Getting the Skills to Pay the Bills

I’ve been thinking about skills: what skills students are supposed to acquire, why they’re supposed to have them, and how they’re supposed to get them. This is on my mind because of an article I just read from Arts & Humanities in Higher Education called 'The "Research-Teaching Nexus" and the Learning-Teaching Relationship: Who's in charge?', by Christopher Rowe and Eleanor O'Kell.

I like this piece a lot, but there was one passage near the end that disturbed me, and got me wondering about both the 'why' and 'how' of skills:

But now we need to ask the larger question: do we believe that Extended Projects and their HE analogue, dissertations, provide the kinds of skills that employers are supposed to be looking for, and that we therefore (presumably) owe it to our students to be offering them? (187).

First, the 'why' of education: is the aim of A-level and higher education really to 'provide the kinds of skills that employers are supposed to be looking for'? Personally, I don't think businesses are the ones who should dictate the profile of the ideal graduate, if only because what they will be looking for in three years is not necessarily what they want now (what traits, for example, was the Royal Bank of Scotland looking for from its future investment bankers in 2006, when this year's graduates started their degrees? Whatever they were looking for then, I hope they've changed their priorities during the course of the past year). Not only that, but a student who graduates in 2009 will probably be working until 2049 - so universities owe it to their students to take the long view, which doesn’t necessarily mean following the lead of today’s employers (think about the skills that businesses were looking for in 1969).

And now, the 'how' of education: the quote's phrasing assumes that educators can 'provide' students with 'skills', such as (to take a classic example) 'critical thinking'. But such power is not given to us: we can tell students about critical thinking, we can model it in our own practice, we can create circumstances that are conducive to it, and we can incentivise it, but we can't 'provide' it to anyone. Skills can be acquired by students, but they cannot be granted by teachers.

This might seem like a matter of semantics, but semantics often matter a great deal. Pretty much everybody talks about 'providing' skills to students (I know I've done it), so it's good to remind ourselves that it's not an act that anybody actually has the power to perform.

[Incidentally, if you want to know more about the Royal Bank of Scotland's problems, read John Lanchester's excellent article in the London Review of Books.]