Education versus money

I was referencing the final paragraph of your post when mentioning history, Doodledog.

Clearly if you were in charge in this educational Utopia, taxes would have to rise in order to absorb the cost of these free lifelong opportunities.

If my plumber had decided to study art history before learning his trade, as you suggested above, he might have had an enjoyable three years but quite how the benefit to him transfers to society , beyond broadening his conversational repertoire, is beyond me.

Oh, and fees charged to students do not cover the costs in many cases. There is already a levy on courses that are cheaper to run (eg Media or History), as their students pay the same as those on more expensive ones, in, say, Medicine or Engineering. As an egalitarian I don't object, but maybe the more utilitarian posters would prefer to see more expensive courses taken even further out of the reach of potential students by increasing the fees?

Germanshepherdsmum

I said ‘a debate about the 11+’ - which it wasn’t.

Of course only some people should go to university - do you seriously think that everyone, regardless of ability, should go and spend three years having a good time at the taxpayers’ expense?

Thankfully I have studied, and continue to study, history.

Well, we disagree on the fundamentals, which has been clear from the start.

I think (and have said from the start) that everyone who wants to, and who has qualified at the previous level should be able to stay in education for as long as they can. I don't think that this should be time-limited, so if someone leaves school with O levels/GCSEs they should be able to go to college to take A levels (free) at 35 if they wish, and then do a degree at 50.

As we all pay for education, I think it is deeply unfair to expect those who are denied it to be expected to pay for those who get it. I also think that fees are not only a deterrent for many, but change the dynamic to make staff/student relationships transactional, so would prefer to see them revoked and have the costs absorbed into general taxation.

I see education as being for the good of the individual, which IMO then transfers to the benefit of society.

Your point about having studied history is not put into context in your post. I was trying to link the exclusionary underpinning of the 11+ and the utilitarian approach to education of the past to some of the arguments on this thread (including yours, obviously) but I can't see what you are getting at by your reference to your studies.

Glad he’s one of the 61% who repay their loans.

My SIL is a farmer. He has a degree in mathematics. He has paid his student loan.
Waste of taxpayers money/ his good times?
Not sure that's so .. oh, and he did try teaching and decided it wasn't for him.

I said ‘a debate about the 11+’ - which it wasn’t.

Of course only some people should go to university - do you seriously think that everyone, regardless of ability, should go and spend three years having a good time at the taxpayers’ expense?

Thankfully I have studied, and continue to study, history.

I'm not 'turning it into a debate' - it already is one, or so I thought. As for the 11+ and the utilitarian approach to education, yes they were around in the past, but it seems to me that those attitudes underpin the idea that only some people should go to university, and even then, only to study 'useful' subjects.

They do say that if we don't study History we are doomed to repeat it.

You are correct Callistemon.

I don’t know why you are now turning this into a debate about the 11+ (which I believe may still exist in some, but not many, areas) and your husband’s ancestor being sent down the mine at a time when parents decided whether or not their children stayed at school and what job they took. This is old history.

What is the point of someone whose teachers know they are most unlikely to pass an A level remaining in academic, as opposed to vocational, education? What would they gain from being proved a failure rather than turning their hand (literally) to something at which they might succeed? And what do you propose for those who won’t manage a vocational course but will be able to do unskilled work?

There is no reason why a plumber’s taxes should not, along with everyone else’s, pay for the training of an accountant. If he is self employed or is sufficiently successful to own his own company he will need the services of an accountant. The only complaint I have about my taxes paying for other people’s children to go to university is that a very large proportion of them will never repay their debts.

Some people who are highly intelligent and live their lives entirely in academia would be useless working as a skilled or unskilled worker, the type of person society depends on.

Farmers are highly skilled and without farmers, the whole of society would collapse.
They are undervalued.

By ‘bright enough’ I was assuming that was what Germanshepherdsmum meant for those who had high academic achievement and would be in this revised cohort of university attendees. As I’ve previously said, that’s not a definition I agree with. A different set of skills is required to be a competent tradesman, and I don’t think that is any more achievable for people without a natural practical aptitude than high academic achievement is.

Germanshepherdsmum

You would need the money to buy or rent a farm unless you can work on the farm of mum and dad. People can go to agricultural college and perhaps become land agents. There are fewer opportunities to become a farm worker as so much is done so quickly by machines. Farming is a precarious way to earn a living.

County farms and smallholdings used to be a route into farming for those who had no money or a family farm.

However, there seem to be fewer Council farms around today.

Germanshepherdsmum

*Casdon*, if someone isn’t‘ quite bright enough’ for skilled work what do you suggest other than unskilled work?

It’s not about brightness, it’s about practical aptitude, which is a different skill.

We can go round in circles deciding who is ’bright enough’ (whatever that means) to become a retail manager, a plumber or a farmer*, but there are systemic questions that need to be considered as well as the human ones.

Firstly, at what point do we cut off possibilities for people? It used to be at 11, when those on the wrong side of a local sex-based quota were written off, along with those whose parents couldn’t afford bus fares or uniforms, or who didn’t want their children to ’get above themselves’. Many would like to go back to the grammar school system - it certainly did well for the lucky ones - but are we happy to cut adrift so many 11 year olds these days? I suspect that LEAs would be deluged with appeals as all children are incredibly bright in the eyes of their parents and grandparents, and if they aren’t, it’s because of a label. Which brings me to what happens to those who have conditions such as Dyslexia, or Autism, Anxiety, ADD - all the things that once had them shuffled off to ‘special schools’ where they were contained but educationally ignored as ‘not very bright’. What do we do with them? Spend taxpayers’ money on nurturing their talents so that they have the same opportunities as everyone else? Or consign them to lower streams, early school leaving and routine work for life?

Then there are the late developers. If we are cutting off access to good education at 11, what about them? How do they ever pass a later entrance exam if their school teaches ‘environmental studies’ instead of science, or ‘humanities’ instead of history, literature and geography?

Secondly there is the question of why we are bothering to educate people at all. If CV it is just to fill vacancies we may as well have a committee of dignitaries attached to primary schools, deciding how much ‘factory fodder’ is needed, and allocating places at high schools accordingly. This did happen, in the name of education being linked to jobs. My husband’s great grandfather (or possibly great-great) got a place at grammar school, but was told (by his father, who had been called to the office at the mine) that there was a start for him at the pit and he was to start the next day. He didn’t ’need’ to stay at school. There was no choice, as the family had a tied house and would have been unemployed and homeless if he’d refused.

Was that ok? He had a job for life. The fact that his dreams were shattered, he didn’t get a chance to study, he had to stay in the Midlands till he died, and almost certainly never met his potential- well, those things are luxuries, aren’t they, according to some.

What is education for? If, like me, you believe that education should give all of us the chance to be as ‘good’ as we can be, then it’s not about money. That will come back through taxes and from whatever is produced by the beneficiaries (whether that is goods, services, knowledge or whatever) anyway. If you believe that education is to plug gaps in the job centre, I’d like to know how you answer the questions about how it should be allocated. Oh, and should the taxes of plumbers go to pay for other people’s children to learn to be accountants?

*Absolutely no disrespect is intended to plumbers, retail managers or farmers. They are simply being used as shorthand for tradespeople, those with occupations that require non-specific degrees and those who inherit the family land. There may well be better examples.

Doodledog

I know. I wasn’t asking that though . What I am interested to find out is whether what we are seeing is what I have observed in ‘real life’, which is the phenomenon of ‘other people’s children’ being better suited to non-university pathways, when the children of those arguing for that studied for degrees, with or without loans.

In other words, are people (as I suspect) arguing for the elitism of old, which denied most people the chance to go to university and consequently to even apply for the jobs that were ring-fenced as ‘graduate’.

I don't know if this helps but one of my sons was not suited to university and we tried to suggest other options (including work)..

Because everyone else was going and he was "very bright" (apparently) he went anyway. He came out into the same job he did part time before (during A levels) and had massive student loans/debt.

He was the first of the family to pay it all back - and now earns more than any of his four siblings. He has his own business.
His youngest sibling decided not to go but the other three all went.

I am "all for" bringing back different courses for different skills sets.

Casdon, if someone isn’t‘ quite bright enough’ for skilled work what do you suggest other than unskilled work?

You would need the money to buy or rent a farm unless you can work on the farm of mum and dad. People can go to agricultural college and perhaps become land agents. There are fewer opportunities to become a farm worker as so much is done so quickly by machines. Farming is a precarious way to earn a living.

Farming definitely is a vocation, it’s one of the toughest jobs there is both physically and mentally.
It strikes me as naive to suggest that the people who don’t achieve top academic grades could be trained to be plumbers, electricians or other practical trades - those trades don’t have massive vacancies, and most people wouldn’t be capable of doing them either, they require a different skill set. The staff shortages are actually in unskilled roles, or semi skilled roles. Are we planning to condemn somebody who is not quite ‘bright enough’ to do those jobs, because that’s where they are needed?

No-one ever mentions farming.
Is that considered a vocation?

Doodledog

Far more use to whom? What happens when there are so many plumbers that they are paid minimum wage? Would you still want your grandchildren to train as one then?

If we use education as social engineering, who will decide which occupations have scarcity value and thus high rewards, and which should be flooded with trainees and low wages?

So you think that the graduates that don’t find graduate posts are better off with no marketable skills after gaining a £50k student loan, never having done any gainful work. When they could have become a skilled electrician, secretary, accounts technician, car mechanic or plumber. All skills that enable a good lifestyle, all are in short supply and we bring workers in from overseas to fill.

The government would decide which skills are needed and enable training at a technical level not a academic level

Yes, I did a couple of O levels early and the grades were numbers. The rest were done when I was 16, by which time the system had changed to letters. People often (well, as often as these things come up in conversation, anyway!) assumed that the numbers were CSE O level equivalents, to the fury of my mum, who corrected them every time

Mamie

Germanshepherdsmum

Casdon, whilst not great nine grade Cs is not indicative of someone who won’t do well at A level in three subjects of their own choosing,

Grade C has not existed for some time GSM. The scale is 1-9, with nine at the top.
There are plenty of other post-16 courses, you know.
educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2023/06/27/alternatives-to-a-levels-and-university-what-you-need-to-know/

Yes, still A* to G in Wales.

Mamie I'll show my age when I say GCEs were graded 1-9 when I took them - with 1 being the top grade.

It seems a very odd system where a 9 is the top and a 1 is the bottom grade.

Far more use to whom? What happens when there are so many plumbers that they are paid minimum wage? Would you still want your grandchildren to train as one then?

If we use education as social engineering, who will decide which occupations have scarcity value and thus high rewards, and which should be flooded with trainees and low wages?

Valuing education of course, but in line with their achievements at 18, an apprenticeship with technical training is far more use than 3 yrs of academic training at university. It’s skilled technicians that the UK is short of not graduates, further education should be tailored much more to skills the country needs.

JaneJudge

Education isn’t a competition or a race.

Valuing education is really important in a progressive society

I couldn’t agree more.

The idea of only teaching people what will be financially useful to them is so very narrow. To take it to its logical conclusion we could ask whether people need to read and write these days? They can press a button and text is read to them, and you don’t even need specialist software to be able to dictate what you want to appear on a screen and print it or send it electronically using an avatar as an address. Think of the savings.

Enjoying books is an indulgence - why should taxpayers stump up to allow others to broaden their horizons in libraries? We could reduce the school leaving age radically, to ten or so, or we do away with schools altogether, other than using them to instil ‘British values’ which would teach everyone their place. Oh, except for the ‘bright’ of course, or those with sharp-elbowed parents who will ensure that their children will stay in education for as long as possible and benefit from the reduction in the number of qualified competitors for good jobs. They’d be set for life.