Learning glues us together

15th March 2002, 12:00am

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Learning glues us together

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/learning-glues-us-together
The benefits of education are not merely academic. Studying can lead to a happier, healthier and more balanced life, says Tom Schuller

We live in an over-tested world. But while we measure pupil progress frequently we seem to focus on only a narrow aspect of their development. How much difference does learning make to people as parents or citizens or carers, or indeed in any of the many roles they will have apart from being a wage earner?

The Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning is one of a number of such centres set up in the past three years. As a co-director, I am hardly a disinterested party, but this was a bold initiative. It was also bold (as well as difficult) to give us such a broad remit: to gauge the non-economic effects of learning on health, active citizenship and improvements in family lives. We are asking questions that are simple, and yet fundamental to the beliefs of most people involved in education.

Why is what we are doing important? It gives the Government a chance to shape policy on the basis of evidence rather than hunches, and for those policy issues to be debated openly and widely. It offers the challenge of looking at longer term and more broad educational outcomes. It reintroduces basic questions of the value of learning, counterbalancing the labour market-driven priorities which sometimes dominate.

One particular goal we have is to bring together sophisticated quantitative analysis and original fieldwork, using in-depth interviews. My co-director John Bynner is in charge of wonderful longitudinal data sets, charting the progress of 12,000-strong cohorts from birth to adult life. Our research director is an econometrician who analyses the complex link between, say, education and crime levels.

This work is complemented by talking to people about the effect of learning on their lives. These are still early days, but for me, the strongest finding has been the way in which education simply sustains us in our daily lives. Education can transform, but we should not forget this fundamental sustaining power, which operates at the personal but also the collective level. Parents of young children who have precious little time to themselves nevertheless make time for part-time education. There were numerous accounts of people fighting off depression, or regaining their mental equilibrium as a result of their studies. Few of these would have ended up as mental health service users, but the effects of learning in sustaining mental and psychological well-being are hard to exaggerate.

Learning also glues us together, if that doesn’t sound too unpleasant. Schools and colleges bring people together and they then learn to understand and tolerate different viewpoints. This underpins a sense of citizenship. But it has a more active side, as learning both grows out of and fosters people’s community activity. It gives them the confidence and skills to participate in civic life, in the local neighbourhood or beyond.

This is what is sometimes called “social capital”: when people get together in networks, sharing values and building trust to common ends. In quite complex ways, education fosters diverse kinds of social capital - and vice-versa.

We heard much about the poor quality of initial schooling, however long ago that was. But even those who had not been successful at school often had a good teacher who left them with some positive memory. These memories act as a spur to get back into the system, maybe decades later. Many teachers can have no idea of this kind of “sleeper” effect.

It is amazingly difficult to identify what we call neat causality - where this specific bit of learning leads to that specific effect. But we are starting to piece together the jigsaw.

Tom Schuller, formerly of Edinburgh University, is dean of the faculty of continuing education at Birkbeck College, London

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