Promise Of The Day Nine Learning Difficulties

Among the outpouring of promises have been many and various about education.  This is not just a left over from the Blair and Brown education x 3 = infinity ideas it is a necessary prayer to the whatever gods are up there allocating the votes.

When I were a lad the great majority of voters had actually been at work for a few years before they were able to take a pencil to their ballot paper, now they are barely out of school with hands and minds unsullied by the need to provide for themselves or family.

As education is now much more extensive so the trade unions and interest groups and those attached have gained greater influence.  As the amount of state spending has increased so have the number of businesses and providers for whom this is a ready market have come to rely on these money flows.

One effect is that to show its love and appreciation for all that is fine in education any government needs to be always "doing something" and running agencies such as Ofsted that are also to be seen and heard in a frenzy of activity, paperwork and IT functions.  Busy, busy and more busy is the whole purpose of running education services.

That this may not be a good thing and indeed counter-productive is the case put forward by this article in The Engineer. This is to do with the unfashionable and lower class sector of Further Education work and job training.

Creative destruction may be popular in abstruse political theory but as to getting things done properly and providing coherent structures and systems for this key part of both manufacturing and service basic functions simply does not work.

You cannot train people or give anyone confidence in a system if there is continual chaos and uncertainty.  If what you set up is likely to be overturned and trashed in a few months this is a disincentive to attempting to deal with the real need.

Instead you go for the option of satisfying the eccentric lunacies of the state and its hirelings rather than trying to do the job that ought to be done.

It may well explain that across so many sectors of so many activities there is so much wrong headed and bad practice.