David Cameron's Britain

Yeah well, especially the migration outa Britain pre WW2 would indicate a brain drain of sorts.....

Those with the get-up-and go...went....

That's gotta leave a mark/effect.....

Seems their public education is a resounding success.

The UK is kinda like Detroit circa 1960. Check back in 50 years and see what happens.

If the old people are so smart why did they do such a poor job of educating the young?

This is likely part of the statist plan. A numerate population is as dangerous to statists as an armed population. Someone who is numerate can personally check the calculations of statist "science" and discover for themselves that statist sanctioned theft under the rubric of "environmentalist" makes no mathematical sense. It doesn't take much more than high school algebra and calculus to demonstrate that CAGW is a total fraud. Individuals with high degrees of statistical analytic knowledge, such as Steve McIntyre, are considered exceedingly dangerous by statists as they can demolish shoddy mathematics that is used to justify excesses of crony capitalism. Likely not one climate "scientist" in 100 has the intuitive statistical knowledge that Steve McIntyre has with their statistical "knowledge" being the uncomprehending use of statistical software packages.

There was a time when the level of numeracy in the British population was far greater than it is today. Many of the mathematics books I've collected over the years were published in the period of the late 1800's to early 1900's. They have some of the most clear expositions of how to do math. The daughter of a friend of mine was struggling with math in school and I suggested she go to a used bookstore to look for math books from that era -- her daughter found it far simpler to understand the approach utilized in the early 1900's and went from failing math to outperforming her classmates.

Isaac Asimov wrote hundreds of articles where he used mathematics just at the level of arithmetic to give people an intuitive feel for the very large and small. Someone who's been educated in this type of environment has a feel for numbers and thus a built in BS detector which is set off by statist "mathematics". Until I read books by Nasim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot on economics, the whole field of economics made absolutely no mathematical sense to me and I now realize this was due to my BS detector constantly going off when I tried to read a standard economics textbook.

Another part of the blame has to go with the educational system's insane adherence to the principle of students discovering things for themselves rather than relying on the working algorithms created by dead white males. In order to have an intuitive feel for mathematics, one should be able to multiply numbers from 1-100 in ones head readily. Such a facility gives one a bit less than 3 digit accuracy in a wide range of mental calculations and I can produce an approximate answer to a seemingly overly complex calculation to the new flock of innumerates while they still are entering the numbers into a calculator. The older I get, the more amazed young people seem to be that I can provide them with a right answer so quickly. For division, memorizing a small set of logarithms greatly speeds things up as does a slide rule. Young people will express disbelief when I tell them that people used to routinely use slide rules to plan trips to the moon.

People who program have absolutely no inhibition in utilizing efficient algorithms that someone else has created. It's fun to come up with a more efficient algorithm than what is considered to be optimum, but when one is interested in completing a program in a finite period of time, one utilizes blocks of standard code with perhaps a few modifications to fit the standard algorithm to ones particular application. Over the past few thousand years, what are probably optimal arithmetic algorithms have been perfected and the failure to teach these in school represents criminal incompetence. That is, if one considers the goal of education the production of a self-reliant intelligent population. However, statists want a nation of ignorant sheeple who lack the intellectual capacity to see through statist lies.

My father, a factory worker, was far better educated at the end of Grade XII than I was. To about the same degree, I was far better educated at the end of Grade XII than was my daughter. Access to technology that gives young people unfiltered access to limitless information often masks their dearth of deep knowledge and intellectual skills.

Part of my work involves teaching teachers. The best ones are generally far better than those my daughter, or I, or my father had. but there are still too many (particularly in an era of over-supply) who should not be let loose around children.