If education is only about earning, what happens to learning?
The acquisition of knowledge is becoming more commodified, seen as a way of filling gaps in the workforce. But for a society to thrive, it needs to remember how to value learning.
Education should be about the sharing and passing on of knowledge, the pursuit of truth. It’s supposed to teach us how to be civilised and moral. But what was meant to be a resource owned and shared by a community has been slowly fenced off by profit-seeking interests. Today the state largely decides what is taught, by whom and how. It is done so in an increasingly privatised, commodified and financialised manner. What should be a conversation about a public good, something that we all have a right to pursue, has become an industry obsessed with economic output, creating jobs and advancing careers. Far from forging curious minds, it is depleting people’s creative imagination. How did we get here?
Historically, all of the great thinkers about education, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, framed it as a means of liberating the mind and making good citizens. In the UK, that ethos persisted into the 20th century, reiterated in a government report after the First World War, in the Butler Education Act of 1944 and in the Robbins Report of 1963. Successive governments insisted that the purpose of an undergraduate degree was to teach students how to think, not how to make money.
Then, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher sought to exclude school subjects that weren’t geared to the labour market and declared that universities should be corporate enterprises run by business-folk, not academics. In 1992 the UK’s colleges for vocational training (“polytechnics”) were converted into universities and universities were reoriented to serve the needs of industry and the economy, rather than intellectual refinement.
Bit by bit, the curricula in all levels of schooling have been revised to cater to the perceived needs of the labour market. The process has become a treadmill, rather than a suitable education for the marathon of life. The tests implemented in those years and more recently are designed to give young people “credentials”, instead of teaching them anything more meaningful. In my book, Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons, I diagnose a pandemic: “examinitis”.
Education that pays
This educational illness continues untreated and politicians are still playing along. When Rishi Sunak was British prime minister, he said that any degree that didn’t result in increased earnings was a “rip-off”. Another recently deposed PM, Keir Starmer, promised that his party would “modernise the curriculum so that it better prepares students for the world of work”. The latest, Andy Burnham, has gone further and said that secondary schools should change their curricula to suit the needs of local employers. A report prepared by Alan Milburn, a former cabinet member, suggests that courses that don’t yield an economic return should be abandoned. What folly.
In the UK – as in the US and elsewhere – the industry has deserted education in its classic sense, as depicted by Rousseau, Jefferson and Mill. The humanities, arts, philosophy and history are fading, their demise rationalised on the grounds that they don’t yield high monetary returns. Young people receive more years of schooling than any generation before them but are emerging with a shallower grasp of history, literature, civics or culture. Deep reading has collapsed.
Meanwhile, teachers and academics are demoralised and in meltdown. There is a persistent shortage of teachers, not because not enough can be recruited but because droves quit citing low pay, unpleasant work conditions and an inability to pursue their vocation. Many schools now rely on temporary staff supplied for short-term posts from agencies, paid a fraction of the salary of regular teachers. They are often unsure where they will be teaching next or even what they will be teaching. This destroys the ethos of schools as integrated communities – try mustering school spirit and pride in such circumstances.
The situation is even worse in universities, which are required to compete for students and the revenue they bring. More academics are on short-term contracts and more are being culled. In 2024 alone, at least 4,000 academics in the humanities, the social sciences and the arts have been made redundant.
Foreign finance is feasting on what’s left. A Chinese company recently took over England’s oldest school, Thetford, set up in 631, whose most famous pupil was 18th-century philosopher Thomas Paine. After asset stripping, it was declared bankrupt in early 2026, then closed. Having been part of the fabric of our society for hundreds of years, it was snuffed out by someone looking at a balance sheet in Hong Kong.
Outsourcing universities
Another symptom of decay is that universities are outsourcing their teaching. Today many students are gaining qualifications from seemingly reputable institutions without ever setting foot inside them. Universities are contracting out to private “franchised” providers, paying them about three-quarters of the tuition fee and pocketing the balance for rubber-stamping degrees. These providers are driven by profit and that means what one CEO calls “no frills” courses. He told the Financial Times that he had no qualms with his business model being compared with budget airlines and discount supermarkets. This is a denial of what universities were always meant to be – a community of scholars learning from each other.
For all this tumult, it’s not too late to rescue and revive the educational commons. Unchecked, the decay will be accelerated by AI, which is heightening the threat of scary-sounding ideas, from “knowledge collapse” to “cognitive surrender”.
But studying and working in education has given me optimism about our capacity to recover. However, it will require a concerted transformational response, which is why the new government should set up an independent national commission for the revival of lifelong learning.
Education and the ideas that underpin it need to be retaught. Rediscovering Rousseau, Jefferson or Mill might not advance the economic situation on a ledger for private-equity investors – but that is the point. Some things – such as thinking for ourselves – are rather more important than profits.
About the writer: Guy Standing’s latest book, Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons, is published by Pelican Books. He is a professorial research associate at Soas University of London.
