For Owen Jones – Any And Every Target Will Be Manipulated

What’s missing is the acknowledgment of education as a function of time. Grades on one axis Time on the other. Good education will turn potential into attainment at a fair old clip leading to Mr AAAAs as a Oxbridge candidate. The whole idea of an elite university is they continue the clip, even accelerate it.
So Mr AABB from happythorpe is judged as having the same potential but not so good education. He gets to Oxbridge at an attainment deficit. Those 2 sub par results don’t lie. So can Mr working class hero AABB catch up and attain the same as or exceed Master 4As? Or does the presence of Mr AABB impede the attainment of all the AAAAs?

If they don’t catch up you’ve no business using potential for selection. Assuming it was there in the first place, it was lost potential. Far better to fix the level that lost the potential in the first place. Or if you can’t fix your school system. Identify potential early on and pay the private schools to turn it into attainment for you.

If being the son or daughter of millionaires means you outperform everyone academically, why aren’t universities full of the children of millionaires?

What is the magic ingredient that possession of large amounts of money brings?

‘Many of the country’s most intelligent, thoughtful and perceptive people do not attend either Oxford or Cambridge.’

So then what’s the fvcking value of going to O or C? The brightest are elsewhere.

‘The educational segregation of children according to the bank balances of their parents – private education – needs to be abolished.’

Cos reasons?

‘But there are such profound structural problems that are very difficult to overcome. If you grow up in an overcrowded house, suffer the stresses poverty can place on family life, sometimes have gone hungry or had a poor diet, and don’t have parents with huge “cultural capital” – like owning lots of books – then the odds are stacked against you from day one.’

So their getting into O or C guarantees their failure. Turns out then that admissions at O and C are actually perfect. And Jones is still and idiot.

‘… it has always struck me that the only solution is to automatically enrol the best performing students from state school, taking class into account.‘

If he carries on like this he will invent the Grammar School.

For younger readers: Grammar Schools were modelled on Public Schools to give children from the Working Class the same standard of education as the wealthier class, but paid by the State.

The Socialist State killed them off because they selected on merit* and so were elitist, rather than treating all the same, thus equality.

*The Jones person seems not to have got the memo from Socialist Central.

Or..we could look at what happens when the state looks after their education. Or think that the bright kids will get on anyway and the non-bright are the ones we should be concerned about. Conning them into wasting three years and £50000 or so for a crap degree, is that state policy?

In my first year, the guy in the next room came from a mining village.

@John B, December 8, 2018 at 2:50 pm

+1

Northern Ireland still has Grammar Schools, although Sin Fink are trying to wreck them.

Unsurprisingly, few private schools in NI.

john 77 said:
“In my first year, the guy in the next room came from a mining village”

In my first year, the girl in the next room was an Arabian Princess. Not sure what that proves, except diversity?

“If being the son or daughter of millionaires means you outperform everyone academically, why aren’t universities full of the children of millionaires?

What is the magic ingredient that possession of large amounts of money brings?”

I’d love to see a study done of the school results of the children of footballers and lottery winners that went to the best private schools. People whose parents weren’t scholars and got a chance to go. Or maybe, we take a dozen random kids and put them in a private school.

I have no axe to grind in this, but everything about private schooling suggests it’s far more about correlation than causation. Ironically, it’s the left, who are obsessed with blank slate thinking that keep boosting them.

Peter Hitchens today: Vital school lesson that we refuse to learn

Once again The Sutton Trust does excellent research on the terrible state of our schools. Once again, driven by ideology, it misses the point.

The revelation that eight expensive private schools together scored as many Oxbridge places as 2,894 state schools will delight Left-wing fanatics, who will pretend it’s the result of Oxbridge snobbery.

In fact, the two great universities strive very hard to encourage applicants from poor backgrounds. But atrocious, disorderly state secondaries don’t teach them well enough, and too many of their teachers, in the grip of inverted snobbery, sulkily refuse to encourage children to apply for top colleges.

That’s only the half of it. The Sutton figures, read carefully, show that academically selective state grammar schools come close to matching the vastly expensive public schools in gaining Oxbridge places.

Alas, there are hardly any of them. In the days when we had a national network of state grammar schools, 64.6 per cent of their pupils came from working class homes, according to the Gurney-Dixon report of 1954.

And most survived into the sixth form, in those pre-expansion days the equivalent of university. The Crowther Report of 1959 found more than 40 per cent of sixth-formers at grammar schools were working class. What ‘outstanding’ comprehensive or academy can say that today?

By 1964, these bright boys and girls from working class homes were storming Oxford and Cambridge, beating the expensive private schools without any special help or concessions. Then that stopped, when all but a tiny rump of grammars were smashed up in the egalitarian lunacy of the 1960s.

Watching ‘experts’ and politicians discussing education is like being in a nightmare.

In that awful dream, I have to watch, powerless, while a surgeon kills a patient because he refuses to use the only procedure which could have saved him.

Well said Mr Hitchens.

Left ideology is always at war with nature, evolution and natural behaviour & ability.

From Wolves & Orcas to Bees, each in group has skills & roles, all are not equal. Humans are the same – JRM is good at debating, but I doubt he can replace a burnt valve in a OHC engine or even change Timing Belt.