Education and Work

University and higher Education

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Universities churn out graduates of dubious quality who infect society with disappointment. Let’s privatise them

Daily Telegraph, 23 June 2018

The first comment to make on this Daily Telegraph article is that nobody at The Daily Stirrer believes privatising universities would be a good idea. The article does, however, get to grips with the current problems facing the higher education system. From the growth in students signing up for what have become known as 'Mickey Mouse' degrees, a category which includes subjects like 'lesbian theory', 'modern dance' and 'gay literature,' they system is producing more and more graduates who are either qualified in an academic field that offers no jobs, or are unemployable simply because thry have no intention of taking an ordinary job.

Universities churn out graduates of dubious quality who infect society with disappointment. Let’s privatise them

Gay, Lesbian, bi, Trans Education In Schools

UK Educational Publisher Unveils Hard-Left, LGBT Classroom Programme

UK Educational Publisher Unveils Hard-Left, LGBT Classroom Programme

Education publishing giant Pearson today announced an ‘LGBT-inclusive’ update to its product range, which will now include a guide to pushing ‘social justice’ activism in every part of the school curriculum. In a shameful attempt to further politicise the state school agenda LGBT activist group Stonewall was invited to produce the guide, ‘Creating an LGBT-Inclusive Curriculum’ which will now be given to schools as an aid to planning a curriculum. Pearson owns the exam board Edexcel and publishes thousands of school textbooks as one of the UK’s biggest education companies.

Organised by subject, the guide lists some crazy sounding suggestions to ensure LGBT visibility across the curriculum, for example recommending teachers set questions which reference homosexual relationships in maths and science, and introduce terminology specific to the lifestyles of sexual minorities in foreign language lessons.

Claiming an inclusive curriculum is “a crucial part of tackling” homophobic bullying in schools, the handbook advises ways in which teachers can alter lessons across the syllabus so LGBT pupils “see themselves represented in what they’re learning”. In other words pupils who are unsure of their sexuality as many highly suggestible adolescents tend to be, will now be pushed by teachers and school staff towards GayBLT lifestyles at an age when they cannot fully understand the implications of that.

The foreword of the guide focuses not on education but the need to stamp out anti-LGBT bullying in schools. Launching the guide, the senior vice-president for schools at Pearson UK, Sharon Hague, said: "LGBT students will only feel comfortable to be themselves if they also get to see themselves in their classrooms." We're sure she thinks she knows what that means.

The Primary Purpose Of The Classroom These Days Is Social Engineering! (video)



Thirteen Years Of Full Time Education Then The Chicken Factory Awaits

They expect all young people to aspire to be kings and queens of ‘the heap’, to sit on its peak and look down on those who failed – those 74% of white British young men on free school meals who did not gain five A-C GCSE grades, including English and Maths in 2012, compared with 60% of young black men and 37% of all other young people on free school meals. Christopher Hope (www.telegraph.co.uk September 3, 2013), quoted Christian Guy, the Director of the Centre for Social Justice, which produced these figures, who said they were “sobering”. They suggest that despite much money and effort white working-class boys are in danger of becoming an educational underclass”.

They must be ‘thick’, and must be made to work, opine those who resent their own place in the work heap. Yet, they are wrong, for many young people take a conscious decision that the work heap is a shit heap, which is not worth climbing. They do not fail to attain five A-C GCSE grades because they have a low IQ, on the contrary, many have the insight to despair of their future prospects if gaining the entry level to ‘the heap’. They understand that over one million young people (their brothers and sisters) have been unemployed in Britain. Being ‘educated’is not the same as being intelligent.

Many of those interviewed in the Reading the Riots study (www2.lse.ac.uk,2011/12/riots), were from the country’s deprived areas, and were pessimistic about their future – 29% disagreed with the statement “life is full of opportunities” – compared with 13% among the general population. Their anger is reflected in the lyrics of the Sex Pistols song “No Future”:

“everything that i see
there is no future for me
everything that i read
there is no future for me, for me, for me”.

This anger is part of a European-wide revolt of young people pushed to the edge. They are all labelled as “looters” or “anarchists” in the brainwashing, corporate press, but they are not. They know that their Starbucks coffee is likely to be made by debt-drowning graduate from a third-rate ‘university’. There is a greater supply of university graduates than a demand for them, because most available jobs do not require a university degree, including the much vaunted science ones.

The ludicrously named “economic recovery” has been nothing more than a transference of State sector jobs to private companies connected to fingers-in-the-pie politicians, whose “efficiencies” include lower wages built around zero-hours (zero-rights) contracts – vehicles of lousy jobs, insecurity and low wages. The ‘jobs’on offer to the young are mainly in the service sector. Britain is a post-industrial nation, a nation of call centres, supermarkets,and white van men. The only thing it produces in any quantity is hopelesness.

Those that aspire to a place on the capitalist shit heap, or are forced on to it, can not participate in society. They can not afford the cars, houses, and holidays enjoyed by those who live in the leafy suburbs. There are no coal mines, steel works, dockyards, and factories in which the white working class could earn enough to participate in society. Jobs have been outsourced, and State industries sold.

Many young men (both white and black) believe car theft and drug-dealing are logical alternatives to ‘the heap’, and are a means of being able to afford those things that working at Starbucks can not give. However much “money and effort” are thrown at the project of getting working class young men to obtain five A-C GCSE grades, it is like trying to sell them a future concocted by Disney, they simply believe the vision to be fantasy. Their reality are the police helicopters that patrol the night sky above the boarded-up shop widows of their forgotten towns.

Yes, many young men who participated in the 2011 riots had previous criminal convictions, but that can not be used as evidence that the riots were essentially about criminality, and not about the pent-up anger of a underclass, whose anger had already resulted in these criminal convictions.

Yes, the capitalist press are right, many young British men do not want the jobs that are available. For some strange reason only known to them, the prospect of serving coffee, cleaning toilets, or gutting chickens until they are 80 does not appeal to them. The ungrateful, lazy wretches!

They reject such work, and desperate employers have to exploit impoverished Europeans in their place – the stuff of popular, moral outrage. Yet, the really outrageous thing is this – British governments no longer accept their responsibility to create an ample supply of well paid jobs, they leave this to that holy of holies, ‘the market’, which has utterly failed to deliver.

The reason that most ‘hard working’ EU citizens from poor countries come to Britain to work is so that they can save enough money to be able to buy a house or business when they return home – to be able tp participate in their own country.

Those that can not participate in society will eventually attack it, and no amount of riot squads, plastic bullets, stun guns, tear gas, and water cannons will stem this tide. An alternative can be brought about by giving all people the means to earn a participatory wage, and that requires the replacement of corporate capitalism and its pro-capitalist politicians with a radical alternative.

Students getting 2.1s and Desmonds Without Doing Much Work

Dumbing down in education has been a regular topic in The Daily Stirrer since we started publication. The greatest indictment of the education system is that we now keep the majority of young people in full time education until age 18 and they still emerge, after thirteen years exposure to the politically correct propaganda that passes for education these days, unable to read and write adequately. Higher education does not escape criticism, we have heard from employers of graduate trainees joining organisations on the strength of having good STEM degrees, onlt to be found in need of remedial education in language and communication skills and basic arithmetic. Now, in a report from consumer protection group Which? universities have been accused of lowering standards after it was claimed students were gaining degrees despite skipping lectures and failing to do any private study. The report raised serious concerns over the value of higher education courses following the imposition of £9,000 annual tuition fees. The study, which was based on a series of large-scale surveys of students and recent graduates, found average workloads of under 30 hours a week - 25 per cent less than the recommended level set in national guidelines. Some students admitted to doing no work at all outside university in the evenings and weekends. Figures showed that little over a third of students - 39 per cent - believed work set by academics was "stretching" and quarter insisted they could "get away with doing little private study and still get good marks". Once again we see the damaging effect of governments' obession with statistics forcing universities and schools to focus on quantity of exam passes rather than quality. The report calls for the creation of new regulatory measures for universities, including making it easier to strip institutions of their degree-awarding powers and giving groups the right to make "super complaints" over failings across the higher education system. The conclusions come just two years after the introduction of the new tuition fees regime, with the cost of a degree for English students almost tripling to £9,000. According official government sources, student satisfaction levels are at record highs, with almost nine-in-10 students saying they are happy with courses. The Which? study however appears to contradict the conclusions, with evidence of significant failings in academic standards. One student attending a Russell Group university told Which?: "Last term I missed quite a lot of lectures but still managed 2:1s in all my exams." Another undergraduate from a former polytechnic recently upgraded to university status told researchers: "I feel like I'm missing something; academically it is not challenging." Richard Lloyd, executive director of Which?, said: "We are rightly proud of our university sector with institutions that are regarded among the best in the world. The next phase of reform for this market should protect that reputation and help students get the best value for money from higher education.