To think in general English people do not value education?

[clairemcnam]

It always dismays me how little education seems to be valued in England. Lots of people say they do value education, but in closer questioning this is nearly always a utilitarian approach to education.
So education is valued to get you a good job, or help you earn more money - to help you achieve something else.
But relatively few people seem to value education for its own sake.

Sweeping generalisation!
I don't really agree in general- a lot of education is focused on academic subjects rather than vocational simply because the focus is on learning for learning's sake. In many other countries you only do the degree that directly relates to the job - eg accountancy for accountant, law for lawyers etc which isn't the case here.
I do think the introduction of fees changes things- many people are concerned about being able to pay it back which puts focus on employability but this has been around in many other countries for a long time

I wonder if it's our high property prices and exam culture. Both kind of suck all the fun out of it

Education can be a route out of poverty for many people so aint nothing wrong with hoping your kids get some kind of job or career at the end of it all. Education just for the sake of education may seem a luxury to some.

ridiculous thread not even worthy of posting a reply.

I think it comes from the system. It's all about results and working towards sats, then gcses then A levels etc ....so now it's all about valuing qualifications and working hard for that.
No time for actually instilling a love of learning that can carry you through life, so that you always continue to be curious and expand your knowledge.
I see it all the time- as soon as the children have got to grips with a concept and start to be in to it it's time to move on to the next item on the curriculum list.
No time for teachers to pause if they see a class really enjoying a topic and explore it further, link it to other topics etc
No flexibility and frustrating the learning journey for all involved.

What I find terribly disappointing is that universities are taking the same approach, talking in terms of how much money graduates will make, how likely they are to get a job, what career opportunities are open to them.
While that is not unimportant, education for its own sake, has a value. It is only when you get to PhD level that you find genuine interest in new knowledge irrespective of its monetary value. But you will always find people who are willing to sneer to at it as being pointless.
Knowledge is knowledge and it doesn't matter whether it is 'useful' or 'valuable'.
However, the rot set in when students started paying to learn. They are now consumers, and consumers have rights.
I am currently doing a masters and every week I hear students who are on one of the best programmes in the country in their field, moaning about how much they are paying and what they are 'getting' for their money.

YANBU.

There are always posters on MN keen to dismiss the value of non-vocational degrees, for example.

I'm not sure it's a specifically English attitude. I take it to be modern philistinism. Probably, as you say, underlaid with a utilitarian mindset.

@hazell42 if universities don't do that they don't get undergraduate students and make losses.

They have always done this to foreign students anyway and started to do this to postgraduate Masters students once fees came in.

Oh and none of my family got bullied at their state schools in England for working hard at school. It is due to the demographics of who went to the schools.

longdistance the points you make don't mean that OP isn't right. She's right (IMO) but so are you in that yes, people go to great effort to get their kids into certain schools. But in my view that's largely for the utility of the education they'll come out with, ie exam results leading to employment. In fact exam results are usually the reason that it's been decided which is the better school.
I was recently asked if I regretted doing my first degree because I don't directly use it in my job! To me that's a bonkers question ( because to me the value is in the education) but I think to many people that's the way they view it.

I'm not sure. Both my ds's recently questioned why they had to attend school and learn facts they didn't feel were beneficial/would never use again.
I didn't really have a good answer. What do you suggest OP?

When you do GCSE's you often have a least favourite subject. You'd have trouble Convincing someone to study that, or rather of the benefits of studying it, wouldn't you?

Resources are scare. Education system is a conveyor belt where kids have to take a set of exams at a certain point - making it hard to repeat years etc.

Uni costs money. Cost of living is high.
I home ed and I think learning about lots of things is cool. BUT i prioritise my kids making an informed decision about their educational choices and how it may impact their life.

Most kids will find at least 1 important subject boring. In that subject they need to be told that not putting the work in (which they could have put into their subject of interest instead) may damage their life chances. Have nothing against medieval poetry (and plan to teach my kids ‘dead’ languages) but statistically my kids have to know that unless excel at it, an average STEM degree is going to earn them moe money.

The problem is we've started to view qualifications purely as assets to be acquired and have stopped thinking about the value of what is learned.

So we go to school to gain GCSEs , then a levels, then university, then a job .....we treat these qualifications almost as a box ticking exercise which grant us access to the next level. We don't think about what we learn.
It's why we've seen a drop in people studying humanities at university....because they aren't vocational and don't lead directly to a profession. When the reality is employers love humanities students because of the transferable skills they develop.

I was brought up to value education for itself. Not that my parents are particularly special, just that value is part of their cultural heritage. So if it helps you get a good job or money, great. But that it matters for its own sake.

I was brought up the same way. As was my DH and many friends. All English.
I agree with what SummerInSun said.
I also agree with this Immigrants often do emphasize education, they can be the more educated members of the society they left or the upper/middle class from the society they left.
When I was at university I knew a couple of (male of course) students who would go on and on about how much more clever and educated and artistic and attractive 'European girls' were. Of course as the women they met from Europe were all intelligent, well educated and wealthy enough to travel to the UK to do an art degree it did seem that way but they seemed to lack the capacity to understand that they aren't representative of everyone. It may seem as though English people don't value education, but that's only because you're here seeing the attitudes of a wide range of people.

Some of the problem is that we tend to overlook the importance of knowing how to learn as a skill in itself. Having a degree as a level of attainment used to be as important as the actual subject matter.

@onlyconnect - would you say the same if you had to pay £9k per year tuition fees plus living costs on top?

I think the English system (don't know about Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales) is mostly about achieving a qualification and preparing for the next stage.

What's with all these English bashing threads

It's not down to the system - children should gain a much wider education at home. I am appalled by the lack of general knowledge exhibited by the younger generations these days. There is not enough time for the school curriculum to cover everything, but parents should be responsible for the extras. Look at eg University Challenge - young people able to answer in depth questions on astrophysics, but can't identify British birds, or trees. Things that would have been known by everyone in the past - even those not attending school.

name and that's one of the issues. Viewing higher education as a commodity.... something that is being bought.
85% of graduate jobs don't specify a particular subject. They're more interested in the skills developed.

We have a credentialist attitude to education and expertise. This means that the qualification is usually all that matters.

The quality of qualifications aside (obviously degraded) this leaves little room for talent, aptitude or a sense of vocation.

Relying on credentials paradoxically enables deprofessionalisation. Teaching, for example, is now carried out by people with teaching certificates.They may have no ability to teach, no love of their subject and no affection for children or learning, but they do have the right credentials.

This helps a system that is standardised and which relies on the uniform transmission of an agreed system of rules. It does not enable people to think better or to trust their own judgement.

How many educated people know much of what happened before 1980? 1950? 1900?

namenic I really believe so yes. That's my point exactly, that I would. Would I have trouble paying the money back if I didn't earn much? Of course. That's not the same question though. The value of education to me is not primarily about what you can get as a result of it financially. Of course I also think what's happened regarding funding in England is evidence of what OP said. We have created a situation where's people are going to think about the costs, possibly above all else and that says something about our attitude to education.

I think some of the replies on here rubbishing the op kind of prove the point - lots of people don't even understand the concept of education for itself rather than with an end goal.

Like a previous poster, I blame tuition fees. When I went to uni my parents encouraged me to study something I enjoyed. They, and I, could afford to. No tuition fees, a grant towards living costs and I left with no debt.

My kids are looking at a very very different prospect. If they are going to end up with tens of thousands of debt then they need to know they'll be able to pay it back. Simple things like buying a house are much harder now too. I can totally understand the focus on helping their kids to earn enough to carve out a half way decent life.

I think if we're going to encourage a love of learning now it's going to have to be as a hobby and outside the school system.

I agree OP. I live in continental Europe and, at least in the country I live, the focus is very different. I have a number of friends who work in jobs that aren't well paid at all but they still command respect on the basis of their degree/PhD/intellectual interests. In the UK (I was educated in Scotland), the focus is always on how much you are earning/how big your house is/whether you've "made it".

I think it comes from the Thatcher era - I was born in the 80s and definitely associated university with the chance to "be successful" = have a big house and a flash car. I know a lot of people in my family did to. My parents were definitely of the opinion that "airy-fairy" degrees were "useless" and, when I considered embarking on a PhD, I was asked by even educated members of my family whether it would be "worth it" in terms of future earnings. There is also the aspect that the place I live now is very affluent compared to the place I grew up in, so I suppose people have more freedom to study things just for the sake of it because they know they are more or less sorted for life.

Having said that, there are pros and cons to everything. Where I live now, snobbery is a lot more intellectual than materialistic, so my friend's millionaire dad, who "made it big" with a company of plumbers that is now a huge company employing thousands is often looked down on upon by other friends whose parents are teachers because of his "lesser educational background". People also boast more about intellectual pursuits, whereas in the UK - to make a sweeping generalisation based on my circle of friends who still live there - competition is more about designer bags and flash holidays than whether you spent Sunday at the museum with the local art history club.

Neither is better or worse, just different.

YANBU, but I seriously doubt it's a specifically English or even UK thing. I'm a teacher. One of the many things wrong with the education system is the fact that it is driven by results and data, and that schools and teachers are forced to go along with this for fear of losing students, their jobs, their salary progression etc.

Don't get me wrong - kids being unenthusiastic about learning is certainly not a new thing, but schools now try to motivate kids by target-setting, extrinsic rewards and relentless pursuit of grades, rather than trying to encourage interest in subjects for the sake of it.

It's not the teachers' fault of course. It's driven by Ofsted, government targets, austerity, inclusion of kids with ever more complex needs in mainstream classrooms, class sizes, ever-changing syllabus demands etc. By the time kids get to university (if they can afford to), they have been taught that every thing they learn is a means to a (largely financial) end.

The only school I've taught at which wasn't like that was an independent girls' school in a wealthy area - plenty of love for learning there. I think the girls all just felt financially supported and assumed they would find successful careers in things that interested them.

@Vulpine
Education can indeed be a route out of poverty but for the majority it is not. The largest number of underprivileged children is by far white working class boys who have the lowest attainment at every level and are the most under represented at university.

The cap on university places was removed to allow for the expansion of the degree system, which are now disbursed to anyone who can pay for them.