Education, Education, Education: or, What has Jane Austen to teach Tony Blunkett?

The difference between training and education has been recognised at least since the days when Socrates searched Athens for someone who knew more than he himself did—and was disappointed to find many craftsmen but no philosophers. The distinction persisted strongly when the universities developed in the twelfth and thirteenth Christian centuries. It was continuously vindicated by poets, novelists, essayists, and generation after generation of teachers, from the Renaissance until about the time Kenneth Baker became Education Secretary, whereupon it vanished from English consciousness—so completely, that the polytechnics were renamed universities, the universities made polytechnics and the Departments of Education and Employment merged, as if that were not only obviously sensible in itself but perfectly consistent with two‐and‐a‐half thousand years of previous thought and practice. The English educated classes are now composed of amnesiacs.