Shadowing Practice: UK universities are being killed by deliberately designed neoliberal government policy. - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Universities in the UK are being killed.
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And I mean that.
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Universities in this whole country are being killed as a direct consequence of UK government policy,
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which is providing them with no future and is going to leave the towns where they're located,
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in some cases, without a major employer and staff without a place of work
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and maybe some of their students without a degree.
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This really matters.
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Now I know that there are many people in the UK who think
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that university degrees have a declining value and I'm not going to argue with that view in this video.
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But what we now know as well is that around 20%
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or one in five of the UK's 120 odd universities are now facing financial risk.
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Nottingham is the latest, it's cutting staff and closing courses and it's facing strikes as a result.
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But these events are not isolated or accidental.
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UK universities are being killed by policy design.
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This outcome was always predictable.
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It's the consequence of the neoliberal thinking
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that has underpinned our education in this country for well over a decade now, almost two.
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And that's because the Conservatives brought a new style of thinking
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into education when they returned to office in 2010 and the consequences are now being seen.
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They treated education as a commodity, something that the student consumed.
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They redefined education as a market transaction
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and in this context students became consumers purchasing economic advantage either from their degree or their A-levels or GCSEs.
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Universities then became suppliers in a managed marketplace and that is why education in this country is failing.
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Under Michael Gove who was education secretary for several years whilst David Cameron was prime minister,
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he and his then assistant Dominic Cummings who became notorious with regard to Brexit and his role with regard to Boris Johnson,
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radically redefined the supposed purpose of education.
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Learning, they said, was all about creating an economic return.
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Universities existed in their argument simply to enhance a student's earning power.
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Economic growth became the justification for the expansion of education and education for personal and social development
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disappeared and we saw that in schools with regard to things like music
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and arts and theatre and all those other softer subjects
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which make the person a whole human being
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and we saw it at universities in the same sorts of area
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but also with regard to the commodification of that whole education process.
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What neoliberalism could not understand was that education should help people to understand themselves.
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And then it should help people to understand others.
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And then it should encourage curiosity and questioning.
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Questioning which should, in turn, lead to real learning.
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The sort of learning that a person develops for themselves so that they deeply understand a subject and can embrace it,
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use it, and then explain it to others.
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As a consequence, education should be about strengthening society and community, but none of these goals fitted neoliberal assumptions.
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As a result, critical thinking was systematically removed from all tiers of education.
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It's gone from schools and now it's going from universities.
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Students are simply taught to absorb information.
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That is what Michael Gove's education reforms were all about.
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He said we'd go back to basics, but basics meant learning precisely what he thought the state should inform a student about,
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and there was no role to ask questions.
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Worse still, there was no role to question the answers.
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And in that case, students were simply taught to reproduce approved answers, the type of thinking that neoliberalism had fed to them,
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and testing dominates educational achievement as a consequence.
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Do you know it or don't you?
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That's the only question that is asked.
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And independent appraisal by the student, by an examiner, by anyone else has been entirely squeezed out of the educational system
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and creative thinking is increasingly discouraged as a result.
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The result is what I would call educational incapacity.
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Many students, ones that I saw when I was teaching, could not write an essay in their second year at university.
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Why?
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That's because grade A, A levels do not apparently require this skill anymore.
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Many students struggled to construct an argument.
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They couldn't construct a counter-argument either.
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There was no narrative flow through their work.
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They didn't understand how they had to weave those arguments
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and counter-arguments together to undertake an appraisal of evidence
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and then present their own arguments as a consequence based upon everything that they had read.
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Conclusions were asserted rather than developed and as I discovered many of my colleagues
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and many people throughout the whole education system were frequently failing to remedy these weaknesses,
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I tried to do so by dedicating a session to teaching my students how to write an essay to meet my needs.
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The wise ones followed my advice.
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Those who were not so wise submitted the essays they'd written in the style they'd learned at school, or rather not learned at school.
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They, of course, got the lower marks.
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The point is this.
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They did not know a basic skill and they got to university without it.
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And that is indication of a major failure in our education system.
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Or is it?
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The fact is that the old elite model of education has survived university expansion.
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Let's just talk for a moment about what that old elite model of education was.
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It was based on the thinking of Rockefeller, in fact.
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The Rockefeller Foundation in the USA in the early 20th century
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was all about the creation of philanthropy to control society on
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behalf of an elite who believed they had the right to set the terms on which society would operate.
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And they had a massive impact.
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I've discussed this issue on my blog of late, but let's stick to the core point here,
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which is that they thought over a century ago that a small elite in society should be taught how to think.
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Everyone else should be taught how to comply or how to do.
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They should become the artisan workers who would supply the products that they were told to create by that small elite.
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And that small elite would then extract value from those workers
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so that they could live in a style which they wished to enjoy.
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Now, university expansion, as it was first imagined by labour in particular, did not actually change that objective.
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Extraordinarily, as the Conservatives became more and more influential on university expansion during the 80s and 90s and then again since 2010,
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they made clear that technical education was what they really wanted universities to supply.
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Remember that Michael Gove quote?
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We don't need experts.
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What he was saying was he didn't need too many highly educated people in society.
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He thought we had enough of them and they were already setting the goals very nicely to suit his objectives.
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The rest should be doers, not thinkers.
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And economics teaching reveals how this has worked.
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When I went to university 50 years ago, economics was taught as narrative.
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It was evidence-based.
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It was about doing your reading.
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It was about looking at arguments.
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It was about comparing schools of thought and the history of understanding in this area.
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Context was everything to understanding.
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Now that has all been replaced.
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You don't write essays anymore to pass an economics degree.
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You write maths.
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Formulas now dominate the subject.
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Assumptions are no longer critically examined.
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The history of economic thought is not on most economic syllabuses, and as a consequence,
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rote learners who can reproduce the formulas they've been given are the people who get the high marks in economics.
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But they come out having not the slightest idea about how the world works, or how an economy works, or how a company works,
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or how even an individual might function.
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In fact, empathy has normally been taken away from them during the course of their study, and there's plenty of academic research to back that statement up.
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Don't blame the students, though.
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Politicians designed this education system to create this outcome.
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Schools have become factories for testing performance right from very young age, from 7, 11, 14, 18, whatever else.
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Students are assessed time and time and time again, and rote learning has displaced critical engagement,
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and universities have now inherited the consequences, which is young people who have been taught not to think
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but to simply answer the question given the information they've been given.
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That failure now is continuing in our university system.
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And the university business model imposed by neoliberals simply makes everything very much worse.
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Universities have been required to behave like businesses.
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They are all independent institutions with their own funding base, their own business model, their own sales pitch and all their own systems,
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which is an enormous waste and duplication with a massive potential for cost saving
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if only they operated on standardized systems and there's no reason why they shouldn't.
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And financial viability became the overriding objective of every single university.
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Educational purpose became secondary.
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Recruitment targets for students became essential because that was the only way in
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which they could attract sufficient money to keep the system going.
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And growth became essential, according to the neoliberal model, because that was the way in which security could be generated.
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In that case, revenue generation shaped all a university's decision-making.
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But this business model was bound to fail.
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It became dependent on overseas students.
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It became dependent upon selling masters and other postgraduate programs as revenue generators.
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And because expansion became a financial necessity, it was matched by austerity in the supply of the education process.
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There were too few teachers.
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There was too little marking.
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There was too little face-to-face engagement.
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And grade inflation became a marketing strategy instead of supplying a decent education.
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A fragile and transparent model was created by design, neoliberal design that had failure built into it.
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And that market is now turning on universities.
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Universities sold what neoliberalism demanded, but the product has too often failed to meet expectations now.
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The students know it.
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They can see that they're not advancing in the way that they were told to expect.
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And education quality has been undermined.
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The resulting crisis is unsurprising and as a result we now need a new education system with a different purpose.
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The obsession with facts should end.
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The obsession with examinations of those facts should end.
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Current testing systems have anyway lost their credibility.
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I know that.
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Employers are increasingly ignoring traditional indicators and exam results and are instead retesting applicants for jobs.
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Why?
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Because they know that those exam results do not matter anymore.
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As a result, we can all say with certainty
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that the existing model of education has broken down because it isn't actually producing the outcomes that anyone,
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students, educators or employers want.
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This system is failing.
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So what should we put in its place?
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I would suggest we need three C's for a new education system.
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There used to be three R's.
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I'm plucking three C's out of the air, not randomly, I should stress, and suggesting that these should become the purpose of education.
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The first C is for curiosity.
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Now, curiosity is key to education.
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Without a curious participant, without a curious student, in other words, you simply don't get participation in learning.
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Curiosity drives participation.
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And when it's done right, you get somebody who wants to learn.
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Instead, we now have education aimed at people who are alienated by it as a result.
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The second C is communication.
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And communication should be at the heart of education.
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And I'll return to that point in a moment.
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And the third C is community.
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Because everything about education is about relationships.
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the whole of neoliberal thought has been about the fact that they think education is about the student as a silo, an economic unit.
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But the student, when they become a participant in the workplace, when they become a participant in life beyond education, is not a silo.
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They are one of a team, one of a community, one of a town, one of a city, one of a club, one of a company, one of whatever else.
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And that is all about community and the ability, therefore, to go back to the previous section to say it's all about communication.
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These are the qualities that matter throughout life.
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They matter more than any test of memorization, which is what education has been reduced to.
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Communication is the key missing skill, in my opinion.
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Young people should be taught to speak clearly.
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Making presentations is important.
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Being able to talk about an idea coherently
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is vital if a young person is to be able to participate in almost any form of social activity.
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It doesn't matter what you're talking about.
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It doesn't matter whether it's academic.
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It could be sporting.
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It could be social.
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But if you can't speak clearly about what you want and explain your ideas, you're not going to get on in life.
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But this verbalization skill is far too underrated.
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Students should also be taught to write coherently, but that does not necessarily mean that they need to write an essay about Jane Austen, much as I like Jane Austen,
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and I do, but they should be able to communicate what they mean clearly and coherently to the person they're sending,
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whatever it might be, a text, an email, a letter, an essay, whatever.
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All of those things matter and they should be able to construct them in a way that the user can understand.
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But at present, I as an examiner, as I used to be, could not always understand what my students were trying to tell me.
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They did not do well as a result and I tried my best to make sure they understood what I wanted.
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It's also true that students should learn to communicate numerically.
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And in this sense, maths has failed us badly.
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There are far, far too many young people who feel that maths is not for them.
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And that's because they aren't told why they need to communicate numerically and what numerical meaning is.
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They aren't taught maths as if it's a real,
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living, communicating tool within the context of real life instead of in the absurd way in which most maths is taught.
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And I can tell you for certain that most sixth formers have no idea what differential calculus is all about.
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And most people much younger who are being taught to do quadratic equations have not the slightest idea why.
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And even earlier than that, most people never understand what a percentage is.
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Well, if you aren't taught the whys instead of just the how-to-dos with regard to maths, of course, you can't communicate numerically.
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So this matters much more than technical rules.
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I've seen the absurd syllabus for young people when it comes to English before the age of 11, where they have to learn all these rules of grammar, none of which I know,
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and I have written and published millions and millions of words.
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You can survive without those rules of grammar, but you can't survive if you don't know how to communicate your message clearly and coherently.
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Education has forgotten all of this, and we're all the losers as a result.
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Education should focus on meaning and conveying it, but that's not what it talks about.
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It's only interested in testing structure.
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The politics of care would then deliver a very different vision of education as a result.
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Education is, as far as I'm concerned, fundamentally about relationships and learning about living within communities.
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Human flourishing depends upon cooperation.
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education should be learning about how to quite literally cooperate.
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Add that in as a fourth C if you want.
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Don't blame students, teachers or universities if that's not the skills that our students end up with.
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Blame the neoliberal framework that is killing education.
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That is what is at fault.
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Michael Gove, David Willits and others who were the supposed Tory education gurus
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have left us with this crisis of universities that are financially failing, of universities that are failing their students,
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of universities that are not delivering the people this country needs,
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and now of universities that might fail the communities that host them because they could go bust with enormous economic regional consequences.
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Education is in a crisis and we need to sort it out
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and we need to sort it out fast and to do
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that we need to understand that education is not about delivering a product,
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it's all about delivering communication and communication in community.
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When we understand that, we might get the education system that we need.
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That's what I think.
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What do you think?
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There's a poll down below.
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Please let us have your views.
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Please do share this video if you like it and if you want to support us by buying us a coffee, we'll be very grateful.
About This Lesson
This lesson focuses on listening comprehension and speaking skills through the analysis of critical issues surrounding UK universities' decline due to government policies. By engaging with the content, learners will practice their English listening skills while also improving their pronunciation and fluency. In particular, the video highlights the implications of neoliberal policies on education, providing a rich context for vocabulary development and discussion. Utilize the shadowing technique to mimic the speaker's intonation and rhythm, thereby enhancing your speaking abilities and achieving greater proficiency in English.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Neoliberalism: A political approach that favors free-market capitalism and privatization in public services.
- Commodification: The process of turning something into a product for sale; in this context, education.
- Economic return: The financial benefits gained from an investment, in this case, a university degree.
- Critical thinking: The ability to analyze information and make reasoned judgments.
- Market transaction: An exchange of goods or services; here, referring to how education is viewed as a service to be purchased.
- Curriculum: The subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college.
- Personal development: The process of improving oneself through activities that develop talents and potential.
- Engagement: Involvement or participation in a topic or activity.
Practice Tips
To effectively improve your English pronunciation and speaking skills using this video, follow these shadowing techniques:
- Timing: Pay attention to the speaker's pace. The video may have parts where the speaker talks quickly, so make sure to practice sentence by sentence. You can pause and replay sections that are challenging.
- Intonation: Observe the speaker's tone and inflection. Try to imitate not just the words, but how they emphasize certain phrases, as this can enhance your expressive speaking skills.
- Playback Speed: If the speaker’s pace is too fast, consider reducing the playback speed to make it easier to follow along until you feel more comfortable.
- Record Yourself: After shadowing, record your own voice. Compare it with the original to identify areas where you can improve, particularly in enunciation and rhythm.
- Repeat Weekly: Consistency is key in shadowing practice. Revisit this video periodically to solidify your learning and reinforce vocabulary retention.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.