Big answers are not things like Marxism that allow one to carp knowledgeably as crap continues. If we’d had a better grasp of how humans tick we’d never have had anything like the feudal structures of today’s economics in the first place. We need to re-address this level of the crap through what we know now through science.
In the meantime, we need big answers of another kind, and first to recognise we need them. We shouldn’t have to work out high-level theory.
Look at cases that keep cropping up.
Do they get fixed or keep cropping up? Victoria Climbie – Baby P sort of thing. Do teenage toe-rags ever go away, or evil poor families. I suggest not. I’ve seen no sign in academic literature or official statistics that things are getting better, though we are living longer and stuff like that. ‘Progress’ still needs scare quotations.
Once we establish problems that aren’t going away, we should try to think big on them. This is a political act, because you come up against all kinds of vested interests and small thinking that protects them. We should really have our politicians thinking big and public dialogue; but vested interests are so powerful we do not.
Big answers of the kind I mean may be ridiculous. One of my favourites involves curing crime by chaining persistent offenders to senior police officers, magistrates, judges, politicians and other stuffed-shirts. This, sadly, is not meant as a real answer, but questions the size and nature of the problem. If we can’t afford to jail the crap forced on us Mr. Clarke, how about putting it in a trailer outside your house?
Most people can’t really get into problem-definition of this kind, anymore than they could connect Relativity and jumping off a cliff. Some are so stupid they take it as a serious practical suggestion. We should perhaps let me teach them Relativity through the view from having jumped off a cliff, and let me set a practical experiment!
Teenage scumbags don’t go away because we always get one year older and they don’t. If it was any better when we were kids, I suspect this was because some of them:
ran away to sea
joined our large armed services
did National Service
could work in factories at decent rates of pay
shaped up and got training in factories very different from skewl
got clobbered by a local “warden” or house-holder with no police action
worked on construction sites
somehow understood not thieving, fouling others’ space and so on and that angry guy’s fist-size
You may be able to add more. What is thrown up today, by politicians who must know they are lying (if not they would be so brainless to make it statistically impossible for them to have survived crossing streets), is more skewelling and university for everyone, despite it clearly being useless to a quarter of kids in Manchester and at least a fifth in all areas of the UK.
One can see that they didn’t think this crap through because we’ve now got tuition fees, meaning “graduates” have debts of about £50K after subsistence is included, or may be £120K down from where they might be if they’d worked and lived with mum and dad. These latter kids would also be more employable as employers value experience not skewl. And anyway, “graduates” often cant write, spell, add up or act sensibly (universities don’t teach these, primary school should have). So we couldn’t afford all these kids going to uni after all!
Instead of this baloney (which claims to make silk purses out of sows’ ears – yet really takes resources from the ‘worst’ kids), we should look to let those who can’t-won’t do skewl into disciplined work and a new form of National Service from 14 to 21. Genuinely non-academic forms of learning and assessment would be encouraged in this format. There would be no dole for drop outs, immigrant children would be opted in. {psst! amazingly enough, non-academic learning with teachers about is nearly always really academic learning without exams – they think you don’t know – keep it to yourself}
I would expect our major companies to go along with this and provide places, though just think of what your average 14 year old is like these days! They are weedy, clumsy and indolent. My guess is we’d have to create a lot of places in shipping and other transport and low skill areas. Much less cruel to do this than force them to sit in classrooms where any learning that happens is so short-term it can’t be tested. This way, they’d at least be learning to get by.
I would expect the demand for university places to drop like a stone if there were opportunities other than dole available. My argument in full is that skewl is responsible for many social ills.
Those who just can’t get over ejukation being a “good” should examine their self-interests. It is a cruel imposition on the many for the benefit of a few – and most of these evade what the rest get through Public School and Russell Group University.
My system would be much cheaper and without the massive social costs of the current system of ‘real education (which means to make like a Duke) only for the rich’. If your kid is bright enough in academic areas (which is about 5% of what you can be intelligent in), hesheorit can make it from the back-streets like me, if we stop the current nonsense, which makes it less possible (check the figures on social mobility).
When Newton popped-off to Cambridge at 18, he was older than most of his peers, many packed-off away from home to debauch at 14 (parents have always known about teenagers). Most of us would benefit from university if we went as adults because we wanted to. The current herding is nonsensical and it leaves behind the very children who need most help.
I must say I believe we don’t address work properly in terms of decisions we can now take rationally about our societies, and that we have it all wrong on wealth. You can get monkeys to work for peanuts, but not when they can see other monkeys working for grapes, or for grapes when they can see others working for bananas. It’s not for nothing that who is getting what for doing what is so hidden from our view. Our society is actually being de-skilled in all this ejukation, which also makes us less smart than monkeys.
The slogans of our political parties should be stuff like ‘send your kid to a third-rate university while the thicker ones learn to steal with local Romanians’ – even the politicians know enough not to say this and can rely on no one really making the links. You see, ejukation has made you think small. Me? They’ve had me working on ideas of how to to get monkeys used to peanuts to eat boiled grass …
Currently, employers create jobs like serving coffee (not long ago 40% of UK ‘entrepreneurs’ wanted to open a coffee shop) for graduates – though since we went into recession and drink less coffee it seems this wasn’t so creative after all. They might have to work harder to attract staff from my scheme.
Most of the ejukation done at undergraduate level has been (OU) or should be put on television with Internet links, not gobbed out through death-by-Powerpoint harpies. You shouldn’t be learning about Hamlet at university, but how to act and produce plays through doing it. The idea of ejukation as an aim in itself was a fucked dead donkey long ago. That would only apply in a sorted society which we’ll have to challenge the real rich to get. Most of our students don’t know who Groucho was now and I have to teach some of mine what is funny in The Simpsons, let alone what ‘cun’ tends to mean in the Bard. The worst have clearly been exhausted carrying worthless skewl qualifications about – that sound like the ones I had to work hard for.
I’m not some elitist get, sneering. I still cry and drink myself to sleep in the vault from time to time. My grandson has ‘discalcula’ and autism-related problems. If I could really help 24/7 I would – just give up to help him. He’s due what I can do in the next few months. I’m dumb enough to do it for anyone’s kid in principle and used to run such a class with some success. I know what I can do is limited, not like some Government-connected jerk claiming she could raise every kid to university level (this is utter lying cruelty). I value the bloke who serves my beer, fishes the seas and myself alike (all women are now necessarily superior of course!). The dolt and dullard the same – and I don’t avoid them all the time either.
They have us crapping on our own. The biggest rise I’ve noticed in the last 20 years is in sneering from all sectors. Try working for a living, not being given one extends to far more than any idle unemployed. We’ve been ejukated out of work and into false notions of what we are. Soylent Green? Too expensive, if you’re interested … I’m being told to use it raw!
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