The UK's curret government likes to pride itself on its record in education because it has got more people into university - but of what real value is that? More people going to university means that the qualifications they come out with are, in real terms, worth less. The best candidates must get postgraduate qualifications in order to distinguish themselves in the eyes of employers. Of course, education is not all about preparing people for employment, but one must then ask what contribution these extra years of learning make to people's lives on a social and intellectual level. Doubtless, one of their biggest advantages to government is that they keep a lot of young people busy - at their own expense - and cut down unemployment queues. Sadly, I find it hard to believe that they contribute greatly in other ways when, for instance, the average number of books people read has plummeted in recent years, and when there are large numbers of postgraduate students who (really!) don't know what percentages are.

It's not that these people are stupid. It's not that they don't work hard - after all, how taxing one finds a piece of acadeic work depends largely on what one has been taught before. It is, quite plainly, that they are being failed by the early part of their education, so that when they arrive at university they are having to learn things that their predecessors were taught in high school (or, in some cases, even in primary school). To make matters worse, the learning capacity of the human brain alters with age, so many of these people will have missed crucial windows and will find it much more difficult to get their heads around basic concepts than they ought to have done.

On top of this - and here's something lots of school pupils and students will confirm - education too often seems boring and pointless. They are not being shown how it can empower them, perhaps because this makes them more difficult to manage within the traditional system. Neither are they learning how it applies to real life. Schools run courses like home economics and woodwork alongside academic classes, but they rarely integrate them, for instance by showing how geometry can be used in design. Too often, people decide that a particular subject is too difficult for them and just switch off, losing confidence, ceasing to try. Do you blank out when people start talking about numbers, or give up on trying to pronounce long words?

One thing which has always distressed me about the education system in the UK, and most particularly in England [2], is the tendency to try and separate students into Arts and Science disciplines, suggesting that the two are incompatible, that they require different types of intelligence. This has left quite a gap in the labour market, where interdisciplinary academics are often useful, and where a frequent problem cited by employers is a lack of general knowledge among staff. I really don't agree that people are capable only of either Arts or sciences - I think, rather, that there are people who learn best in the manner in which Arts subjects are normally taught, and people who learn best in the manner in which Science subjects are normally taught. I have personally taught a number of people who excelled at Maths, Computing, Physics and suchlike subjects but who had always been told (and had believed) they were incapable of learning languages. By eschewing the popular style of language courses and presenting them instead as one might present a computer language, or a mathematically based cipher, and so forth, I was able to get them to learn quickly and successfully - what had formerly bebeen obscure suddenly made sense to them. I am sure that most students could benefit from increased diversity in methods of teaching, which would not be beyond the resources of the educational system as it stands, at least not in urban areas. Simple increased awareness among educational facilitators could help a great deal, improving the chances of pupils being referred to other, more personalised educational materials which they might study in private.

What else can be done? If we are to help these generations which the system has failed, adult education must become more and more of a priority. Where this is concerned, government funding tends to favour vocational courses, but it is vital that we make sure people are given due access to basic academic skills, with all the support they need to learn to wield them effectively.

Why do skills like this matter, when they are not going to contribute directly to an individual's employability? They mater because they are empowering, because they make that individual less susceptible to manipulation. They are, in fact, the cornerstone of democracy, because only a population of people who can think for themselves can truly vote in its own best interests and secure its long term future.

Go back to Jennie's page about politics.

This way to go back to Jennie's personal pages.

Last updated 13th January, 2009