Do Sickly Children Make Successful Adults?
I ask this question because of a post on the UK-Coeliac list from a mother, who was worried that her coeliac child might have problems because of days off sick during his GCSEs.
I was always off sick at school, but I got to Grammar School and obtained good O and A levels, went to a good university and by all accounts I have been very successful since. I often wish that I’d been diagnosed with coeliac disease, when my parents and GP, were looking into my childhood health problems, but you can’t change the past.
Was it because of my many days off school, that my father took me to his printing works so often and my mother taught me household skills from cooking to making clothes? Or was it because I was the boy and was favoured by my parents and especially my grandmother, who lived with us?
I also became very reliant on my own company and this served me well, when I was programming, as that can be a very lonely experience.
Now is that self-reliance is my strongest defence against the trials of my life?
UCL Lunchtime Lectures
I went to one of the UCL lunchtime lectures yesterday on the largest archaeological site in London; the Thames. It is all detailed on this Thames Discovery web site.
The Student Fee Debate
If I look at my course at Liverpool University in the 1960s, there were some of us, who did very well, others who did reasonably and possibly quite a few who never did any serious engineering at all. Now they are trying to force more and more people to go to University and this happens when they have a funding crisis, caused by the appalling financial management of the infamous Nulabor government.
In some ways we may well be having the wrong debate.
We have a problem to pay for it all, but are Universities the right place to educate people for careers.
My father was a printer, who owned his own business and if there was one thing in his business he was proud off, it was the success of the apprentices he’d trained. He once told me, that of the dozen or so he’d had, only perhaps one had not been a success. In some ways they were bigger successes than they thought, as he always chose the rougher kids, who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty in one of the dirtiest businesses of the 1960s. I remember him complaining that schools used to send him kids, whose English was good, but if they wouldn’t get their hands dirty they were out. He always said that teaching the English was the easy bit, provided they could read, but learning to get a feel for the lead tyoe used in letterpress was not so easy.
So the first thing we should do is create proper apprenticeships in all sorts of businesses and make the whole system worthwhile for both those businesses and the young people. I’ve owned the stud for twenty years and in that time, we’ve never had any help with training some of the local kids. So what do the big studs do? Import people on short term contracts from places like Pakistan. I may be wrong, but there is something serious missing here!
To give the government credit, they are saying that they are going to create more apprenticeships. We need lots more and obviously they need to be very flexible and backed up by training leading towards qualifications.
It used to be that most nurses and others in the caring professions, were in a large part taught on the job in what was almost an appreticeship with lots of teaching. Now many of these professions need a university degree before you actually see anybody who needs some help or comfort. I’m sure that many are now barred from these professions, as they are not very academic and wouldn’t be able to get on a course. As an example, one of my friends, who has few qualifications, now works as an orderly at Addenbrooke’s and thoroughly enjoys it. She is being given on the job training, to suplement everything she learned as a mother of two. Surely, there could be a route to get this type of person into the caring professions, rather than importing them from the Phillipines and India.
All this proves to me, that on-the-job training is probably the best way to train people to do the important second level jobs, that don’t need a specialist degree. We’ve all met people, who run large companies, organisations or departments, who’ve fought their way to the top without any academc training.
We also have two other routes to getting a university degree; part-time study or the Open University. A schoool-friend used to be the Admissions Tutor at a well-known university and he was very adept at creating courses to fit round applicants jobs and family. He also had very strident views on universities, which are at completely at variance with all government thinking, but are based on many years experience in the field. The Open University always seems to be forgotten in education debates, but surely it is one of the finest successes of our education system in the last few decades.
So if the route for many to a good job and perhaps a degree is based on training and low personal cost, then perhaps we can reduce those numbers who take a traditional degree.
One also has to question whether this is necessary. In the forty years since I left university, I only worked for one year, where I needed any of the specialist knowledge that I learned at Liverpool. But the university degree got me the good job in the first place!
So is that the main reason for universities? They set you up on the ladder of life!
So to me the problem is we’re trying to send too many people to university, when there are better alternatives.
If we cut the numbers, we could probably fund everything in a better and more equitable way!
That is not to say the government’s proposal of no upfront fees, loans and paying it all back when you earn over £20,000 a year is wrong, but students need a choice that gives them value for money and one that they can afford, by getting an academic degree that pays well in the future.
Empty-nester? Buy underwear…
This was the come-on for one of the inside articles in today’s East Anglian Daily Times. It was subtitled “Lynne Mortimer’s sage advice”
It wasn’t advising mothers, who just packed their last child off to University, to buy something sexy to get the old man or possibly a new one in their lives, to get the production line going again, but a plea for mothers to make sure that their sons had enough pants to take with them. Preferably the same colour as their towels; black.
Richard Dawkins on Radio 5
I’m listening to him on Radio 5 at the moment. He talks a lot of sense.
He has just said that we want free-thinking schools, where scirnce is to the fore. I went to one of those. It was called Minchenden. Such don’t exist in the public sector too much these days. So Minchenden was a grammar school, but that was just incidental. We had good teachers, who gave us the basics and made us think both in and out of the box.
Sexuality in the 1960s
The report by Dr. Linda Papadopoulos, that children are over-exposed to sexual imagery makes some good points, but it seems to give the impression that this is a new phenomenon.
I doubt it is.
Top of the Pops was one of the top BBC shows from the 1960s onwards until it faded away a few years ago. Before the advent of pop videos many of the bands played live, but in many cases when they couldn’t, a dance routine would be performed by Pan’s People. Tame they weren’t, and they did go out in the early evening on BBC1. So when the report talks about rating pop videos and banning some before the watershed, I say “What’s New?” Pan’s People got there fair share of complaints about exposing sexuality to the young.
The report also suggests that certain magazines should not be sold to those under 16. Will this make any difference? I doubt it. When I used to deliver newspapers as a fifteen-year-old, we always used to go back to the shop afterwards and thumb through the dirty magazines. And some were quite dirty! No not quite, very! We didn’t have the Internet, but it didn’t matter.
But what has changed is that in the 1960s and before, you had to beware paedophiles. Hadley Wood, which was near where I live, was full of them. All the kids passed messages between themselves, but we never told our parents as then we’d have been banned from going to the Woods to do things like train spotting on the Great Northern line to the north.
Thankfully, paedophiles seem to have gone from public places.
It’s a funny thing, but some of the most explicit photos I’ve ever seen, I saw when I worked in a factory as a vacation job from University in probably 1966. They didn’t involve children, but they did involve most other perversions.
Was it the same before the Second World War and even in Victorian Times?
Dr. Linda Papadopoulos has made a lot of good points, but I doubt that any will make any difference. Commercial pressures from MTV, Facebook and other American sites will mean that no legislation will be enforceable and kids are always curious and want to experiment. So it could be a losing battle.
What we must do is educate children properly, so that they take everything around themselves with a strong pinch of salt and choose the things that will enrich their lives and make them valuable members of society.
Watering Down Sex Education
The government has retreated on sensible proposals on sex education, by allowing faith schools to virtually opt out of reality and the truth.
I thought that it was no well excepted that the more and better you educated kids about sex, the less teenage pregnancies you get.
But think of all those religious votes!
Fined for Enrolling Too Many Students
My late wife was a governor at Anglia Ruskin University, so I take note of what happens there.
It has just been announced on the local BBC News, that the University has been fined £600,000 by NuLabor for recruiting too many students. They are not the only one to be fined, as this article in the Telegraph details.
Now I’m not one who believes that all and sundry with three E’s should go to University on leaving school, but I do feel that in times of high unemployment, that Universities and other colleges should be used to give needed skills to those without jobs.
So fining those Universities who take on more students is just another load of old Balls from NuLabor’s Stalin Central. If anything Universities should be praised and rewarded if they manage to give good education to more students.
Can anybody tell me where the fines will go? Into Nulabor’s general pot for bonkers ideas no doubt.
I should say, that for some years my software has been used by the Department of Education and Science, or whatever politically correct name it is now and the guy I talk to can document loads of failed ideas that have cost billions of pounds to such as fraud. It would have been better to plug these leaks and then there wouldn’t be a funding crisis.
Completing a Widowhood Survey
Yesterday I completed the survey for Lizzie Evans at Liverpool University.
It was fairly painless and therapeutic. So please do the survey!
Upward Mobility
There is a lot of talk on the news today about how there is less social mobility. The first paragraph on a BBC report says.
Top professions such as medicine and law are increasingly being closed off to all but the most affluent families, a report into social mobility will say.
I came from what would be described as a strong middle-class family, with both Jewish and Huguenote roots. Both my parents were reasonably intelligent and they had a very strong work ethic. I certainly have the latter and wouldn’t have got where I have, without masses of long and hard work. Now, I did go to a very good grammar school and this helped, by giving me a strong believe in myself and also some very sound career advice in choosing engineering.
The latter choice I’ve never regretted and I would recommend it to anybody, who is that way inclined, as it is often a pathway into all sorts of related careers, if after training, you find you don’t like getting your hands dirty! I’ve also heard stories of how people with engineering degrees have got golden hellos to join various companies. Surely a bonus in times like these, where students leave university with large debts in addition to their qualifications.
My late wife actually had two first degrees; Politics from Liverpool University and Law from UCL. She then went on to be a successful barrister.
Her parents did own their own house, but could never be described as well-off. If she hadn’t been able to get into the local grammar school and then get a full grant to go to university, she would not have gone. She said so very often, as the government brought in loans so that they could spread higher education thinner and thinner.
I do find it strange that this government, many of whom got their start in life because of the system of grammar schools and university grants in the thirty years after the wars, have destroyed the system that gave them their start in life.
The Anonymous Widower 