Prática de Shadowing: UK universities are being killed by deliberately designed neoliberal government policy. - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo

Universities in the UK are being killed.

And I mean that.

Universities in this whole country are being killed as a direct consequence of UK government policy,

which is providing them with no future and is going to leave the towns where they're located,

in some cases, without a major employer and staff without a place of work

and maybe some of their students without a degree.

This really matters.

Now I know that there are many people in the UK who think

that university degrees have a declining value and I'm not going to argue with that view in this video.

But what we now know as well is that around 20%

or one in five of the UK's 120 odd universities are now facing financial risk.

Nottingham is the latest, it's cutting staff and closing courses and it's facing strikes as a result.

But these events are not isolated or accidental.

UK universities are being killed by policy design.

This outcome was always predictable.

It's the consequence of the neoliberal thinking

that has underpinned our education in this country for well over a decade now, almost two.

And that's because the Conservatives brought a new style of thinking

into education when they returned to office in 2010 and the consequences are now being seen.

They treated education as a commodity, something that the student consumed.

They redefined education as a market transaction

and in this context students became consumers purchasing economic advantage either from their degree or their A-levels or GCSEs.

Universities then became suppliers in a managed marketplace and that is why education in this country is failing.

Under Michael Gove who was education secretary for several years whilst David Cameron was prime minister,

he and his then assistant Dominic Cummings who became notorious with regard to Brexit and his role with regard to Boris Johnson,

radically redefined the supposed purpose of education.

Learning, they said, was all about creating an economic return.

Universities existed in their argument simply to enhance a student's earning power.

Economic growth became the justification for the expansion of education and education for personal and social development

disappeared and we saw that in schools with regard to things like music

and arts and theatre and all those other softer subjects

which make the person a whole human being

and we saw it at universities in the same sorts of area

but also with regard to the commodification of that whole education process.

What neoliberalism could not understand was that education should help people to understand themselves.

And then it should help people to understand others.

And then it should encourage curiosity and questioning.

Questioning which should, in turn, lead to real learning.

The sort of learning that a person develops for themselves so that they deeply understand a subject and can embrace it,

use it, and then explain it to others.

As a consequence, education should be about strengthening society and community, but none of these goals fitted neoliberal assumptions.

As a result, critical thinking was systematically removed from all tiers of education.

It's gone from schools and now it's going from universities.

Students are simply taught to absorb information.

That is what Michael Gove's education reforms were all about.

He said we'd go back to basics, but basics meant learning precisely what he thought the state should inform a student about,

and there was no role to ask questions.

Worse still, there was no role to question the answers.

And in that case, students were simply taught to reproduce approved answers, the type of thinking that neoliberalism had fed to them,

and testing dominates educational achievement as a consequence.

Do you know it or don't you?

That's the only question that is asked.

And independent appraisal by the student, by an examiner, by anyone else has been entirely squeezed out of the educational system

and creative thinking is increasingly discouraged as a result.

The result is what I would call educational incapacity.

Many students, ones that I saw when I was teaching, could not write an essay in their second year at university.

Why?

That's because grade A, A levels do not apparently require this skill anymore.

Many students struggled to construct an argument.

They couldn't construct a counter-argument either.

There was no narrative flow through their work.

They didn't understand how they had to weave those arguments

and counter-arguments together to undertake an appraisal of evidence

and then present their own arguments as a consequence based upon everything that they had read.

Conclusions were asserted rather than developed and as I discovered many of my colleagues

and many people throughout the whole education system were frequently failing to remedy these weaknesses,

I tried to do so by dedicating a session to teaching my students how to write an essay to meet my needs.

The wise ones followed my advice.

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.

They, of course, got the lower marks.

The point is this.

They did not know a basic skill and they got to university without it.

And that is indication of a major failure in our education system.

Or is it?

The fact is that the old elite model of education has survived university expansion.

Let's just talk for a moment about what that old elite model of education was.

It was based on the thinking of Rockefeller, in fact.

The Rockefeller Foundation in the USA in the early 20th century

was all about the creation of philanthropy to control society on

behalf of an elite who believed they had the right to set the terms on which society would operate.

And they had a massive impact.

I've discussed this issue on my blog of late, but let's stick to the core point here,

which is that they thought over a century ago that a small elite in society should be taught how to think.

Everyone else should be taught how to comply or how to do.

They should become the artisan workers who would supply the products that they were told to create by that small elite.

And that small elite would then extract value from those workers

so that they could live in a style which they wished to enjoy.

Now, university expansion, as it was first imagined by labour in particular, did not actually change that objective.

Extraordinarily, as the Conservatives became more and more influential on university expansion during the 80s and 90s and then again since 2010,

they made clear that technical education was what they really wanted universities to supply.

Remember that Michael Gove quote?

We don't need experts.

What he was saying was he didn't need too many highly educated people in society.

He thought we had enough of them and they were already setting the goals very nicely to suit his objectives.

The rest should be doers, not thinkers.

And economics teaching reveals how this has worked.

When I went to university 50 years ago, economics was taught as narrative.

It was evidence-based.

It was about doing your reading.

100

It was about looking at arguments.

101

It was about comparing schools of thought and the history of understanding in this area.

102

Context was everything to understanding.

103

Now that has all been replaced.

104

You don't write essays anymore to pass an economics degree.

105

You write maths.

106

Formulas now dominate the subject.

107

Assumptions are no longer critically examined.

108

The history of economic thought is not on most economic syllabuses, and as a consequence,

109

rote learners who can reproduce the formulas they've been given are the people who get the high marks in economics.

110

But they come out having not the slightest idea about how the world works, or how an economy works, or how a company works,

111

or how even an individual might function.

112

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.

113

Don't blame the students, though.

114

Politicians designed this education system to create this outcome.

115

Schools have become factories for testing performance right from very young age, from 7, 11, 14, 18, whatever else.

116

Students are assessed time and time and time again, and rote learning has displaced critical engagement,

117

and universities have now inherited the consequences, which is young people who have been taught not to think

118

but to simply answer the question given the information they've been given.

119

That failure now is continuing in our university system.

120

And the university business model imposed by neoliberals simply makes everything very much worse.

121

Universities have been required to behave like businesses.

122

They are all independent institutions with their own funding base, their own business model, their own sales pitch and all their own systems,

123

which is an enormous waste and duplication with a massive potential for cost saving

124

if only they operated on standardized systems and there's no reason why they shouldn't.

125

And financial viability became the overriding objective of every single university.

126

Educational purpose became secondary.

127

Recruitment targets for students became essential because that was the only way in

128

which they could attract sufficient money to keep the system going.

129

And growth became essential, according to the neoliberal model, because that was the way in which security could be generated.

130

In that case, revenue generation shaped all a university's decision-making.

131

But this business model was bound to fail.

132

It became dependent on overseas students.

133

It became dependent upon selling masters and other postgraduate programs as revenue generators.

134

And because expansion became a financial necessity, it was matched by austerity in the supply of the education process.

135

There were too few teachers.

136

There was too little marking.

137

There was too little face-to-face engagement.

138

And grade inflation became a marketing strategy instead of supplying a decent education.

139

A fragile and transparent model was created by design, neoliberal design that had failure built into it.

140

And that market is now turning on universities.

141

Universities sold what neoliberalism demanded, but the product has too often failed to meet expectations now.

142

The students know it.

143

They can see that they're not advancing in the way that they were told to expect.

144

And education quality has been undermined.

145

The resulting crisis is unsurprising and as a result we now need a new education system with a different purpose.

146

The obsession with facts should end.

147

The obsession with examinations of those facts should end.

148

Current testing systems have anyway lost their credibility.

149

I know that.

150

Employers are increasingly ignoring traditional indicators and exam results and are instead retesting applicants for jobs.

151

Why?

152

Because they know that those exam results do not matter anymore.

153

As a result, we can all say with certainty

154

that the existing model of education has broken down because it isn't actually producing the outcomes that anyone,

155

students, educators or employers want.

156

This system is failing.

157

So what should we put in its place?

158

I would suggest we need three C's for a new education system.

159

There used to be three R's.

160

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.

161

The first C is for curiosity.

162

Now, curiosity is key to education.

163

Without a curious participant, without a curious student, in other words, you simply don't get participation in learning.

164

Curiosity drives participation.

165

And when it's done right, you get somebody who wants to learn.

166

Instead, we now have education aimed at people who are alienated by it as a result.

167

The second C is communication.

168

And communication should be at the heart of education.

169

And I'll return to that point in a moment.

170

And the third C is community.

171

Because everything about education is about relationships.

172

the whole of neoliberal thought has been about the fact that they think education is about the student as a silo, an economic unit.

173

But the student, when they become a participant in the workplace, when they become a participant in life beyond education, is not a silo.

174

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.

175

And that is all about community and the ability, therefore, to go back to the previous section to say it's all about communication.

176

These are the qualities that matter throughout life.

177

They matter more than any test of memorization, which is what education has been reduced to.

178

Communication is the key missing skill, in my opinion.

179

Young people should be taught to speak clearly.

180

Making presentations is important.

181

Being able to talk about an idea coherently

182

is vital if a young person is to be able to participate in almost any form of social activity.

183

It doesn't matter what you're talking about.

184

It doesn't matter whether it's academic.

185

It could be sporting.

186

It could be social.

187

But if you can't speak clearly about what you want and explain your ideas, you're not going to get on in life.

188

But this verbalization skill is far too underrated.

189

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,

190

and I do, but they should be able to communicate what they mean clearly and coherently to the person they're sending,

191

whatever it might be, a text, an email, a letter, an essay, whatever.

192

All of those things matter and they should be able to construct them in a way that the user can understand.

193

But at present, I as an examiner, as I used to be, could not always understand what my students were trying to tell me.

194

They did not do well as a result and I tried my best to make sure they understood what I wanted.

195

It's also true that students should learn to communicate numerically.

196

And in this sense, maths has failed us badly.

197

There are far, far too many young people who feel that maths is not for them.

198

And that's because they aren't told why they need to communicate numerically and what numerical meaning is.

199

They aren't taught maths as if it's a real,

200

living, communicating tool within the context of real life instead of in the absurd way in which most maths is taught.

201

And I can tell you for certain that most sixth formers have no idea what differential calculus is all about.

202

And most people much younger who are being taught to do quadratic equations have not the slightest idea why.

203

And even earlier than that, most people never understand what a percentage is.

204

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.

205

So this matters much more than technical rules.

206

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,

207

and I have written and published millions and millions of words.

208

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.

209

Education has forgotten all of this, and we're all the losers as a result.

210

Education should focus on meaning and conveying it, but that's not what it talks about.

211

It's only interested in testing structure.

212

The politics of care would then deliver a very different vision of education as a result.

213

Education is, as far as I'm concerned, fundamentally about relationships and learning about living within communities.

214

Human flourishing depends upon cooperation.

215

education should be learning about how to quite literally cooperate.

216

Add that in as a fourth C if you want.

217

Don't blame students, teachers or universities if that's not the skills that our students end up with.

218

Blame the neoliberal framework that is killing education.

219

That is what is at fault.

220

Michael Gove, David Willits and others who were the supposed Tory education gurus

221

have left us with this crisis of universities that are financially failing, of universities that are failing their students,

222

of universities that are not delivering the people this country needs,

223

and now of universities that might fail the communities that host them because they could go bust with enormous economic regional consequences.

224

Education is in a crisis and we need to sort it out

225

and we need to sort it out fast and to do

226

that we need to understand that education is not about delivering a product,

227

it's all about delivering communication and communication in community.

228

When we understand that, we might get the education system that we need.

229

That's what I think.

230

What do you think?

231

There's a poll down below.

232

Please let us have your views.

233

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.

O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.

Prática de Shadowing: UK universities are being killed by deliberately designed neoliberal government policy. - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo

Sobre Esta Aula

Vocabulário e Frases Chave

Dicas de Prática

O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?