Every country acquires the education its economy calls for, no more
and no less. It isn't the overall standard of education that raises
one country's standard of living above another. If that were the case
then China, with its hundreds of thousands of engineering,
scientific, maths and economics graduates every year, would already
be leading the world in every possible advanced technology and
business sector. Instead, it remains in the mass-produced consumer
goods department and still has to plagiarize, or to import, its high
technology from (mainly) America and Germany.
Innovation is a different matter entirely and depends on a much more
subtle blend of features already present in a culture. By my
calculations, about 70% of all the Nobel prizes in the sciences have
been won by researchers in only three countries -- America, Germany
and the UK (mostly, but not necessarily, by those who were born
there). Yet, in America and the UK (and maybe Germany, too -- I don't
know the figures), about half the adult population (and a quarter of
newly graduated state school teachers) can't do maths beyond simple
addition and subtraction. Calculations involving percentages or
square roots or more than single digit fractions are beyond them.
In the UK, about half of our tenured research scientists were born
into the 20-class (those educated in private schools), the remainder
from the 80-class (those educated in state schools). Well . . . all
one can say is that, compared with the rest of the world, we're still
not doing too badly on the innovation front, whether of new ideas or
products. We could do better and, of course, in this increasingly
specialized scientific age, we'll need to do better in order to hang
onto some income from trading with others. Our politicians (as in the
US) are constantly calling for higher educational standards and,
indeed, in recent years, they are even allowing some experiments --
Academies and Free Schools -- outside the state system run from the
Department of Education in London. It will only need a modest
proportion of these experiments to do as well as the existing private
schools (only 7% of the whole) before we'll be swimming in bright
creative minds.
A preponderance of Academies and Free Schools (particularly the
latter) -- both in existence and being proposed -- lie in and around
London because that's where most of the parents who are deeply
concerned about poor quality state education live and work. They've
been attracted there in the last 50 years or so because they were
already among the more talented of the 80-class of the economically
declining provinces who migrated to London find better jobs. For
vote-catching reasons the government will hope to scatter a
reasonable number of Academies around the country in the coming
years, but in the case of Free Schools, which are entirely dependent
on the initiative and organizing abilities of concerned parents, a
large majority are, and will be, in and around London.
My money is on the Free Schools rather than Academies but the
evidence as to whether they will succeed or not is beyond my allotted
span. My point in writing today's piece is simply to record for my
own benefit that I've turned my previous life-long ideas about
education on their head. Considering that education is a byproduct of
an existing inherited culture rather than its primary cause, now
seems to me to be a better way of looking at things than that which
still mostly occupies the minds of governments today. It's a change
from Keynesian precepts (shovel more and more money into state
education of declining quality) to Say's Law (the demand of concerned
parents in a more demanding age will create its own supply of high
quality schools).
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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