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. 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. 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”.
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. |
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