There is very little known generally about technical colleges and the whole range of further education. The debate on education usually encompasses comprehensive/grammar/public school and university. And yet the majority of 15-18 year-olds who are in formal education are in colleges. Neither do universities provide the major educational provision for the over-18s. Again, the majority are taught in the various further education colleges. This, at least, makes Eric Robinson's book* important.
This ignorance pervades much of the thinking of the Labour Government and the left as a whole. The NEW STATESMAN, for example, gave the 1956 White Paper on Technical Colleges a mild welcome as a new deal for technical schools. Either this was a thrust of rare wit or an uncommon admission of abysmal ignorance. At a very serious level, Anthony Crosland was responsible for a Labour Party study group which reported in 1963 that most students in technical colleges were under 16 and the work of these colleges was irrelevant to a policy statement on higher education!
It is not surprising that Eric Robinson states that: "The story of the development of higher education in the technical colleges during the last decade is a story of development in spite of government action as much as it is a story of the effect of government policies". It is certainly true that it is further education that is the most vulnerable object of the government's present onslaught on education. This, of course, does not square with many of the Labour Party's policy statements, least of all the breathtakingly hypocritical document on further education prepared for one of the Young Socialist conferences. But at least Labour has been consistent on ratting on its policies over the entire political horizon.
This is all very worrying to Mr. Robinson as he sees a very particular role for technical colleges. He bases his argument initially on an attack on the Robbins report, which assumes that higher education is only for an elite minority and will be carried on in the universities. Robinson counters with the slogan "Higher Education for All". The university is associated with elite education and, therefore, cannot serve as a model for mass education. Coupled with this point, he challenges the concept of liberal education. Vocational education for the working class is only degrading if the work that is being trained for is degrading. Robinson wants opportunity for all men to live through their work rather than in spite of it, as at present.
The cornerstone of his concern for the technical colleges is in relation to the comprehensive reform beyond school. In the reform of secondary education, the grammar school was the victim. Mr. Robinson promises us a bloodier battle before the commanding height of British education - the university - is stormed. Much of Mr. Robinson's thesis is politically facile and shows typical reformist illusions about capitalism, the alienated nature of work under capitalism, and the ideological function of the education system within the state, but, nevertheless, hiding in the interstices of his arguments are points that ought to be incorporated into a socialist critique of higher education.
*THE NEW POLYTECHNICS by Eric Robinson. Penguin, price 6/-.