Re: Here's someone on our side :o)

On Sat, 09 Sep 2006 11:20:46 -0500, Grumbletweezer wrote:

I think maybe the problem is still that we, as a society (businesses
included) have a problem deciding what we want education to do.

That's true and there will always be different views. That is why
education is subject to politics. The gove that gets voted in gets to set
the agenda.

The CBI
et. al. do seem to give the impression that education is for the benefit
of the economy, the current governemnet seems to agree - here's one
point where I miss those Victorian values :o)

Education is important to the economy - well there does seem to be broad
correlation that the most wealthy economies generally have better
education and the poorest have worst. Whether or not it is chicken or egg
is debatable but there seems to be some logic in it.

My own particular beef here is that business will continually push for
lower taxation or even re-locate itself to avoid paying tax, while
demanding what seems like a disproportionate (sp?) say in education etc.

Actually business doesn't have much say in education in practise. There is
some evidence that lowering income tax rates actually increases revenue -
really not too surprising since if you end up paying 50% plus of your
income in tax you tend to either not bother doing more work or finding
ways to avoid tax if at all possible. VAT and other indirect taxation is
different.

What exactly it is they want is hard to tell - according to one set of
figures (see my posting elsewhere) our 12 year olds are 3rd in the
world with their standard of literacy - just how good do they have to be
for the CBI to be satisfied?

The problem is that there is a bigger demand for office type workers now
and lower demand for manual. That means we have to produce more office
types but from the pool that previously didn't have to do these things.
The employers are in competition for these people and there are not enough
to go round. So they moan about standards.

Or, is it possible that, for some at least, it's
convienient to blame education for the lack of business success in a
global market: China isn't an economic powerhouse because of it's
education system (yet).

I think China has a lot of educated people as well as a lot that aren't.
In sheer numbers they probably have more graduates than we do.

Indeed, in a world economy in which ideas are becoming the high- value
items, it seems odd to be stuffing kids heads with facts and telling
them how they should think - it's not just good spellers we need, but
free thinkers.

I totally agree and I think employers in general want creative thinkers
for some sorts of jobs but they also need people that can spell in other
types of jobs ;-)

Hmmm - did that go a bit off the point :-/

--
Ian Lynch
www.theINGOTs.org
www.opendocumentfellowship.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk
.

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