February 27, 2007
Tuesday
"Young people in the UK today, particularly from the state schools, are not able to get the qualifications to come to a place like this"
This interview with Richard Sykes, head of Imperial College, is another reflection of how disastrous Britain's state education has been:
Sitting in his neat office in Imperial's main administration building - a dizzying cube of blue glass that hovers at the centre of the South Kensington campus - he still gets worked up at the thought of the new GCSE. "It's superficial stuff, fine for the general populous, but where are these people who are going to be the drivers and leaders of tomorrow? How are they going to do their A-levels if they're never getting the grounding of the single subjects?"His tirade against falling standards is backed up by a count of those he welcomes to his college every year. "More and more come from outside the UK: 30% of our students now come from outside the EU and 50% come from outside the UK. What we're doing is educating the elite of the world, not the elite of the UK. Young people in the UK today, particularly from the state schools, are not able to get the qualifications to come to a place like this."
The full article is in the Guardian (see also the entry below).
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education
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At the end of the day, the UK is no longer a nation. It is merely a marketplace. The State shows no loyalty or real concern whatsoever for British people. Indeed, the welfare state shows a total lack of real concern for the public. Instead, the State is too busy chasing economic growth the easy way: through mass immigration. Why bother training up the natives when you can get rich chinese to pay their own way? Why bother with vocational education when you can just poach a load of workers from eastern Europe? I'm typically 'free-market' in outlook, but in the case of Britain and mass immigration it seems quite obvious to me that the free movement of labour into Britain is not such an obviously good thing. Of course, to believe that mass immigration is a "bad thing" is frowned upon these days, so it is doubtful as to whether anything will really change.
Posted by: Raw Carrot at March 2, 2007 11:56 AM