Sign Up

Please sign up to be able to read, comment and contribute to our website.


Log In

Comprehensive schools only create and reward mediocrity



One of the most baffling things I have encountered as an immigrant to the UK is how utterly awful the state schools actually are.
 While being an overachiever blessed to be born at the best time to take advantage of one of the best educational system in the 20th century( in the 80s Romanian schools were churning out international competition winners in every field), I am aware that my standards are hilariously high.

That being said, I find that compared to eastern European kids educated under communism and average far east kids? British kids fall behind in pretty much every field.

They might have heard of Richard the Third from Shakespeare, but how many Brits can tell you whose son he was? IN a recent survey we found out the average 20 year old doesn’t know who was the father of Elizabeth the First and more than 50% have no idea who or what Charles 1st was most remembered for.

In math skills the average Brit without a calculator can’s figure out  the results of such boggling questions as “9*8”, and  only 38% can find Argentina on a map.

And this is not news. For at least a decade and a half since I’ve been darkening these shores education was always discussed, bemoaned, and the only way they could find to fix abysmal test results was to make tests easier.
 And this is because of the comprehensive school system.

This works on the erroneous and much loved by the western left idea that all children are born equal as blank slates and individual results can only be blamed on family and class circumstances.  Time and time again this theory was proven to be wrong, because it fails to take into consideration individual abilities and achievements.

While a child’s results do depend heavily on their social class and family environment, history is full of rags to riches stories that prove the theory should at best be taken with a huge grain of salt.

By claiming that all children are equal and should get the same education you are catering to the middle. Much aware of that, the system tried to counter that by investing heavily in helping the less able, but little is being done for helping the tops.

The least catered for kids in the comprehensive system are the ones that should be sought and nurtured, the best and the brightest, however they’re the ones most expected to sit back and allow the middle to slow their progress down, and then everyone has to deal with the one kid with special needs who has his own dedicated TA in the same room but still screams every once in a while interrupting the teaching process for everybody.

The message here is clear: the less gifted kids are considered to be a higher priority than the tops, and the kids can see that by themselves.

This is stupid and counter productive, and the fact that the state educated British kids’ academic results are amongst the lowest in the first world  is not a fact to be denied, so in order to hide that the metrics of the studies are being skewed towards the irrelevant in order to control the narrative.

A school’s results should be measured by the lifetime achievements of the pupils not the test results. There are a lot of high test scorers that end up as NEETS because the test results don’t translate into useful life skills, but this important fact is being conveniently buried in feel good statistics.

 

Most of today’s members of Parliament are the product of grammar schools, and even in the solid working class and lower middle class areas the support for grammar schools is high.

The politicians and the left disagree though. WE are supposed to believe that a group that values “diversity” is magically “pro” one size fits all education.

I had an intriguing discussion about this with one of such creatures on twitter.

His argument was that I’d rather “throw millions of working class kids to the wolves to give the rich a little hand up”.

It’s phrases like this that show that comprehensive schools create mediocrities such as the author of this tweet.

 

This discussion is not about the mythical rich that the virtue signalling middle class hate and envy so much at the same time.

The rich will always come out on top because they can actually afford the best schools and universities. George W Bush went to Yale and graduated.

This discussion is about the middle class and lower kids. This discussion is about the  brilliant kids of the families that can’t possibly afford private schools.

Because those who can afford them will send their kids there. Even if it means a second mortgage or living off plastic, any parent worth his salt will want the best for their kids and they KNOW comprehensives aren’t delivering on anything but feel good self righteousness.

A working class yet brilliant child that goes to a comprehensive will have to slum it down with the mediocre and with little Timmy who has special needs and has his own TA. This child will receive a lot less attention and guidance than Timmy and the lack of resources for kids like him/her mean that he won’t get to develop his special talent for maths or engineering or science or writing because the money needed for gifted classes go for TAs for all the Timmies that will live on disability all their lives.

So our brilliant working class child will not come out of the comprehensive with the best results he /she can achieve because he/she is not deemed by the one size fits all system to be as valuable and worthy of investment as Timmy.

So he or she will come with some A levels that may or may not be enough to get into a university but will never be good enough to get into Oxbridge. However the foreign student from a country that nurtures its values will get in and will end up in the good job that our subject could have gotten to, if only the Britain left would have deemed him valuable enough.

Kids aren’t born equal and pushing them all into a one size fits all system is idiotic. The kids at the bottom of the scale are as equally punished as our previous subject because the system only rewards academic skills on and around the average line.

Which means that the kids who are not academically inclined will never get the chance to find what they’re good at, they’ll be pushed through the system and regurgitated into NEEThood with no skills to make a living, condemned to a life on the dole.

Countries with tradeschools and vocational schools have a significantlly lower rate of dropout and higher rate of youth employment than countries that use the one size fits all approach.

But see, that doesn’t sound good, because Britain doesn’t value manual labour. Britain considers it to be demeaning and unworthy and prefers to outsource it to brown skinned people or dirty eastern European and push its own working class on the dole where they’ll perpetually vote for whoever provides them better benefits.

And therein lies the problem. The Middle class liberals of all nuances that drive and create public policy in the UK are afraid of the working class and regard them as subhuman. It doesn’t even enter their tiny minds that there are people who might want or choose to qualify for manual work.

Think about that



Please log in to comment

Back to All Posts



If you enjoy our work, please share it on your medium of choice.
While we are a free site and make no money from traffic, more visitors mean a larger the number of people who get to see an alternative view.
Thank you



If you enjoy our work, please leave us a comment. Registration is free, and we will not censor you. WE want to create a community of intelligent people who care about the fate of the world, where we can discuss without fear of social media censorship.