Unreadable red bile

This overlong, self-serving anti-capitalist screed of a book is defined by an undisguised dislike of anything in education that fosters elitism or profit. It is simply another contribution to the bloated library of works that seek to reshape schools and universities into utilitarian extensions of socialist reductionism. Guy Standing’s “progressive” ideas, forced through the linguistic mincer of his deadening prose, create a kind of anti-learning: each page endarkens rather than enlightens, bludgeoning the reader with endless facts about why this private-equity company has bought out that one in order to maximise profits on something, or anything, related to education. On and on the examples come, like a river of red bile, attempting to drown any contrary position. You begin to yearn for a spark of vivid prose or a new, telling insight, but in vain. Instead, we trudge through chapters with titles like “The Commodification of Education” and “The Smirk of Finance”, the only hope in sight being the distant Appendix.

The book’s 400-plus pages are predicated on a silly, antediluvian metaphor: namely, that education is a common, public good which, like common land, has been enclosed, privatised and corrupted by “rentier capitalism” (one of Standing’s favourite terms). He writes that the book was prompted “by a belief that the commons and commoning have been at the heart of all progressive transformations”. This is quite a claim, but it is difficult to see what part “commoning”, that now-neglected communal activity, played in the invention of vaccines and antibiotics, nuclear fusion, the microchip, satellite technology or spaceflight. For Standing, however, these may not count as “progressive” innovations, coming as they do largely from private companies recklessly committed to making money so that they can invest in the research and organisations they support.

Indeed, you begin to suspect that what Standing means by “progressive” is, in reality, deeply primitive. He quotes approvingly the Nigerian academic Ngozi Unuigbe, who has “argued convincingly that shared indigenous ecological knowledge is inherently more democratic than the esoteric knowledge of scientific experts”. The obvious response is: so what? What would you choose: a herbal remedy believed to cure headaches by many indigenous people, or a paracetamol? Such an answer is, no doubt, for Standing, hopelessly ethnocentric. Indeed, in a statement of astonishing ignorance, he claims that “scientific knowledge is the servant of capitalism”.

Standing admits that “commoning” effectively “ceased to have any meaning” in the twentieth century, but this does not stop him attempting to resurrect it on almost every page, and each time he does he manages to make his meaning increasingly less clear. It does not seem to occur to him that the death of his much-loved, shared, selfless activity reflects not merely a linguistic redundancy but the fact that the activity itself is no longer needed. For any modern, complex society seeking to educate its population, private companies are essential if we are to avoid being stuck with a one-size-fits-all, inert, state-run blob: a sector owned, apparently, by all, led by nobody, and disenfranchising the many.

There seems little chance of Standing’s vision succeeding. Not because education is under-populated with idealistic extremists who despise financial, pedagogical or institutional independence of any sort, nor because there is a shortage of well-meaning liberals willing to trash the Enlightenment if it makes them feel less guilty about their country’s history. Standing’s book will remain largely unread because it is unreadable (and, to borrow a line from Martin Amis, I should know because I’ve read it). He claims that “the state has never promoted a universalistic, de-commodified education commons,” and that education once provided to “the upper classes” has been pushed “downwards”, leading to a shift from class to identity politics and the neglect of an “emancipatory education commons”. As rallying cries go, such language lacks urgency.

Standing argues that much of what has gone wrong in education is the excessive influence of the moneymen. He sees no irony in this claim, even though, as an economist by trade, he could be accused of doing exactly the same thing. But he attempts to distance himself from his dismal science by asserting that “empathy is at the heart of good education”. Yet this book, with its erroneous arguments, indecipherable prose, and tedious corralling of “facts” displays little understanding or empathy for the issues it seeks to explain. For the common good, it should either be consigned to the educational remainder bin of history, or held up as a perfect example of how an educated man can write something so profoundly and irredeemably fatuous.