Tuesday 8 March 2011

Strength Of Character

Philip Cottam, chairman of the Society of Headmasters and Headmistresses of Independent Schools, has had enough:
Universities are being asked to “repair the problems of 18 years of upbringing and education” by skewing admissions in favour of poorly performing pupils, according to a leading headmaster.
Making lower-grade offers to students from state schools is like forcing an engineer to improve the design of an aircraft “after the plane has already crashed”, he will claim in a speech today.
And he’s not wrong, though I’m sure the progressives and social scientists will be mounting a vigorous challenge to ensure this statement of fact is buried under a mountain of rhetoric.
But it was another comment that resonated with me:
“An education system that emphasises entitlement at the expense of effort and commitment will not develop the strength of character we need in order to deal with the ups and downs of life,” he says.
And can’t we just see the evidence of that all around us?

6 comments:

gildas said...

Correct!

NickM said...

He is almost right.

I once taught remedial maths to first year maths students at Leeds University (summer before they'd start studying). It was an attempt to teach them what they should have learned at A-Level but no longer did. I say "attempt" because it was a crammer.

The metaphor should be more along the lines of, "You convince someone they can build an aeroplane and then they find out they can't when it taxis to the runway hops a foot into the air and that is it."

Surreptitious Evil said...

But let's not forget Bastiat while we are generally agreeing with him.

He is proposing matters in his direct commercial interest.

Oldrightie said...

He is proposing matters in his direct commercial interest.


Rather like one of our special trade envoys would you say? Give me this guy any day.

Anonymous said...

He is proposing matters in his direct commercial interest.

So what? Does that make him wrong?

Don't tell me, when you go to work, it's for the love of humanity and you obviously refuse payment, for to do so would be to profit from you effort and that would be surreptitiously evil.....

JuliaM said...

"The metaphor should be more along the lines of, "You convince someone they can build an aeroplane and then they find out they can't when it taxis to the runway hops a foot into the air and that is it.""

Good one!

"He is proposing matters in his direct commercial interest."

Yes, but in this case, I am content that his commercial interests mirror those of our society, or at least, the society we want...