Ruthie has spent a worthwhile few hours in the past week providing careers advice to local students. We live in interesting times. The quality of English advocacy was once a benchmark for the world, but I worry that the cost of qualifying is now discouraging many able students.
It is hardly suprising that able students are not attracted to long-term rewarding professions when the quick fix of The City in the 80’s, DotComs in the 90’s, etc. are much more attractive get-rich-quick solutions to student debt and massive home-ownership costs.
In a society which has had problems working out whether to encourage excellence, evidenced by the lack of Public Sector academic selection/streaming of students, so the gifted can be stretched rather than withering whilst the less gifted struggle to keep up. We now have the anomaly of “Sports Colleges”, “Arts Colleges” and “Science Colleges”.
But when the last batch of results were published we find “standards” have risen again. Now I know that does not mean spelling, but eventually unless a standard dictionary set of spellings is considered important we will have a society with increasingly difficult written communication problems.
We already have Euro/American problems using different units of measurement as well as language. Remember the space probe that failed to slow down for a planetary soft-landing because the parachute designers had worked in foot pounds and the rest of the craft was designed in kilogram metres?