Credentials in a More Expressive Future

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

One could not want a saner and more well-informed guide to contemporary questioning of school than Torsten Husen, and his new book admirably catches doubts and anxieties which assail those responsible for educational systems today. The range of research and distilled experience he draws on is impressive, so is restraint, even-handed tolerance for all points of view with which he handles some of central controversies, particularly about heredity and social selection-a tolerance which one can admire while wishing that he would more often be willing to say that nonsense is nonsense. Underlying this gentle generosity, this insistence that those who have seized trunk and those who have seized tail are all giving at least an honest account of same true elephant, is a desire to think well of individual men which leads him also to optimism about Man. Somehow we shall muddle through to a better world. Moreover, in his last chapter he throws caution to wind and makes clear shape he expects that better world to take. There will be, among other things, a shift of priorities and resources from pre-career schooling to recurrent life-long education: there will also-and it is this that I wish to concentrate on in present note-be changes in reward system so that there is less emphasis on marks, diplomas and certificates and a lesser correlation between salaries and educational levels-as result of a shift from instrumental to expressive values (page I76). It would be nice if it were so. Unfortunately there is little in what has gone before to prepare us for that conclusion or to make it convincing. He charts inexorable trend, hitherto, for educational selection to play a steadily increasing part in determination of occupation and social status: he rightly points out that this trend is contingent on values of an instrumental kind. But what he does not do is to analyse in detail changes in those values nor show mechanisms whereby value changes might reverse historical trends and alter emphasis placed on marks and examinations. That, I believe, is because he remains-as, indeed, all of us remain for want of enough empirical research on subject-uncertain as to why our present instrumental values cause a high and probably increasing correlation between educational records and job determinations. Is it because (page 178) the school provides competencies that in modern society increasingly constitute an individual power base (my italics), or is it because educational attainments are used by those who award jobs and income rights as a proxy measure for other underlying capacities which (although school may have done little to develop them) are believed for some reason or other to correlate with educational attainments? So stated, contrast between 'human capital theory' and 'screening theory' explanations of link between educational and occupational structure is too stark; two alternatives need to be broken down into a number of discrete sub-mechanisms[i], but for all its crudity it will serve to clarify some basic issues which must be tackled before one can decide how far changing values will alter 'exam-centricity' of educational systems.