POSTPONED UNTIL MARCH 2022

Higher education confronts a curious paradox. One of its traditional core missions is innately conservative: to conserve and transmit knowledge and culture for and to future generations. This tends also to be conservative in the related sense of reproducing the cultures – the modes, values and mores – of the different societies which it inhabits and which sustain it.

An interesting piece in the New Statesman on the ongoing degree inflation (with First Class degree awards being 7% in 1994 and 29% in 2019) and how it might have much wider implications and repercussions for the UK economy in comparison with its competitors. The author asks why such improvement has not been reflected in soaring productivity – instead of the UK having one of the lowest levels of productivity amongst its economic competitors.

Increasingly over the last 30 years or so, legal issues in education have come to the fore in many countries. Examples abound: teachers and administrators of schools, post-secondary educations and other places of formal instruction and learning have to deal with disorderly student conduct that was formerly dealt with pedagogical means and sanctioned, in severe or repeat cases, by disciplinary action, but now fall into the responsibility of the police, various authorities dealing with youth, or the courts.

November 2019 will mark an important educational centenary: the publication of the Ministry of Reconstruction’s Final Report on Adult Education. The report, largely authored by R.H. Tawney, set the groundwork for liberal adult education in Britain for the rest of the 20th century. Its centenary is, we believe, a vital opportunity to reflect on the needs and possibilities for adult education today.