Journal of Vocational Education & Training Isn' t

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Isn' t higher education employability? Gibbs P. T.

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To cite this article: Gibbs P. T. (2000) Isn' t higher education employability?, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 52:4, 559-571 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636820000200138

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Journal of Vocational Education and Training, Volume 52, Number 4, 2000

Isn’t Higher Education Employability? P.T. GIBBS Ashford, United Kingdom

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ABSTRACT This article seeks to avoid the conflation of employability and other, wider aims of education into one notion of higher education. Drawing initially on Aristotle and then on the existentialism, it attempts to distinguish between employability as one of the outcomes of higher education, and other aspects of personal and civic development. In doing so, the notion of competence is retained, but its link with vocationalism as a primary education aim is questioned.

Introduction To find a short answer to what is in essence the question ‘whom shall we educate and for what?’ is probably beyond this article. Here, I attempt only to explore some of the tensions within the discourses of employability and emancipating education. Rorty (1993) highlights such tension in, for instance, Aristotle’s own account of education, which resolves as concordant the development of an individual’s essential potentialities in the context of preserving the polis. In so doing, the potentialities of the individual and conjointly revealed with the potential well-being of the community.[1] In this article I will argue that employability has become the general characterisation of the polity good and may be disconcordant with individuals’ authentic well-being. I contrast the inauthenticity of employability with a more existentialist view of education. This sees the development of the individual as humanity as a wider discourse. By considering employability as one form and aim of higher education, where learning and education are contextualised as good in the sense of the need to be an education citizen [2] within an educated public. Employability is not the end of education, but a competency of the skilled authentic social agent. I see no difficulty in employability skills being incorporated within a more general set of aims for higher education, but I am concerned that we might instrumentalise our education system to such an extent that employability becomes the 559

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prime purpose of higher education, satisfying only often ill-informed and morally base notions of what is an adequate education by reference to a measurable return on financial investment. To do this, I will initially offer a definition of employability and then discuss three reservations that I have to the centrality of employability in state sponsored education, and progress to looking to existential life-long education as an alternative educational aim.


Employability One contribution which, I propose, higher education ought to make is to the creative revelation of an individual’s potential. Its aims ought to be much wider than any one ideological notion of sustainable employment, and extends to engagement with the individual’s development and wellbeing, morally as well as economically. In these aims for higher education tutors help students in their preparation for an active and creative membership of the communities they choose when they graduate. These communities include the professional bodies in which graduates may seek to serve with informed integrity in the context of a full and complex life. This becomes ever more difficult as tensions emerge in the paradigmatic shift from the individualism of Thatcherite culture to a more interdependent, yet more cooperative and more accountable working life. Indeed this work-life is likely to be less dependent on an employer-determined workplace as the diversification of the working space finds more common expression in the new millennium. The struggle to understand the various uses of the term employability is itself problematic. My first reservation concerns the building of an aim of higher education on what is an indistinct and poorly formulated concept. It seems irrational to build as a central aim of our education system an idea whose meaning is indistinct even to its protagonists. However, to progress the argument I want to utilise one attempt to synthesise the data, albeit based on an academic although extensive, review of the literature developed by Hillage & Pollard (1998). They offer this definition: Employability is the capability to move self-sufficiency within the labour market to realise potential through sustainable employment. For the individual, employability depends on the knowledge, skills and attitudes they possess, the way they use these assets and present them to employers and the context (e.g. personal circumstances and labour market environment) within which they seek work. (p. xi, 1999) The emphasis on the above theme of sustainable employability may not be prescriptive in the sense of the exclusive purpose of the human condition, but it does presume the acceptance of a capitalist ideology.

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EMPLOYABILITY AND HIGHER EDUCATION

This is my second reservation. In offering us a notion of education that, for the most part, takes it justification from the economic (indeed, one economic system) it assumes acceptance of that single ideology. Modern educational aims have a tradition of being so much more. A discussion of the aims for education are outside the scope of this article.[3] However, to ground my argument in a philosophical tradition I will explore the perfectionism of Aristotle as an example, but later link this to a more explicit existential project for higher education. In choosing Aristotle, I choose an educational doctrine that underpins a notion of liberal education, but one unlike the neo-liberalism of the 1980s that recognises the texture of a complex social order. However, it is one where employability is part of (but not an all-embracing purpose of) education, one that can accommodate the interrelated directions of the perfectionist, utilitarian and liberal approaches as they coalesce in the notion of citizenship.[4] Take, for instance, the three notions of education in a civilised community, which are balanced between the mercantile, the civic and the contemplative [5] to satisfy the moral and economic needs of a community. Aristotle’s solution on how to balance these priorities was not to subscribe to mechanical calculative methods of assessing educational priorities but to evoke judgement through the notion of the mean. He has a clear vision of education as a source of well-being best established by a rounded, rather than an isolated focus on one or two aspects of the good-life. (In this, it is worth drawing attention to the limitations that Aristotle attributes to the singularity of the Spartans’ way of being.)[6] Today, this would imply using a yet to be found instrumental solution to what is an appropriate mean for the various ends and it would fail on how difficult it is to weight priorities using such a method. Indeed, the centralist notion of employability would have been far from hegemonic. It is sufficient here to point out that the solution is probably not as simple as one controlled through a neo-liberal ideology of freedom [7], as defined by the market and by the present Government’s education policy. My third reservation is that employability as defined is a monologue of the skilled employee selling his/her skills to satisfy the employer need. It is not necessarily creative or fulfilling of employee’s potentialities nor, paradoxically, necessarily for the best benefit of the employer. It is a power transaction and is more dependent on the old notion of a life-long contract than the lack of security that is implicit in the notion of employability. The new self-motivated, flexible, multi-skilled and employable worker is how the United Kingdom is encouraged to develop as we respond to the global competition. However, as researchers indicate, is it the way we behave. This approach is based on a mutually beneficial dialect that is not yet the reality today. Rajan et al (1999) cast serious doubts over the culture and commitment to employability in employers.

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An alternative to the monologue of employability might best be revealed through a dialectic understanding of the nature of the working context of the individual in certain environments. Employability as a notion of hermeneutic interpretation, where a person’s character, rather than simply his skills is considered to formulate practical judgement. Furthermore, if practical judgement is central to the dialect of employability (although not exclusively its purpose) then universities have a role in developing the positive characteristics of their students that favour good judgement. They have a role in developing not only a skilled public, but a moral and educated public, one manifestation of which (albeit core to our economic well-being) is as evident in the softer skills of being a member of humanity, as well as the harder skills of IT, numeracy and literacy. This approach, should it be valid, questions the positivistic methodologies that search for hard, factual functionality of employability. Clearly – not discounting the need for skills – the notion of employability goes beyond the hard skills of technique into the less factual, more value-driven use of practical judgement in the work encounter. In this, it goes further than the evaluation of the externality of the skill to the character of the holder of that skill and it is here that I want to linger whilst considering employability as an hermeneutic interpretation of an engagement with others. For help, I turn to Bernstein. Bernstein argues for the primacy of practical wisdom and its links to praxis as incommensurability with a notion of objectivism and relativism. Praxis and phronesis go beyond such intra-separations of knowledge. The implicit acceptance of the subject/object distinction negates the productive and communal interpretation of phenomena, from what we know and from how we might understand. It rejects the common ground of solidarity of human experience through deliberation, interpretation, communicative interaction, dialogue and judgement.[8] The praxis Bernstein is proposing seeks to equate rationalism with truth, where ‘subjective becomes virtually synonymous with the private, idiosyncratic, and arbitrary’ (Bernstein, 1996, p. 46). In the context of higher education, its manifestation is in the identities of the graduates it reveals. In a society dominated by the desires of commercial interests, the temptation is for the authority of others (regulators, quality agencies, funding councils) to determine both the content and the purpose of education, but it need not be so. The dialectic relationship between scholar as member of society and scholar as economic agent in society has its roots in the Socratic examinations and in the nature of well-being identified by Aristotle. More recently, in carefully argued articles by Gadamer (1996) and Bernstein (1985), Aristotle’s distinctions between the forms of knowledge and their contribution to the good-life have been explored. Both authors distinguish in Aristotle three forms of knowledge: pure (episteme), practical (phronesis) and theoretical (theoria). As well as reasoning,

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Aristotle distinguishes another type of knowledge that is concerned with production. This is skill or craft knowledge (techne) that deals with the making of things (poiesis). Poiesis has an end beyond itself and phronesis is done for its own sake. For Bernstein (1996), as for Gadamer (1975), technical competence (whether it be in skills or ideas) falls short of wisdom. It is with wisdom that actions can gain their moral direction and practical wisdom supports a praxis of higher education.[9] As Gadamer points out, phronimos is ‘always in the situation of having to act in exigent circumstances. The image people have of what they ought to be, their conceptions of right and wrong, of decency, courage, dignity are always presupposed in decisions they are called upon to make’ (Gadamer, 1975, p. 283). Garrison has developed this in the teaching of students, claiming that ‘teaching students to distinguish what they immediately and unreflectively desire from what they ought to desire after reflection is the ultimate goal of education ... It is an education that lies beyond knowledge alone’ (Garrison, 1997, p. 126). Others have indicated that the most appropriate way of developing this notion of praxis is through a conversation which exceeds the technical skills of employability.[10] The responsibility for the initiation of the conversation is held jointly by the student, the employer and the teacher, for each ought to be in the process of inquiry and deliberation. This conversation need not be confined to the face-to-face tutorial for, through the use of technology, time and space can be more readily utilised for this engagement. Indeed, by its use, conversations can take place which were previously impossible, but technology in these circumstances must retain its function as a means to a conversation and not the message. Technology retains the scientific power, whereas the educational practitioner ought to exhibit the morality of phronimos to avoid exploitation and manipulation.[11] Technical reason produces goods, the end of which is their means. These ends are specified by considerations external to the process of doing or making. A good employee may be inferred by his boss as one that achieves the goals set. The employer’s instrumental interests in the achievement of the task have little or no concern for the type of person who achieves the task. In this instrumental hard skills approach, any relationship to the ends of the task are purely external. An alternative choice – one embedded in the Aristotelian notion of practical judgement – is that the choice of means ought to be governed by standards of excellence designed to extend human capacities, the basis of the soft skills. If his behaviour meets the requirements, we do not normally enquire about his motivation. Where by contrast we exercise practical judgement we see the good to be realised as something sought through the action and not as an independently specified aim. Smith offers an illustration where the ‘good manager, say, chooses means which extend her colleagues’ “capacities for self understanding and self-mastery” by

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encouraging open and honest discussion and democratic decisionmaking, rather than ruthless driving the meeting towards a predetermined conclusion’ (Smith, 1999, p. 424). It is necessary to pause here for the sake of clarity. This is not an argument against competencies; indeed, it is supportive of the notion that, in order to exercise an appropriate role as an educated citizen, one must be competent. However, in the educational context if it gives a platform for the concept of an instrumental educational method such as Competence Based Education and Training (CBET) with its narrowly defined performance statements, I see it at risk of becoming solely a manipulative engagement for work training and not worthy of higher education. It would become the handmaiden of vocationalism, which for most of the global economy has been replaced by an active and evolved praxis. Lum (1999) makes an interesting argument on the nature of CBET. Far from supporting the exclusive assumptive ownership of competence by supporters of CBET, Lum explores the notion that all education leads to some form of competency. In taking this route he highlights what ultimately is shown to be a very weak and unconvincing rationale that CBET is distinct in its insistence on outcome statements. He shows that the degree of detail and objectiveness required of this atomistic approach loses the essence of the act itself. This is not to deny the advantages of setting staging posts that are relevant, but these should lead to judgements of achievements, rather than a quasi-empirical statement of fact. Higher Education The view of higher education supported is diametrically opposite to form where its accountabilities are instrumentalised in the form of the programme specific regimes and performance indicator measurements. This is one where an ill-considered notion of employability stripped of the context of its communities’ values is put forward as the basis of education which rapidly reconstitutes itself as training to work for others, as employees or as debtors to financiers. The preferred higher education model put forward here is one based on mutual trust where individuals are encouraged to flourish by engaging at the limits of what is known and thus creatively redefining what is knowable. In this it is unpredictable, risky and the outcomes are not easy to measure on one scale of success. Yet it is responsible to the real world bringing theory and practise together in the fusion of scholarly praxis. Bernstein has already made the point that praxis cannot just be a search for one or even many forms of external knowledge: it is a personal, as well as a moral endeavour. This is a significant point in the connectedness of self and others, and one on which Heidegger’s interpretation of everyday-ness and his revelation of what one’s 564



possibilities might be is useful. He attempts to help us realise that our taken-for-granted world is more complicated than it is generally accepted to be and that a firm understanding of it is difficult, if not impossible to grasp. The unrealised potential of our taken-for-granted-world is its ‘standing reserve’ and, in the sense meant by Heidegger, is the underlying genuine authenticity revealed through actions and use; it is its potentiality – hidden, latent and waiting to be revealed by being-in-theworld. With regard to understanding human action it offers a mode of understanding of an individual’s comportment in his world that transcends any one mode of revealing. This offers a challenge to any accepted single notion of truth. A truth is generated from this engagement, rather than being presented for passive acceptance, which can lead to delusion. In this sense absolute truth is problematic and a truth might best be considered as a dialectical resolution by the student with the authority of others. This encourages a creative, rather than specific and accepted way of seeing things, and gives him/her personal value, rather than measuring worth by the aggregated opinion of current, significant opinion formers. What is true [12] is our interpretation of what we understand truth to be. It rejects the superficial authority of the untested and uninvolved opinion of others, seeking the revelation of what it might be through engagement with it for what it is. Heidegger (1962, 1977) thus asks us to dig deeper, not always to accept the authority of others, but to involve ourselves in experiences in order to know. This requires courage, for it is not undertaken in seclusion from the world, but within it, facing the barriers to our authenticity created by our roles and myths. This exploration gains its authority from its moral consequence of being for humanity and by the solidarity of being a member of humanity. It is a praxis where self-interest cannot be separated from the interest of humanity at large. It embraces all those who are able to develop and reveal their potentiality through the experience of higher education as a lifelong activity. A danger of a rhetoric of education for all is that it is only affordable if provided for students in fragmented isolation or in inferior, instrumentally-based institutions. It is easy to envisage the involved, able and motivated student responding to the collaborative solidarity of working within a community of scholars, but the image may be stretched when applied to the phenomenon of current higher education provision, of part-time mature students studying vocational subjects at university outposts (their own homes or employers) in their local communities. Here, personal projects are undertaken away from a scholarly community or in a community that has replaced scholarly activity with instruction in the instrumentality of materialism. Indeed, if the university is to be considered a place of security in which one can grow, discrete cells of educational activity focused on the successful completion of a programme might even be considered the antithesis of a praxis of higher

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education. Where distant, self-directed learning results in the removal of the possibilities for self-awareness and personal well-being as part of humanity, it can become self-serving and replaces higher education with a form of preparation for life as being-for-others. In this it creates a deceit, not a substitute, for the non-instrumental aspects of higher education.


Resolution: lifelong education? Perhaps a resolution to my three reservations might be found in the notion of lifelong education where a reconciliation of education as a means of revealing man’s humanity with the functional definition of employability and the softer notion can be found.[13] Lifelong education presupposes the development of a learning society, one where active ongoing learning of a higher order will be broadly embraced. There is a danger that it might be considered as a ‘totalising’ system. This is avoided if the desire for education, for the most part, remains as the engagement of individuals choosing what to learn for the realisation of their possibilities, but not if it becomes synonymous with an employability agenda. A recent OECD report has shown that labour force activity rises with educational attainment and the correlation is especially strong for women. Indeed, the relationship between educational attainment and earnings is even stronger than labour force participation. There appears to be a virtuous circle whereby participation in continuing education and training raises skills and competence that enhance employment and earning prospects, which in turn increases the demand for learning opportunities. However, the report concludes that ‘learning after initial education and training is not a sufficient condition for improved performance of enterprises and individuals’ (OECD, 1997, p. 9). If lifelong education is considered to be more than small chunks of external learning destined only to promotes one’s position in an economic community (a community separated from the rest of humanity) then it will fail, and so will the cultural, moral and spiritual infrastructure, which established the human condition. We have recently travelled this path, which has led to self-interested individualism. It manifests itself in forms of hedonistic instrumentality, where ‘understanding right and wrong was a matter of dry calculation, rather than anchored in our feelings’ (Taylor, 1997). The alienation of feeling outside a world in which one acts can be ameliorated by finding comforting rituals and beliefs, which standardise and make understandable the world as it appears in inauthentic discourse with others. Cooper, too, is critical of a society that has been overcome by a manifestation of managerialism: technicism.[14] He suggests that in our state of postmodernity our ‘reference to values, wants and goals is refracted through the technicist prism’ (Cooper, 1983, p. 44). This detaches the naturalness with which we could (indeed, 566



according to him, should) relate to our environment and replaces it with an instrumentality that sees everything as an available resource, moral issues as resolvable problems and education as a training in a society of ‘getting’, rather than being. Taylor warns us, however, that the postmodern condition has sanctioned a more self-satisfying form of social membership, one in which the moral essence of humanity has been disengaged from a form of social authenticity, and been replaced by narcissistic and instrumental self-satisfaction. In Taylor’s contemporary world, I understand myself in the way acceptable to my culture and the dominant theme in western culture is individualism. However, the egocentricity this implies is not synonymous with inauthenticity. Inauthentic judgements ought not to be considered wrong in the sense that authentic behaviours are right: they are both valuable for our well being in our engagement in-the-world-we-make-with-others. We have to balance them and do not need to find strategies to do away with inauthentic behaviour. How we do actualise our potential is, however, a communal act. We can choose to accept that our actions are grounded in our communality and choose, as Sartre suggests, to live as if humanity will mirror our actions [15], or we can try and alienate ourselves from humanity for our private goals. Should we choose to emphasis our communality then many of our autonomous decisions conceived in the form of ‘for-me’ or ‘forthem’ cease to have relevance. In this sense to act authentically is not tightly defined as actions which are only self-serving. Indeed, the very nature of our being in a world with and as others indicates that much of our autonomously-chosen behaviours will be for others. It requires knowing and relying on oneself to act autonomously on what one believes to be correct within the limits of one’s behavioural repertoire. This is not simply about knowing what is truth in an empirical sense but requires the experience of acting practically within one’s environment. It also requires an understanding that the being you might become is within your control. This understanding is an educative process that can be built on the dialectical engagement with others through dialogue. In this the commonality of language leads, as Gadamer has observed, to ‘the birth of reason: the more what is desirable is displayed for all in a way that is convincing to all, the more those involved discover themselves in this common reality; and to that extent human beings possess freedom in the positive sense, they have their true identity in that common reality’ (Gadamer, 1996, p. 77). Dialogue may not be the only way to access one’s understanding of the pluralism of self but it is one of the most worthy educative engagements.

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Conclusions My proposal, albeit controversial is that which differentiates the institution of higher education is not the content of the curriculum, but the future orientation of the scholarly community which it creates and nurtures. In this it has some of the same goals as employability. Within such a function the universities’ epistemological mission is achieved through research and scholarship, which are viewed as necessary conditions for the appropriateness of the universities’ learning missions. Should this be acceptable then traditional disciplines are not critical, although they clearly offer a common structure for scholarly pursuit. This is not an argument for a fully negotiated curriculum between student, employer and teacher, for discipline-based traditions certainly have the benefit of manifesting our historical links with others, but dependency upon them can also lead to a dominating interest in the poiesis of learning, rather than the paideia of humanity. Should the learning become only a means-to-an-end instruction (either in the formal engagement or in the relationship the student builds with the subject) the process can become impersonal and lacks a realisation in humanity. This is not to say that where higher education programmes are designed to function as ‘licensed practitioner gateways’, certain content should not be prescribed, but even here the curriculum content is secondary to the primary aim of higher education institution; it does not distinguish it. University education ought to provide more than what Sen (1993) calls the ‘functionings’ of life, such as employment. It should concern itself with how these functions provide a trajectory into the possibilities of what the student and the tradition might become. Its specific and distinctive task is to facilitate learning in shaping the identity we choose for ourselves with awareness of our commonality in humanity. This involvement identifies higher education institutions as being about the future prepared for and revealed today. It brings future possibilities into the present through dialogue and is sustainable in this pursuit, if funded by public money, as long as universities are trusted by their host communities both to supply students able to sustain their immediate economic well being, and to add to the notion of an educated public. This view may be contested both by those who see the function of higher education institutions as an initiation into a discipline and by those who see it predominantly as a provider of trained or trainable economic agents. Typical of an enlightened interpretation of the former view is that held by Blake et al (1998). Although they clearly want to counter a competence model of higher education, their reliance on traditional disciplines to provide ‘methods of enquiry and critique’ is too exclusive, for those skills need not rest on the notion of the tradition of the subject matter. This position at its worst risks inauthenticity and bad faith, and at its best offers only one mode for authenticity’s realisation.

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The second position, based on the economic functionality of higher education, is a view which is resonant with the function of mass[16] higher education to provide graduates for the job market and has come to hold political sway. Education in this context might be considered as simply conferring ‘credentials that employers can use to select workers and to determine relative wages and salaries’ (Lange, 1998, pp. 18–9). This interpretation of higher education’s function uses relative rates of return on social and private investment to measure its worth, and to determine its effectiveness. Both views have relevant points to make, not about the nature of the educative development of a student through the engagement with the learning community of higher education but about the nature of the inputs and the outputs of the process. I am interested in how the community assists or fails to assist in the student’s realisation, and construction of his or her authentic identity as part of humanity. I am interested in the dialectic, which occurs inside the black box of input and outcome, and the changes it makes to our authenticity. This approach recognises the reality of employability as one outcome but resists its hegemony.


Corrrespondence Dr P.T. Gibbs, 11 Barrow Hill Terrace, Ashford TN23 1NF, United Kingdom ([email protected]). Notes [1] See Aristotle (1995) Politics, Book VII, Chapter 2. [2] See Rorty (1993) and Tam’s discussion of Communitarianism (1998) [3] Freire is very strong in his book The Pedagogy of Freedom stating ‘Purely pragmatic training, with its implicit or openly expressed elitist authoritarianism, is incompatible with the learning and practice of becoming a “subject”’ (1997, p. 46). [4] I acknowledge that Aristotle pursues a communitarianism notion of individual responsibility and I use this as a contrast to the market, competitive grounding which, I suspect, is at the core of the educational aims of employability. I do not, however, offer a defence of either basis of educational systems. [5] For a contemporary defence of this notion see Nussbaum (1997). [6] Their focus on war is analogous to our educational focus on employability. [7] See Freire (1997). [8] See Bernstein (1996), Part 4.

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P.T. Gibbs [9] ‘Practical judgement has, unlike technical rationality, a significant and irreducibly ethical dimension’ (Smith, 1999, p. 423) Aristotle also writes on this subject that when ‘using any kind of skill or practical knowledge one ought to be in control of both these things, that is, of the end itself and also of the actions which conduce to the end’ (1995, p. 280). [10] ‘The man who lacks phronesis may be technically accountable, but he can never be morally answerable’ (Carr, 1987, p. 172). [11] ‘Educational practice cannot be made intelligible as a form of poiesis guided by fixed ends and governed by determinate rules. It can only be made intelligible as a form of praxis guided by ethical criteria immanent in educational practice itself; criteria which serve to distinguish genuine educational practices from those that are not, and good educational practice from that which is indifferent or bad’ (Carr, 1987, p. 173). [12] For a longer discussion of this point, see Sartre (1992), where he builds an argument for the existential nature of truth.


[13] Education is deliberately used here for two reasons. The first is that lifelong learning is somewhat tautologous and the second is to focus on purposeful, intended learning behaviours. [14] ‘By “technicism”, I mean the broad, but identifiable, idea that the technological power at men’s disposal is the fundamental feature of our times, and that their energies should primarily be directed towards utilising the power for the sake of increased material welfare’ (Cooper, 1983, p. 36). [15] ‘For every man, everything happens as if all mankind had its eyes fixed on him and were guiding itself by what he does. And every man ought to say to himself “Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?”’ (Sartre, 1990, p. 20). [16] I note the use of the word ‘mass’ here, both as it is commonly used to refer to increased participation, but also in the context of Heidegger’s Das Man with the closing off of identities and potential abuse of power it offers to those Others who control the anonymity of the masses.

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Carr, W. (1987) What is an Educational Practice? Journal of Philosophy of Education, 21, pp. 163–175. Cooper D. E. (1983) Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsche’s educational philosophy. Aldershot: Gregg Revivals. Freire, P. (1997) Pedagogy of Freedom. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Gadamer, H-G. (1975) Truth and Method, trans. G. Berden & J. Cummings. New York: Seabury Press. Gadamer, H-G. (1996) Reason in the Age of Science, trans. F. G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Garrison, J. (1997) Dewey and Eros, Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (Eds). Oxford : Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology, Trans. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbook. Hillage, J. & Pollard, E. (1998) Employability: developing a framework for policy analysis. London: Department for Education and Employment. Lange, T. (1998) Rethinking Higher Education, On the Future of Higher Education in Britain. London: IEA Education and Training Unit.


Lum, G. (1999) Where’s the Competence in Competence-based Education and Training, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 33(3), pp. 403–418. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997) Cultivating Humanity: a classical defence of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. OECD (1997) Labour Market Policies: new challenges: lifelong learning to maintain employability. OCDE/GD(97)162, Paris. Rajan, A., Van Eupen, P., Chapple, K. & Lane, D. (1999) Employability: bridging the gap between rhetoric and reality. Tonbridge: CREATE Publishing. Rorty, A. O. (1993) Moral Imperialism vs. Moral Conflict: conflicting aims of education, in B. Darling-Smith (Ed.) Can Virtue be Taught. Paris: University of Notre Dame Press. Sartre, J-P. (1990) Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Citadel Press. Sartre, J-P. (1992) Truth and Existence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sen, A. (1993) Capability and Well-Being, in M. Nussbaum & A. Sen (Eds) The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, R. (1999) Paths of Judgement: the revival of practical wisdom, paper given at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Annual Conference, 9–11 April, New College, Oxford. Tam, H. (1998) Communitarianism. London: Macmillan Press. Taylor, C. (1997) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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