Youngsters need some life lessons
SO ANOTHER academic year is about to begin. Over the past couple of weeks pupils received their gradings for GCSE or A-levels with varying levels of joy or disappointment. Shortly a sizeable proportion of those who finished school this summer will present themselves as freshers for university. But all is not well in the groves of academe.
Four of the most prestigious public schools seem to have got themselves involved in a scandal over cheating for exam results. How on earth did that happen? Back in the day chaps didn’t do that, when chaps were chaps. But it is the tip of an iceberg.
From the instructing side come reports that more and more students are choosing “soft” courses rather than rigorous disciplines such as the classics or maths and sciences. I take the view that any country that recategorises dodgy polytechnics as real universities and permits degree courses in golf club management and media studies is asking for it.
Detached observers claim that even with this lowering of standards the academics themselves are not doing anyone any favours by permitting “helpful” papermarking to enhance the pass figures in order to make the percentages look better than they ever would 30 years ago.
TRADITIONALISTS who study the students themselves do not appear to be consumed with admiration either. One’s eye falls upon articles claiming that on campus after campus the student body has been consumed by a brainless but suffocatingly arrogant political correctness that permits not a smidgin of variation from the accepted Left-wing viewpoint.
Those who think universities are places for lively and iconoclastic debate are barking up the wrong tree. Today, say the oldtimers, they are hotbeds of ultra-conformism where a single dissentient word can lead to mass outrage, ostracism, the banning of speakers and placard-waving marches and demos. Youngsters still very wet behind the ears feel able to instruct their professors that displeasing statues must come down and busts be removed. More to the point, the academic authorities, having apparently no authority, are capitulating.
Without wishing to be censorious of the very young it might bear stating just a few provable facts. By sheer mathematics the freshers and undergraduates have never contributed a thing to this country, quite simply because they have not yet had time. They have lived their entire lives off dad, mum and taxpayer every hour of each day. With rarest exception they have learned very little about the real world out there beyond the school gates.
This is not to be rude, it is a simple fact. There hasn’t been time. I have a recommendation. A battlefield tour of all the cemeteries where lie the millions of young men who gave their lives so that the divas of today could even live at all, let alone in a very indulgent society.
Put the tours on the school or varsity curriculum. Even in our straitened circumstances, surely we could afford that? They might actually learn something.