Posts
'People are a bit puzzled about what “levelling up” is. Given the desire of voters in places like Hartlepool for it to happen, urgent answers are needed.
'I think I have hit on one. Abolish the insistence on a university degree for any job in the public service, perhaps for any job at all. The professions will say they need people with well-trained minds to become doctors, barristers, investment bankers and top-grade civil servants. They do. But what makes them think they will necessarily find more such minds emerging from our bloated university system than from graduates of the “University of Life”, whom they could train themselves?
'Nowadays, policing and nursing are graduate professions, with the result that they disdain the bits the public most value and make entry from poorer areas harder. Even those wandering the richest “olive groves of academe” are not necessarily the better for it. Three years of anti-Brexit prejudice and “decolonising” curricula at Russell Group universities (plus debts of £30,000) may instil lasting bitterness and render alumni unfit for useful employment. Of course, people should go to university if they want to. But why should jobs be specially reserved for them?'
Far too many people go to university in many rich countries, because there are so many more jobs for brain workers rather than manual workers. (There are exceptions though, like Switzerland and Japan.) The biggest problem this poses is the apartheid that separates graduates from non-graduates. This is very true in Romania.
Another problem in the West is that universities are centres for left-wing indoctrination. I went up to read history in 1980 wanting to see if the conservative ideas of the 18th and 19th centuries had stood the test of time and to see the history of colonialism free from liberal prejudices. I suspected, and I was right, that most of the colonial empires (including even Belgium's, though not Germany's) were hugely positive achievements.
If I did so now I'd be in trouble with dons and fellow students alike, from the induction onwards.
So far Romanian universities are not too infected with the left-wing bacillus but the harm that will be done by clever young people who graduate in arts and other soft subjects in the West and return to Eastern Europe is incalculable. It is possibly the biggest problem Romania and the region faces.
Most of the universities should be shut down. In the West we're suffering from a plague of lawyers and economists. We need some lawyers. I'm not convinced we need any economists. We certainly don't need anyone with business degrees. Nurses don't need degrees. We need at most a handful of arts graduates.
ReplyDeleteWe're producing four or five times as many graduates as we need.
In Australia we have absurd numbers of people going to university but we have to import doctors.
We need to reduce education spending across the board. Most people should leave school at fifteen.