James Delingpole and David Craig on low standards in higher education:
When we were at university, probably one out of six school-leavers went to university. Now it’s about one out of every two. The number of people going to university has gone up from about 700,000 thirty years ago to over 2.3 million now… The way we’ve achieved that is not by increasing the intellectual capacity of British youth. For example, now, around 51% of all people going to university are getting in on three ‘D’s at A-level, or worse. Leeds Metropolitan University during one year had 97 courses for which you only needed two ‘E’s at A-level… We’ve increased the number of students with a huge drop in the bar you need to get over to get a place at university, and to be able to borrow up to £50,000 of taxpayers’ money.
Higher education isn’t for everyone.
There have always been and I guess always will be a significant group of people who look down at trades people and blue collar workers.
Many years ago a suit started getting frustrated because our work was making it difficult for him to get to his Tim Horton’s. I told him – not nicely – if it wasn’t for us he’d be living in a cave.
Leap Manifesto neo-Marxists champagne socialists are the worst.
Class of 1970. Started out with maybe 160 entering grade 1. 120 walked at grade 12 graduation. Maybe 100 actually completed high school and received their diploma. Maybe 8 went to university. They keep making it easier and easier.
They keep making it easier and easier.
Yup. I noticed that when I started my teaching position nearly 30 years ago. Social promotion had, by then, become common practice in the secondary school system. One was allowed to fail a grade once and, after that, that person would be pushed into the next one, regardless. Any incentive to actually earn one’s way through the system had been removed.
I was reminded of that this past year. Since I can’t always be at the house I inherited, I hired a high school kid to cut the lawn during the summer and shovel the sidewalk in the winter. He was in junior high at the time (yeah, I’m that old that I still use that term, rather than that dreadful “middle school”) but he had absolutely no idea of what he wanted to do when he graduated.
Having been a post-secondary educator, I had my share of students like him in my courses. Many didn’t know what they wanted, had no real idea why they were there (except for maybe mommy and daddy telling them to go back to school or find a job), and no real ambition after having been coddled by the school system.
When I reminded him that he needed to figure out what he’d be doing after he graduated from high school, all I got was a blank look–completely clueless, with no concept that life continued after Grade 12. Unless he undergoes a metamorphosis from an aimless dimwit to someone focused on his future, he will be troublesome to whoever has to teach or train him.
I’m sure, though, that he’ll be accepted by any post-secondary institution he might apply to. However, since those places are, nowadays, more concerned about filling seats in lecture halls rather than in giving a good education to qualified students, I don’t think the situation will improve any time soon.
Our father was always adament that we obtain at least 75% in our grades. If you knew 75%, you would know where to look for the other 25% which you needed to know. This was because of his flight officer training in 1939. Every Friday, there were exams, if you could not make at least 60%, then you were dropped from the course as there were a bunch of new recruits arriving on the Saturday. When he was posted to Ireland, to fly in the submarine war (protecting the merchant ships crossing the Atlantic), the crew was allowed to form themselves. He said that you wanted the pilot, the co-pilot, the navigator (him), the radar officer(him) and the gunner/bomber to have at least B+ or better. And of course, after many missions, they all became better. He said they never bothered with the C or C+ students – “they weren’t coming back!”. The C+ students would be lost over the Atlantic, or shot down, or if they were flying over France/Germany, shot down, taken prisoner. There were very real consequences for not knowing your course of studies.
does this have anything to do with wyynedfarm’s free tuition?
A: it was NOT ‘free’. summbuddy paid for it.
B; why ALL of it ‘free’? isnt it better to add some ‘incentive’ by covering only *part* of it and not waste the tuition and time partying instead of using that ‘one shot’ to GET the friggin edjukashun?
C: do they use the opportunity of having all those young impressionable minds in the same place to warn against all manner of SCAMS and such vital stuff as ‘5 most important thing when buying a house’ starting with NEVER EVER EVER sign ANYTHING without getting your OWN real estate lawyer FIRST.
you know, stuff like that, and THEN proceed with the course material.
ah yes. and the reason this will never be done? it undercuts the status quo. it just might cause the impressionable yout’ to have a eureka moment and start actually be skeptical about the tsunami of information around them, be it political, economic, medical wtf ever.
University bureaucracies built empires by increasing the numbers of students accepted into university. The easy way was reducing intellectual standards, along with promoting the view that social status comes from going to university rather than skilled/technical trades.
Cult. Marxism’s infiltration of the humanities and much of social science serves that empire building perfectly. Post-modernism claims there is no such thing as truth, nothing to be tested by critical thought, logic and scientific method. There is only class struggle under the ever newer version of identity politics. Critical thought is suppressed in class, labeled as a micro-aggression, being reported for investigation for the crime of making snowflakes feel unsafe. Professors, who refuse to go along with this are subject to a threat of protests or being fired, e. Evolutionary biologists: Prof. Bret Weinstein and his wife, Prof. Heather Heying were tenured. The Canadian grad student T.A. Lindsay Shepherds persecution is, as Prof. Jordan Peterson notes is the most appalling case in Canadian university history. Both Shepherd and Peterson have launched civil lawsuits against Wilfred Laurier university.
A week of classes in Cult. Marxism/Post-Modernism makes the naive/under educated into a Social Justice Warrior, ready to suppress critical thought and condemn the Western Civilization, they are ignorant of.
The scam got a huge boost by the no student can be failed policy. It in elementary to high school and now into some parts of the universities.
The imposition of Cult. Marxism into the private sector is an ongoing battle being carried out via Human Resource departments, mostly staffed by women educated at university, including gender studies/unconscious bias workshops (no scientific basis, at all – Prof. Jordan Peterson). The Cult. Marxists H.R. dominate most of the public sector and have heavily infiltrated public sector regulated industries. Now they use gov’t. regulatory powers to pressure the private sector to Sovietize, them too.
One example being government organizations and some private ones doing affirmative action hiring of visible minorities. Where the person hired deals with the public, in person or over the telephone, but whose english is unintelligible. Those who ask for someone else to speak to are sometimes denied and even called racist. In such a case, the affirmative action hiree has likely brought their supremacist ideology along as a cultural “enrichment” (multi-culturalism/diversity/inclusion/equity).
Huge amounts of public monies are wasted, while simultaneously weakening the high standards that built Canada and Western Civilization, primarily hierarchies of competence, and yes, the economic productivity that funds universities. Every institution, public and private has been affected by this, to varying degrees.
Provincial governments are either complicit or too intimidated to live up to their responsibilities and using critical thought, discredit and dissolve this intellectual blood clot.