A Mickey Mouse degree is useless
SURVEYING the omnibungle that the Government and yet another idiotic quango, this time Ofqual, have managed to make of the A-level hopes of hundreds of thousands of young people, I can only be grateful I took mine in 1954. I got myself a place in either Oxford or Cambridge but opted out of both and went to join the RAF instead. Today this would appear lunatic, but not then.
When I finally persuaded my dad to get me out of school and into the real world, expectations were far different. Today a youngster is regarded as hardly literate, let alone educated, unless he/she has been to university. Back then at least half the careers worth going for relied on in-job training, often by apprenticeship with night school to cover the academic side. And it worked.
The RAF not only taught me to fly but schooled me in aerodynamics, aviation medicine and meteorology, not to mention navigation – i.e. mathematics.
Passing into journalism and three years as apprentice under the National Council For The Training Of Journalists, I also had to study libel law, government (local and national) and constitution.At least when the RAF and NCTJ had finished with me I could fly a plane and cover just about any kind of news story, national or foreign.
Can a modern lad, brandishing a Two:Two from a former polytechnic, now re-dubbed university, do anything practical at all? My point is: back then if you could do the job, you got the job and probably kept the job. Three years boozing and pot-smoking, plus running up a massive debt for a piece of paper most employers do not even glance at was for most a waste of time.
Then came the obsession with paper learning. Indentured apprenticeships were downgraded and under John Major – another of his brilliant policies – all polytechnics, hitherto valued for technical qualifications, converted to universities offering courses so “soft” an oldtimer blinks that they are even regarded as academic courses at all. Thence the blizzard of paper degrees with exactly what practical value out there in the competitive market? I seem to recall that back then in the whole of Fleet Street, very much the concentrated home of national journalism, there was just one journo with a degree – and he was a figure of fun.
Looking today at the numpties failing to cope with Covid-19 and trying to run a few exams I have the impression that 50 years ago we might have trusted them to make the tea – if they could have mastered the kettle and got it right.
Of course today the tea comes from a machine in the corridor and those equipped to make it are in the CEO’s chair with a framed degree on the wall behind them.
The much-reviled Dominic Cummings has forecast a “hard rain” on their blithering heads before long. As the song says, let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.