Synagogues and pedagogues: rethinking educational priorities

Derivations of words throw up some significant curiosities.  I knew that a pedagogue was originally someone who led a child around, including to school.  The term then took a professional turn, to refer to the specialised function of instructing children. But I had never noticed the – to me now rather obvious – etymological similarity between pedagogue and synagogue.

This article appears in the PIMA Bulletin No 26.

Synagogues and pedagogues: rethinking educational priorities

Derivations of words throw up some significant curiosities.  I knew that a pedagogue was originally someone who led a child around, including to school.  The term then took a professional turn, to refer to the specialised function of instructing children. But I had never noticed the – to me now rather obvious – etymological similarity between pedagogue and synagogue.

Apparently, a synagogue originally had no intrinsic connection to Judaism.  It was a place of assembly, where adult males came together to socialise and discuss issues. It’s not clear who did the bringing together, and the word referred from the start to a place not a person, so it immediately diverged from its etymological sibling.  The key point is that a synagogue was a secular space where adults learnt from each other.   It then (probably during the Babylonian exile) became exclusively identified with the Jewish religion, as the place where Jews could come together to read scriptures and, eventually, worship.

So far, so mildly interesting in a pub quiz a kind of way. But just think what might have happened to the history of education if the original institutional character of the synagogue had been maintained, and had developed into a general way of organising learning (as pedagogy did).  We could have seen, from the outset, a network of adult education centres accepted as an integral part of any modern society, as schools and colleges now are.  These might have been self-organised, or they might have evolved into more structured and professionalised forms.  

We might as a result have had ‘synagogy’ as a term to describe how people come together to learn from each other. It’s true that we’ve had attempts to mainstream the notion of andragogy as a counterpart, or counterweight, to pedagogy. These have been successful only in the comparatively rarified discourse of adult education professionals, and then only in certain countries.  The word itself is not important, but if the notion of synagogy had taken off, it would have signalled a broad cultural commitment to adult learning as part of regular civic life.

And here is the real point, the substantive relevance.  Put crudely, pedagogy has stifled synagogy. The education of young people has swollen to dimensions, which crowd out the chance of a balanced system of lifelong learning.  We are on course for social arrangements, which channel all young people up to the age of 20 and perhaps even 25 into some kind of formal learning.  Adolescence is grossly extended. The pedagogues will have their work cut out to lead many of these adolescents unwillingly to school, let alone to keep them there in any positive sense; and it’s not at all clear what the benefits are, to anyone.

Imagine instead that the public commitment, and the resources, had been to learning for all - to synagogy not just pedagogy.  Let’s shorten the historical timeframe massively, back just two decades or so, narrow the focus to the decision to aim for 50% enrolment in higher education, and consider the potential alternatives.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK estimates annual up-front government expenditure on higher education at around £17 billion, depending on various assumptions. The projected cumulative higher education debt mountain is much higher – in the region of £50 billion.  For the purposes of this argument it doesn’t much matter whether we think of the debt as public or private, so we can sidestep the debate as to whether young people are deterred by fear of a financial arrangement, which is not a debt in the true sense.  It’s still money that has gone out of the door, paying for university expansion. 

Much of that expansion has been physical, with shiny new buildings popping up everywhere to accommodate students, including in places of acute public housing shortage. It’s not clear who has really benefited from all this additional spending.  Certainly the lives of university staff, apart from a few at the very top, don’t appear to have improved, with heavy demands that bear only a distant relationship to teaching or research, on procedural tasks such as quality assessment.  As for the students, the experience is often depressing, with contact hours at anorexic levels; and talking of depression and anorexia, students’ mental health is an increasingly serious issue through to the point of suicides. 

But what about the benefits, the improved careers?  Very varied, is the answer, very varied indeed.  Some graduates from some universities do very well, moving quickly into highly paid work, but it’s not at all clear how much that has to do with what they have learnt as opposed to the signalling provided to employers by the selectiveness of these universities.  Some do much less well, and some poorly. In any case, the fundamental measure of the graduate premium means that their success is defined in relation to those who do not graduate – a thoroughly relative concept, which has only a tenuous link to our overall wellbeing.

That’s enough of the negative.  I don’t want to do down higher education, still less those who work in it.  My point is simply to ask what the opportunity costs have been of the billions spent on higher education.  Let’s take just the current spend of around £17billion, not the cumulated total; and let’s just take the part of it, say 20%, that would have been available if universities had not all rushed to expand.  That gives us about £2.5billion.  Had it gone into promoting synagogy, not swelling pedagogy, what might the consequences have been?  (With all due respect to all university students, the ‘ped’ part of pedagogy does increasingly apply to them, as mature students in the UK have been largely shown the door.)  A big chunk of it – perhaps half of the 20% - should go into further education colleges.  But let’s say the remaining 10% - that is, £1-1.5 billion - was available for our secular synagogues.  Imagine how many towns and villages across the country could have well-designed local centres where adults could easily come to learn, sometimes from each other and sometimes calling in outsiders with particular expertise or experience to give their discussions shape and direction.

This happens, of course. It’s an age-old image; it is in exactly this mode that the University of the Third Age operates, and it flourishes. But the U3A is largely self-funding, which inevitably restricts its social range, and it caters for a specific age group, when what we need is wide-ranging and diverse.  Other adult colleges survive.  I’m particularly proud of the Working Men’s College in Camden where I served as governor, but there are equally worthy others to be found in London and beyond. Yet they are under-recognised and in constant danger of total marginalisation.

A decade ago Learning Through Life, the final report of the National Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning, analysed the age distribution of all the resources going into learning - government, employer and individual expenditure.  We showed that the allocation of the total across four adult age groups - 18-25, 26-50, 51-75, 76+ - was respectively 86%; 12%; 2.5%; and 1.5%. This is a striking misallocation, especially given demographic trends towards an ageing population.  My guess is that the concentration on the front end is even greater now, even though the population growth has been mainly in the older age groups.

What more appropriate fora could there be than our ‘secular synagogues’ to raise the level of civic debate – most pertinently, to encourage the kinds of exchange that we need in the wake of Britain’s Brexit debacle? Different generations might meet and learn from and about each other – a crucial social challenge, with huge implications for health and wellbeing.  In particular, the massive availability of online resources means that almost infinite content is there for the downloading. What is needed are spaces for these resources to be used collectively, with the proper professional support to make full use of the wonderful opportunities the new technologies offer.

Exactly a century ago the National Commission on Adult Education sketched a picture of just such a network of learning spaces. A centenary revisiting of that seminal report is under way, and there are other commissions under way as lifelong learning maybe enters one of its recurrent upswings.  Any of these could seize the moment.

Tom Schueller

This article appears in the PIMA Bulletin No 26.