No moral compass

Some evil bastard at my university has sent me a flyer inviting me to a conference on foundation degrees called 'Investing for Success'. The keynote speaker is Tesco's personnel director of education, talking about the Tesco degree in retail (outsourced, of course, to some opportunistic bullshitters). What do they think I can learn? How to dumb down? How to subjugate all academic and ethical concerns to the mighty dollar? I suspect that the Retail Foundation Degree doesn't mention union rights. I wonder if it includes modules on systematic £billion tax evasion using the offshore economy? That's not exactly investing…

Leicester University should be ashamed of its behaviour in legitimising this kind of astroturf. It's exactly the kind of limiting, reductive fodder for proles that our governments have decided is good enough - a simulation of education which (Ritzer's McDonaldized University) ensures a compliant supply of drones (sorry, flexible workers) to keep corporate Britain in school fees and gymkhana kit. The minimum-wage, benefit-dependent proletariat think they're being educated while the nobs are getting sherry in tutorials down in Cambridge. Why shouldn't the poor get a share of the sherry, a couple of hours' personal attention from an academic at the top of her or his game? Perhaps with that kind of 'investment', they'd get a lot more out of it than an overconfident toff with all the advantages.

Ian McEwan imagined this dystopia in skin-crawling detail years ago in The Child In Time, as did John Christopher in The Guardians.