Bildung of human resources

There isn’t much new in my life. Studying is as demanding as ever; more and more of the work has moved from lecture rooms to independent research and writing. Instead of a diary-like description of a series of identical days, I am rather offering a short reflection of the British higher education from the point of view of someone who’s been through it.

The culture of the final year of undergraduate study resembles a competition. Since as early as October, students fight over graduate jobs. The number of employability tutorials, employer presentations and graduate opportunity markets is at a peak – and whoever still doesn’t have a job in March has simply lost the game. The depth of integration of universities with the labour market is remarkable in many respects. Most of the big private and public employers offer an insight week to first years, a summer internship to the second years, and finally third years compete for graduate jobs. The minimum requirements almost always include certain achieved grades, often even from A-levels. It might seem that universities are viewed as mere factories producing human resources fit to employers’ liking and that undergraduate study is little more than a vocational course. In fact, in debates about the role of higher education in the 21st century, the proponents of the humanistic tradition list the UK and US as examples of the commodified market-based education reducing humanity to human capital. I would like to offer a brief apologetic of the British education system.

If I simplify it, one pole of the debate is the traditional humanistic view on education as a goal on its own, a process in which a person matures into a personality, humans and societies develop and human knowledge is deepened. On the foundations of ancient Greek roots, this idea of liberal education has been essential in the establishment of first European universities in the Christian Middle Ages. The German concept Bildung is crucial – human beings are supposed to construct themselves actively, developing their inner lives so as to become as far as possible an image (or picture – Bild) of God.  (Pritchard, 2011) The legacy of these early ideas are the liberal ideals of intellectual freedom, academic autonomy, the unity of knowledge or the unity of teaching and research.

The other pole, which today dominates the discussions about tertiary education, emphasizes the instrumental value of education as a means to get competitive advantage on the labour market. Higher education institutions create human capital. This view, which according to its critics was ushered in by capitalism, focuses on the economic role of universities as the drivers of innovation and technological progress on the side of academics, and as the source of labour force quality on the side of the students.

It is easy to see the Anglo-American model as a representative of the marketization of schooling. After all, the Anglo-Saxon intellectual tradition is far closer to neo-liberal thinking than continental Europe, so why should education be an exception? Unlike the rest of Europe, tuition fees are very high in England and students often talk about “value for money”. It seems logical to be led to perceive education as a purchased service, an investment, which will later guarantee a higher pay. As it usually is the case, however, the more we generalise, the further we’re getting from the reality.  

It is worth noting that unlike for instance the Czech, the British employers rarely ask for a specific degree. An investment bank accepts graduates of history, chemistry or art history. To land a graduate job, one doesn’t even need work experience. Employers are looking exactly for those personalities, which are formed during liberal education that is based on universal development, own research, intellectual freedom and the search for truth. They are not choosing their employees by their grades because they are maybe naively led to believe that there is some sort of causal relationship between good marks from biochemistry and good knowledge of financial derivatives. They do it because they know that the same variable that causes good grades is the variable that will also lead to good performance in the job.

It is, I think, clear that the above mentioned polarity is by no means necessary. I don’t see a reason why education cannot have both intrinsic and instrumental value; why it cannot be both the end and the means. As the British system shows, the mental and spiritual development through education, Bildung, prepares students better for the labour market than any government’s programme to boost competitiveness ever can.