Well, Homeland Security will take care of all of that and move to Canada in
the future. But then again it may be about Reptilian Illuminati according
to you tube. :>))
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2012 4:49 PM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Say's Law of education
On Sun, 27 May 2012, Keith Hudson wrote:
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.
I don't have a reference in front of me, but I think it should be possible
to find, but I recall a discussion from some decades ago (1970s or 80s ?)
about the quality of US education, where the Nobel Prize count as proof of
the quality of the education system was refuted by figures showing that most
- I think almost all - of the US Nobel winners had had their
pre-graduate-level education in europe. I don't know how it stands now, but
I would guess the balance is still toward foreign educated winners.
-Pete
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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