This week’s blog is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Fellows here at the Lodge.
OG is Senior Fellow, Dr Owen Gower. AG is Annie Gosling, the King George VI Fellow.
AG: If this question implies that we undervalue the technical skills of, say, mechanics and construction workers, then I think the answer must be “No”. My sense is that we do, as a society, admire that sort of technical skill. The reason for this is that British people tend to respect skills which they themselves don’t have.
OG: I’m not sure about that. Isn’t what happens that people value the skill only insofar as they value the product of the skill? So because we want cars that work, we value the mechanic’s skill. It isn’t our awareness of our own ignorance that makes us admire the mechanic, is it?
AG: Well, perhaps we do partly respect the skill for the benefit it brings. But I do also think that we respect something intrinsic in the skill itself. We just like it when someone is a ‘master-builder’ or an expert mechanic. Think about how, for example, mechanics are perhaps less respected now than they were twenty years ago because of the increased use of computers in diagnosing faults.
OG: So the computer diminishes the mechanic’s autonomy?
AG: Possibly.
OG: Does that mean that what we really admire is self-reliance?
AG: Yes, but along with that goes an admiration of the use of our hands. When something can be made or fixed directly with our hands, we tend to value it more highly.
OG: Doesn’t that imply, in fact, a kind of inverse ‘anti-intellectual’ snobbery in British society?
AG: I guess so. We value the practical and the hands-on, rather than the abstract. You can see this in a lot of the debate about higher education. The value of education is often described in terms that make it sound as though universities are only useful insofar as they produce tangible benefits, such as economic enhancement.
OG: Do you think, though, that if we could somehow connect the value of education to the established ‘British’ admiration for self-reliance, we could focus the debate about what university education is good for? So if you could say that university education makes you intellectually self-reliant, you would automatically establish its value in our society?
AG: Well, it depends on whether you really think that self-reliance is a key value in British society or whether, as I’m inclined to think, admiration for ‘the practical’ is dominant.
OG: So we’re back to valuing whatever has a practical, concrete outcome?
AG: Yes. As far as education goes, then, it’s no use trying to fit the value of education into the ways in which we use admiration and respect in British life. We have to develop a new way of talking about the values that is, in a way, ‘un-British’.
OG: ...develop a new way of talking about value, or recapture an ancient way, perhaps...
This discussion was cut short and will be returned to in a forthcoming blog entry...
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