Has Our Benefits Culture Eradicated Hunger (to learn)

Loughton_Monkey

silverwhistle wrote: »

I have to admit I read the post you are referring to and the thought "chav" did indeed occur to me.. The general rule I apply in these cases is ignore anyone who is so lazy as to avoid punctuation and slack of thought to use the term 'lefties'. The latter rule I find particularly reliable.

I tend to agree, but personally I am particularly impressed by use of the term "scummers". I pride myself on a reasonable vocabulary but I do wonder if I am getting rather out of touch in my dotage.

...er...

...um...

innit?

MacMickster

Itismehonest wrote: »

Kids in Pakistan & parts of Africa will risk being killed or maimed to get an education & elsewhere will walk many miles to & from school (often in addition to carrying out their fairly onerous daily household chores) all because they believe education is the route to a better life than their current existence. It requires real effort & hunger to learn for many to fulfil their schooling.

Here education is too often looked on as a boring waste of time because not working = getting paid anyway. Children who don't want to be at school misbehave & get rewarded with exclusion. D'uh.

In any country with real (as opposed to relative) poverty, children tend to grasp the chance of an education to try to be better able to support themselves and their families.

Here in a first world country, our children should be pulling further and further ahead of their third world compatriots. With a proliferation of electronic aids to access the internet, the world of compiled knowledge is available at their fingertips, allowing them to learn more about any topic that excites their imagination. All of the classic books available for free download to an e-reader or tablet.

Yet our children get more excited about using Facebook to find out what their mate had for breakfast, to watch a series of people performing pratfalls on YouTube, to look at their own house (rather than the Taj Mahal) using Google streetview.

What happened to the thirst for knowledge and adventure that drove our forebears to explore the world? We seem to take our privileged place in this world for granted. We don't see real poverty around us, so appear to have lost a key incentive to do our very best and make our mark on the world.

Percy1983

I do have a simiple solution to this problem, start swapping with third world countries.

ie, get a child who will take the opputunities with both hands and then send back a child who doesn't give a....

Net immigration is nil and we have a future generation who will do us proud.

I will say my other half works in a school and she can see this everyday.

As for being taught to test, they have the big push on phonics to which she is working with an autistic child. The interesting thing is he is the best at reading in the year, but he learnt much like may of us did (this is the word 'the' its said like this etc). So now they have a phonics test coming up and the best reader will get the lowest mark so is seen as a failure. The reality is he is never going to learn phonics so why not just pushing down the path he is already on as proven with many generations it won't cause to much harm.

Pennywise

It's the same problem as we have with people saving (or not) for their retirement. Those with lots of income can put shedloads into a pension and get a good lifestyle in their dotage. Those with no income (or who spend it all) don't pay anything in and get the basic state benefit, plus top up benefits such as pension credits, housing benefit etc. If those with modest/average incomes put a relatively small amount into pensions, they find themselves no better off than those who've put nothing in, because their private pension income just comes off the top up benefits so they think "what's the point".

OK, now back to the subject of this thread.....

Brighter kids and those with pushy parents will try hard because they see that they can achieve a good job in the future - it's within their grasp!

Chav kids won't even try because they know they'll never get a really good job. All they see are carp jobs where you have to work hard to get a pitiful wage that could well be less than they'd get on benefits. They think "what's the point of learning".

So it's an aspirational problem. Somehow, the chav kids need a reason to believe that it really is worth the effort to learn and get a good education.

The existing school system doesn't help with this at all because it's all based around academic achievement. There should be an awful lot more emphasis on practical skills and learning a trade and far less on foreign languages and advanced sciences, English & maths. It's completely pointless trying to teach a foreign language to someone who has poor literacy - it's pointless trying to teach science to someone who has poor numeracy - just wasting everyone's time and demotivating the kid even further. The emphasis should be on getting the kid up to a live-able standard of literacy and numeracy - forget trigonomety and equations, concentrate on the basics so that the kids can all read and write and do basic maths at school leaving age, hopefully alongside some practical skills.

We desperately need to scrap the "one size fits all" comprehensive system and bring back specialist skills - get back to having grammar's in every town for the academics, and technical schools for the non-academics. The only change to the old (pre 70s) system being some way of making it easier to change from one to the other rather than it being a once in a lifetime decision at 10 years old (11+ exam) which was the only thing wrong with the old system as you were pigeon holed too early.

Generali

Pennywise wrote: »

We desperately need to scrap the "one size fits all" comprehensive system and bring back specialist skills - get back to having grammar's in every town for the academics, and technical schools for the non-academics. The only change to the old (pre 70s) system being some way of making it easier to change from one to the other rather than it being a once in a lifetime decision at 10 years old (11+ exam) which was the only thing wrong with the old system as you were pigeon holed too early.

If you've spent a period of time in one system you won't have the skills to be able to change unless you go back to earlier years.

The world has changed, it's not suitable to split the world into metal bashers and accountants. Most people in jobs that don't require degrees, these days probably a reasonable proxy for 'working class job', need to be literate and numerate.

Even if you include all the people in the Skilled trades, Machine Operatives and Elemental Occupations you get to a little over a quarter of the UK's entire employed workforce of almost 30,000,000. There are more people employed as Admin and Secretarial workers than as tradesmen or Machine Operatives.

chucknorris

Pennywise wrote: »

Chav kids won't even try because they know they'll never get a really good job. All they see are carp jobs where you have to work hard to get a pitiful wage that could well be less than they'd get on benefits. They think "what's the point of learning".

But chav kids grow up (was I chav? I probably wasn't that bad, but I certainly didn't want to play the game), well at least I grew up. I realised that I wasn't happy with what I had and went back (if I could be classed as being there in the first place) into education aged 28 and got a first class honours degree. I don't know if you would class it as a 'really good job' but I became a chartered surveyor and now work as a university lecturer.

EDIT: On the subject of benefits, in the mid 80's before I went back into education I was quite comfortable (or at the time at least I thought so) on invalidity benefit. But it wasn't enough for me, I could see a potential better future ahead.

ash28

Itismehonest wrote: »

No, not everyone wants to go on benefits but the fact that everyone can tends to make us all, at the very least, a little complacent about the alternative if we don't have regular paid employment.

I obviously don't know your son so don't know but it sounds like he suffered from the One Size Fits All education system that has progressively made things worse over recent decades.

Our son suffered from that common teenage complaint of knowing everything absolutely secure in the knowledge that his parents knew nothing......

He did very well in his GCSEs - it was getting him to stay in the sixth form that was the issue.

We gave up in the end and let him do as he liked....which was to go and work for the Inland Revenue for a year (not for him he said) and then go to Holland to work for a year followed by almost a year in Gibraltar......he came home and started a late apprenticeship, is a decent carpenter and is the manager of a property maintenance company...

Prudent

The_White_Horse wrote: »

i think it is very unfair that none of you are blaming the left wing teachers. the younger ones are terrible. i saw some child write "we kan chrust teechers" or some nonsense and they were praised rather than corrected.

no wonder most of the graduates we get are simpletons.

Not all of us our left wing

It makes me deeply sad that so many children do not value education because of attitudes that come from home. I spent several years working on a school in one of Scotland's most deprived estates. The local education authority threw money at the school during the labour government and it had some high quality teachers. Few of the pupils could see a benefit in working hard because they knew money was just given to their families anyway. There was actually a surprising amountof money in the families with many having holidays that I simply couldn't afford. Neither did the money given to the families improve the life quality of the children. It was all too common for breakfast to be biscuits or crisps bought on the way to school. Perhaps the saddest moment was listening to a five year old girl role playing a drug dealing situation.