Ceci n'est pas a good translation

Not “soft skills”. Instead, deep skills. Communication, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence are deep skills that are increasingly valuable, under-appreciated, and often strongest among those traditionally disadvantaged in the labour market. Plus, robots can’t do them.

We need not only a political economy of siege, but a political economy of inter-continental warfare.

It is a depressing experience for a university teacher, [...] to be confronted with classes [...] whose members wilt with anxiety at resource to elementary algebra or geometry, or giggle at the futility of the recommendation if they are referred to any standard work in French or German.

Their mistaken views (if they are mistaken) call for action just as unavoidably as if they were true (which they might be).

I am working from my own memory and not all my figures may be accurate; but this, roughly, was my own early experience: I was the only one from my ‘elementary’ school class who went, in 1930, to the local 1902-Act grammar school. I have been told that I failed to pass the qualifying examination (I remember a cold march day, a walk to a large strange school, and some strange and complicated Maths. papers). I was given a grammar school places, the story goes, because my Headmaster asked the local education office to look again at my English essay. I remember others in that ‘elementary’ school class who were bright. But other forces - poo food, unhelpful homes, poor teaching - were presumably too much for them. Those who went on from that slum school were exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally tough, or exceptionally lucky. In my grammar school form - drawn from a wide area - I was not usually top boy, except perhaps in English. I was usually among the first 5. After Matriculation (in which I gained a Distinction in Maths! - we had a good teacher), only about half-a-dozen of us stayed on into the Sixth form. First, the social climate did not greatly encourage staying on, except for the really outstanding [sic] boys; second, too many had parents who needed the money they could earn (parents who could see their way - imaginatively, financially - to keeping their child at school from 14-16, so he became a black-coated worker; but for whom a further stretch was only rarely conceivable). I stayed because of one sentence on my report at the end of the Matric. Year. My headmaster wrote at the bottom of the report: ‘Should think of professional life’. I was an orphan, being brought up by my grandmother on 7s 6d. A week Board of Guardians’ money. She did not know exactly what the sentence meant but asked the Board of Guardians' Visitor, a most helpful woman. She took the report to her Board who increased my weekly payment to 15s. A week. My grandmother, a first generation townswoman, had the old rural respect for learning; I stayed on. After two years in the Sixth a handful of us took H.S.C. State scholarships were practically unheard of. I only remember Oxford or Cambridge being mentioned twice, each time in connection with rather special pupils who took a third year in the Sixth. [...] Of the rest of us one or two gained Senior City scholarships, of which 20 were given each year throughout the city’s grammar schools, and were told that our next move was to Leeds University. Some others reached university on R.S.T. grants. Ther rest went to Training Colleges. So I joined others, who had been similarly selected each stage, at Leeds. My education properly began when I joined Bonamy Dobree’s School of English there. I give this personal history first, because it comes into my mind first whenever I hear people talk (and some talk easily) about ‘scraping the barrel’. By comparison with us, even a moderately-endowed boy from a good school and a well-provided home had a simple run to the University in the ‘Thirties. If, on my 12 years rock-climbing progress there, only one other of my class-mates with similar abilities had been lost en route, then that - repeated in schools all over the country - meant a considerable drain of talent. I think it follows that we could stand a large expansion, in these more comfortable times, to cater for those intelligent children who would have been lost by the wayside in harder times. [175] We are still losing mean (see, e.g. Early Leaving, Floud and Halsey’s work - or think of the shortage of places for girls at Oxbridge). But we are losing less. Better health, better schools, less worry about money and steady employment among parents … all these are creating a climate more congenial to the idea of continued education. I am struck by the number of my students who are first-generation undergraduates in their families. Some parents are thinking chiefly of investment, of ensuring a better-paid job for their children (though this is not a sin); but most, it seems to me, also respect education in itself - they say they are glad to think that their children are having ‘opportunities we could not have and regret missing - there’s nothing like education for broadening your mind’. It occurs to me that these parents include those who I left behind 30 years ago, in the ‘elementary school’. [...] In making provision for an education democracy we are only now at the end of the beginning.

The general reason for demanding a rapid increase in the numbers going on to postgraduate work is that the enormous extensions of knowledge in all fields of study have made it impossible for a student to master more than the rudiments of his subject within the limits of a first degree course. Attempts to include too much in courses for first degrees have in some cases led to serious overloading and to neglect of a thorough grounding in rudiments. In science this is well recognised. It is less often recognised that in the humanities also there have been immense extensions of knowledge through recent developments of the technical means of acquiring it, and postgraduate study has become a necessity for any student who wishes to go on to research. The microfilm has made the contents of all the libraries of the world easily available. Civilisations and cultures that even fifty years ago were beyond the view of any but intrepid explorers now offer themselves for study. The continuous process of re-interpreting and re-assessing the achievements of mankind, on which the richness of a culture depends, demands a depth and range of knowledge today far beyond what was within the power of our grandfathers and even of our fathers.

Just to show you the interest with which I have looked through your pages, may I call your attention to the fact that your printer has shown his animosity for the enemy across the Channel by murdering the spelling of a German quotation in the footnote of page 98?

‘Burke, in a famous passage, speaks of an age of the “economists and calculators” as inimical to humane feelings. This Report shows how wrong he was. Because the economists and the calculators have given us here a programme not simply for national well-being; they have given us a programme by which fresh opportunities are given for entering into the life of the mind which it is surely the greatest aim of any society to promote. It is in that light that we have to welcome and interpret and implement this Report.

So far as education is involved, the essence of the university stage is learning rather than being taught.

desideratum

It was open warfare at least - the kind of warfare which I had learnt about in the training courses and on manœuvers with Hatchard and Kinersly - and we were in retreat. It was in such circumstances that I realized what months of trench warfare, sitting about waiting to be killed, had not taught me and never could teach me, that war, moving warm, can be exciting and even enjoyable - however disgusting in retrospect. I can honestly say that I relished nearly every minute for it; and that when at least I was wounded and had to leave the field, I felt a sense of bitter deprivation. Doubtless this was partly due to the mere relief from waiting for the unknown: this was something tangible. But partly, I am sure, it was due to something much deeper - the intellectual and emotional appeal of certain kinds of warfare as such. Certainly it enabled me to understand what I should not have understood before, why war with all its horrors and injustices and its danger to all civilization stands for, has yet persisted so long. If all wars had been trench wars of the Ypres Salient variety, it is safe to say that they would have been eliminated long ago the sports of man would have found nothing attractive in them, nothing but pure squalor. It is because in most wars there has been an element of adventure, of a game, of something which stretches all the powers of courage and resourcefulness to the utmost, that the habit has persisted so long and overstayed an appropriateness it ever might have had. A distributing fact, irrelevant, however, to the prospects of nuclear warfare.

meliorism

‘For it is in the essence of the libertarian outlook that where the true positive goods of life begin, there the economics and the political philosopher must bow and take their leave; for in that sphere they have nothing to do.’

The first night I came home, I got into my old bed - the first bed I'd laid in since I'd joined the army. When mother bought my cup of tea up in the morning she found me fast asleep on the floor.

[...] the economic dictator will soon find himself forced, even against his wishes, to assume dictatorship over the whole of the political and cultural life of the people.’