OxBlog

Monday, April 19, 2004

# Posted 6:25 AM by Patrick Belton  

MODERN-DAY ENGLAND IN A NUTSHELL: Thus Education Secretary Charles Clarke:
"There is no point having improving GCSE results and higher education participation rising towards 50% if there remains a huge chunk in the middle that continue to drop out and enter into a cycle of continuous low paid work or unemployment."
While I'm hardly a Nietzschean in matters of education policy, it seems to me there actually is indeed some point in raising test scores and the number of people going to university, even holding for the moment constant the number of students dropping out of secondary school. This might be true, for instance, even if it were motivated only by Rawls's Difference Principle, and a desire to create a larger reservoir of income with which to drive a more robust social welfare state. But such ideas are coming to be seen as terribly out of fashion in an England which would rather condemn its principal research universities to slightly-below-European-level mediocrity than subject itself to criticism for pursuing any goal other than (or even together with) utter levelling equality, or allowing any inequality irrespective of how meritocratically attained or useful for the society as a whole.
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