There’s no arrogance like academic arrogance. The latest issue of the Royal Society of the Art’s Journal features an interview with Michael Young, whose 1971 book Knowledge and Control: New Directions in the Sociology of Education set forth a thesis that come to dominate education schools: that, as the RSA puts it, the traditional emphasis on skills and knowledge served “the needs of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor” and that those from disadvantaged backgrounds needed instead a curriculum that heightened “engagement.”
The fact that, in both the U.S. and the UK, emphasizing knowledge and skills had by the early 1970’s created historically unimaginable levels of both wealth and social mobility regrettably did not occur to Young. Nor did he stop to think that emphasizing content-free fluff was the worst possible service the schools could do for the poor, in that it both condescended to them and deprived them of the tools to improve their own lives. The result has been, as Dennis Hayes and Kathryn Ecclestone of Oxford Brookes University argue in their forthcoming book on The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, has been to create a system that “promotes the idea that we are emotional, vulnerable and hapless individuals. It is an attack on human potential.”

Young’s interview is a mea culpa of sorts, albeit one of the “stop him before he kills again’ variety. He now realizes that “you’ve got to start from the subjects, the disciplines, and then see how they can become more connective. . . . What I forgot in my early work was we saw boundaries only as constraints, we wanted to do away with all constraints?do away with the boundaries between the school and everyday life, between disciplines, and between the sexes and so on. . . . But what that apparently radical idea misses is the absolute core element to boundaries”.

His early failure does not stop him from making the same mistake all over again: he ends the interview with a call for education to take up a new stance to boundaries, which is that they must be considered as “real but bridgeable.” Young fails to learn the lesson of his failure, which is that neither he nor anyone else is smart enough to describe all reality in a pat, reductionist phrase that can become the basis for an educational system. That is why the traditional focus on knowledge and skills was so valuable: contrary to the charge of the faux radicals, it was liberating precisely because it emphasized both what was known and how even more could be known in the future. It created not a closed system but an open one, based on stable foundations.

Young’s belief that the purpose of sociology, his discipline, is to focus on unintended consequences illustrates the problem beautifully: the job of the sociologist, he claims, is to think about these “before an event, rather than after.” If sociologists are really capable of this, those consequences are no longer genuinely unintended. But of course sociologists are not capable of this. The assertion that they are amounts to exactly the same arrogant claim of elite omniscience that undergirded his 1971 book.

This is not just an academic problem, one without consequences in the real world. On Thursday, Imperial College London–the fifth ranked university in the world–announced that it was adding an extra year to its degree program so students can catch up on what they have failed to learn earlier. As the director of admissions put it, exams that “were originally designed as an entrance to university . . . has now been distorted to a general education qualification.”

Even more stunning was Wednesday’s announcement by the British Minister of Education that if £400 million in additional funding did not solve the problem, 638 underperforming schools would be closed and re-opened as academy schools, which are run by parents, businesses, or volunteer groups–a plan that makes school vouchers appear positively staid. But they are both based on the same idea: rejecting the one size fits all model that is now inseparable from the orthodox educational establishment, ossified in Young’s radicalism.