The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics: - Higher Education ...

The Scholarship of Engagement for Politics
apparent ‘honesty’, ‘integrity’ and ‘forthrightness’, the judgement of its
quality is more elusive. I will return to this argument following a broader
historical and cultural review of status of placement learning in UK higher
education.
The status of placement learning
The radical student politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s informed and
was informed by the discipline of sociology. Demonstrations, sit-ins, teachins
and occupations were part of the lifeblood of sociology at the time.
There is an apocryphal story of a university vice-chancellor reassuring his
governing body, who were witnessing a student demonstration on campus,
by claiming that there was no need to worry – it was only the sociology
department ‘doing their practicals’. The manifest comic feature of this
story is a confirmation of the stereotype of the radical sociology student.
However, the latent quality is the idea that sociology has its uses. Its
students can practically engage with the world in an ‘acquisition of life
skills’.
Since that time, and in keeping with the predominant values of UK
higher education, sociology has resisted attempts to brand it ‘useful’. An
education in sociology was to be precisely that, i.e. not training. A
university education for much of the second half of the twentieth century
was still ensconced in the liberal tradition informed by the writings of
Newman. According to Newman, education should promote its chief aim,
‘knowledge its own end’. Education might be useful in terms of the
formation of character, but this was not to be its prime purpose. In other
words, so-called ‘transferable skills’ should be allowed to develop in an
emergent and passive fashion. They should not be taught directly for fear
of encouraging instrumentality, the most heinous of sins: ‘Knowledge . . . is
valuable for what its very presence in us does for us after the manner of a
habit, even though it be turned to no further account, nor subserve any
direct end’ (Newman 1999: 95).
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