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Thea
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Black Planet wrote:
d00mw0lf wrote:
Thrash Harry wrote: Buxton, Stockport, Sheffield. That's a hell of a catchment area. Was it just a Catholic sixth form college you were looking for? My Catholic school education ended when my parents moved from Bournemoth to Marlborough in Wiltshire. We were a very small minority there. I didn't realise I was Catholic until then.

Edit: Forgot to say I was about seven then.

Doomie,

dont ever limit your horizons.

Come see me, if you ever feel that happen to you

Oh my.. just typing this ... makes me think...opposite..

Sigh..,..
thanks to a very helpful bloke my horizons have kinda gone *ZHOOM!* it's just a case of fathoming how to get where i wanna be that's got me stuck.
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Thea
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Thrash Harry wrote:
d00mw0lf wrote:
Thrash Harry wrote: Buxton, Stockport, Sheffield. That's a hell of a catchment area. Was it just a Catholic sixth form college you were looking for? My Catholic school education ended when my parents moved from Bournemoth to Marlborough in Wiltshire. We were a very small minority there. I didn't realise I was Catholic until then.

Edit: Forgot to say I was about seven then.
i was looking for anything at all. sheffield was just the closest.
Where the hell were you then? Sheffield and Stockport are miles away. I'm too confused to continue...
i'm in hope valley. it's technically in derbyshire, but our house has a sheffield postcode :|
the simplist way i can explain it (at this time of night) is that from the nearest station it's 30 minutes to sheffield and 45 to stockport... i think. well, it's an hour to manchester and stockport's well before that :\
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:eek:
Last edited by Black Planet on 08 Feb 2004, 15:30, edited 1 time in total.
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Thrash Harry wrote:Since Mr James mentioned it, I was just wondering what you all thought about the Government's proposals for funding higher education.

Whadayathink?
Plumbers in London charge £100 per hour. A three year degree doing media studies at luton (pronounced lu'on) polytechnic will get you £68.33p per week on the dole upon what is dubiously termed (semestered, for our american friends) graduation.

We have too many third rate universities offering too many third rate courses and false hopes to students who believe they might have a job at the end of it, or learn something worthwhile.

I would prefer to see less courses (on subjects which teach skills of genuine application which require a lecture hall or class room to teach) and less universities, and more vocational on the job training.

This would sort out the 'funding crisis' at universities and ensure that my boiler gets replaced at a cost of slightly less than one MR 007 an hour.
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I pretty much agree with your solution, but you seem to be suggesting that a graduate is inherently more valuable than a plumber. Surely it's this sort of thinking which has led to the current dearth of skilled tradesmen in the first place.
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Rubbish. I can't see any suggestion there at all. Infact, I'm saying the opposite: The idea that a graduate is inherently more valuable is a misrepresentation by universities in many cases.
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We pretty much agree on all counts then. Doesn't make for a lively debate though, does it?
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Thrash Harry wrote:than subsidising the social lives of the next generation of smart-arsed cynics like myself.
Oh no! I've turned into my Father!
Go to sleep now, Francis.
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<sigh>

From where I'm sitting (in a huge heap of Year 10 - 14 & 15 year olds, for non UK residents - essays to be precise) it might help if the government started by abandoning this silly idea they have that 50% of the population needs or wants to go to Uni.

Possibly if a bit more money was thrown at educating school kids (thereby ameliorating teacher shortages & class sizes), we could get 50% to be vaguely literate when they leave. Possibly with a less 'one size fits all/universal leaving age/further education inherently a GOOD THING' attitude from the great & good, we might have fewer expensive graduates who vacuously went to Uni at 18 for want of anything better to do & a few more affordable plumbers.

From a purely selfish point of view, I might have to take less crap from teenage thugs who'd be MUCH happier & more productive if someone found them something slightly more vocational to do than sitting in a classroom chucking glue sticks at the ceiling to make them stick...

Sorry! 27 of 10y3's musings on Pre-19th Century Love Poetry is enough to bring out the latent curmudgeon in anyone, I'm afraid - & no-one's likely to suggest sending any of THAT lot to Uni: if they were any dumber, we'd have to stop teaching 'em & start watering 'em. But it does seem to me that 'Let's send every 18 year old we can round up to University! Oh s**t...who's gonna pay for THAT, then?' is a problem with its own in-built solution...
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apoligizes.... to Harry. Sorry I was not up to even being normal last nite.. Sorry mate.

At least I did not use Pictures....gag,,,,,,
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An architect friend in London was telling me how Bob the Builder (yes, the children's show) is intended, in part, to promote handimen or laborers. Such professions are shown in a positive light. Maybe children will want to follow such trades, is an argument (although I know few people who became what they wanted when they were five years old). Has anyone else heard that about Bob and the gang, or was it just people in the construction industry who promote it because the show fouses on their profession?
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The problem with education is we don't know what to do with it. My parents both worked in education, mum as a schoolteacher and dad as a lecturer at Sunderland Uni (Polytechnic in the old days).

They are both entirely committed to getting as many kids as possible as far through the system as they are able to achieve and believe that a well-educated workforce and population leads to a better society for everyone.

In my mother's case this is particularly pertinent. She grew up in post-war Ancoats, Manchester. In the 1950s she lived in a house with no hot running water and an outdoor toilet, but she was bright enough to pass the 11+ (entrace exam for selective grammar schools, now obsolete) and went on to the Manchester Grammar School for Girls. She eventually became head girl there, which prompted the city council to re-house her family because they were so embarrassed that one of the best pupils at their flagship school was living in such a tip. School led to Uni and into a professional career which would otherwise have been barred to her, so unrestricted free education was absolutely crucial to her (and by extension my) quality of life.

So why do I have reservations?

My own Uni experience suggests that too many people are there for the beer, and hardly anyone knows exactly what they are trying to do. I spent three years on a music degree, became disillusioned after one year and largely wasted my time for the rest. I didn't actually complete the minimum specified requirements for my course, but nobody cared enough to do anything other than award me a 2:2 which seemed to be effectively a long-service mark rather than a measure of my ability.

Had I been paying for this I would have quit sooner: that would have stopped me wasting two years doing very little at other people's expense and would have freed up a place for someone who might actually have done something useful with it.

After a year spent in the "real world" (I actually had a job!) I paid £3k to do a p/grad journalism diploma at Strathclyde. This was completely different. I knew what I was doing, and why. I knew that it was my investment and my responsibility to make it work. Sure enough it worked and I graduated in style and have gone on to make a career as a newspaper reporter. My only regret is that I didn't look at an undergraduate journo training course rather than being wrongly advised into collecting a qualification that didn't suit or benefit me.

There's a further irony. My elder sister is a natural student, and graduated with a 2:1 in English from Birmingham. She still struggles to find rewarding employment, largely because the market is flooded with people who are given degrees because uni's (the apostrophe is there to denote a contraction, not a possession, pedants) can't be bothered to get rid of students who are taking it easy (like me). So a degree doesn't help people who deserve one, and turns into a beer festival for those who don't.

Meanwhile we have more graduates than ever, and I see little evidence of society as a whole getting any more attractive. I don't sense that people are in any way "better" or "worse" than in the past, despite the argument that universal education will make a profound difference.

Changes? Restructure universities. How about lectures five days a week? On my music course we had a day-and-a-half of contact time each week for four weeks of a nine-week term. Call that work!?!?!?!? We could have completed three years of study in about a month if we'd worked 9-5! It would have stripped out the wasters like me, but not impinged on the people who wanted to be there. Plus courses would be shorter and thus less expensive. Even if it's going to cost £3k/year, a one-year course is still much cheaper than a three-year version.

After all, the one-year p/g course I went through was far more intensive (though nothing like as time-consuming as going to work!) and much better for everyone who was on it (IMHO, but also those of several of my colleagues).

What we need is a radical new look at what we want our education system actually do, and how we advise kids to go through it. In lieu of that, maybe asking people to pay will at least encourage people to think about why they are looking at further and higher education and give them an opportunity to view their future in rather more detail.

.... written too much again :oops: Back to the football thread. :oops:
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Black Planet wrote:apoligizes.... to Harry. Sorry I was not up to even being normal last nite.. Sorry mate.

At least I did not use Pictures....gag,,,,,,
I should jolly well think so too young lady. How dare you clutter up my superior thread with your drunken gibberish. I see you've been round with the hoover.
Go to sleep now, Francis.
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over here education is still practically free....it's how it's supposed to be I think....otherwise the poorer people don't get a chance to study and you get more and more a class system where the poor get poorer and the rich richer....I know it always used to be that way, but propere educatio nis the only way to have it differently, and here it works....people get the chances they deserve...they take it or not, but you can't blame your own failure on society that way.....
I'm a mathematician, if I lived in England or in the US I'd probably be working in a factory by now....because even with a loan I wouldn't have been able to make it, probably.....it was difficult enough as it was..;.
countries that don't understand education should be their priority number one get the system they deserve I guess....
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some very interesting points raised here. i tend to agree with all of you, to some degree (doh!).

i certainly see a lot of truth in what andymackem says. i went to uni as a "mature" student (at 23) because i really didnt know what i wanted to do when i was 18. i half-failed my a-levels first time aroudn and re-sat them over the following 2 years.

by that time i was sick of "learning" and education and if i had gone straight to uni (to study what, exactly?!?) i really think i would have dropped out.

as it stood, my parents were behind me after i explained my thoughts on the matter and so i spent a couple of years doing "temporary" labouring jobs in various factories around oldham/middleton :urff:

after a couple of years of that i found myself unable to get another temp job and so was unemployed for 6 months. this qualified me to study for a city & guilds (vocational) course of my choice, courtesy of the dss. i chose to study computing. during this course i realised that i enjoyed learning again, that i had an affinity with computers, and also that i could get on a HND course at uni with my c&g.

so i did.

and i worked my balls of 9-5, 5 days a week (and some weekends) for 2 years (and a placement year in the middle) while my housemates tossed it off doing engineering, law and physics! :o they very rarely went in, spent all day in their rooms DJing or getting caned and watching goodfellas :roll:

i started seeing a girl doing a "womens studies" degree - 7 hours a week :o what a bullsh*t course that was - full of slackers and misfits learning about nothing in particular. i ended up writing half her essays for her coz she got an extra 15% if it was typed up and looked nice ;) :roll:

hmm. as i said initially, i do see alot of truth in both sides... i think the biggest problem to understanding here is that the consciencious ones amongst us fail to realise that a vast number of so-called "students" are utterly slack and use their uni time in the manner suggested by mr mackem :( whether or not they would rethink their options if forced to pay is debatable though.

good thread ;)
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andymackem
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Quiff Boy wrote:hmm. as i said initially, i do see alot of truth in both sides... i think the biggest problem to understanding here is that the consciencious ones amongst us fail to realise that a vast number of so-called "students" are utterly slack and use their uni time in the manner suggested by mr mackem :( whether or not they would rethink their options if forced to pay is debatable though.

good thread ;)
But to an extent it doesn't matter if they rethink their options. If they are paying for it, it's up to them to waste as much of their time and money as they see fit. I've no problem with someone shelling out a fortune and then sitting on their arse for as long as they wish. But, even allowing for a measure of hypocrisy, I think it's wrong that the opportunity should exist for state-sponsored butt-scratching. If education is to be free then we need tighter assessment of uni's and colleges to ensure that the courses they are offering actually work. We could start by banning any subject that ends in the word "Studies" :evil:

Whether this should be reclaimed through top-up fees up front or through a graduate tax or a more sophisticated restructuring of income tax is debatable, though.

More importantly pre-payment should not become a barrier to anyone who is keen to study but short of readies - enthusiasm and aptitude should always come first. So how best to fund it?
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I think they fixed what wasn't broken, in order to appear PC and to make it easier for the ladies to succeed on an equal footing ( talking late 50's ) here.

My dad did well at his 11+ , and went to Altrincham Grammar, where amongst other things, he was taught the life-skills required for ex-grammarschool kids, the future intake for Uni.

My uncle, didn't do so well, so he went to Comprehensive and was given the lifeskills he required as a tradesman. If he did really well, then I guess he would have gone to Poly.

Either way, they were equally important for the skillset they required in later life.

Merging Poly's and Uni's IMHO started the mess, further exacerbated by merging GCE and CSE. Certain people have certain needs, we aren't all the same intellectually , we shouldn't be treated the same.

The worst problem I encounter on an annual basis, is the new intake of graduates with all the knowledge but absolutely no sense of how to apply it practically.
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paint it black wrote:The worst problem I encounter on an annual basis, is the new intake of graduates with all the knowledge but absolutely no sense of how to apply it practically.
that's so true in the IT sector :roll:
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Can we please stay on topic. Who is going to fix my boiler?
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Quiff Boy wrote:good thread ;)
Indeed. Thank you all.
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andymackem
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paint it black wrote:My dad did well at his 11+ , and went to Altrincham Grammar, where amongst other things, he was taught the life-skills required for ex-grammarschool kids, the future intake for Uni.

My uncle, didn't do so well, so he went to Comprehensive and was given the lifeskills he required as a tradesman. If he did really well, then I guess he would have gone to Poly.

Either way, they were equally important for the skillset they required in later life.
But is 11 the right time to decide that? On the basis of one or two exams? I didn't mention above that my uncle didn't pass his 11+, in a similar situation to yours. It's not because he's less academically able than my mum simply that on the day of the exam he had a less good day than she did. I don't believe any group of 11-year-olds will automatically achieve their potential in a single exam (or group for that matter).

I agree that you can't have a "one size fits all" policy here, but 11 seems very young to divide our children up into graduates and tradesmen. It's not far from creating a self-perpetuating underclass of ill-educated drones (with no disrespect intended to either of our uncles).

Also, how much of education should be about delivering vocational skills and how much should be about broadening horizons?

My interest in music stemmed largely from my primary school, where I was lucky enough to have a genuinely inspirational woman who taught me to play recorder (I know, but I was only seven!). This was nurtured at secondary school, both in class and via the county music service which taught me to play clarinet and gave me the opportunity to play with orchestras. From my background I would never have accessed the world of classical music any other way (my parents' tastes lie elsewhere and it's not really a fashionable hobby for a teenager) and I would say that my life would have been the poorer for it. Are we saying that our potential future tradespersons won't be given the opportunity to experience anything other than the technical skills that will earn them a living? Seems a bit harsh.

Trouble is, it costs. And too many uni courses (in my experience) don't seem to deliver value for their students or require them to make a significant contribution to their own work. Tuition fees _will_ force a cultural change in universities, because people will stop taking them for granted. Whether they are the best way of doing this is still very debatable.
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so the problem seems to be actually that your universities suck innit?
but won't they suck even more if not the best people can attend the lessons(and so become the future teachers, some of them at least), but only the ones who can pay? ok you can get a loan, but a lot of very capable people won't do the effort, which you can say, "if they don't make the effort why should we pay?" but the thing is....if they do make the effort on the long run it's a win for the society: the ones who will complete their education will get higher pays, and so pay more taxes, which will easily pay for the cost they were for society when they were students....
it means they can sit on their arse a few years while passing a few exams per year....so what? it will be the best years of their life, and those years will benefit society as a whole in the long run...Not such a bad thing I think.....
like I said, here it works fairly good....the result is that flanders has one of the most high-level education in the world, AND is one of the most prosperous regions in the world.....
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randdebiel² wrote:the ones who will complete their education will get higher pays, and so pay more taxes
sadly in our country it doesnt work like that :(

huge amounts of people are graduating from uni and not getting a (good) job because their course was rubbish and they are ill-equiped for a career in whatever subject they studied, or because their course was hard and they struggled to get a 2:1 whereas someone studying a mickey-mouse course came out with a 1st class honours degree for doing a 3 hour week and just turning up... in a lot of industries, it doesn't matter what your degree was in, its purely a case of having one that is taken as into consideration.

it also doesnt automatically follow that the higher earners in this country pay more taxes than the rest of us... but that's a whole new discussion :urff:
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Quiff Boy wrote:
randdebiel² wrote:the ones who will complete their education will get higher pays, and so pay more taxes
sadly in our country it doesnt work like that :(

huge amounts of people are graduating from uni and not getting a (good) job because their course was rubbish and they are ill-equiped for a career in whatever subject they studied, or because their course was hard and they struggled to get a 2:1 whereas someone studying a mickey-mouse course came out with a 1st class honours degree for doing a 3 hour week and just turning up... in a lot of industries, it doesn't matter what your degree was in, its purely a case of having one that is taken as into consideration.

it also doesnt automatically follow that the higher earners in this country pay more taxes than the rest of us... but that's a whole new discussion :urff:
that's what I meant with "your unies suck" :whistle:
see, the problem is that this is a vicious circle.....this way your uni's will only get worse and worse.....
you need a way to lift the level again up, and the thing is, as far as I know, that the more you have to pay for your studies (UK and US come to mind....) the crappier the education you'll get...and that's just because with the higher price mercantillism struck in in the education area, the one place where you don't want it.....that's the reason why you get crappy meaningless studies....that's the reason why you get teachers that are no good....because of it they get less and less motivated...and so on....
actually your arguments make me only believe more fiercely in free education..... :)
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