ABSTRACT
Panorama or some less official programme should come back to these questions. It's all very well showing the clip from Kes, with an idea of freedom highlighting the bureaucracy of youth employment. But it can't be had both ways. One of the careers people said the object was to bring the young down to earth without stifling their dreams or ambitions. Someone else used the word "instability" to describe young people who went through five or six jobs in a year. That gives an odd idea of what stability may be, or of what learning is preparing us for, in an increasingly mobile and flexible society. Education can disregard work altogether in ways that derive from a class situation in which people didn't get jobs, or at best got positions and had careers. Or it can be reshaped, against the stubborn instincts of many good teachers, until it is from the beginning a part of industrial training: all round pegs in round punch-holes. Or, may we not still say, it can try to teach the whole truth about work: a history and a society; our own skills and those of others; the realities and the possibilities of choice. Panorama touched the edge of these questions, but television, of all media, with its unrivalled opportunities, should go, and repeatedly, to their centre.
