here
I liked the 'comments' beneath in particular! You always get some crackers in the Torygraph.
FWIW, I think the proffered arguments are breathtakingly simplistic. And how short are memories who can't recall the 'writing off' of up to 90% of DCs to secondary moderns!
No, we have lost our world dominance in 'Maths and Engineering'. But that's becasue our brightest and best (the DCs of Telegraph readers??!), seem to have become so imbued with a sense of entitlement to wealth they opted for banking and finance with their top degrees, shunning what THEY see as 'trade'u.
Look where THAT got us!
We as a society look down on 'trade', so our educational establishments tart up trade qualifications, making them into tin-pot degrees at huge expense, but still the Telegraph writes rueful articles about how well remunerated plumbing is as opposed to investment banking...
And the arrogance of assumption that school 'selection' means that MY DC will definitely get IN. Or the failure to recognise that if you open a grammar school to 75% of the local DCs, it ceases to be a highly selective, academically rigorous establishment (in response to the 'give us back our grammars!' argument).
And the lack of recognition that the jobs that the lowest academic achieving DCs took back in 1950 no longer exist! It wasn't that those DCs back then were all fantastically well educated, it was purely that they all got jobs of some description thus became contributing members of society with the responsibilities that entails whereas their modern equivalents become welfare dependent NEETS with all the social ills that seem to follow, thus making them far more 'on the radar'. This isn't just a British problem.
And finally I get sick of hearing 'Sweden' quoted as a paragon of 'how to do it right'. Yes, they DO do it better than us- but that's because they're a far more mature, egalitarian society than us. How soon we'd start moaning when our dustman neighbour's DCs got the same right to the 'good' school as our own DCs thus MIGHT by dint of higher intelligence, 'nick' our own DCs' university place!
Sorry, banged on like Tory reader there, didn't I?!!