The Education Delusion.

Today’s leading news item is the fact that GCSE grades (for the sake of non-Brits, GCSEs are the exams young people take at age sixteen) have fallen for the first time ever. The lunchtime news went into schools and filmed the kids opening their results. Some were helplessly ecstatic because their grades were good; others were in floods of tears because theirs weren’t. They evidently felt the pain of perceived failure and feared for their future prospects.This is just the base level of the problem. It goes on from there to A-level and university.

I’ve railed against universal higher education before. I’ve argued that anybody with intelligence and a free mind must see that, the professions apart, there’s little inherent value in it. The value has been manufactured to mask the effects of an increasingly free market economy in an increasingly technological world. Universal higher education is only important because the Establishment chooses to hoodwink people into believing it is – and the Establishment includes the educational system and employers, as well as government.

Meanwhile, back in the news room, politicians and head teachers in smart suits argue their respective cases with a self-important air, and they stick strictly within the tram lines while so doing. They don’t want to see the bigger picture. Nobody in positions of influence, it seems, wants to see the bigger picture. If that’s the case, why should I waste my insignificant little voice trying to explain it all again?

But the Establishment is cheating as usual, and thousands upon thousands of young people all over the country are being subjected to intolerable and unnecessary stress because of it. And that makes me cross.