Are skills the opposite of education?

Very well put Athene.

And may I say with great wisdom and reason. But moving on from the ancient Greek is vital and part of your case I believe. I think recognising the interdisciplinary skills dimension of education is critical if we are to make what universities are “good for” about the purpose of what learners can do, rather than continuously harking back to what we lament that universities were “good at”. This was often the case when their focus was on making sure the elite remained the elite. These are different times, with broader needs, that call for diverse solutions, and as you say fewer demarcations.

Since I’m being referred to – indeed, critiqued – in Dame Donald’s blog, I had better enter the lists again.

I’m afraid that Dame Donald’s text completely mistakes my position. I was NOT arguing that ‘skills’ and ‘education’ should be kept separate – quite the reverse. Indeed, I agree with Dame Donald that there are considerable advantages in keeping them in close juxtaposition.

In brief, I was making neither a conceptual point (about the concepts of ‘skill’ and ‘education’) nor a normative point (as to how skills should be developed in higher education). Rather, I was making a sociological observation about the discourses that are present here, namely that the discourse of skills and the discourse of education nowadays keep themselves to themselves and rarely acknowledge the other. And I cited a HEPI blog as illustrative of the point.

Much to Dame Donald’s surprise, perhaps, it turns out that we are much on the same side, that the polarisation of these discourses is harmful on several fronts.

What I would add – which is also implicit in my earlier HEPI blog – is that while that polarisation is problematic, one should also be wary of believing that the ideas of ‘skills’ and ‘education’ are synonymous. There are considerable complexities and even tensions between them that contain educational potential.

Holding skills and education together, but not in a facile way, IS part of the challenge of education in the C21.

Ron Barnett

The distinction between education and skills matters. How we use these words is not the subject of the political discourse being discussed here, it is why we use the word skills as the purpose of higher education, as a contradiction, in opposition to only education. The purpose of higher education is education for that is how it is. The idea of higher education was invented, before then we only had universities which educated. The reason why the skills political discourse has got muddled with the education discourse is due to politicians and their advisors wanting to make parallels and then institutional connections between different parts of institutional apparatus whose purpose is to prepare people for employment. The state has never had a Department for Skills. It has had a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Universities could never teach you everything you needed to know and do for employment, only organization-specific training and experience can realise those abilities. Universities readied you for only a few occupations, it was only during the 19th century academic subjects were invented in number without employment as their purpose. Industrialization and trade forced the universities to invent evermore subjects, now with the purpose of employment in industry and the civil service. As deindustrialization occurred and unemployment grew, employers wanted skills they could simply slot into a job with the minimum of cost and so the 1981 White Paper was published with a focus on skills training in further education, apprenticeships having been abandoned. In the last 20 years, the 2003 White Paper wanted higher education to accept further education qualifications as a route for entry into higher education. Skills training for employment are supposed to be an equivalent way of thinking as in higher education, but it is not. How a university academic approaches the execution of the same work task is not the same as a further education teacher, even if they have been taught similar skills. The cultural and institution-specific background matters. Cambridge is not the same as Oxford for the same degree subject and I think that is a good thing and further education is not the same as higher education and that is a good thing as well. The rare combination of skills training for employment and then higher education is good, but it is not same as A-levels.

I’ll also echo Ron – I was attempting to describe the use of ‘skills’ as a bureaucratic instrument in policy discourse, which are distinct from the complicated and interwoven range of learned capacities and knowledges imbedded in people (in which, as Dame Donald argues and I agree, are falsely demarcated between education and skills). I hope I was able to argue that this type of policy language is one of the reasons why ‘skills’ and ‘education’ has become so polarised and that this usage has consequences for how we allocate resources.

While there are some agreeable points in this piece, the necessary correctives have already been achieved in the comments. Prof Barnett is of course correct to point out that his objection is one against a reductive discourse.

The “grammar” of skills allows us to use this term in a variety of ways. Personally I would recommend the work of Christopher Winch on professional know-how, a much more nuanced path into this area.

I am piqued a little by Dame Athene’s comment on writing: “Why is being educated in how to turn a fine phrase not a useful skill to any future employment? Civil servants’ ability to write papers on any and every topic in lucid (one hopes) prose surely relies on such abilities.”

The turn of phrase as a skill, yes… but how do we describe the ability to turn this skill to good use in different contexts?

Teaching and promoting the ability to write in the modern university is something I can get on with. The occasions for doing so in the AI age – that’s problematic.

It is a dangerous thing to argue with Dame Athene, firstly because she puts her case so brilliantly, but most importantly, because she is invariably right.

Not only are education and skills overlapping and not opposites, they are not even the same class of concept. ‘Skills’ are attributes – properties of a person. ‘Education’ is a process through which a person may acquire attributes such as skills and knowledge.

So, if we’re looking for an opposite to ‘education’, ‘training’ might be a better candidate, but it’s not either for the reasons Dame Athene has argued. Training is a process that is entirely complementary with education – and sometime overlapping, sometimes barely distinct from it.

Rather than getting bogged down in arguments about skills vs education that frankly come across as intellectual snobbery, higher education should be more explicit at every stage and opportunity about how, as a process, it develops roundedness which encompasses skills, knowledge, values, attitudes, behaviours, and even social capital.

In the context of work, this roundedness may be described as ’employability’, and, while it’s absolutely accurate to do so, that reduces it to a purely transactional role.

Through (higher) education, we need to foster not only that roundedness in our students, but an explicit understanding in them – a self-awareness – of exactly what qualities they are developing and to what purposes they might turn them. Then, they can examine their qualities and, if looking the lens of careers, recognise them as employability, but if looking through other lenses, they may equally see their life skills, their identity, their sense of fulfilment even.

I asked Claude to write 4 critiques of this debate from the viewpoint of an academic scholar, someone trying to get into oxbridge, a single mum wanting to upskill, and a child in a poverty trap in Africa. This is what it came up with. Make of it what you will. But let us all consider who learning is for.

15:36Claude responded: The Academic Scholar
Donald’s anecdotal STEM reasoning bypasses substantial philosophical literature on skill and capability. The Donald-Barnett exchange, though collegial, obscures a genuine tension between critical citizenship and labour market instrumentalism. Most critically, all contributors neglect the material conditions — defunding, marketisation — that actually drive the skills discourse, leaving the debate curiously depoliticised.

The Oxbridge Applicant
This debate feels abstract when every personal statement workshop already treats curiosity and capability as inseparable. The suggestion that critical thinking belongs only to humanities would baffle my Further Maths teacher. And nobody at any Oxbridge open day ever said they wanted “skilled applicants” — they want people who genuinely love their subject.

The Single Mum
Professors debating whether skills and education are philosophically distinct haven’t considered childcare costs, benefit entitlements, or flexible timetabling. The only question that matters for someone like me is whether I can actually access either one. “Roundedness” and “self-awareness” are luxuries when you’re just trying to earn enough before school pickup.

The Orphaned Child
Cambridge professors arguing about terminology on websites I can barely load feels impossibly distant from walking hours to a roofless classroom. Whatever you call it — skills, education, roundedness — I just need access to it. The people who escaped poverty here used all of it simultaneously, because for us it means survival.