John Astley, author and facilitator of Exmouth community education column, writes for the Journal.

In my recent piece for the Journal on utopias I emphasised my continued faith in young people to keep us thinking about their and our futures.

In this article I want say a little more about how the very ideas, attitudes and realities of contemporary society get in their way.

In my 2005 book, ‘Liberation and Domestication’ about the everyday lives of young people I said;

‘One central concern for any democratic society is to ensure that each new generation accedes to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Much of this concern is associated with the processes that turn children in to role taking adults. Will the younger generation take on the mantle of adulthood, play their part in the continuing development of a civilised society, and in large part legitimate the activities of key social and political institutions?’

Nothing has changed in this respect, except that the often problematic nature of these crucial transitions, has in my opinion, become more difficult. I believe this is especially so in what I have called the relationships between the way young people make their identity, and how does this then have an impact on their access to the ‘opportunity structure’ available for them?

A key issue here and now is that the opportunities for young people is impeded by an educational system that absorbs much more effort for less return. A significant factor here now, and consistently since 1945, is lack of a coherent development in technical and vocational education as an integral part of secondary and higher education. There have been dozens of reports looking at the need for such policy, but at every turn successive governments have committed to an elitist system in one form or another, which the current GCE A level epitomises. One of the most recent visits to this debate was in 2003/4 when Mike Tomlinson, a former member of the national education inspectorate regime, produced a report on the urgent need to streamline the post 14 curriculum and make qualification more flexible and understandable for us all. This report, like most the previous ones, was effectively ignored by the Blair government in the lead up to their 2005 White Paper on 14-19 skills training. Indeed, Blair in welcoming the Report, stated that for him, A level was still the gold standard!

My own grammar school education in the late 50s/early 60s, exemplifies this continuation of a social class and elitist education snobbery, which continues to this day. Even then we had to deal with the artificial split between sciences and arts/humanities; I went down the latter route, but have always tried to keep up to date with ‘science’. Particularly the biological and psychological approaches to understanding ourselves, key issues for me as a sociologist.

We should be doing better by now. There was a period of progress and hope in the 1960s when Crosland and the Labour government introduced an expansion of technical education with the creation of Polytechnics and Technical education in Further Education colleges. But, sadly the obsession with elitist education, and bogus standards won out in the 1990s with the ‘upgrading’ of Polys to university status. From then on, for all higher education, we took the road to a business, money making model, that has now spiralled out of control. It’s a mess, and for me, another example of how the obsessively acquisitive, consumer oriented way of life has swindled the vast majority of us, especially so young people. The precariousness of a ‘snakes and ladders’ life is still there!

Writing as long ago as 1982, Jeremy Seabrook wrote;

‘All societies involve the interplay of (often scant) material resources with (mostly abundant) human energy, ingenuity and skills. In most societies until now the latter have been the significant factor. In recent years however, the former has been in the ascendant. One consequence of this has been that many hard-one traditional skills have perished among the mass of people.’

We can see this today, with many promises of a great new high-tech future for young people (and their gadgets seem to confirm this) but, I have my doubts.