Category Archives: anti-education

The BBC can be very quick to spin one story into another, if it suits them. But isn’t it curious that they can run an item here on the disturbingly low levels of numeracy amongst those leaving our schools without so much as once asking why we have such poor teaching of the subject? Each year, the BBC leads the hallelujah chorus that GCE’s and A level results have come to constitute,  with praise being lavished on the Education system and those within it. This is the same education system that delivers 22% of students obtaining a “decent” GCSE in Maths. On the Today programme this morning, there was an interview with a lady who had failed Maths at school but had subsequently went back to College and gained a Maths qualification. She stated that she felt let down by what went on in the classroom with the teacher allowing her to mark her own questions! She said she cheated. This went without comment. It’s remarkable to observe the BBC protect a dumbed down Education system.

I’ve been following the debate on the proposed changes to the allowable criteria schools can use when determining which pupils they will accept. What interests me is that the BBC frames the debate within a social engineering context leaving out any reference to academic ability. The Con-Libs seek to provide Academies and Free Schools with the ability to discriminate on an income basis – the poorer the family the better. Now I would have expected the BBC would provide a forum for someone who thinks this is morally and academically inappropriate but no such luck. It seems to me that so long as Government goes down an anti-academic social engineering pathway, the BBC gives it a bye. The fact that our Education system is corrupted as a consequence is a minor detail.

Did you catch this interview on Today which debates the claim that the average student leaves University with £23,000 debt. The discussion was between one of the architects of the student loan system Nicholas Barr from the LSE and NUS President Wes Streeting.

The interview manages to entirely miss the essential fact that a Labour government, ideologically driven by radical egalitarianism, is pushing far too many young people into debt in the first place by encouraging them to go to University when other avenues may be more appropriate for them. Streeting managed a get a sly dig in at the Conservatives and of course there was the usual class warfare angle from Student Grant. It’s sad to see the important area of university education used as just one more battle-field by the radical left since this now means that a degree is increasingly worthless, that the chance of an academically bright kid from a working class background getting into a University is reduced, and that Universities themselves have become bastions of left wing orthodoxy. Labour must be pleased that they have gotten away with this and all the BBC wants to talk about is the level of debt and terms of repayment. Based on this interview, so long as a graduate avoids work for 25 years, all will be well!

I see that class warrior Lord Peter Mandelson is to call on our Universities to become “engines of social mobility” later today. The BBC covered this here, with an interview with Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group which represents the 20 top universities. Sarah Montague was relentlessly pushing the patronising idea that Universities should accept a lower set of “A” level results from those from a “disadvantaged” background, although Piatt gave a decent enough defence. However what worries me is that the Universities will go along with the Mandelson line so long as they get to hike tuition fees. The BBC, like Labour, continually pushes the “All must have prizes” Dodo mentality and it rarely gives time to those who advocate that standards must be maintained at all costs and that the primary role of a University is to educate – not to facilitate the creed of socialism.