Abstract

A lot of the talk about education nowadays invokes the notion of ‘quality’ and it has been suggested that education in schools and universities would benefit from exposure to the kind of quality assurance procedures originally developed by industry to monitor and raise performance. The paper is critical of this suggestion, arguing that the notion of quality which has emerged from industry is a very limited one and that importing the latter into education would change our educational thinking and practice in significant ways for the worse. What we need, instead, is a fuller appreciation of the kind of quality and standards which are proper to education and which depend upon the exercise of personal judgement.