EDUCATION! EDUCATION! EDUCATION!

Consider these two quotations: 'The man we are proud to send forth from our Schools [Cambridge] will be remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit for knowledge, than for being something, and that 'something' a man of unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose judgment we can trust to choose the better and reject the worse' – Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 1916.

'The unique importance of the Department of Education and Employment's role stems from its responsibility for ensuring that the UK has a well functioning labour market' – David Blunkett, 1998.

The first, echoing Cardinal Newman as the principal source of 19th century thinking about the role of the university, echoes intrinsic values in education – mental culture and the formation of character – while the second is entirely instrumental and utilitarian in tone. The very title of the ministry speaks volumes, as does the fact that it is now called the Department for Education and Skills. These books are all a response to the crisis of morale in education, and in universities in particular. They raise issues that should be widely debated in the media and which should inform educational manifestos for the next election. So far as universities are concerned, their problems stem partly, as Lord Sutherland (Principal of Edinburgh University) has observed, from the fact that they have become part of a system of mass higher education in contrast to the relatively small scale and selective system that prevailed before. Alongside this has come a raft of bureaucratic auditing procedures that are analysed in grisly detail in the first three books. The projection is for more of the same, raising university participation from the current 35% to 50% - will the system take it? The authors of these books think not.

The focus of the first book is managerial ethics and the law of unintended consequences. This looks and the 'mismanagement of universities' and 'testing to destruction' in the new school environment. The contributions vary in readability and depth, but the most brilliant for me was Bruce Charlton's opening salvo entitled 'Audit, Accountability and All That'. Managerial culture in the UK is dominated by accountancy, hence the audit-based technologies of regulation that have been introduced with their emphasis on accountability and quality. Charlton uses his scalpel to show sliding meanings in the key terms: 'accountable' means on the one hand the provision of comprehensive and self-consistent documentation and on the other, being answerable to or responsible. Thus the rhetoric can slide from one meaning to the other so that unaccountable comes to mean 'un-managed' and therefore irresponsible and even unacceptable. Likewise with 'quality': this is defined in terms of auditable systems and procedures, rather than excellent outcomes. It leads on to 'transparency', which means 'transparent to audit', with 'opaque' meaning by implication intrinsically deficient and probably dishonest.

Under QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) all teaching had to be auditable, in other words self-consistently documented with mission statements, aims and objectives, flow-charts, monitoring, feedback and formal procedures for every imaginable contingency. This is immensely costly in both time and expense and generated mountains of paperwork. The reasoning is wonderfully circular, since the QA approved system is assumed to be higher quality by definition, 'because the pre-existing systems were undocumented, hence unaccountable and lacking in transparency, hence low quality'. The second and third books have much to say along the same lines. Maskell and Robinson put the case with some force, while Graham's tone is less polemical – he does see the argument for bringing in auditing procedures even if he shares the view that they have gone too far. In some cases minutes of meetings are invented and, in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), colleagues agree to cite each other on every possible occasion so as to boost the department's ratings and therefore funding! The later Quality Enhancement (QE) suggests a questionable logic that something excellent can carry on increasing year on year, like economic growth.

Another theme that runs through the first three books is the relative balance between education and training. Graham argues that the universities have always been concerned to some extent with training, even in mediaeval times (his brief history of universities in most enlightening). Others are more concerned to criticise the over-emphasis on skills, the decline of academic standards (the standard degree is now a 2:1) and the modularisation of degree courses. Students have become customers (we have lost passengers on the railways as well) who buy a product which the university is designed to deliver. Moreover they now have to pay for this through student loans, which encourages the view of education as investment. 'Wealth-creation' comes in for some critical analysis – I think Graham is right to define this more widely, as he also does when analysing the 'needs of society' – whose needs and in relation to what? Likewise 'transferable skills', a phrase that comes in for much derision, partly for confusing values with uses: Maskell and Robinson perform a nice reductio ad absurdum on a document that quotes 'learning new skills' as a skill!

The essays on the new school environment in the first book make pretty depressing reading, but it is topical that it includes a piece by the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams. It contains much original thinking on spirituality and values in relation to the school environment. What interests him more are acts of values in the school rather than mission statements along the same lines; and the discrepancy between the value aspirations of the school and its physical environment. He analyses the use of time, the understanding of the body and the use of language. Time? Not enough of it, but it is vital for reflection or digestion of experience. Body includes buildings. Language must be alive and the school a place where people are not merely socialised but civilised as well.

'The New Idea of a University' is a powerfully-argued book that will stir up considerable controversy. It begins with the economic case for education, followed by the old idea of the university based on Newman. Then an ironic look at the 'new university for life' with a section on how to run a new university in seven easy lessons – teach – in courses – with aims, objectives and goals – in modules – total quality controlled – give firsts – put on the crown jewels: research, or, great heaps of nothing. The fourth part is about levering up standards, described as 'top-down drivel' and the conclusion includes the authors' constructive proposals for an education policy document. They reserve some of their withering fire for Sir Ron (now Lord) Dearing and his use of the 'distinction-annihilating power of the cliché' in merging 'the new idea of the university as a mass institution selling instruction in saleable skills' with 'the old idea of it as an elite institution giving a free and liberal education'. Perhaps their most interesting angle of approach is the use of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as a leading text on liberal education.

Universities – the Recovery of an Idea is an altogether more measured – and indeed penetrating – analysis by the Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen. It unpacks many of the key terms and explores their implications in some depth. The book as a whole begins with a short history of the university, discusses the value of a university education before moving on to an analysis of its content and context. Then there are chapters on research and its justification, university management and finance. The University Education chapter examines a number of dichotomies and tries to steer a middle course while maintaining a rigorous assessment – for instance in the necessary development of expertise and professional judgement that goes beyond student feedback on modules. The research chapter is also excellent, arguing for the value of understanding and dissecting the value of the RAE and its relation to the language of production – quantity vs. quality. His conclusion, shared by Lord Sutherland, is that intellectuals need to undertake serious reflection designed to formulate at solid self-understanding of their purposes – otherwise they will perforce adopt that imposed by the government. I don't think it possible for universities to return to pre-1980s position, but for the health of society as a whole they do need a measure of independence if our democratic infrastructure is to be maintained. And some top institutions may take this step themselves, which would further polarise the existing position.

The fourth book is orthogonal to the others but its message of sustainable education is a critical one that goes well beyond the existing rationalist ethos of the current university. In this sense universities are Enlightenment institutions dominated by mechanistic and reductionist thinking – naturalism in the sciences and relativistic post-modernism, equally materialistic, in the arts. This can be understood historically as a reaction to the previous dominance of theology. In Stephen Sterling's terms, universities follow a transmissive rather than transformative model. It is hard to see how this situation will shift in the short term since their commitment since the ethos, eidos and praxis of much new organic and holistic thinking is regarded as heretical. The initiative will have to come initially from outside the system and feed into it, like the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College validated by Plymouth.

Sterling has a series of excellent charts that help to schematise his views and offer a contrast with older ways of thinking. As he rightly says, the ecological worldview 'entails a shift of emphasis from relationships based on separation, control and manipulation towards those based on participation, empowerment and self-organisation'. He observes that the existing university audit regime is based on old scientific ideas, while business has already moved on to models based on holism and complex systems. His direction is a move from information education to wisdom education, which reflects the earlier distinctions between training and education discussed above. However, we need both – it is just that the current balance is wrong. And the wisdom must include action: understanding our predicament is not enough, as eco-psychologists have discovered. So it's not just Education! Education! Education! We have to ask ourselves what it is for and these books all help us do exactly that.