Very well put
Education in this country has been fucked royally by the socialists ever since the sixties.

Part of education, or indeed most things in life, is for your good to further your learning. Part of it is how you measure up to other people.

"Everyone's good at something" has been bastardised to the hilt into "No one's allowed to be bad at anything."

Prizes for all.

Doesn't really help you trying to get in to college when everyone got an A, does it? Doesn't help get in to Uni when everyone's got 30 points.

And then there's the poor lecturers who want bright kids they can make a difference to, but get so bored with teaching them up to the level they should already know.

And what the fuck is an 'entrance exam' for? "Oh, they're very nice, they'll fit in well". Bollocks. It should be "They're pretty smart, they'll make my uni look good and we can push them until they're the one of the next best of the best researchers"

Certainly doesn't help you get a job. Doesn't help the employer choose between CVs.

All the way through college and uni, lecturers would look at us with pity, geniunely upset at the things we didn't understand or couldn't be taught until next year.

There was a time Uni was a place the top 10% of ACADEMIC types went to become excellent. If you weren't academic, you did something else and became excellent at that.

The tests meant something, the curriculum pushed you.

And the country happily paid for it all - it could afford to - uni wasn't part of "general education" where 90% of the country went.

Pretty soon you'll need a "degree" to become a hairdresser, and then somehow pay off a twenty grand loan for your fees on minimum wage.

Sorry, rant over. That one's been bubbling up for a few years...
(MrOli is ugly, but in the morning you will be sober, Mon 6 Apr 2009, 21:54, 1 reply)

Agree with you (almost) entirely
But was it really the socialists who killed off the value of the degree?

Granted, the "Everyone's good at something" becoming "everyone gets a prize for turning up" is a typical syndrome of extreme political correctness, but it was the Tories who decided to turn the polytechnics into universities (which - I'm too young to remember them - but strikes me as a fucking stupid idea: what exactly was wrong with an institution that taught people a useful skill that would make them eligible for a trade?)

And then it was Tony "Mrs Thatcher II" Blair who decided that we needed to get 50% of our populace into university - which obviously goes back to your point about it becoming "general education."
(LongJohnBaldry, Mon 6 Apr 2009, 22:18, closed)