That's fucking stupid

Education is a wonderful thing because it is the single most important thing we can do to make the world better. Many of the ills of the world are caused by poor education or political and religious influence in the education systems and the work of the religious fundamentalist extremists in the US to include creationism faith into the science curriculum will have a wider implication in later years when a generation of kids come though the system without any way of qualifying evidence and applying reason to scientific debate.

Education as a political tool is one of the most evil things in the world but failure to provide proper education or promote education as the means by which an idividual can advance in society; that’s just crazy!

In the UK we don’t value education. We don’t pay our teachers or give them the authority to maintain discipline in the classroom. Teaching is now a McJob with little status and practically no freedom to actually educate kids. The only reasons to be a teacher in these troubled times is the holiday allowance and the security of working in a government funded industry.

The reason the education system has got so bad is partly due to the way teachers have been ground into submission, but also mainly because standards have fallen to include people who would otherwise not have gained an education. Somewhere a decade or so ago I am gussing a member of the government read in a book that an educated workforce would make Great Britain more competetive in the world market place. Rather than ploughing money into education to bring children up to the international standard they decided to devalue British qualifications by lowering standards. Sure, more kids are getting good GCSEs and A’ Levels but this is because the standards of the tests have fallen, not because the level of educated people coming out of the school system has risen.

University attendance has risen dramatically but that is because Universities are funded for their student numbers and not for the quality of the courses on offer. Course like Media Studies and Fashion are swamping the job market with people who have done little accademic work and whose lectures consisted almost entirely of discussions about how their subject fits in to Maslow’s heirarchy of needs.

Ideally the solution would be to assess what skills the country needs each year and base university funding on filling those skills gaps. If there is a shortage of people with Media Studies degrees in the workforce then by all means let’s train a few up but it’s likely that this money would be better invested training engineers and nurses or nuclear physicists and primary care physicians. The study of skills gaps could also be used for a basis for allowing selective immigration of those who can help fill those skills gaps, as is the case in many other countries.

And what to do with all those people who are not bright enough to be an engineer or a doctor? Currently we welcome immigration in this country to fill the service industry jobs and agricultural jobs that British citizens won’t do because the welfare state is more attractive. By making working more attractive (with tax breaks and income suppliments for working people) and making the benefits system less attractive (by freezing benefits and not raising them in line with inflation for the next decade) we could gradually wean people off benefits and put them back into the workforce.

All this requires long term strategy rather than quick fixes and it’s unlikely that any government elected for 4 years at a time will make decisions based on the long term benefit of the country because they stand to make their successors look good.