Abstract
The emphasis, in the service of promoting lifelong learning, in various national and European level government policy initiatives on developing basic skills in their populations for the workplace and for other uses in life has been, and is still, in different ways both appropriate and not appropriate. It is appropriate if we place the emphasis on the term ‘skill’ as a form of knowledge, and if we place emphasis on ‘basic’ in the context of providing a focus for increasing life’s opportunities for those relatively dispossessed. It is inappropriate if we are forced to pretend that skills are discrete, specific entities that can, along with the people in possession of them, ‘transfer’ unproblematically from one learning context to another. It is inappropriate further if we were to treat skills as always basic and technicist, as if lower knowledge levels are the limit of entitlement for citizens, or always a-contextually generic. The English conception of ‘skill’ promotes this inappropriate emphasis, which is also an economic and employment-led perspective, fuelled by neo-liberal hegemony. Domination of the English language, and hence prevalence of the English term ‘skill’, across the European Community will be reinforcing this particular conception as if it were universally appropriate. The key question concerning how we serve the appropriate policy for lifelong learning is ultimately an ontological one about the nature of skills. Certain amongst both proponents and opponents of the skills agenda are stuck in a ‘realist’ mindset which demands critique. It promotes, on the one hand, an unhelpful deficit model of skills as discrete concrete requirements and, on the other hand, gives licence to the equally unhelpful challenge that skills and higher knowledge attainments are worlds apart. Reconceptualising skills as ‘knowledge practices’ enables us to open up analysis of the term and avoid the unhelpful connotations. In turn, we can understand better how an agent can exploit knowledge from one context of use into another and can develop judgement, the most important of all ‘skills‘, and get closer to the ‘Good Life’.
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Notes
- 1.
This phrase is, of course, handed down to us from Aristotle through his concept of Eudaimonia: ‘human flourishing’ (White 1997) is a modern equivalent alternative.
- 2.
c.f. Tessaring and Wannan (2004, p. 3); they go on (pp. 5 and 23) to advocate that job-related skills and competences, not just academic excellence, are the key to progress.
- 3.
‘[…] to ensure that people’s knowledge and skills match the changing demands of jobs and occupations, workplace organisation and working methods’ (sec. 1, p. 5); ‘The driving force that brought lifelong learning back onto policy agendas in the 1990s has been the concern to improve citizens’ employability and adaptability’ (sec. 3.2, p. 9); ‘Europe has moved towards a knowledge-based society and economy. More than ever before, access to up-to-date information and knowledge, together with the motivation and skills to use these resources intelligently on behalf of oneself and the community as a whole, are becoming the key to strengthening Europe’s competitiveness and improving the employability and adaptability of the workforce’ (sec. 2, p. 5).
- 4.
c.f., subsequently: European Commission (2001), Eurydice and CEDEFOP (2001). Indeed, a ‘Eurobarometer’ survey shows that this better reflects people’s motivations to engage in future learning (van Rens and Stavrou 2003, p. 19); c.f. Davies (2001). Aside from varieties of individual motivation, the Memorandum does ‘not take account of learning as a social, collective activity’ (Summers 2000, p. 231). Arguably, any humanistic language is largely rhetorical, even pre-Memorandum: ‘the EU’s action programmes are relentlessly vocational, utilitarian and instrumental in their emphasis’ (Field 1998, p. 8).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
c.f. Winch, ‘Skill – a concept manufactured in England?’ Chapter 6, in Brockmann et al. (2011), p. 88.
- 8.
c.f. Hanf, ‘The changing relevance of the Beruf’, Chapter 4, in Brockmann et al. (2011), p. 57.
- 9.
Regrettably inspired by contributions to Western thought such as from Gilbert Ryle: Winch, ‘Skill – a concept manufactured in England?’ Chapter 6, in Brockmann et al. (2011), pp. 90–93.
- 10.
Reflection upon which would become redundant: Brockmann, Clarke, Winch, Hanf, Méhaut and Westerhuis, ‘Interpretive dictionary: competence, qualification, education, knowledge’, Chapter 10, in Brockmann et al. (2011), pp. 180–184.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
c.f. Westerhuis, ‘The meaning of competence’, Chapter 5, in Brockmann et al. (2011), p. 81.
- 14.
Méhaut and Winch, ‘EU initiatives in cross-national recognition of skills and qualifications’, Chapter 2, in Brockmann et al. (2011), suggest (pp. 30–31) that and this is probably a political decision, given licence by the conceptual bias prevalent in the UK usage against autonomy in the workplace (once English is granted dominant language status, a prior political decision in turn). The political decision would ostensibly be aimed to benefit employers who would want a compliant workforce, although, ultimately, such a policy will benefit no one, in terms of facilitating neither the Good Life universally nor the higher potential of workers to be more productive.
- 15.
c.f. Winch, ’Skill – a concept manufactured in England?’ chapter 6, in Brockmann et al. (2011), pp. 99–100.
- 16.
c.f. Winch, ’Skill – a concept manufactured in England?’ Chapter 6, in Brockmann et al. (2011), pp. 90–93.
- 17.
In nursing this would mean caring for a patient as a person with feelings and with a biological welfare, but, rather than just having consideration for the person as an end in itself, the nurse needs to focus on carrying out the job of work conducive to that end in the medical context; thus the caring is analogous to the context of the plumber caring for good design and maintenance of a plumbing system. Winch correctly emphasises just this point, that care to do the job well is what matters, but then expands this view fallaciously to claim that the important task to this end is ultimately to cultivate the virtues of general living to make ‘the way one exercises a skill in this sense […] partly constitutive of one’s character’ (ibid., p. 100).
- 18.
Lum (2009, pp. 22–24) adopts the same stance as I do against what he calls the ‘orthodox’ view of skills shared by the skills ‘lobby’ and certain opponents of it.
- 19.
As if via an automatic mechanistic process: Winterton et al. (2006, p. 8). We need to wrest the concept of skill away from the automaton conformity fetishists – with apologies to Erich Fromm; but not to opponents of the skills agenda, e.g. Maskell and Robinson (2001, Chapter 5), Furedi (2004) and Rowland (2006, Chapter 4), who are yet beguiled by this conception of skills per se.
- 20.
So I still draw from Ryle but more appropriately, I would say! I illustrate irrealism further in Gough (2011), section on ‘Dimensions of (knowledge) practices’.
- 21.
Albeit perhaps attributable ultimately to the quirk of language which encourages us all to use primarily the noun term in English.
- 22.
c.f. Barnett (1990, p. 42) uses this term in his own way and others more recently.
- 23.
And, arguably, of a humanistic rather than technological sort, a point implicitly entertained by Chisholm et al. (2004, p. 34).
- 24.
I go into greater detail explaining the dimensions of knowledge practices and how the key dichotomies of discursive/nondiscursive, thin/thick and primary/secondary explain the place of judgement and the translation of ‘skills’ from learning environment to context of use, with the illustration of academic Philosophy as one such, in Gough (2011).
- 25.
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Gough, M. (2014). ‘New Basic Skills’, Nonbasic Skills, Knowledge Practices and Judgement: Tensions Between the Needs of Basic Literacy, of Vocational Education and Training and of Higher and Professional Learning. In: Zarifis, G., Gravani, M. (eds) Challenging the 'European Area of Lifelong Learning'. Lifelong Learning Book Series, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7299-1_5
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