New ideas for education will flow to the West from the developing world, says Prof. James Tooley

An educational revolution is happening behind (politicians') backs. The Chinese failed to rescue British car manufacturing, but to China we must look to see the future of education. People there talk openly of the "education industry". In China - and India too - private education, whether chains of posh academies and universities, the mushrooming of private schools for the poor, or innovative e-learning for the masses, is becoming big business. As the market progresses, competition will force prices down, and force the pace of innovation.

My prediction is that innovation in education, if freed from the restraints of the state, will mean challenging the grossly inefficient and wasteful systems that governments have set in stone. Once this happens, education can be reclaimed from the "two tyrannies", the state and schooling. Free of the state, the educational market will be free to challenge the shibboleth of schooling. And once the new industry develops in the east, globalisation will bring the new sunrise industry to our shores.

says Prof. James Tooley, Professor of Education and Director of the E.G. West Centre, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the IEA 50th Anniversary Lecture on 20th April 2005 at the Institute of Economic Affairs, London. The E.G. West Centre is dedicated to understanding the role of choice, competition and entrepreneurship in the delivery of "Education for All."

Expanding on the above theme, Prof Tooley asks

What will education reclaimed mean in practice? As the market develops, we will wonder how it was possible to believe that all the diverse aims of education –preparation for citizenship, careers and family life, and initiation into the best that has been thought and known – could possibly be realised through schooling. Education will become organically linked again into everyday life, not forced into schools and colleges where young people sink into an alienated youth culture, into compulsory idleness and irresponsibility. And the market will look askance too at the wasteful egalitarian way in which all teachers are straitjacketed. Why, it will probe, are inspirational teachers given not only the same pecuniary rewards, but also the same number of children to teach, as teachers who lacked motivational ability? The market will not tolerate such inefficiency, and will reward those innovators who find more effective and efficient use of scarce teaching resources.

And what will educational institutions look like? Once education is reclaimed, I believe that question will look rather odd. Education will be known to pervade the whole of society. Educational institutions will be family homes, workplaces, sports’ centres, town halls, reading rooms in pubs, debating chambers, bookstores, and so on. There might be some dedicated learning centres where you’ll go when you want to learn – you’ll probably see the distinctive bright orange logo of the “EasyLearn” chain, and the characteristic red “V” of “Virgin Opportunity”. And there would be “places apart”, like monasteries, dependent on subscriptions and patronage, where young and old together can engage in study and research for the love of it. But you won’t see the youth ghettoes we call schools and colleges. They’ll definitely be consigned to the wastebin of history, a state-sponsored experiment that grossly failed.

For politicians, the threat comes from the east. For everyone else, it will be liberation.

Prof. Tooley's vision of the future is quite radical, but not necessarily utopian, I would think. A lot of food to provoke thought.