the purposes of HE learning has emerged, promulgated by government, policy-makers and employers, which advocates HE learning almost exclusively in terms of economic expediency and employability. The revitalised narrative is geared towards shaping the expectations of new HE learners, many of whom are being modelled as life-long learners. The discussion explores the role of the wider society, and of the HE community itself, in allowing this revitalised narrative to take root and asks whether the older, expressive narratives of HE learning can be revived. Is it possible to restore balance between the libertarian-humanist and the economic expediency models of HE learning, between the ‘hero of knowledge’ and the ‘hero of liberty’?

Key words:

• Public good
• Libertarian-humanist model of HE
• ‘heroes of knowledge’
• ‘heroes of liberty’
• exploratory learning
• skills acquisition
• instrumentality
• employability
• consumer undergraduates
• lifelong learning
• qualitative narratives of HE learning

Introductory discussion

This paper asks whether higher education (HE) should primarily be about helping learners develop a general intellectual capacity or whether it should provide training schemes for specific technical competences. The first invokes a ‘university model’ of education as enabling undergraduates develop a critical capability of general application, to understand arguments and to make some of their own, the second a ‘polytechnic model’ of education designed for helping vocational students to acquire skills necessary for employment. Expressed in terms used by Jean-François Lyotard in his widely read polemic against the narrative foundations of modernism (1984), the first model and its accompanying narrative assumes that the place in society of teaching as a public good is to foster the development of ‘the hero of liberty’ and the second model and narrative to produce ‘the hero of knowledge’: ‘The moment knowledge ceases to be an end in itself - the realization of the Idea or the emancipation of men - its transmission is no longer the exclusive responsibility of scholars and students’ (Lyotard 1984: 50).

It might have been hoped that by merging the two kinds of institutions in the UK to produce the ‘new universities’ in 1992, these two models would be reconciled and their twin educational objectives meet side by side; that there is always a productive pay-off between general intellectual capacity and employability (Dearing 1997, Kogan et al. 2000, Wright 2004). To the extent that employers are increasingly seeking employees having competences of generic application to ‘serve the needs of an adaptable, sustainable, knowledge-based economy’ (HEFCE 2007) and are thus seeking new kinds of skills appropriate to the ‘new communicative order’ (Street 2004), it is easy to assume that the uni-poly hybrid provides the best guarantor of employability and economic competitive advantage.

The critical perspective adopted in this paper, however, is to ask again whether the balance between the two models has shifted so decisively in the direction of means, skills and applications that the only narrative of teaching as a public good which is being heard today, the only message about what HE is for, is a revitalised instrumental narrative which defines the outcomes of HE learning exclusively in terms of economic expediency and employability (Wright 2004, O’Shea 2004). Correspondingly, the essential life-developing and life-supporting benefits to society of broad-based general intellectual capacity, benefits which are also fundamental to the purposes of HE teaching, are gradually being lost from view.

A first part of the reason for the increased dominance of the instrumental narrative of employability, we argue below, is that the present audit culture only recognises as ‘positive outcomes’ those aspects of HE activity which it has the means of measuring. Difficult to measure qualitative outcomes, such as critical reflexivity and critical empathy, quality of judgement and an ability to distinguish what is worth knowing from what is trivial, are increasingly left out of account. A second part of the reason is that the HE community itself seems to be losing its own narrative voice when it comes to explaining what the public benefits of HE teaching are. In this respect, the HE community might be represented as ‘going along with’ the revitalised narrative of expediency and employability, whilst forgetting to tell crucial audiences in government, amongst employers, parents and students outside the academy, about the qualitative benefits to society of enquiry and criticism, benefits which seem entirely self-evident to members of the HE community.

These issues of narrative compliance and narrative silence are especially critical for the social sciences for at least three reasons. First, HE social science is better placed than many other disciplines to provide highly desirable qualitative outcomes such as capacities for critical thinking, empathy, deconstructive imagination and creativity because these occur in particularly concentrated forms in HE social science learning. The basic pedagogic platform in these disciplines, the essence of what they hope to achieve at the level of personal development, is to give students confidence in their capacity to make informed judgements but always in ways that acknowledge the need other people have to do this also. The HE social science community regards students, as Burawoy puts it, ‘as carriers of a rich lived experience that [it can elaborate] into a deeper self-understanding of the historical and social contexts that have made them who they are’ (2005: 266).

Second, HE learning outcomes in these disciplines tend to be less self-evident than those in disciplines which appear to be more explicitly ‘vocational’. The business of explaining the links not only between HE social science and employability (links which have become more obvious with the continuing expansion of the public and service sectors), but also between the qualitative outcomes of HE social science learning and the general benefit to society, is often problematic since those explanations take the form of a social construction. Constituencies of government, employers, parents and students all depend on the HE social science community to explain to them what these qualitative benefits really are since often there are no ‘independent’ or ‘objective’ criteria against which they can be measured. It is easier, for example, to record the number of ‘crimes against the person’ in society than it is to measure the capacity people have for being ‘respectful’ of others.

The importance of positive social construction applies equally in respect of a third peculiar characteristic of HE social science which is that it, uniquely, offers society a vision of what the ‘Good Society’ could be like. Exhibiting most strongly its modus operandi of critical reflexivity, HE social science provides insight into how, through the elective development of social institutions and practices, personal goals can be achieved through common means. This dimension of the hero or liberty lies at the centre of the libertarian-humanist conception of HE learning as a public good. In each of these key respects, an assured and positive narrative of the benefits to society of the qualitative outcomes of HE learning in the social sciences is not only desirable but, if predictions of the immanent credibility crisis of disciplines like sociology are accurate (e.g., Urry 2000; Gane 2004; Fuller 2006), increasingly essential to its own survival.

Organisation of the discussion

In the next section, we focus on the most recent wave of new and even newer HE learners who, we are suggesting, are most directly subjected to the revitalised instrumental narrative of expediency and employability. We consider economic rationale and consumer choice as two leading explanations of their entry into HE. We then reflect on how new HE learners in the social sciences are exposed to the instrumental narrative of employability. We look first at how the revitalised narrative is being reinforced by the current practices of HE learning. Second, we look at the widespread presence of the instrumental narrative of employability in society more generally, and third at its apparent naturalisation within the current ethos of HE teaching in the social sciences. In the concluding section, we return to the question of whether the old expressive narrative of general intellectual capacity can also be reinvigorated.

The constituencies of new and even newer HE learners

It is widely observed that HE learners have increasingly instrumental expectations and are adopting a distinctively instrumental orientation towards HE learning (Ransome 2003, 2006; O’Shea 2004; Marr and Leach 2005), an orientation in which skills seem to be sought more vigorously than exploratory learning. Whilst accepting, with some relief, Higgins et al.’s finding that ‘new students […] are not simply instrumental “consumers” of education, driven solely by the extrinsic motivation of the market [but] adopt a more “conscientious” approach [and] are motivated intrinsically and seek feedback which will help them to engage with their subject in a “deep” way’ (2002: 53), there is still a widespread perception of clear differences between ‘old’ students having a subjective orientation prioritising intrinsic rewards and ‘new’ students who are objectively oriented and seeking extrinsic rewards. Marr and Leach found, for example, that for ‘new students’:

“[T]heir intentions, aspirations and expectations were bound up with their perception of what a degree could do for them in terms of enhanced employability […] all students interviewed to date have emphasized that they embarked on a degree to improve their employment prospects and to get more rewarding (i.e. higher-paid) employment.”

(Marr and Leach 2005: 28–9)

Looking a little more closely at the profile of ‘new’ HE learners, it is clear that this is becoming an increasingly heterogeneous group. The first wave of new students came into HE under the ‘widening participation’ and ‘diversity’ agendas of the 1990s. Members of this first new group were typically from non-middle-class backgrounds, were often returners to full-time formal education and tended to enter the ‘new’ rather than ‘old’ universities. Many of them were mature age students who had followed the access route provided by the further education sector and, in an era without tuition fees, ‘paid their way’ through part-time working. These students often had heavy domestic commitments outside their lives as students.

Although sharing some of the characteristics of access type entrants of the earlier 1990s, which is to say that key characteristics of students in the earlier and later phases are not mutually exclusive, this first wave of new students is being joined by a second wave of what we can call new-new or even newer HE learners. A key characteristic of these latest groups is that their expectations are shaped by the public policy discourse of continuous or continuing lifelong HE learning (Brine 2006).

Part of this most recent group of new HE learners, as O’Shea describes it, ‘is now younger, less well-qualified and less literate, is doing many hours of paid work during term time, has little apparent socio-economic engagement, is deeply engaged in popular culture’ (2004: 99). Another (and chronologically older) part of the new HE learner group has been identified by Haggis:

‘Now, however, new students are as likely to be professional teachers, administrators, managers and health care workers as they are to be 18-year-olds who have just left school. Alternatively, they may be security guards, nurses, prison officers, secretaries, retirees, factory workers or mothers’

(2006: 526).

A third part of the group might not be atypical of students attending the Social and Community Studies Programme at Manchester Metropolitan University described by Kirk (2006: 28): ‘Mature, disabled or dyslexic, from black and “minority ethnic” backgrounds, single parents and carers from low socio-economic groups, from overseas, those for whom English is not the first language, the first in their family to enter HE, and “care leavers.”’

The heterogeneous nature of these groups of new and new-new HE learners obviously raises many challenging issues for HE provision in the UK. The particular aspect we want to focus on here is the fact that the explicitly instrumental narrative of employability seems to be a characteristic found amongst all members of this otherwise highly diverse group of new HE learners. The message which they all seem to be responding to, and which, one might reasonably argue, has drawn them into HE, is that they are all assimilating quite vigorously the revitalised instrumental narrative of lifelong learning for employability.

Rational choosers and HE consumers

There are two leading explanations of increasing instrumentalism amongst new and even newer HE learners, both of which, we argue, draw down key elements of the instrumental narrative of employability. The first uses a cost-benefit model in which increasing sensitivity towards the likely employment outcomes of having a degree is linked directly to the financial drain of spending three years in HE (Moreau and Leathwood 2006). This cost-benefit rationale (first expressed by Dearing 1997) is explicitly described in a government discussion paper accompanying the 2004 Higher Education Act in the UK called ‘Student Loans and the Question of Debt.’ Recording that average graduate debt was £8,666 in 2002-3, the paper predicts that ‘our best estimate’ is that this will rise ‘to an average of around £15,000 for those beginning their courses in 2006–7.’ With the exception of noting that ‘graduates experience better health, less poverty, and are less likely to be victims of crime’, all the justifications the paper offers as to why incurring such a large personal debt is a ‘good investment’ are expressed in terms of improved employability (DfES 2004a: 6–7). As Wright expresses it, ‘[L]ifelong learners are incentivized by debt and, from their days as a student onwards, they are inculcated into the behaviour of consumers and take loans to invest in learning against the promise of increased earning power - “learn to earn”’ (2004: 80).

A second leading explanation of increasing instrumentalism amongst new HE learners, which also echoes key elements of the employability narrative, uses a learned-behaviour model in which already acquired consumerist attitudes are transferred to, or become the framework for, evaluating the products of HE (Wright 2004; O’Shea 2004). Learning from their general experiences of being consumers in their before HE or outside HE careers, new learners certainly know their rights as consumers and are also likely to have some fairly explicit expectations about educational commodities. Adopting, as O’Shea describes it, ‘the “customer-is-always-right” position’, this is ‘a student body which has grown up in a depoliticized and ever-intensifying consumerist culture’ (2004: 101, citing Finlayson 2003). Similarly, Wallace (2003: 4) suggests, ‘higher education is now a consumer-led economy and students will shop around for the institutions and the courses that best cater for their needs. They will continually search for a “better deal,” believing in their right to change their mind about the courses they study’ (see also Ballinger 2002, Smith 2004).

Instrumental narratives and the HE experience

Having identified some key characteristics of the new and even newer HE learner, and having sketched out the role of the latest version of the instrumental narrative of employability through lifelong learning in forming their expectations of HE, the next task is to consider the conditions which allow this instrumental narrative to flourish. The argument underpinning this part of the discussion is that, for the employability narrative to have the hold it appears to have over the expectations of new HE learners, it is likely that it is being reinforced both within the HE community itself as well as within key constituencies in government, amongst employers, parents and prospective students.

The new practical conditions of HE learning

Two levels of explanation suggest themselves in respect of how instrumental-consumerist expectations are being shaped and reinforced by the actual experiences of HE, one practical, the other ideational. On the practical side, instrumentalism certainly seems to have developed in parallel with, and thus to have been reinforced by, a shifting of patterns of course delivery and assessment in HE from year-long traditional modes of delivery towards modular schemes, from ‘the problem-solving model’ to the ‘banking model’ of student learning (Canaan 2005: 172). The consumerist tendency is thus abetted by ‘the introduction of cafeteria-type choice systems of options spread, along with semesterisation, to produce bite-sized learning units’ (Harvey 2006: 14). Clearly, there are important challenges in trying to combine the principles of exploratory learning with the structural constraints imposed by the modular framework now expected by the new HE consumer and the new lifelong HE learner who are increasingly preoccupied with skills acquisition (Knight 2002; Simonite 2003). Modes of assessment such as multiple-choice tests and online assessment as distinct from essay writing also reflect this restructuring of the HE experience. There is a significant difference between assessment based on cumulative learning and assessment based on the incremental gaining of skills (Kirkwood and Price 2005; Bryan and Clegg 2006; Crook et al. 2006). Looking backwards in the undergraduate experience, it can certainly be claimed that this expectation is a form of behaviour which is being learned at the secondary level with the increasing modularisation of A-Level programmes and their recent incrementalisation into A1s and A2s.

New HE learners, new instrumental narratives

The second explanation is ideational. Both the rational-chooser model and the HE-consumer models of student expectations find clear resonances in the instrumental narrative of employability. Amongst rational-choosers, the narrative easily accommodates the expectations of (the diminishing proportion of) ‘old’ students of yesteryear, who, at least at the rhetorical level were regarded as comfortably assimilated into the middle-class preoccupation with education as essential in the acquisition of cultural capital. It is also gives voice to the expectations of the first wave of new proto HE-consumers whose family background, so the rhetoric maintained, offered no such experience of HE but who are well versed in the principles of consumption and recognise the need for employment. Most importantly, it is also sufficiently flexible to accommodate the expectations of the latest variant lifelong HE learner, who, according to the narrative endorsed by HEFCE, only sees HE teaching as beneficial in terms of employment. Although it is unclear how effective skills-based learning in HE actually is in improving employment prospects (Cranmer 2006), there is reasonably firm evidence that previous and current experience of employment does enhance employment prospects (Marr and Leach 2005, Moreau and Leathwood 2006). The latest wave of lifelong HE learners are therefore already assimilated into the narrative of a seamless fit between HE learning and employment.

We can reasonably suggest, therefore, that partly through reinforcement in the form of practical changes in course delivery and assessment but even more decisively in terms of supporting the perceived legitimacy of such developments in HE pedagogic practices and routines, the instrumental narrative of employability is being echoed within the HE community itself. If the revitalised narrative trains incoming HE learners to expect modes of learning directed primarily towards acquiring technical skills for employment, and if HE programmes are shaped according to the same template of pedagogic outcomes, then it would be consistent to find new HE learners expressing a largely means - ends orientation grounded in perceptions of improved employability. To the extent that the HE community is adapting its own practices and expectations to the revitalised narrative, incoming learners are certainly having key aspects of their instrumental orientation shaped by the HE experience itself.

Having asserted that the instrumental expectations of the new HE learner are reinforced within the current HE experience, we should not assume that these ideas necessarily originate within the HE community. To reflect on this question we need to consider, first, how the narrative circulates within society more generally and, second, how it is being received within the HE community.

Society’s expectations of HE: personal gain and social advantage

Three clear reasons can be identified in respect of the pervasive influence and increasingly normative status of the revitalised instrumental narrative of expediency and employability. First, and beginning with the avowed political imperative of educating an ever-increasing proportion of the population to HE levels, and reflecting particularly on the situation in the UK where the ‘target’ has been set at 50 per cent participation of young people (aged from eighteen to thirty) in HE by 2010 (DfES 2004b), one safe haven in the choppy waters of current uncertainty about the aims and benefits of HE for all has been to revert to free market ideology (Finlayson 2003). In the same way, as just described, that the new student instrumental-consumer uses their experiences as consumers and hopes for employment to fill a vacuum in their expectations of what HE must be about, government fills a vacuum in its thinking about the purposes of HE by falling back on the argument that HE gives people better jobs, even to the extent of suggesting that getting any worthwhile job in the new knowledge economy means having a degree. As Richard Taylor (2007: 14) puts it, in his critical review of the concept of lifelong learning: ‘the need to invest in lifelong learning is, therefore, a policy imperative for economic success.’ The ‘logic of employability’ thus fits in with, and undoubtedly reinforces, new HE learners’ expectation that HE really is about getting a better job. From June 2007, the apparent seamlessness of learning and earning is further reinforced at the administrative and institutional levels by narrating the functions of further education and HE, of ‘skills’ and of ‘learning’ within a single government department, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. The vocationalism of the former colonises the pedagogy of the latter.

Second, HE is especially well suited to the prevailing audit culture where positive outcomes are assessed very much in terms of what can be measured (Shore and Wright 2000). It thus corresponds closely with what Street has called ‘unitized notions of measurement and of quality on educational outputs and “products”’ (2004: 10). And the HE community is fortunate indeed to have the benefit of the National Student Survey, and the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), with its battery of ‘performance indicators’ and ‘adjusted sector benchmarks’ to keep numerical track of its activities. For convenience, ‘a “plus” symbol is used for institutions performing better than the benchmark and a “minus” symbol for those performing worse’ (HESA 2007, PIs 2005/06: Guide to PIs). People and society are better educated because that is what the performance indicators, league tables and pass rates tell us. Statistical comparisons are also popular in the international domain where, for example, rising levels of educational attainment (‘average accredited learning’) are taken as a decisive comparative indicator of national achievement. The proportion of young people (aged sixteen to twenty-four) in further education and HE, numbers of people working towards a qualification, proportion of GDP (gross domestic product) spent in HE (see ONS 2007: Tables 3.8, 3.10, 3.16) provide objective indices of how effectively the narrative of lifelong learning for all is being absorbed.

Third, the revitalised narrative of employability matches employers’ needs, not so much for generally well-educated and confident graduate trainees (although few voices are raised against this possibility) but for skilled-up technicians ready to go. To provide, as the HEFCE Strategic Plan 2006 – 2011 (HEFCE 2007: 8) puts it, ‘rounded, highly skilled graduates, who are readily employable and can play their part in helping organisations adapt to changing customer or stakeholder demands.’ It is also consonant, as Wright (2004) and others (e.g., Rutherford 2005) have pointed out, with the development of international trade agreements such as the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) 1994, and the Bologna Process 2003, which seek to exploit the commercial potential of the HE sector by making it a tradable commodity. There is, thus, confluence between the messages that government, employers and the HE community are telling about the purposes of HE. Constant repetition of the mantra of meeting the challenge of a ‘competitive workforce’ to build a ‘competitive UK economy’ sounds like there really is a deeper rationale at work. The rhetoric is simple and irresistible: better education never prevented anyone from getting a better job.

The HE community’s view of the instrumental narrative of lifelong learning for employability

Having seen how easily the revitalised instrumental narrative appears to fit in with society’s and with employers’ expectations, we need to reflect on how receptive or resistant the HE social science community itself is towards the revitalised instrumental narrative. Lyotard’s analysis remains controversial, but he certainly achieved one of his apparent intentions, which was to cause members of the HE community to think again about their own role as the guardians of knowledge and about how they could best defend their intellectual territories. Beginning with the point we have just been making, along with notions of the consumer-learner and the customer-stakeholder, the narrative of the continuous lifelong HE learner focused on employment and national economic competitiveness is now a central objective of the HE sector’s vision of its own role. HEFCE’s Strategic Plan 2006 – 11 (HEFCE 2007: 8), for example, explains that new students have become an increasingly diverse group made up of rising proportions of people aged over twenty-one, part-time students, and postgraduate learners who ‘want varied and flexible provision that enables them to return to leaning at different stages in their lives.’

We can easily identify further clear consistency in this revitalised narrative between the justification of government expenditure on HE and lifelong-learner indebtedness on the grounds of economic competitiveness and employability, and the shifting of justification for research activity away from ‘pure’ research, which is justifiable on the grounds of the quest for knowledge alone, and towards research with the potential for commercial exploitation and policy relevance. This theme has been taken up more recently by other ‘critical friends’ in the HE community. For example, in a recent polemic defending the autonomy of the social sciences against the encroachments of socio-biologists and evolutionary psychologists, Fuller (2006: 1) observes that for those in HE who are ‘solely concerned with maximizing demand’ (rather than supporting disciplines as autonomous vehicles of knowledge formation) and those who seek ‘eager-to-please “evidence-based-policy”’ as distinct from ‘the organized pursuit of social knowledge’, ‘sociology is thus reduced to a disposable means to the maximization of policy-relevant research income and employer-friendly accredited degrees.’

In terms of the effects of these ructions amongst the HE social science community itself, the emergence through postmodernism of radically new theories of what constitutes thought, meaning and knowledge inevitably challenges the established division of academic labour which was itself derived from the earlier philosophical traditions and their associated narratives of knowledge-performativity and enlightenment-emancipation. At the surface, this new willingness to share ideas accounts for the increased popularity of interdisciplinary approaches in theory and research as insights from one field are productively applied in another. At a deeper level, however, postmodernism has had a much more significant effect, because the sense of authority and autonomy which academics previously had about the reliability of the body of knowledge in ‘their’ discipline, the integrity of their research techniques and, increasingly of their role as public educators, has been undermined. A significant part of what postmodernism does is to create a sense of insecurity and unease not only in popular culture but also in academic and intellectual culture (Kivinen and Ristelä 2002; Abramson 2006).

Extending this reading of events to the aims and purposes of HE, one can argue that there has also been a significant impact on how the HE community values itself and what it does. In one sense, the technicians and ‘heroes of knowledge’ have an advantage because the natural science community has a more assured and assertive idea of itself than does the social science community because it can always fall back on its contribution through technique to the principle of performativity. ‘Performativity’ provides one kind of external measure of the purposes of HE teaching in its polytechnic mode. The social science community, in contrast, and as we noted in the introduction, is peculiar in that it has continuously to make and remake the objects of its analysis through the process of social construction. ‘Purpose’ and ‘utility’ have to be negotiated with various constituencies of audiences or ‘publics’ outside the academy. These are essentially value-laden objectives which, to adopt the vogue language of reflexivity, ‘continuously spiral in and out of reality’ and thus can never provide an ‘external measure’ of purpose. The autonomy of the social sciences thus depends on the levels of energy and resources it is able to put into supporting its own ‘public image’.

Under increasing pressure from government to ‘prove its worth’, the HE community in general, but the social sciences especially, is being forced to abandon substantive evaluation of the qualitative benefits to society of HE learning and have ended up using the audit culture as a highly imperfect (objective) proxy for (substantive) evaluation. To borrow from Habermas’ lexicon, the lifeworld of HE social science has been colonised by the audit culture and by the performative narrative of employability. In a characteristically assertive reading of the effects on HE staff of what we might call the instrumental turn in HE, Burawoy offers the following characterisation:

“The original passion for social justice, economic equality, human rights, sustainable environment, political freedom or simply a better world […] is channelled into the pursuit of academic credentials. Progress becomes a battery of disciplinary techniques - standardised courses, validated reading lists, bureaucratic rankings, intensive examinations, literature reviews, tailored dissertations, refereed publications, the all-mighty CV, the job search, the tenure file, and then policing one’s colleagues and successors to make sure we all march in step.”

(Burawoy 2005: 260 – 1)

Maintaining a critical perspective

What is being lost from HE here, or at least being foreshortened, is what one might call a capacity for maintaining a critical perspective between what is and what might be. Following Fuller’s argument, the ‘identity crisis’ in the social sciences arises because there has been an endemic loss of confidence in the kind of vision of ‘the Good Society’ which the social sciences feel able to offer. It is no longer clear what kind of ‘liberation’ the ‘hero of liberty’ is seeking and whether the HE community retains sufficient status in the public sphere to be regarded as a leading source of such ‘vision’ at all.

Inevitably, these developments are impacting upon the capability of the HE community to provide the kind of intellectual capacities and employment skills which are sanctioned within the revitalised instrumental narrative of employability. One could argue, for example, that one of the most impressive achievements of the narrative of continuous lifelong HE learning for employability is the way that ‘employability’ has been redefined so that it now includes under the label ‘soft skills’ many of the attributes of general intellectual capacity, the qualities necessary for the acquisition of ‘abstract, propositional knowledge’ (Haggis 2006: 522) formerly associated with the ‘old’ university model of HE learning. O’Shea provides the following list of the ‘soft skills’ required in the new information-intensive knowledge economy, a list which even the most ardent supporter of the university mode would easily recognise: ‘Employers in these sectors have asked for the following skills: oral and written communication skills, team-working skills, interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills, analytical skills, creativity, flexibility and adaptability, willingness to learn, self-motivation and initiative’ (2004: 98).

There is a strong indication here that, under the banner of ‘employability’, the portfolio of skills has been adjusted to talk down technical competences associated with industrial processes (polytechnic vocationalism) and to talk up adaptive and communicational skills which already have long and distinguished careers in the HE teaching portfolio.

Whilst it could be argued that the apparent naturalisation of old-school pedagogic values represents a victory for the university model, such an assertion is both shallow and misleading. Despite its deep-structural dependence on the values of the old narrative, what is missing from the instrumental narrative is any indication of the critical perspectives which such general competences could be used to develop, of the ‘active and critical citizenship’ which the HE community might have hoped to inspire (Giroux and McLaren 1994, cited in O’Shea 2004: 96), a ‘pedagogy of critical hope’ (Canaan 2005), ‘a more questioning, critical engagement with the world’ (Haggis 2006: 524, citing Barnett 1997). The new narrative is thus formed through a process of hollowing out the old narrative, removing its critical libertarian core, then filling it up again with the employability rhetoric of lifelong learning. The HE community seems, as Abramson puts it, to be taking refuge ‘in shrunken worlds that, grounded in skill, founded on measurement and legitimated through audit tend to “kill thinking” and curb imaginative practices’ (Abramson 2006: 26, referring to Evans 2004).

There seems to be a somewhat perverse idea in the background of the revitalised instrumental narrative that the acquisition of general intellectual capacities lying at the intrinsic end of the scale acts against employability. The apparent dominance of the instrumental narrative is such that basic pedagogic criteria of ‘educational achievement’ and ‘educational benefit’ are now only measurable in terms of skills and employability. As Lyotard puts it, ‘Having competence in a performance-oriented skill does indeed seem saleable [ … ] what no longer makes the grade is competence as defined by other criteria true/false, just/unjust etc. - and of course low performativity in general’ (1984: 51). One might even argue that an increasing deficit in society’s collective capacity to think laterally about the outcomes of HE is partly attributable to a decline in the effectiveness of HE in providing undergraduates with these self-same capacities.

What is to be done?

Lyotard certainly had it in mind to open academia up to wider public scrutiny in order not only to make education more accessible to everyone but also to justify such a procedure by demonstrating the redundancy of the claims to guardianship and legitimacy over knowledge still made by the academic intelligentsia. The wheel seems to have turned again, however, so that now there is a new urgency in the need to re-establish some boundaries both around and between different spheres of knowledge but also around what the purposes of HE social science are. Whilst there always will be assessment by number, it seems that the willingness and capacity to assess the qualitative and intrinsic benefits to society of HE learning are being continually reduced.

One solution, as described by Marr and Leach (2005), is to entirely shift the focus of the HE teaching and learning experience so that it becomes tailor made for the new lifelong HE learner. The HE community should not, as these authors put it, ‘cling to outdated notions of academic respectability and credibility at all costs’ (Marr and Leach 2005: 31), but should devote itself to giving the consumer-lifelong learner exactly what they are asking for. Another is to look for a compromise pedagogy of ‘forging a middle path between conventional and radical approaches’ and in so doing ‘protect some aspects of the “old” higher education [model] against the threat of colonisation by market-driven values, and a possible drift towards more simplistic versions of academic processes’ (Haggis 2006: 521, 533). What both these solutions demonstrate, however, is the tremendous pressure being placed on the HE community to allow the revitalised instrumental narrative, together with its generalised persona in the form of the lifelong learner, to drive the system rather than the HE system having a valuable narrative of its own which it seeks to introduce the new HE learner to. Something which, despite acknowledging the ‘special’ needs of the new lifelong HE learner, ‘may intrinsically, and perhaps even deliberately, incorporate difficulty and struggle’ (Haggis 2006: 531):

“In the increasingly marketised and funding-driven context of higher education, the demand to meet the diverse needs of students as paying clients clashes resoundingly with the more conventional idea that the purpose of many forms of higher education should be that of providing a challenge to students’ values, assumptions and habits of thought.”

(Haggis 2006: 531)

As things currently stand, perceptions of HE teaching as a public good, defined according to the single criterion of enhanced employability, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. First, the architecture of the degree scheme and its mode of assessment increasingly inhibits the development of general intellectual capacity through cumulative learning, thus undermining any alternative to the ‘learn to earn’ model. Second, tutors and careers advisers continuously drive this same message home on behalf of institutions who are under ideological and certainly financial pressure to stay ‘on message’ with the revitalised instrumental narrative of lifelong learning for employability. Third, and having been pre-prepared by the new instrumental narrative, new HE learners do see themselves as ‘heroes of knowledge’, and thus actually do receive what they had expected to receive from their HE investment-purchases. They are unlikely to express dissatisfaction if they fail to become ‘heroes of liberty’ because this is a form of education which they did not realise might have been available to them anyway.

Reinvigorating the expressive narrative of general intellectual capacity

What then are the possibilities for change? Clearly, it is not sufficient to argue for the wholesale abandonment of the instrumental narrative in favour of some equally dominating alternative. The essence of libertarian-humanist education is to find compatibility between the instrumental and expressive narratives, to encourage discourse amongst the heroes of knowledge and the heroes of liberty, to reinvigorate the ‘life of the spirit and the quest for emancipation’ (Lyotard 1984: 52). A number of steps and associated debates can be identified in such a process.

First, the HE community needs to make a fresh bid at controlling the terms of the debate about its own role. Second, it needs to attempt a reconstruction of its capacity to offer not just a critical commentary on the revitalised instrumental narrative but to reinvigorate its social role as providing alternative narratives of its own. A revised, expressive narrative of the benefits to society of HE social science would reflect present-day pragmatism but not at the expense of the libertarian-humanist precepts of critical reflexivity, critical empathy and quality of judgement which lay at the centre of the old narrative. Third, and as the assault on the integrity and autonomy of the social sciences continues, the fate of those disciplines will remain closely tied up with their capacity to persuade critical audiences within government, employers and other constituencies of the wider public outside the academy including parents and prospective HE learners themselves, of the special and unique role of the social sciences in providing society with critical notions of the idea of ‘the Good Society’.

In order to achieve these objectives, a number of internal and external audiences will have to be addressed. Beginning with the expectations of new HE learners, it would mean reinserting into the undergraduate experience a clearer perception of the intrinsic benefits not only of developing curricula knowledge but also of the virtues of general intellectual capacity. Rather than offering an increasingly narrow conception of what HE social science education offers them, a conception legitimated almost entirely by the criteria of employability, HE learners should be challenged to make their conceptions as broad as possible, even to the point of being confident in challenging the logic on which such criteria are based. Being involved in the critical exploration of alternatives to the society of which they themselves are part is one of the most exciting elements of the HE social science experience, and it is something which students are eager to hear more about.

Second, the social sciences need to raise their game in addressing the expectations which society has of HE social science. This involves reiterating and repopularising the many intrinsic and substantive qualities of HE teaching which make it a public good as judged against criteria other than economic criteria. Whether this fresh narrative of critical renewal is expressed as the quest for knowledge for its own sake, engagement with ‘the big issues in life; justice, ethics, love and humanity’, of getting back to ‘a democratic as opposed to a market paradigm’ (Rutherford 2005: 16), or as publicising ‘critical pedagogy and critical academic literacy’ (Canaan 2005: 172), this earlier expressive narrative, which was regarded by the traditional undergraduate and all of their teachers as self-evidently worthy, needs to be clearly articulated for the current and near-future generations of HE learners. This expressive narrative, based largely around conceptions of the collective benefit to society of a broadly educated, articulate and inquisitive population who are prepared to use their capacity for critical thinking against society in order to make society a better place, needs to be reinvigorated so that it can compete on more equal terns with the revitalised instrumental narrative.

Members of the HE social science community constitute a third crucial, and characteristically self-critical audience. Within the academy, and as we have already hinted, ways need to be found of raising the profile of the expressive, qualitative and reflexively critical learning outcomes which are an inherent part of a social sciences education. The challenge here is to devise effective ways of including the assessment of these learning outcomes as part of the teaching and learning process. This is not a question of inventing new kinds of expressive and qualitative outcomes but of enabling greater formal acknowledgement of those that are already there. Giving credit to students explicitly for the expressive-qualitative aspects of their learning is perhaps the most effective way of demonstrating the false legitimacy of the current audit regime, which is, patently, unable to measure qualitative outcomes. These are matters of professional pedagogic expertise, and so debate must begin within the academy itself.

The author

Paul Ransome is Lecturer in Sociology at Swansea University.

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the C-SAP Annual Conference ‘Teaching in Public: The Future of Higher Education?’ 21 – 3 November 2007, Cardiff. I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments from the Editor, Anthony Rosie, and from two anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this paper.