British education is rubbish: part 2. My own personal opinion is that the root of the problem is a confusion between elite, as in of the highest possible standards and elite as in posh. We are obsessed by class and since posh people always had the best available education, it was easy to confuse those two ideas. This had two equally dire consequences: first, many white, working-class families (by no means all, but enough) became biased against education, with the consequences we see today: white kids under performing all other ethnic groups, even those that do not come from English-speaking households. Second, many middle-class, university-educated, guilt-ridden radicals felt obliged to tear down bourgeois concepts like spelling, grammar (in foreign language teaching as well as English), fact-based learning - anything, in fact, that reminded them of their own huge privilege. The result is an anti-learning bias that has no equivalent anywhere else on earth - with the possible exception of fundamentalist cultures in the Middle East /Central Asia and the southern states of the USA. Soviets never thought that the revolution precluded mass literacy and culture: quite the reverse. No other European country lowered its standards the way we did. Asians, of course, drive their children to succeed. Africans will walk for miles to get an education. We, alone, despise learning. Unless we can afford to pay for private education, in which case we spend up to £35K p.a. for it and entrench the very privilege and, yes, elitism, that the people who wrecked education wanted to destroy.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 10:03:57 +0000