A long and interesting piece on education has been written by Niall Ferguson. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here is some of it:
[In the past] Those who just scraped home in terms of literacy and numeracy could also expect relatively comfortable lives as clerks. And those who inherited wealth and status could be as thick and ignorant as they liked.
But globalisation means that those days are gone.
……
So remember: the next time you gasp at the difference between executive pay and average wages, which has widened dramatically since around 1980, you are not only gasping at how well the smart and skilled are doing. You are also gasping at how badly the people at the other end of the scale are doing. According to Save the Children, there are one million children in Britain whose families are living on less than 40 per cent of the median income (£124 per week for one adult and two children, after housing costs). This country’s worst council estates have become little Africas within.
This, then, is the single biggest problem that Gordon Brown is going to inherit when he finally becomes prime minister: an uneducated and unemployable underclass, whose only hope of upward mobility is one day, like Jade Goody, to make it onto Big Brother. If Mr Brown has a credible answer to this problem, it is strange that he has kept it secret for — just count them, if you can — 10 wasted years.