A Tired Old Whinge

'A' level results day depresses me more each passing year. News bulletins will be full of joyful groups of teenagers celebrating their success. There will be arrant nonsense spouted about how children are getting cleverer and cleverer (though not I'm pleased to say from the children themselves) and there will be mischievous comments about a 'lack' of university places holding back our development of a 'knowledge based economy.' All of this masks the truth we seem unwilling to share with the exam candidates themselves , that a university education is not some magic passport to wealth and job security and nor should it be. Our political masters, most of them schooled at elite universities, deem the proper traditional liberal arts education to be something only their class deserves or can handle. For the rest there will be vacuous 'vocational' degrees which serve no more purpose than a chocolate teapot. They will be taught in unsuitably large classes and will be patronized by talk of them as 'consumers' of education services. A deception on a grand scale is being practised on our youth. Let me give you a list of the problems. I can't give you the solutions but it's not my job to do so. What I, as a current 'consumer' and as the father of another such, would appreciate is an outbreak of honesty. So here goes my list;

• There are too many universities and not enough (any in fact) centres of technological and practical excellence.
• The universities are criminally overcrowded - this is unfair on students and staff.
• modern teenagers are over-examined and yet perversely under-extended by our public examination system. The joy of the Lower 6th (the best year in education) has been battered to death.

There is talent out there - I see it in my daughters' generation, I see it daily in my own university life. But the talented are being cheated and made to think that their entitlement is merely to be trained to take a place in the morass of mediocrity that is the 'knowledge based economy.' This is vile elitist bollocks. They talk of social mobility but have systematically kicked out the rungs from the ladder which so many of us were grateful to climb in the past. Who did this? We did. My own greedy, deluded and dishonest generation. Well not in my name you half-wits. I didn't ask for any of this and I'm fed up of being told what is good for me by people you wouldn't allow to run a whelk stall. As a bit of light relief there is a special Overgraduate  plaudit to be had for whoever can remember who notoriously came up with the whelk stall remark.

It saddens me to say it but some things really were better when I was a lad. Not the clothes though - man were they dreadful.