Mr Grundy, an Oxford academic expresses his doubts about the value of modern education:
One wonders what these unfortunate lads are going to do for a living after they leave the University ; and one wonders, too, what the parents are going to do when they come to realize the returns on the heavy expenditure on their boys’ education. They will realize this soon, for these sons of theirs, these products of post-war ideas in education, will soon be coming back on their hands ; and then they will have to solve the question of getting employment for those whose ignorance renders them unemployable in the professions and in many forms of business.
Now as you’ve probably guessed from words and phrases like “lads”, “on their hands”, reference to parents paying for education and the fact that this post has my name at the top, this is not a recent quotation. It is, of course, from a hundred years ago and formed part of the latest episode of that YouTube channel I do.
But the sentiments are familiar enough. Which causes me a difficulty. While I am quite happy to believe that many modern degrees are worth less than the cost – and indeed may have a wholly negative value – I am reluctant to believe the same was true a hundred years ago. So how do I tell?
Did this generation fail to find gainful employment as Grundy suggests? Not that I know of. Shift forward ten years and many did awfully well… in the KGB. Which brings me on to a worrying thought: this generation was bloody awful. This was the generation that gave us the 1945 Labour government with the horrors of nationalisaton, gun control, the NHS, the welfare state, the Town and Country Planning Act, council housing and the abolition of flogging. This was a generation whose arrogance was fortified by a point blank refusal to let facts get in the way of ideology.
So, maybe Mr. Grundy was right.
By the way, Grundy’s main complaint about post-war ideas in education – as far as I can make out – is that Latin and Greek are being dropped in favour of modern languages.
Depends who is getting flogged and why.
As an additional punishment for violent crimes where imprisonment was deemed insufficient, it may have merit. The problem is when it becomes customary with very little oversight (as it became in the Isle of Man) and especially on the young then it is little more than state sanctioned cruelty.
Discipline in schools has degraded since the abolition of caning and other forms of corporal punishment, but the reality was that the underlying causes of disruptive behaviour (such as inability to read leading to boredom) were ignored in favour of blunt violence.
Most of us who were in school when corporal punishment was allowed knew damn well that some school teachers got a sadistic thrill out of whipping young boys.
Again, without oversight it just becomes cruelty.
With every generation there’s a battle to instill the proper values of civilization, ones that work. Every elder generation winds up feeling as though they’ve lost that war, and when the time comes, the ones they lost it to feel the same way about their replacement cohorts.
Much of the problem stems from this one seminal fact: The things we’re doing for “education”, which is what we name this process of civilizing our replacement barbarians, are not working. I don’t think they ever really have worked, not since we outsourced the work to the least competent among us.
News flash for any of you who’ve forgotten the people society inflicted upon you as “educators”: Most of them shouldn’t have had those jobs. Ever. If they weren’t petty tyrants working out their own issues of abuse on the coming generations, perpetuating the cycle ad infinitum, then they were brutally incompetent as adults, and seeking their own immature level among the students. I can’t think of too many “educators” I ever ran into that I felt like really wanted to be there, doing their work, and who should have been there… The rest? Incompetent dolts who were working out their personal issues with life and the raw deal they’d felt they’d gotten from the rest of society.
The real problem is how we’ve been doing this. Little thing to be pointed out: You want your children civilized, proper adults? Don’t leave them to a mish-mash of their peers and a bunch of failed adults to be brought up. Most children these days take in rather more from their fellow children, in terms of acculturation, than in ye olde dayes of yore. I suspect that any adult/parent before our “modern” times would be horrified to see what we’re doing with them, the way the children lead separate lives without integration into the older society they’ll inevitably have to take a role within. You do things the way we are, and you wonder why so many children fail at being adults? Are you stupid?
The way we’re doing it is basically a recipe for Lord of the Flies. Shouldn’t be too surprised when the work product is both inferior and inimical to the values of civilization; the primary participants in it are failed adults and the perennially immature who don’t feel comfortable with adulting in the first damn place, so they’ve sought out a level where they can lord it over real children, and feel like they’re successful.
The basic institutions of civilizing the next generation are all failures because of the people we’ve put in charge of them, and our own laziness. You want your kids to be decent, successful and self-actuating agents of their own? You’d best be involved with them, and do all that acculturation yourself. Don’t leave it to a random mix of peers and failed adults; down that path lies a lot of unhappiness. For all concerned…
I went to a Boys Grammar School, long established, whose ethos was to turn out well rounded young men. That system has now been replaced by factories geared up to produce good exam results. The children/young adults are mere ‘work units’ in the education factories work flow. A few teachers still care but their efforts are easily undone by those less committed.
Oh I dunno, I had a former Korean War era RAF Squadron Leader as a House Master & French teacher (also a shooting instructor: the school actually had a rifle range, and sailing instructor), a chap who was a former coastal salvage project manager as a geography teacher (also a sailing instructor), former ICI commercial scientist as a physics & chemistry teacher who had an endless cautionary litany of great stories about industrial accidents. They were pretty cool as much for their experience based asides as the subject matter.
The school was very much of the view that a school boy should be taught to be “acceptable at a dance & invaluable during a shipwreck”.
But I’d be surprised if such people would even be allowed to teach these days, but perhaps I am wrong on that score.
Kirk writes:
I blame the invention of the push-chair and the way it took over from the pram.
In a pram, from an early age, the child is able to see the face of the person (e.g. mother) pushing the pram. As the mother pushes the pram, she will interact/converse with other people and the child will see this interaction, learning how grown-ups communicate.
In a pushchair the child is sitting, facing forward, isolated from the mother, unable to experience human interactions.
The shift from pram to pushchair is why we are where we are.
Ban pushchairs!
Oddly enough the latest episode also has a story about a pram and how its owner ended up in court.
Today’s graduates include tomorrow’s political and cultural leaders, so the problem today is how many of them have been taught to despise their own country and its entire history and culture. But it is utterly abnormal – both historically and internationally – for any society to be ruled by an elite which is so hostile to its values, unless it has been subjugated by a foreign invader.
So, they are the anomaly that needs to be corrected, not the ordinary citizens with normal feelings of attachment to the place and culture that they grew up in. In a nod to the American term AWFL (Affluent White Female Liberal), we should call them the ABNRML (Anti-British Nasty Ranting Midwit Lefties). Of course, many ABNRMLs are AWFL too.
It’s bad now that it’s only hurting people with useless Fine Art and “Something” Studies degrees, but what happens in a century or so when population and automation have gotten to the point that there simply aren’t enough jobs for everyone? What do you do with 12 billion or so people who have too much time on their hands when robots and drones do the heavy lifting and automated factories only need a handful of people to do everything? There will only be so many engineers and robot repairmen needed.
All day will be spent paying homage to the soul of Klaus Schwab, eating ze bugs, watching hyper 5D videosims, deep in 5D cyberspace or having tantric zero-g sex with our cat boys / girls (genetically modified or VR according to social credit level)
Steven R,
I’d point at you and laugh, but… You’re merely mouthing the conventional wisdom.
Couple of things: One, the world population of humans may have already reached it’s peak. It may not even be what we think it is, right now: There’s too much incentive for a lot of nations to falsely report demographic numbers, and the ground truth may well be considerably different than we suppose.
My guess is that we’re going to peak around 8-9 billion, and then the effects of the “birth dearth” are going to start hitting home. Max human pop is probably never going to reach 12 billion, on this planet. Instead, the problem is going to be keeping enough people around to support things, and that’s probably going to result in draconian measures in many places.
Secondly, the available work is going to expand to fill the population available to do it. The real issue isn’t that there isn’t enough work to go around, but that we tolerate paying people to do nothing. Why aren’t welfare recipients out picking up trash or doing ecological restoration work for their checks? Sheer stupidity in the leadership classes, that’s why. There’s plenty of work, and necessary work at that. Why we’re not mandating work for benefits? You got me… I’d never countenance that, even if it meant having paraplegic’s counting fur follicles on caterpillars.
All the slack in the system is there because things got a lot more efficient, particularly in agriculture. At some point, adaptation will be made. May take awhile, but it will happen.
I think the real crisis that’s coming is going to be that “birth dearth”: The handwriting is on the wall, when you go and look at the fertility rates in developed nations. You can’t keep a civilization going with only a 1.17 birth rate, at least not for long.
The great American intellectual (when “intellectual” meant person of intellect – rather than Collectivist stooge, as it does today) Paul Elmer Moore visited the United Kingdom in the 1930s – specifically the great universities, he wanted to see how British rulers were educated – remember at this time the British Empire was still the greatest Empire in human history.
At first P.E. Moore was charmed by Britain – he even wished he was a young man, like his friend T.S. Eliot had been when he came to Britain, and might make his home here. The peaceful nature of Britain (rather than the savage ideological battles of the United States – where the Liberty League was fighting, and partly losing, against the “New Deal” regime of Franklin Roosevelt) and the honest nature of institutions charmed P.E. Moore.
For example, elections were honest in Britain – without the Gerrymandering (drawing lines to get a majority in a legislature) of the Republicans or the ballot-stuffing of the Democrats (the ballot stuffing of the Democrats reached an extreme in the election of 2020 – but it did not start then, it is ancient).
Everything seemed just so much “nicer” than America – but then P.E. Moore realised something, something terrible.
There was no real conflict of ideas in Britain – everyone, including the Conservatives, was in support of “Social Reform” – of a bigger and more interventionist government to “help the people”.
It is easy for politics to be peaceful, a ritual exchange of mild insults – rather than brutal physical violence (the fist, knife and bullet have always been a big part of American politics), and for elections to be honest – if there was no real choice, if all the parties were working for a bigger government. And the only question was “how fast should social reform be pushed?”
P.E. Moore looked in vain among the elite students for people who wanted smaller government, but there were none. The concept that government might be made smaller, rather than bigger, over time (that “Social Reform” might be a BAD things) was just not part of their education – of their mental universe.
I think this is what Patrick is driving at.
It does not matter how educated someone is – if their education excludes even the possibility that “Social Reform”, i.e. ever bigger and more interventionist government, might do harm rather than good.
Indeed education that assumes that ever bigger government is automatically a good thing – is indoctrination. And such indoctrination is worse than no education at all.
American education has now reached this stage – if they returned to modern America the only jobs that people such as P.E. Moore or Irving Babbitt would get in American universities (or American schools – especially the elite private schools) is as security guards or cleaners – they would not be allowed to teach.
So America will, likely, collapse as a great power – just as Britain collapsed.
Why we’re not mandating work for benefits?
If I could get the work, why would I be applying for benefits?
Why aren’t welfare recipients out picking up trash
And put out of work well-paid state sector employees?
This.
In my state, a great program for teaching prison inmates a trade, and good work habits, was cancelled because it performed work that the local unions – public and private – wanted for themselves.
One of the things out forefathers understood which we forget, is that if you want to socialize youngsters you have to keep them out numbered. This is because they will naturally align with the largest group. One apprentice in a workshop with half a dozen craftsmen will learn something, six apprentices with one craftsman will muck about. This has been understood since the begining of time, the men will take one boy out a hunting party, no more.
Classroom teaching may well work for a group of young men eager to become doctors or lawyers, it does not work for two or three dozen twelve year olds who would rather be outside climbing trees and getting into mischief.
Roué le Jour said:
This is precisely why so much of our school system doesn’t work for young males. Our current schools were set up by and for Head Girl types, the fussy little twats that absolutely live for desk-organization and silly little games with letters and numbers that don’t do anything. It’s all form; no substance.
You want to educate boys, with an eye towards them being men? Then, they have to be on their feet, out doing things. Boys are not natural abstractionists, the way girls are. It’s a mental difference, an outlook difference, and a sign that they’re utterly alien to the female mind and mindset. Women simply can’t understand why boys can’t sit still, and will demand they be medicated into quiet submission. There’s something wrong with them, that they can’t behave like little girls…
The most pernicious thing we ever did as a civilization was putting women in charge of anything at all to do with education of young males. That was cultural suicide, and you can see the results all around us. The female mind simply doesn’t lend itself to dealing with the needs of the young male, and with the males being driven out of education, well… Yeah.
By the way, Grundy’s main complaint about post-war ideas in education – as far as I can make out – is that Latin and Greek are being dropped in favour of modern languages.
I agree that a working knowledge of Greek and Latin and the Classics should be a part of every learned persons education, but not at the expense of giving a student the tools to succeed in the world today. I’d rather our children be taught Spanish so they can deal with the hordes pouring over our southern border or Mandarin Chinese so they can deal with the new world power now that the West is on its way out than to fixate on dead languages.
Of course I’d rather our students be taught how to balance a checkbook or do quadradic equations than to be taught it is okay to be dosed to the gills on hormones and surgically mutilate one’s sex organs just so they can LARP as the opposite sex, but that’s an argument for another day.
O/T
“But we won’t let ourselves be dictated by polling… the challenges facing this country are too big for that,”
Said by the German Green Party leader after getting just 12% of votes in a local election.
Very un-German attitude. On reflection though not dissimilar to pretty much every western leader whether elected or merely installed.
John – as you know, Germany depends on making things, on manufacturing industry.
The Rhineland has been famous for making things for more than 2000 thousand years – for example sword blades, but just about everything else as well.
To make things one needs energy – and “Green” energy policies make energy too expensive for German industry.
So Germans face a choice – a choice between Green doctrine and survival.
The recent local elections in part of Germany does indicate that German voters are choosing survival – rather than the insane doctrines of the “educated”.