Professor Jane Gingrich is Professor of Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College. Her research focuses on comparative political economy and social policy, specifically on the contemporary restructuring of the welfare state and the politics of institutional change. The Oxford Political Review sat down with Gingrich earlier this year to discuss the global landscape of education policies today, the sharp political divisions in society around the welfare state, and some of the broader changes and crises in our political economy.
Debates about education have recently dominated the headlines, not only on questions about the material taught in classrooms, but also the purpose of education itself. Is it designed to provide people with skills? Is it used for indoctrination and nation-building? According to Professor Jane Gingrich, while these are all true, they are a superficial way of thinking about education’s role in our lives.
What Is Education For?
The purposes of education systems are not fixed or permanent. Rather, they have evolved over time as “the types of skills that we need to function in society have changed,” says Gingrich. This is only natural given that countries are increasingly transitioning to knowledge-based economies where new skills are required and new types of human capital are needed to stay competitive. Yet, the way systems are currently structured is often geared towards providing a set of skills that policymakers might deem useful to the economy, but “might not be the things that help people thrive as humans,” notes Gingrich.
“Everyone has the right or should have the right to be able to live their lives in a way that’s meaningful, [and] we as a society have some obligation to provide that to people [through our education systems,” argues Gingrich.
Yet, Gingrich did not neglect to emphasise that “the origins of education systems were often about indoctrination and the socialisation of people in order to facilitate political order.”
“Indoctrination can be a word that’s quite loaded. It has a negative connotation, but clearly we think education systems have this function… of teaching people how to be citizens or members of society beyond just economic skills,” she states. Education is a means of explaining the status quo to people, a way of telling them why the world exists the way it exists, while creating critical, tolerant citizens at the same time. “All of that is some selection of values that we are communicating to young people through parts of the curriculum,” the professor adds.
A Common Curriculum
A common criticism from the right against more equality in education systems is that this would hurt the development and potential of exceptional students, requiring them to sacrifice their talents and advantages for the sake of an ill-defined ‘common good.’ On that front, the professor seems to think this is based on an overexaggerated and misleading assumption: “there are clearly very exceptional people who might be extraordinarily skilled…but we may overstate how many of them there are.”
Gingrich agrees that “there was a lot of political hope put on education systems to equalise opportunities in the long run by advancing skills to give people the capacities to participate in a market economy in a more egalitarian way” in the 1990s, but to harbour the same kind of ambitions and wishful thinking for education systems today is asking too much of them. What we have ultimately learned, however, is that the way systems operate depends on the level of existing inequality in the labour market.
“If you try to use education as a tool of social mobility in a really unequal labour market, you’re going to have different effects than if you expand education in places where the distribution of wealth looks different,” Gingrich says. Ultimately, we have to be more modest about what goals education can alone achieve, which is where other institutions such as labour market reforms or taxation come in.
In fact, Gingrich argues that the real problem we face is the underinvestment in further education, particularly when the nature of the knowledge economy requires people’s education to be continuously upgraded in some ways. To address this problem, Gingrich suggests “some kind of revitalization of options for both upper secondary and post-secondary education that is an alternative to universities is important.” Another option would be to introduce shorter college degrees that could meet some of the needs that people have for skilled qualifications, she argues, pointing towards research from the London School of Economics’s David Soskice.
This discussion is particularly relevant in the UK, where technical universities have fallen by the wayside of policy debates. Yet, in the search for solutions, the professor cautions against pushing everyone through a single model: “trying to emulate Germany is also not going to be successful. Finding something that works within the British context that can continue to increase the skills for everyone is essential.”
The Voters Are Not Coming Back
In recent years, Gingrich’s research has been focused on political coalitions around the welfare state. She concludes that there has been a class reconfiguration in voting in Europe over the last 30 years, with two major shifts happening. One is the shrinking of the traditional working class, as mass educational upgrading has led to an occupational upgrading. The second is that the left in general has been increasingly relying on white collar voters in particular occupations such as professional services and teachers.
However, Gingrich argues that this shift in voting patterns is frequently misunderstood. Instead of working class voters flipping parties to vote for the radical right, “what has actually happened is that there’s been a cohort replacement,” she explains. “The social democrats voting base among the manual working class has gotten much older, whereas new working class voters have gone into more different sets of parties.”
This creates a dilemma for political parties over party positioning. For example, the Danish Social Democrats tried to win back some working class voters by moving towards a welfare-chauvinist position, taking a tough stance on immigration. While this has worked in Denmark, there are barely any instances where that success has been replicated in other countries.
In general, Gingrich asserts that “voters that no longer vote for the left who might like more restrictive policies are unlikely to go back to them because they have other parties that are potentially more credible on that front on the right.” In that sense, “accommodating too much really won’t work,” says Gingrich, “because you’re going to lose the new voters and not get back the old ones.”
What does that leave for the traditional left then? From Gingrich’s point of view, they will become much smaller parties. “They won’t go back to 30, 40% in most countries, but they can still play the kingmaker role in parliaments and shape the welfare state.”
New Age, New Risks
Much of the recent discourse on the welfare state, specifically labour market policies, has been consumed by the social unrest in France. Massive—and often violent—protests and strikes have erupted in opposition to President Macron’s decision to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. This might seem baffling for outsiders given that most developed countries have a higher retirement age, but the intensity of the backlash does not seem to surprise Gingrich.
France has traditionally practised passive labour market policies, such as giving benefits to women to stay at home. These policies did not actively encourage participation in the labour market. For Gingrich, this was a mistake and France is now trying to activate more of the population to keep people in the workforce longer and encourage higher female labour force participation.
“It’s been politically difficult to raise the retirement age because voters often use it as a heuristic for where their pension benefits are going. This means even if you’ve done a lot of other reforms to make the pension system more sustainable, whenever voters see the retirement age go up, they think, ‘I’m getting a benefit cut.’”
What Macron’s administration needs to do, says the professor, is an “honest discussion with people” about the sustainability of the pension system. That may spell an increase in the retirement age, but also a simultaneous commitment to broaden some of the taxation base. In addition, France should look to other countries such as Japan, who have been more successful in increasing female participation in the labour force.
In short, she argues, “growing the size of the active labour force doesn’t just require increasing the retirement age.”
We then turned our attention to automation and growing concerns about AI tools like ChatGPT replacing middle class jobs. Historically, industrial transitions often took the form of early retirement and exit programs that eased the political costs of job loss by avoiding mass layoffs. Today, the efficacy of those programmes seem far less certain. Instead, an alternative proposal is to introduce a universal basic income or some other similar benefit that would give people some capacity to cycle in and out of work over their lifecycle while redistributing some of the gains of automation across the population.
However, Gingrich is unconvinced by this idea: “I’m not personally sold on that as an idea yet. I think it could undermine the solidaristic coalitions around the welfare state.” A better way of thinking about this problem, says the professor, is “if the owners of capital are the ones that are benefiting at the cost of labour from these changes. What we need to be considering is something like a wealth tax.”
A New Economic Paradigm?
We end our conversation by talking about the US Inflation Reduction Act. When I ask whether it signals the arrival of a new economic paradigm, marked by more government intervention in and planning of the economy, she responds by dissecting the question.
“The first thing [in your] question is about whether we’ve entered a period of deglobalization or reshoring,” says Gingrich. In Gingrich’s eyes, COVID certainly brought this up in ways that meant that questions of resilience and supply chains landed at the top of political agendas. Specifically, this often took the form of desires to cultivate more domestic economic capacity in green jobs and to incentivise or shield infant green industries from international competition.
Secondly, there is a growing concern over ‘left behind places,’ signalling a lack of shared geographic prosperity in many countries. Cumulatively, “you have these concerns about supply chains… combined with the green agenda and the impetus for place-based policy reflected in a potent form in the thinking behind the Inflation Reduction Act,” observes Gingrich. Europe is heading in the same direction, although industrial policies are harder to coordinate at the EU level, meaning that action has been weaker.
However, Gingrich is quick to highlight that industrial policies do not have to be progressive. “If you think about the past industrial policies in countries that were famous for more state-directed industrialisation, both in Europe and in East Asia, these were often paired with approaches that were picking national champions with more labour repressive policies,” says Gingrich. She points to the examples of public-private partnerships in the high-tech manufacturing sector in Japan and Taiwan, as well as the US military’s development of cutting-edge technologies.
“While the overall trend is that industrial policies are experiencing a comeback, whether a more permanently progressive or more egalitarian form of policy emerges remains an open question,” Gingrich states. It’s an acute reminder of the flexibility and mutability of policies. Faced with the fluctuating tides of history, nothing can be fully taken for granted.