Editorial

I put off writing this editorial until after the new year. I must confess that part of me was hoping that I might have to write it by candle light whilst seeking out an existence on a few remaining tins of beans and powdered milk. In reality, though, whilst the numbers on the calendar look very different, a great deal of ordinary life is much the same. Amidst all the talk and musings about the new millennium, new starts and new beginnings, it is important that we identify what is enduring and what we must keep, as well as what can be relinquished, as we turn our attention to the trials of a new century. I am reminded of a saying - I think by Churchill - which goes:

The further back you look, the further ahead you can see.

In a rather ad hoc way I've tried to do this here by identifying three enduring issues that, for me anyway, help set things in perspective and provide some footholds as we gaze into 2000 and beyond.

For the first two issues I go back to when I first started work. Talking to a gathering of new graduates the then managing director predicted a "paperless office" in ten years' time. Well, he's retired now but if his successor's office is even remotely like mine then this is one prediction that went badly wrong. I suspect it will be true of a number of others including the "intelligent" home,the transformation of work and "cyber learning" through "virtual universities". There is no denying that the Internet represents an enormous source of knowledge. Virtual universities may well make major inroads into traditional,community and campus-based education provision. But transforming how people learn is one thing; transforming what they learn quite another. I often ask new groups of students (young and old) to recall significant learning events from their past. Invariably they recall past teachers, tutors, old friends and groups they "knocked around with" - the social side of learning. Some recent research,in which I have been involved and which addresses individuals "returning" to formal learning, indicates that above all it is the social side of learning that is most valued. Our critical capacities as learners are surely best developed through dialogue and discourse and in the context of what - for most us anyway -will continue to be how we spend most of our time, i.e. in the company of others whether at home or at work.

Soon after the prophecy of the paperless office myself and another new graduate reported to "Big Bill", the rather daunting night production manager for a stint on the "line". After a bone crushing handshake Big Bill asked us what we'd done at college. On learning that my colleague was an arts graduate Big Bill roared with laughter and replied:

What are you going to do, paint the bloody place?

The questions and issues this raises about the capabilities of, expectations upon, and transition of school-leavers and graduates as they move into employment are as pertinent today as they were 25 years ago. Of course things have changed. The traditional apprenticeship, more significant in terms of numbers than graduate recruitment when (and where) I started work, has largely disappeared. Increasingly graduates find themselves in "non-traditional" jobs without the support and development programmes which I and countless other graduates enjoyed. A recent report suggested that in small, growing SMEs graduates need to "hit the ground running" with a unique blend of "technical and core competences". I'm afraid, for me, this raised a somewhat cynical laugh. Ultimately what will help today's young people initially survive the Big Bills of the world of employment and subsequently prosper in (or change) their chosen careers is not a particular technical skill, nor their classes on good communication skills - though of course these will help - but the maturity and the confidence their overall education has provided; their confidence in their ability to ask the critical questions of themselves and of their work and indeed their confidence in their own ability to continue to learn.

Finally, to "education and training" itself. Since (at least) 1884 reports have argued with remarkable unanimity that inadequacies in the skills base were undermining the UK's competitiveness. The conclusions that have run through so many of such studies is that the UK must take the skills of its workforce more seriously.

In many ways I have no problems with this but if we look back - not quite as far as 1884 but to issues of this journal in the late 1980s and early 1990s - we find warnings about "creeping vocationalism" and fears that we may be witnessing a fundamental shift away from "education" and "towards" training. The critical relationship between education and training is as important today as it was in 1884, 1984 and 1999.

There is a lovely passage in The House at Pooh Corner when Pooh Bear,walking through the Hundred Acre Wood, muses to himself:

Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. All you can do is go where they can find you.

Training is something which is done to us; something which we go out and"get" from time to time. I like to think education is more like poetry and hums- it gets us. Whether inside or, more often, outside the classroom, it finds us. Sadly, though, it is often a harsh education. We learn what the inequalities of society and life really mean. We learn the routines and coping strategies of an undemocratic and oppressive workplace. Perhaps for education to be really like poetry and hums we have to re-vitalize and open up the places where fun rather than harsh education, liberating rather than constraining learning, can find us more easily.

Our society will be impoverished if, in our drive to "train the workforce" -often even before it has started work - the opportunity for poetry and hum type education to find us further diminishes. Education for its own sake must be championed. We must ensure, furthermore, that education actually underpins training, so that whether we are 18 in our first job or 55 in our 15th, we encourage reflective practitioners; thinking, critical employees rather than"trained" automatons.

Richard Holden