Why do we need to learn this?” It is a question that has interrupted many lessons. Until recently, there has always been a reliable answer to fall back on: “Because it’s on the exam.”

But this year, “because it’s on the exam” hasn’t been an option, so it may have been trickier for teachers to avoid being drawn into discussions about what exactly the point is of this lesson on the subjunctive tense/Newton’s laws/Death of a Salesman.

And although the middle of your lesson might not be the appropriate time to have it, the pandemic has shown us that this is an important discussion to have.

The recent lockdowns have forced us to consider how we should judge the impact of pupils spending time out of school and, by association, to consider an even bigger question: what is the true value of education?

Earlier this year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies attempted to put a price on it, estimating that the lost school time could cost UK pupils £40,000 each in future lifetime earnings.

Teachers, too, will often tell a student that the reason why they “need to learn” something is because it will help them to get the grade that will land them a good job - and by “good job”, they usually mean a job that pays well enough for them to live comfortably.

But is this really what we want the primary measure of education to be? How has this become our go-to?

The Covid era is an ideal time to ask whether a narrow focus on the earnings returns of education is preventing us from understanding the full effects of education on people’s lives, what is driving those effects and whether our current curriculum lines up with what we believe the value of education to be.

Measuring the worth of education in terms of future earnings can be done relatively easily and is often a major focus for policymakers. The Department for Education (DfE) Longitudinal Education Outcomes dataset, pored over by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and other economists, makes it possible to look at how people’s earnings vary according to the university they attended and subject they studied, plus their A-level, Btec or equivalent grades.

In gathering this data, the DfE follows the traditional human capital theory approach adopted by many economists studying education.

David Deming, professor of public policy at Harvard University, observes that human capital theory sees a person as being like a factory: as one might spend money on equipment to make a factory run more efficiently, “you pump some knowledge into somebody’s head so they can churn out more widgets per hour and earn more”. Death of a Salesman knowledge pumped into heads = higher earnings.

But while human capital theory is “not wrong” - education does make people more productive - and we have a lot of evidence “basically showing that when you get more education, you earn more … What we have a lot less evidence on is why”, Deming continues. “What is it about being in school that increases your earnings?”

The purpose of education

What complicates matters is that education does not just increase your earnings, it also has a positive impact on your life in many other ways, and it is hard to pick apart the relationship between these factors, higher earnings and education.

Many economists who have looked beyond earnings returns would argue that having more or better education - more compulsory schooling, higher education or receiving early educational interventions - is associated with a huge array of life benefits, including living longer, being happier, even having better chances of hooking up (Ghent University researchers found that Tinder users “prefer potential partners with a higher education level compared to themselves” ).

Economists who study these benefits often trace them back to the non-cognitive skills we gain through education (social skills, teamwork, resilience), which influence our mental health and happiness.

Gaining these skills is “important in the labour force but they are also what makes us ‘us’ as adults,” says Philip Oreopoulos, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Toronto.

Oreopoulos co-authored one of the key academic papers on the “non-pecuniary” returns of education, published in 2011. It looked at data from the US General Social Surveys, finding that when having roughly the same annual household income, high-school graduates reported being happy about 4 percentage points more often than high-school dropouts.

The study also found that, as people’s number of years in education increased, they were less likely to have been divorced or separated, to agree with the statement that “it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard spanking”, or to have been arrested.

Whether or not you think being divorced correlates with being unhappy is up for debate. But that aside, there is another question here about whether education is causing these effects. Couldn’t it just be that the kind of people who complete more education and are more likely to stay married come from certain family backgrounds? That is a hotly contested debate among economists of education.

Oreopoulos and his co-author, Kjell Salvanes, of the Norwegian School of Economics, tried to drill into this issue. They looked at Norwegian administrative data - which gathers a lot of information about siblings - to compare siblings who had spent different numbers of years in education (in theory, a way to take family background out of the equation). Siblings with one more year of schooling than a fellow sibling were found to be less likely to be unemployed, less likely to be divorced and less likely to be receiving disability payments (which the researchers take to be an indication of better health).

Another key economist to have studied the wider benefits of education - specifically in health - is Adriana Lleras-Muney, a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of her studies looked at what happened between 1915 and 1939, as around 30 US states changed their compulsory schooling and child labour laws, meaning some children born a few months apart ended up spending more or less time in school than each other. Her paper found that an additional year of education lowered the risk of dying in the next 10 years by “at least 3.6 percentage points”, while in 1960, one more year of education increased life expectancy at age 35 by as much as 1.7 years”.

Does having more education actually cause people to live longer, though? “That’s a very big debate,” says Lleras-Muney. “But it looks like, in the data, there’s the potential for that to be true.”

The reasons for this could include that “more educated individuals are better informed about health information…they tend to believe in science more”, so they do things like stop smoking or wear a seatbelt, she continues.

Perhaps then, when a student asks why they need to learn something, rather than telling them it is because they will need to know it for the exam, teachers should be telling them that they need to know it because it will increase their life expectancy.

Of course, while that connection exists statistically, the reality is more complicated.

More broadly, education “gives you the ability to learn new stuff”, skills in “information acquisition, dealing with uncertainty, the ability you have to change yourself and your behaviours, deal with others, and navigate systems like healthcare systems”, Lleras-Muney argues.

Yet there are plenty of economists studying education who would argue that there is another factor at play here: that the value of education is less in the skills it puts into us, more in the signals it sends to employers and the way people with lower levels of education - particularly those without university degrees - are treated by society.

Ultimately, elements of both arguments may be intertwined. The argument from economists like Oreopoulos and Lleras-Muney is that the socialisation and social skills gained through education are an essential - perhaps the essential - element of its value. And although much harder to measure, these social returns from education have been pinpointed by many as key casualties of the recent school closures.

Learning and earning

So, education has myriad benefits, not just financial ones. But do we know how far each benefit is connected and whether we could be doing things in a better way to boost these benefits? Nobel prizewinning University of Chicago economist James Heckman has carried out research evaluating interventions to boost early childhood development that could shed some light on just how important the social returns of education might be.

One such programme was the experimental Perry Preschool Project, targeted at disadvantaged African-American children in Ypsilanti, near Detroit, in the 1960s, which “fostered active child-centred learning through intensive interactions” between children and teachers. An initial group of 58 children was given the intervention, while a control group of 65 children was not given the intervention. Follow-up surveys were conducted with both groups at ages 15, 19, 27, 40 and 55.

Heckman has processed all of the data, finding “long-lasting impacts” from the Perry project, in particular for men.

“What we find is not only that these lives [of the people given the intervention] are more successful”, being “more likely to be married, more likely to have income”, but that their children’s lives “are more successful”, Heckman says. There are “substantial effects on reduced crime, higher level of education and engagement in wider society for the children of the original children”.

Heckman’s study has found that, at age 55, participants in the Perry Preschool Programme had much greater executive functioning skills - a measure of self-control, reasoning and decision-making - than those who did not participate.

The key benefit of this early education intervention and the thing that gave participants better outcomes, not just in employment but in everything across their lives was, says Heckman, the “enhancement of these social and emotional skills - the ability to control one’s life, the ability to make decisions about health, to make decisions about the health and wellbeing of your own children”.

What’s more, Heckman suggests that these social and emotional skills could be the return on education that makes a big difference, not just to an individual’s quality of life but also to society as a whole.

Heckman has tried to quantify the wider benefits from improved health or lower crime in monetary terms (fewer people committing crimes or using healthcare means governments spend less money on all these services). He puts the return on investment for the Perry Preschool Programme at between 7 and 10 per cent - which he has described as outperforming the stock market since the Second World War.

The idea behind expressing the social benefits from education in monetary terms is that this can help to persuade those in government making decisions about education policy to fund interventions that focus on social and emotional skills, Heckman thinks. “My point is we can quantify that and, at the same time, we show the whole range of benefits.”

Heckman points to the fact that even the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has focused a lot on cognitive skills and earnings returns to education in the past, is now developing a Study on Social and Emotional Skills (SES), which aims to assess “the conditions and practices that foster or hinder the development of social and emotional skills for 10- and 15-year-old students”.

The OECD’s decision to create the study stems from “a realisation that, for success in modern workplaces, modern societies, you need quite a broad range of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values,” says Andreas Schleicher, its director for education and skills. “The arrival of artificial intelligence pushes us to think much harder about what makes us human; where do we create value?”

He argues that the pandemic has “accelerated” the existing need to better understand learning not as “a transactional phenomenon” but as “a relational and social experience”.

Soft skills to pay the bills

But how far is this shift in focus towards valuing so-called “soft skills” being played out in classrooms? After all, while social and emotional skills are increasingly being taught explicitly, this is often happening primarily in the form of personal, social and health education sessions, which are often taught by non-specialists. Students are also not formally assessed on their progress in this subject as they are in, say, maths or English.

Is this something that needs to change? Heckman says that a lot of important work on developing these skills is already taking place in the earliest years of schooling.

“Teaching social and emotional skills, teaching how to stay on task - that’s already embodied in the curriculum of successful preschools,” says Heckman. “I think they [preschools] should recognise that they are producing those skills.”

However, Heckman’s research is an argument for the benefits of further investing in early educational interventions, the kind of approach dropped by the Conservative government in the abandoning of Sure Start.

More broadly, Heckman argues against the “crazy idea that tests would capture the essence of what’s important about a person and that schools should teach to the test”, and that, instead, seeking to foster those key character traits should be seen as the essence of education.

For Oreopoulos, the key to maximising the wider benefits of education for individuals might lie in how “to structure schooling in a way that students might enjoy it more, or not mind it as much”. He thinks it may be “not a bad idea to have honest conversations about what we’re trying to do here in education and, at young ages, to get students to really think about it” (maybe that research on people with more education doing better on Tinder could come in handy).

Oreopoulos says: “If students can understand, ‘all right, the labour market is starting to get kind of crappy and super-competitive and I don’t know how well [education] is going to help me, but it will help me in all these other skills and be useful to me in a lot of other ways’, I think an argument can be made for that.”

However, this shouldn’t be seen as an either/or choice looking at earnings returns or social benefits, some argue. The notion that non-cognitive “soft skills” are driving earnings returns to education is “extremely hard to prove” but “likely to be right”, says Deming.

His research looks at the role of non-cognitive skills in employment, at how “education makes you make better decisions and be more adaptive to changes in the workplace”. He asks: “Do we actually teach people how to make good decisions to achieve your objectives? It seems to me like we ought to, at some level of schooling.”

Schleicher agrees that social skills “are not just complementary to economic outcomes: they could also be highly predictive” of earnings returns to education.

And while research is moving in the right direction by paying more attention to the benefits of these skills, he believes there is still a key obstacle that is holding us back from mobilising our growing understanding in this area: “We have policymakers who are not willing to engage in this. They say, ‘look, we have too many things to do to teach people reading and maths; don’t come in with those kinds of additional demands’. I think that’s a mistake. In my view it [social and emotional skills] is one of the sources of inequalities that people do not realise.”

The new OECD study can “help us make our curricula fit for the 21st century”, Schleicher thinks. “Once we can actually see those social and emotional skills, we will be able to embed them more systematically into curricula and instruction design.”

That might suggest that we shouldn’t be looking at the earnings benefits of education on one hand, the social benefits on the other; seeing this as a matter of hard cash on one side of the scales against being in touch with your emotions on the other. Maybe it is the social benefits of education, and the so-called “soft” skills gained, that are actually driving those hard earnings returns.

In the wake of so much lost face-to-face learning time, perhaps measuring that loss in financial terms by way of earning potential isn’t entirely problematic, as long as we also acknowledge all the elements of education that are likely to be contributing to that earning potential - and use that as a starting point to consider whether our current focus for catch-up, and for education as a whole, is really where it needs to be.

John Morgan is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 28 May 2021 issue under the headline “What’s the point of school?”