HEADLINES

Concerning Prince Charles' recent letter to The Literary Review? in which he opines that children are not learning enough about the history and literary heritage of this country :- What is Prince Charles talking about? We don't all have the leisure he has to study history and read love stories. We don't have palaces and mansions, relations with palaces and mansions and Aston Martins and Bentleys in which to cruise between them. We don't have a continuous stream of money flowing in from Duchies of Cornwall enabling us to indulge our every whim or an army of flunkies looking after our every need. We don't live in the same world as he does. History and love stories are of virtually no relevance to us, they barely help us at all in the struggle to stay solvent and eke out a dismal subsistence. We need to be taught how to make a tolerable income so that we can have somewhere tolerable to live, go somewhere tolerable for a tolerable holiday now and then, save up for a tolerable old age, eat tolerable food etc. it doesn't all fall in to our laps like it does into his. We are not very interested in our cultural heritage, we are more interested in trying to ensure that we have a tolerable future.

At last it seems that a government is waking up to the need for children's education to be vocational and to prepare them for a productive role in life rather than to become scholar/philosopher/aesthetes. Perhaps one or two of them may also have noticed that, partly as a result of their enthusiasm for turning Britain into a service economy, perhaps as many as 50% of the population have to make their living by doing work that barely requires them to be able to read, write or do simple arithmetic and probably 40% of the remainder have to do work that is an insult to their intelligence. What is the point of educating most of the workforce to a high level if there is no suitable work for them to do? It makes them very discontented with the work they manage to get; it also makes them expect higher wages than their work is worth; the result is the wage inflation that made most of the manufacturing industry we once had uncompetitive in the world market so that it disappeared. All that is left for most people is customer service work and various sorts of clerking. A large proportion of the workforce is just producing rubbish:- free newspapers and a myriad other sorts of advertising most of which goes straight into the dustbin or recycling bin. Degrees in "Have a nice day" wishing, fork lift truck driving and the like are about the only sort that are of any use in the service economy. According to a news item in the Sunday Telegraph (19/1/03) graduates are now training to become plumbers and can earn over £100k pa. Developing one's brain power is a passport to poverty for most people today.

In a recent newspaper article, Chris Whitehead? said the principle task of education was to make people civilised. There isn't much sign that it is having any success at present, society seems to be getting less and less civilised, all most people seem to be interested in these days is third rate entertainment and crude sexual gratification. It is very difficult to be civilised if one finds it impossible to earn the standard of living a large proportion of the population enjoys because the Ancient History, Greek and History of Art qualifications one has are inappropriate for most vocations.

One day it will be realised that the whole education system is designed principally to serve the sordid, corrupt and disastrously wasteful purposes of the middle and upper classes. It is largely designed to corrupt a large section of the population into believing they have the right to enjoy a better life than everybody else, to create a body of parasites who can't do anything productive themselves but believe they have the right to exploit and organise the lives of those who can.

PRINCIPLES

1. Everybody should be able to obtain the education they need to, a) earn enough to have a standard of living not significantly below the average, b) make the most productive use of their abilities, c) gain enough satisfaction from their work for it to be possible for them to do it efficiently, d) be sufficiently well informed to play a full part in society.
2. The opportunity to improve one's education, employability and earning power must be available throughout one's life (including when one is close to retirement), not just at the beginning. At present, if one makes a bad start to life for any reason and fails to get a degree, one is condemned to be a second or third class citizen for the rest of one's life, it is almost impossible to recover.
3. It must be possible for people to obtain the education they need without risking significant damage to their financial situation or their health. A good case can be made for paying people to learn, if there is a good prospect that it will benefit society. However, people who have been privileged to receive support throughout their education should not also expect to receive exceptional rewards for the work they do afterwards.
4. Education undertaken by a person because he or she enjoys studying, wants to know more than anyone else or just to improve his or her enjoyment of his or her leisure time, not with any intention of becoming more productive or useful to society, should be paid for by that person.
5. Those people who are capable of educating themselves using books, libraries, computer programs etc. should be able to do so without having to pay for tuition they don't need, ie it should be possible to obtain a detailed syllabus of all courses, to purchase course materials, obtain suggested reading lists, previous examination papers, course work problems and tasks (if the course absolutely has to have these) and sit examinations without paying for tutoring or to attend lectures. It should be possible to do practical work at summer schools, or some-such, when the examinations have been passed, ie when the expense is known to be justified. Students don't have an obligation to support the educational establishment.
6. Students at an advanced level should be expected to do most of their work without being spoon fed by pedagogues, it should be sufficient for them to have tutorial support. It shouldn't be necessary for a large proportion of the best brains in the country to be spending a large proportion of their time teaching lazy students, they should be doing creative work that contributes to the prosperity of society.
7. The education system should allow students to learn at their own pace as far as possible since, as well as probably being the most efficient option, it is also likely to be the one that gives the best measure of their ability ie, the speed at which they progress.
8. Children's abilities, aptitudes and interests should be carefully assessed throughout their schooling so that they can be guided towards a career in which they will be successful and happy.
9. Career studies should be a subject in the curriculum from an early age so that children can make an informed choice of the career (or, preferably, career alternatives) that would most suit them and then plan their path towards it/them.
10. Those children who know what their career will be from an early age, because it is a family tradition or is in the family business or whatever, should be able to prepare for it specifically from an earlier age than those who don't. Many children are only interested in knowledge that they know is going to be useful to them, it is counter-productive to try to force them to learn subjects when they are not interested in them, they will misbehave and disrupt the education of the others in the class. It is best to teach people when they see the need for what they are being taught and are therefore motivated to learn. It should be possible for people to learn what they need when they need it throughout their lives, they shouldn't be forced to learn everything they might need at the beginning of their lives and be barred from any opportunity to learn from then on.
11. It must be possible for people of all ages to get the education they need in an affordable way. Taking three years off work to study full-time for a degree is not a realistic option for most people. (A first degree is about the minimum qualification for membership of the middle class now and therefore the only worthwhile qualification for many people).
12. Few people need a degree qualification to be effective in their work, few people with a degree do a job to which their degree subject is relevant, vast numbers of young people are being vastly over-qualified or misqualified for the work that they end up doing.
13. Our education system is designed largely to prevent children from poor backgrounds displacing the children of middle class people from good jobs. It is designed to present a series of hurdles, stretching over an inordinate period of time, that only the children of the prosperous classes and a few exceptionally talented or exceptionally dedicated students can surmount to reach the end of the process, a Masters degree or PhD. Most people with degrees still need yet more training when they start work outside the academic environment. Very few have the opportunity to use, or retain the ability to use, more than a very small fraction of the academic training they have been given. The whole system is hopelessly inefficient and uneconomic. People from disadvantaged backgrounds who have little chance of getting on the education bandwagon are not given the opportunity to indulge themselves in this way, they are likely to be subjected to time and motion study or be continuously monitored so that they have to work flat out all the time.
14. An excessive period of education is being used as a bogus justification for a high salary.
15. Children are maturing earlier physically and mentally but the education process is getting longer and longer, it is interfering with children's normal development into adults. Three year degree courses are no longer enough, in engineering at least; first degrees likewise, a PhD will soon be necessary to get a half decent job in the electronics industry. This is potentially very damaging to young people not from prosperous backgrounds, financially, physically, mentally and socially. The answer is that there must be more specialisation, it must start earlier and there must be opportunities to get new qualifications throughout life.
16. A very long period of full-time education before starting work is probably only justified for high-flyers destined for research work in very technical subjects, fundamental physics for example. These people have a lot of work to do to reach the research frontier and need to get there before their abilities begin to decline.
17. The degree qualification should probably be abolished because:- a) It is too big a hurdle to take in one go. b) Only a minority of graduates use their degree subject in their subsequent careers. c) Few people have sufficiently good memories to retain more than a small fraction of what they learn in a three year degree course. d) Few people know what is taught in most degree courses now or ten years ago or thirty years ago (ie. employers don't really know what people's degrees qualify them for), diplomas in a handful or more different specialisms would give a much better indication of the sort of work a person was qualified for. e) Most people specialise in a very small area of the subject they studied at degree level. In my own subject, electronics, some employers are so insistent on previous experience that they will only employ new graduates whose final year project, or even summer holiday work experience, was connected with the employer's business. Engineers can easily get trapped for life in the narrow subject area they gained a little experience of in the only holiday placement they were able to find. f) Most degree qualified people quickly move into management positions where their work mostly consists of scheduling, progress chasing, allocating resources, liasing, monitoring the performance of subordinates and such-like, ie elementary functions which most people can pick up in a few weeks in the job. Degree courses are wasteful, self indulgent, designed to create a class divide and to feed the bank balance, vanity and sense of superiority of those who obtain them.
18. As far as possible, every child should have the same education opportunities. Competitive entry into universities isn't fair if some children have had more expensive education than others. Public and private schools should be incorporated into the state system. The public schools could perhaps become sixth form colleges or fifth and sixth colleges so that every child has a taste of boarding school life. Another possibility is that all children of secondary school age could attend a boarding school for one month each year.
19. The role of the universities is to do research themselves, to collect details of all the research done elsewhere and to organise all this material so that it is conveniently accessible to those who need it ie, to incorporate it into basic, refresher or advanced courses as appropriate. The courses need to be in book or computer compatible form suitable for self-study. The courses need to contain a good selection of problems so that students can test their knowledge thoroughly. There should be a sufficient number of problems for a randomised selection from them to form a suitable qualification examination, this way examinations can be held easily and cheaply at almost any time convenient to students, rather than at intervals of one year. If a student has been diligent enough to work through all the problems in the book and can remember how he solved the ones set in the exam, that should be good enough to earn the qualification.
20. The best training for most jobs is on the job training. Adaptable part-time or sandwich courses are probably the most efficient way to provide most people with the education they need. Adaptable means that people should be able to tailor their learning to meet their own specific needs. In the IT. field, for example, they might want to study the particular database, the particular operating system, the particular programming language and the particular software development system their employer or prospective employer uses. Educational establishments often have their own versions of these things that are not used anywhere else. Universities tend to teach subjects in an academic way which is appropriate for only a very small proportion of their students, the minority who are going to become academics and teachers rather than go out into the commercial world.
21. Our politicians are deluding themselves about the need for education. The vast majority of jobs available in this country now barely require one to be able to read or write. Our industry has been decimated since the Second World War and is still in steep decline, it is virtually a waste of time getting a technical qualification (other than an IT. one) unless one wants to work abroad or teach in a secondary school or university. About the only things worth learning in this society if one doesn't want to be at the bottom of the heap are, how to make a profit out of buying and selling and how to exploit other people for your own profit.
22. Politicians keep reminding us that jobs are no longer for life but they don't tell us how we get a new job when the old one comes to an end nor do they take any steps to make it possible to transfer from old to new without severe stress and financial damage. This is a particularly difficult problem for members of some professions (rapidly changing high tech. ones) and those who are getting on in years. They find it almost impossible to obtain a position anywhere near as good as their previous one, they find their qualifications no longer have any value and there is no practical way to obtain new ones that qualify them for anything better than menial work. They also know that even if they had the right qualifications it wouldn't help very much because employers invariably insist on a substantial period of experience as well; also, younger people would nearly always be preferred for any position they applied for. This problem must be dealt with properly not just ignored. Everybody who wants to work, whatever their age, must be able to retrain for a type of work that is available and must be able to obtain that type of work. Some types of work may have to be reserved for elderly people.
23. Providing they have adequate reading, writing and arithmetic skills or have progressed as far as they are likely to, secondary school children who are disruptive in class or who have no interest in learning should leave school and start working for their living until they feel the need for further formal full-time education. They should qualify for part-time and vocational training of course.
24. People who abandon full-time education early should be able to draw on this entitlement later in life.

1. The education system has to be drastically transformed to provide the education everybody needs, at each stage of their lives (not just at the beginning), to enable them to earn a good living without having to depend on the generosity of employers for training, since this isn't usually forthcoming.
2. All levels of education should be made much more readily and affordably available to everybody, whatever their age or circumstances.
3. The emphasis should be on education when it is needed rather than everybody completing their education before they start work.
4. Most education for adults should be in the form of short, intensive, full-time courses (3-6 months), part-time courses or in the recipient's own time. Full time study should be available to those who are prepared to pay for it, or those who need to retrain quickly due to redundancy or their skills no longer being in demand. Unpaid day release should normally be available to all those, of any age, who want it, either for education or for starting a business. Subsidised day release should be available to those who qualify for it.
5. It should be made much easier and cheaper for people to get education and qualifications tailored to their specific needs. It should be made possible for people to select text books containing the information they need, to study these books by themselves and then to be tested with a random or impromptu selection of the problems set in the books, (anybody who has done all the problems in a text book and can remember how to work out all the solutions deserves to pass). The only costs should be the prices of the books and perhaps a small examination fee. It should be made possible to be examined at virtually any time so that it won't be necessary to fit one's study and examination to a college timetable.
6. There should be incentives for people to train in wealth producing skills, difficult skills and skills that are in short supply, disincentives for studying soft subjects that have little utility.
7. Initial education for the professions should start earlier, be more specialised and job related and should be for a significantly shorter time.
8. Students at the higher levels (ie, above GCE 'O' Level) should be expected to teach themselves to a greater extent, rather than being spoon fed. Tutors should be available to give help to those who need it. This policy may be extended to all ages so that all students can progress at their own pace, this may be the best way to determine children's aptitudes and abilities and ensure that the brightest are not held back by the slowest or most disruptive. Progression through school might be determined more by ability than by age. Provided late developers have the opportunity to make up lost ground when they hit their stride, this seems to be fair.
9. Disruptive children should be separated from those who are motivated to learn. Children who are persistently disruptive at secondary school should be found suitable work, an apprenticeship or something of that kind until they feel the need for further full-time education.
10. All schools that set homework should make provision for this to be done at the school, after normal hours, by those children who don't have suitable conditions for study at home.
11. All schools should provide compulsory sports and physical education.
12. All schools should provide a wide range of extra-curricula social, recreational and club activities outside school hours. Playgrounds, playing fields, gyms and other facilities should be available for children's play in the evenings and at weekends; in most neighbourhoods there is nowhere else for them to go.
13. Education beyond the basic level that isn't relevant to a person's present work or a proposed career change should not be subsidised. Any subsidy obtained on the strength of a proposed career change that isn't proceeded with, should be reclaimed, unless there are acceptable reasons for the change of plan.
14. Far more attention should be given to ascertaining children's aptitudes and interests and providing them with sufficient careers information to enable them to make a suitable career choice.
15. Far more attention should be paid to giving children the education appropriate to their chosen role in life.
16. The so-called Public Schools and Private Schools should be brought into the state sector, the quality of children's education should not be determined by the wealth of their parents. Places at boarding school might be awarded partly according to ability to benefit from such an education and partly according to need to get away from a disadvantageous home environment (ie. a single parent household). Alternatively, every child might be given the opportunity to experience boarding school life at some point in their secondary education.
17. Faith schools should not be allowed. All children should be taught enough about the major and some of the minor religions to see that all are flawed, all make claims that cannot be substantiated, all are relics from an ignorant and superstitious past or are recent bogus inventions, most claim to be the one true faith and denigrate other faiths hence most of them must be bogus and probably all are etc.etc. The divisive and antagonistic effects of religions needs to be emphasised. The good features, especially those common to most religions, should also be covered but it must be shown that these can be discovered without the intervention of supernatural entities. Some of the major philosophical systems need to be covered in a similar way. The achievements of methodical enquiry ie, science, particularly the understanding of the evolution of the Universe from the Big Bang and the evolution of species, should be contrasted with the largely sterile output of religious enquiry. The fact that there isn't likely to be any more point to human life than there was to dinosaur life, or than we can conceive for the existence of the Universe should be made clear, also the fragile nature of the Earth and the human race. It might also be useful to emphasise the small likelihood of any other body in our solar system ever being made habitable or of it ever being possible for most, or even any, of the population of the Earth ever to be able to reach another habitable planet. About the best objective we can set ourselves is to prolong the life of the Earth and the variety of fauna and flora upon it, including the human race, for as long as possible and to enhance the quality of life for everybody as much as possible.
18. People to be subsidised while they are being trained by their employers?