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Idiot statement of the day

If we’re serious about wanting a better-educated, better-trained workforce, let’s not look to selective education for the solution.

Sigh.

I know that Ritchie and Farnsworth show that you don’t actually need to know anything in today’s academia but could we start from at least one basic premise? That we’d like the bridges to be designed by people who can do maths? And then take selection as far as we need to from there?

Or, alternatively, just about all that’s wrong with the education system in one sentence above:

Selina Todd, a social historian, is fellow and vice principal of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

16 thoughts on “Idiot statement of the day”

  1. I bet she can’t understand how Germany et al manage to do this whole education thing better, when they have highly-selective education and career-focused streaming…

  2. Whenever I hear anti-selection talk I know that the talker is either not especially smart, or went to a very good school. Literally nobody who went through being a genuinely smart kid in a genuinely ordinary/bad school is anything other than hugely thankful for what streaming exited, and probably wishes there’d been more opportunities to escape the influence/fists of the hoard.

  3. @The Thought Gang:

    Absolutely. I went to a school that was large enough to do proper streaming and benefited exactly as you said. Uni friends who were at smaller rural schools didn’t get proper streaming and classes went at the pace of the slowest.

    (On a tangentially related note, I still like the comment that a school that tolerates truancy is a well-behaved school. Might even have been Squander Two who said it?)

  4. @The Thought Gang:

    I agree with your sentiments, but not your spelling.

    “for what streaming exited” => that streaming existed

    “hoard” => horde

    A quick search on the internet reveals that this woman does indeed embody everything that is wrong with education in this country, I expect her to have her own BBC series soon, on either BBC 4 or Radio 4.

  5. Ian Reid

    Sadly correct – look at her own description…..

    ‘I am a writer and Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. I write on class, inequality, working-class history, feminism and women’s lives’

    Sadly this kind of person is very influential in modern intellectual discourse – but in Murphy’s world she would no doubt be dismissed as ‘another neoliberal’ – this is how far down the rabbit hole we have disappeared. The road to sanity will be long and arduous….

  6. “There’s an inequality crisis in university admissions and assessment.”

    Crisis? Her degree is in drama?

    “Why shouldn’t everyone attend the university of their choice?”

    Cirrusly? Because the state doesn’t have infinite money? Because professors don’t want to have to teach dummies?

  7. “Why shouldn’t everyone attend the university of their choice?”

    That’s actually a really good argument for 100% privately funded degree courses: whoever pays the piper calls the tune and all that. And when it’s the taxpayer that’s paying, then the prospective students can bloody well dance to our tune.

    I’m sure though that the SJW professor won’t see it that way!

  8. It’s the parents of middle-class thickos who drive this demand for equality. Real opportunity for the best to compete for limited places would mean their little darlings lose out.

  9. They should rename it St Margaret Hilda’s College.

    I was working class, council house born and bred, but was lucky enough to go to a grammar school. As we sit and look over the Whitsunday Islands from our ~$2 million house, my equally former working class wife and I often pinch ourselves (figuratively) in disbelief at how our lives have worked out. It would have been a lot, lot harder without selective education.

  10. It’s the parents of middle-class thickos who drive this demand for equality. Real opportunity for the best to compete for limited places would mean their little darlings lose out.

    That’s exactly it. Once you understand this point, much of how society is run in Britain makes sense.

  11. “I know that Ritchie and Farnsworth show that you don’t actually need to know anything in today’s academia but could we start from at least one basic premise? That we’d like the bridges to be designed by people who can do maths? And then take selection as far as we need to from there?”

    One of my observations about academia is that you get twats involved subjects where no-one dies or uses the subject for profit. Death or losing money test the standard of teaching. If a veterinary college was run by people with Richie levels of understanding of the subject, they’d teach people badly and animals would die. It would be traced back to the people teaching there. There would be a public scandal, vets would stop hiring people from there, people would stop going, It would shut down.

  12. So what would we get with comprehensive universities? Only people from Oxfordshire allowed to go to Oxford, only people from Cambridgeshire and a bit of Suffolk allowed to go to Cambridge. Nobel prizewinners teaching lads who would be better off training horses at Newmarket.

    If we want a better-educated workforce let us look at the schools which succeed in given their pupils a better education as examplars. In my day Manchester Grammar sent more boys to Oxford than Eton (not all of them ended up with a $2m house – the one I knew fairly well chose to be a teacher). Grammar schools generally lifted pupils from working class backgrounds into the middle class. While Public Schools generally led the way in introducing improved ways of teaching. Selective schools are *absolutely* the solution if we want a better-educated workforce.

    This woman claims to think that white middle-class males get more first-class degrees (do better in maths exams) by “assertive declarations” – when the only assertive declaration in maths is QED at the end of an ‘A’ level geometry proof. No, I’m not misinterpreting her – the biggest gender gap, which in some analyses accounts for the overall total, is in mathematics: so her claim boils down to what I said.

  13. Grammar schools generally lifted pupils from working class backgrounds into the middle class.

    Which is precisely why the Labour government of the 70s destroyed them: it was cutting into their voter base.

  14. Which is precisely why the Labour government of the 70s destroyed them: it was cutting into their voter base.

    Quite, BiW, as a spotty faced grammar school boy, I was a stinking commie. By the time I got to uni as a comfortably well off, NCB sponsered mining engineer, I was a worshiper of St Margaret Hilda.

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