Since the publication of the Beveridge report on social security during the last war no report has been as anxiously awaited as that of the Robbins Committee on higher education and none has received such an enthusiastic reception. It has been hailed as a landmark in British social history and so it is without doubt. Even the Communist Party has had to admit that the targets recommended by the committee coincide with its own demands.
The figures speak for themselves. The committee has proposed that compared with 210,000 students receiving higher education in 1962-63 places should be available for 390,000 in 1973-74 and 560,000 in 1981. To finance such expansion public expenditure on higher education will increase from the present figure of £206 million to £742 million. The capital expenditure in next seventeen years is placed at £1,420 million.
The number of universities is to be raised from 32 now to 60 in 1980-81. To reach this figure the committee believes six new universities should be established, one of them in Scotland. The existing colleges of advanced technology should be expanded to accommodate 3,000 to 5,000 students against the average of 1,000 and given university status and power to award their own degrees at once. At present they award only diplomas. Ten other regional technical colleges and teachers training colleges should be selected and raised to university status by 1980. The existing universities are themselves to be expanded to provide for up to 10,000 places. Outside Oxford, Cambridge, London and Manchester, the present average is 3,000.
A Leveller
The proposed expansion of higher educational facilities provides for every boy and girl who will be qualified for university education. At present one out of every fourteen students of the relevant age group goes for higher education. In 1980-81 the proportion will be one in six. The social consequences in terms of the movement from the working class to the middle class can well be imagined. As I have often mentioned in these columns the inequality of opportunity for higher education has been attracting the sharpest criticism against the Conservative Government. It was natural because education has proved the great leveller in this highly class-conscious society.
In a sense it can be said the Robbins Committee’s report is the logical next step in the expansion of higher education. Britain, for instance, was spending only £26 million on higher education in 1937. While the expenditure rose by three times in the past 25 years the number of students itself rose by over four times – from below 50,000 to 200,000. Also Oxford and Cambridge, which before the last war were more or less exclusively meant for sons of rich parents from independent private schools popularly but erroneously called public schools, have been admitting 39 and 25 per cent, respectively, of their students from grammar schools since 1955.
None Too Soon
Yet the report is significant for a variety of reasons. First it is the first comprehensive survey for full-time higher education in the country. Secondly, for years the Government has been dragging its feet and setting up niggardly targets. At the pre-report rate, for instance, universities would have been 25,000 places short of the requirement by 1967. Thirdly, the award of proper degrees to students of technical colleges and colleges of higher technology will be a major step in the elimination of prejudice in favour of arts and science.
The Government announced its acceptance of the principles of the report the day it was published last week and already it is busy working out details of the programme of implementing them. This commendable speed may partly be due to the fact that the general election is less than twelve months away and the Education Bill will be a major subject in the electoral debate. But the more fundamental fact is that it is generally agreed here that if Britain is not to be left behind in the technological revolution she must produce far more scientists and technologists. For a nation which must live by its technical skills it is a question of survival.
As compared with America and Russia, Britain already lags behind in the opportunities she provides for higher education though not in the quality of education. Nearly 22 per cent of the school leavers go to colleges and universities in America and ten in Russia against 6.9 in Britain. These and other competitor nations have plans for massive expansion in the coming years. Britain could no longer afford to be a nation of gentlemen in a world of players.
There is a lesson in the rush for higher education for us in India. Education must be given a much higher priority than it has now and all the mumbo jumbo about basic education must cease.
The Beatles
When I wrote about the impact of Peter Pans on the British social scene and me I had not even heard of the Beatles. Bouffant hairdos which settle like fur hats over the ears had intrigued me for a long time but I was ignorant that four young pop singers had set the fashion. Or had they copied Prince Charles? Since then the Beatles – probably they derive their name from the term “Beat Up” – have been here. They took the city by storm. The police failed to control the enthusiastic teenage fans and it has been the same story of stampede by screaming fans from town to town in the last fortnight. Girls have fainted in the rush for a close view of the idols. In one place 120 persons had to be given first aid and seven admitted to hospital. These are undoubtedly Britain’s biggest attraction today.
These young men evolved their kind of music in Hamburg two years ago. They were there for four months playing for eight hours a day. As they kept running out of material they had to improvise the old rock tunes and often they just made a noise and stamped their feet to cover the lack of a repertoire. The Germans liked the way they fooled around and their lighthearted horseplay was a great success. They came back to Liverpool because the Hamburg police closed one club on account of its being too noisy. The breakthrough came a year ago when one disc dealer was repeatedly approached for non-existent Beatle records. The teenage buyers had listened to the Beatles.
In this one year of success two and a half million discs of Beatle music have been sold. They make £2,000 a week, over £100,000 in one year. Mobbing is now so much a part of their lives that police guards are automatic wherever they appear. When they appeared at the Palladium here several girl fans were seen wearing flapping shirt tails inscribed with the names of the Beatles. I am told children in the north sing Beatle songs instead of nursery rhymes. Liverpool is now known as the city which has produced the Beatles.
The Times of India, 3 November 1963