'Education' - what is the point?

(BTW reducing the number of university places by half firing 25% of academics to give the rest a pay rise, making it difficult to get in and a degree mean something would be a good start)

''places with really good education systems like Cuba, Nigeria and Iran''

I'd like to hear dave's idea of a good education system is?

also: home schooling c/d?

I'm not particularly happy with this line of thinking. It suggests that education is some kind of competition just to be the best, like a quiz show or a sporting fixture, rather than an attempt to get the best out of everyone and provide them with the means to be useful workers and good citizens. I have no problem with lots of ppl having a degree, provided there is sufficient range in the courses available to them to ensure that everyone is able to enrol on a course suited to their needs and interests.

One odd thing about the British education system is that the degrees that are most useful to employers are the most derided - Media Studies being a prime example. If I had 2 CVs in front of me and one of them states that the person has a Media Studies degree from one of the "new" universities (how long will they keep being "new"?) and the other has a doctorate in Ancient History from Oxbridge, then I'm going to employ the former, no question.

The pressure for 50% of kids to go through university is crazy. In days gone by the professions (Law, Banking, accounting) would take on bright people post A-Level now you have to have a degree.

I realise I'm not suggesting any solutions here, just going over problems.

This doesn't even get onto the fact that schools and universities have been refocused from enquiry and learning to exams.

c'mon Ed, you must know that the REAL reason we have no manufacturing industry is because other countries are able to undercut us by having lower labour costs and so drive our manufacturers out of business! the reason the courses aren't run is because there are few jobs in that sector for the ppl to go on to afterwards.

crumbling infrastructure

define pls - if you mean things like the trains not running on time, then its due to underinvestment in the transport networks...what's that got to do with education?

Germany ha shigher labour costs and still has a manufacturing industry, OK so it's not just down to the skills base, there's bad management, historical labour relations, short sightedness since the end of WW2 etc. etc. ad nauseam

The trains not running on time is largely due under-investment, but also because the trains are run by business people, not engineers.

Hmm. I have a year, maybe two, to go before I finally exit the UK education system, and this is exactly how I have approached it at every turn... this is how I excelled at school.

My gut reaction is to agree with most of dave q's points - even speaking as someone who went to a firly decent public school, the education system is severely flawed when it comes down to a) bringing the best out of the kidz and b) making sure the kidz know basic life skills and basic cultural knowledge. But still, despite the horror stories, a very large amount of people still seem to emerge relatively unscathed at the other end.

Re: media studies at a former poly vs history at Oxford... maybe you'd take the media studies graduate, and maybe you'd be right to, but the fact is that the history graduate is always going to have more options.

Instead, more should be made of the interview process to pick out candidates with genuine potential, regardless of school or predicted grades.

Big problem with all of this is that there is no obv way of providing 'greater opportunities for all' without lowering standards. It's not really about the extremes, so much as how do you get as many as possible of the middling candidates from all backgrounds to achieve the excellence which no doubt many of them could achieve. For a start it would help if at comprehensive schools if teachers could actually *teach* instead of having to devise ludicrous 'all inclusive' schemes of work designed to keep everyone in class, from Oxbridge candidate to total plank *busy*. Making it harder clearly raises stds for many so-so students. Problem now is that they can kind of get by, go to Uni anyway and come out with a so-so degree and so on. I'd prefer that people were given the chance to shine early on - although we need to find a way to chuck those who don't want to/can't on the scrapheap.

To be honest, I think school and uni have been incredibly important for me in that they provided access to stuff I could get passionate about outside of actual, like, lesson/lecture time. As for 90% of what happened in the classroom, and even more at university... really, I could have done without it. Currently I am trying to reconcile the fact that university is meant to be a centre of learning with the fact that my degree repeatedly prevents me from learning and growing.

Random school what-the-fucks: They don't teach politics in school. That's jaw-droppingly awful, that you can get through the entire educational system and have no idea how politics works in this country. They don't teach people how to cook! Like... all this nutrition home economics nonsense counts for nothing when you're faced with a cranky oven, random ingredients and no idea how to even turn it on. And don't get me started on the attitude towards languages...

yes it gives preferential treatment to those who are good at interviews hence written work should be taken into account too, but to an extent that's saying that it gives preferential treatment to, y'know, intelligent kids. Which is kind of the point.

Nobody actually NEEDS to go to university purely to learn - anyone with access to a good library and enough enthusiasm/self control can do that. But Lex has crystallised an important point here... outside my actual course, my university DID provide me with access to all sorts of things I wouldn't have been able to get hold of outside that environment as easily - the opportunity to develop my writing skills in a friendly but competetive environment, learn to use Quark and put a magazine together outside the pressures of work, play music, form a band, etc etc. Ditto for a shedload of students - you get to learn stuff that is valued in "the labour market" as much (well, let's face it, far more) than being able to flaunt a thorough knowledge of 18th Century Augustan poetry.

Dr C OTM regarding school education - although I'm not sure that "a so-so degree" in itself really IS worth that much in today's world, now that every bugger has one.

In the absence of a better solution, I'd prefer to start increasing the number of 18 yr olds who have excellent qualifications/good all-round education/know how to learn & work by acknowledging the sad truth that the current system FAILS many bright kids by wasting their time. Of course we need more good teachers too - let's raise the bar for teachers AND pay the best ones a decent salary too.

Tim - they should NOT be excluded. But the standard should be raised.

(As I understand it, Ed's lucky because there is a political party which is taking precisely his line on Higher Education, he can vote for them.)

...and i'd probably still like theatre.

(of course there is a need for engineering degrees, to advance the field forward, but as far as using the tools of engineering (Maths, statics, dynamics, structures, mechanics, solids, materials etc.) on the job training combined with some classroom and distance work would have suited me far better and produced a far better skilled me)

'Also, education as nothing more than learning a trade: classic or dud?'

DUD

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article2971600.ece

Every early years worker I know thinks that kids in England are being pushed into formal learning at too young an age. Every serious academic in the field that I'm aware of thinks the same thing. So why the fuck does the Government think it's such a great idea for 4 year-olds to be doing homework?

" well-off minority are trained to be assholes. "

omg

Cos of parents' expectations? Early years workers and academics should be the ones they listen to, course, but then they are not the ones who make up the bulk of the votes, so...

(Altho I can't think of any parents I know who would want their kids to be doing homework at 4, either.)

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/03/can-protests-university-southern-maine-flashpoint-reverses-mallification-american-higher-education.html

On Wednesday, between the rounds of layoffs, a university-wide “Transition” meeting was held by the President and University of Maine System Board of Trustees, at which Page and Kalikow announced the decision to move USM toward becoming a metropolitan university. Amidst the tidal wave of boardroom cant employed during that conference — which included USM Foundation chair Rick Vail’s admission of ignorance of the concept of “shared governance” in public institutions; an ill-received analogy of accessible online platforms to Netflix by trustee Karl Turner; a reproach issued to faculty for discussing a public institution’s affairs with the press; and multiple references to students as “customers” — you’d be forgiven for thinking a “metropolitan university” was merely an glitzed-up euphemism for an urban school.

Not quite. The Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities originated in 1990 with a vaguely stated goal of streamlining its educational models across the country. Since that time, it’s become increasingly implemented in public and private schools, both in the United States and internationally. Structurally speaking, it’s a branded organizational framework with ideas increasingly in line with corporate-driven models of education reform, such as utilizing online learning platforms like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), increasing student-to-faculty ratios, teaching to a test, employing performance- or outcome-based funding, eliminating and avoiding union and tenured professorship (with a subsequent greater reliance on adjunct professors and lecturers), broadening administrative staffs, and placing greater emphasis on answering the calls of the business community. In the case of USM, as presented in Wednesday’s public meeting, it would mean all of the above.

I think everyone can agree that higher education just has not been all it could be in terms of creating a streamlined, efficient assembly line for delivering plug-and-pay cogs to the corporate machine. Instead, corporations still have to bear some minor costs on employee training. All the interested parties, ranging all the way from CEOs to University Presidents, now recognize that these training costs need to be shifted to the employee asap, but our colleges and universities have had a difficult time getting completely up to speed and some inefficiencies still exist in the system.

Maine may not be leading the way, yet, but at least they are docilely falling into line with the business-driven agenda and very soon the business press may be citing them as models for the rest of the nation, in much the same way as the University of Phoenix and many similar for-profit institutions.

Chokes me up a bit, it does.

what good has education ever done anyone, anyways?

I say, children would be much better off if we all just ignored them. They'd find their way eventually.

u of p is an institution designed to take advantage of poor people for the benefit of apollo group stockholders, it's clearly not part of any massive business conspiracy to shift training costs on to workers...for the most part it's not doing any training

http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2014/03/university-week-virgin-air-uf-online.html

yeesh, this sounds way worse—lots of details (some speculation?) about u florida's contract with pearson

Pearson, Udacity, Coursera, and other private providers came to public universities touting a similar paradigm: universities are little more than holders of a government-sanction monopoly power--to grant degrees. Say you want to innovate to improve and/or end the monopoly, and then keep the monopoly in place to capture as much of its revenues as you can. The analogy to Virgin's bad train service (and many other failed enterprises) is strapped university instruction, which at public universities badly needs the scalable upgrade they have no money to build.

pearson: they are gatekeepers and also they own penguin books