What do I mean about abolishing the Oxbridge system? I don’t mean bulldozing the universities – and their beautiful quads – into rubble. There is an argument about transforming the universities into purely postgraduate institutions, and I am sympathetic to that.But, to begin with, I would dispense with the interview system, which is biased towards the more articulate – and the more articulate are those who tend to be more middle-class and have benefited from “cultural capital” passed on from their parents. They are not, necessarily, automatically brighter than those who have benefited from far fewer resources.
Then I would completely overhaul the admissions system. George Monbiot suggests offering a place to the top one or two every school in the country. That’s a good start to the debate. I remember one privately educated fellow Oxford student (who had been rejected the first time he applied) suggesting that comprehensive school students like myself only got in because of quotas. In actual fact research has shown that students from comprehensives do better at Oxford than those from public schools. More widely, research has shown state students do better at university than those who were privately educated.
But, as well as redressing the balance with the types of schools, admissions needs to take account of class. The top percentage of those who were once eligible for Educational Maintenance Allowance or on free school meals should be offered automatic admissions, for a start.
It’s not just Oxford and Cambridge this should apply to: all the top Russell Group universities should be made to follow suit.
Above all, Oxford and Cambridge should be normalised as universities. The best tutors should be encouraged to disperse across the university system – perhaps with incentives. It is right to have a top tier of universities catering to the brightest students – particularly when they are forced to reflect society as a whole, rather than the brightest rich kids: and that is the model that should be promoted.
But Oxford and Cambridge should no longer be regarded as the nation’s top universities. It’s time to leave the Oxbridge era behind us.
I can see lefties nodding their heads like Churchill the insurance dog at these wise words. But you're ALL entirely wrong.
If you want to know why you're wrong, let me ask some simple questions: given the unlimited financial muscle of the state (with our money), the fact that comprehensive teachers are heavily unionized and largely toe the left's line and given that we had 13 years of Labour paradise with Gordon Brown pissing our money away at the left's tropes du jour:
- why the fuck ARE public schools still so much better?
- why DO the top teachers and top tutors flock to public schools and Russell Group universities?
- why does Oxbridge retain any cachet?
And more importantly, why does someone who would have been a complete and utter non-entity but for his Oxbridge education want to deny other people the same thing?
At no point in his tedious, right-on cockwaffle does the dreadful scumbag attack the heavily unionized teaching profession and the overwrought polytechnics for not getting better so that public schools don't have an advantage or raising the standard of "David Beckham Studies" to compete with a PPE.
It's all about destroying the great to make everyone a nice anodyne shade of beige, with a smug side helping of "I'm alright, Jack, I've been and got all the perks, but heaven forbid anyone else should get a look in."
Unlike Owen Jones, I don't have the advantage of an Oxbridge education. But I don't begrudge anyone else the right to it.
If I was going to bitch about education, I'd be asking why the people who absolutely love sucking Owen's cock are not asking why state education should not be made better, rather than why public school and Russell Group universities should be torn down to the mediocrity that Owen seems to think the rest of us should be moulded to.
9 comments:
So he'd have us destroy top Universities now just as his beloved Labour party destroyed Grammar schools (greatest ever Social mobility tool).
What a complete fuck-wit.
Homogeny and mediocrity always seems to be the aim of the left.
Owen Jones is a short, weedy twat from a useless, non-entrepreneurial family.
And he wants us all to be like him.
Well, excuse me if I don't want to wipe tadpoles off my chin and if my parents had some get up and go.
But there is one part of his socialism with which I agree. Labour camps - and he and his family should be in one.
Who the bloody hell does Owen Jones think he is ?
He is a cultural Marxist and like all Marxists want to see the destruction of liberty and personal choice.
I went to York University. I got into York because I went to a grammar school. If I hadn't been to a grammar school (in Kent which still has them) I probably wouldn't have thought of going to university at all since none of my family had done so before.
I think this sums up how I feel about education. And I taught in a roughty toughty comprehensive for 10 years. Many students there would have benefited from being in a grammar school and would have taken differnet paths and routes perhaps if they had they had the chance.
It seems Mr Jones doesn't appreciate the chances he had and the benefits given him. It's about time he got that nasty impediment on his shoulder removed and cheered on those who are going for it rather than stopping people, from whatever background, to share in what he had access to.
Somebody, a Labour politician I think, was once asked if he was going to abolish 1st class travel and he replied no 2nd class. I think this was when they nationalised the railways. There's a message in there somewhere about aspiration.
Owen Jones is a Marxist utopian cunt of the very highest order. Loving the use of the word knave. There's a word that needs to be brought back into common usage
Obnoxio: Oxbridge takes tax money from the government despite sitting on metric fucktons of endowments, land and property revenues. They spend that money mostly upon upgrading their buildings and superstar faculty pay. They don't spend it on students. They expect you and me to do that through tax, and that is why all of their buildings are usually named in honour of the persons who paid to erect them, but you still have to borrow money off the student loans company to attend.
The fundamental reason why the private education system, and ultimately Oxbridge, does so well is not really the teachers. Many people who work in the state sector are actually SERIOUSLY good, when you consider what comes through the gates on an annual basis. British people just don't value or notice this because the children just magically wind up educated somehow, through the inhalation of pixie dust perhaps, in spite of the shitty parents that they often have and the avalanche of distractions that they usually go home to. Private schools ration computers and television viewing, and operate using ongoing expulsion of anyone who is violent. Fighting used to be tolerated in public schools as an aspect of socialisation, nowadays, the sums of money are so large that expulsions occur and the parents do the disciplining for them.
If it is not the teachers, it is not the pupils either, in that IQs may be slightly higher, but please, they are not that high. It is class sizes.
Private education is only expensive because the high unit cost of facilities and teachers is amortised across so few pupils that it becomes exclusionary. Private schools have also raised their fees massively in recent years targeting international money, not Grammar school parents with professional jobs chasing scholarships. Girl's schools in particular, are real centres of study rather than what they offered previously, namely busywork to fill up the time around hockey, pony riding and deportment classes.
Oxford and Cambridge run upon the Tutorials System, and to run tutorials that are that small costs serious money. Our money.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system
I mean, god help us, look at this place:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonville_and_Caius_College,_Cambridge
Come on mate, it would be piss easy for yourself or me to study here, given that this is how they teach. Three students in a weekly supervision! It is no trick whatsoever to master degree-level material if you have hourly discussion with a Nobel laureate, once a week about a subject that you are keen upon, "living above the shop" as you do so: Food, books and lodging offered at minimal cost. Never mind the peer group that you also find yourself in, in that I doubt many of them are nursing contagious cases of "conscript syndrome" in the fashion that some people I studied around did: They have to be there, to pass the modules, to audit the paperwork requirement, to get the certificate, to get the internship, to stand a chance of getting the vacancy....And that is why they are so antisocial. They are of a sort that you categorically do not find in an ivy encrusted quad with porters, a wine cellar and fundamentally, alumni. Simple.
If institutions like Oxford and Cambridge were private, like Buckingham, it would be nobody's business how they operated. That would state to this country's leftie element that if you still have a problem with us, you are either against elite education entirely or you could raise your game and work harder to produce students who can win scholarships to it.
Like the boarding schools do.
...Like Oxbridge used to: They used to offer entrance examinations and you being offered an "exhibition." I doubt that they still do it because ANYONE could win one and often did. Sir Frank Whittle, for instance. It would leave far too much to chance.
So, nah, I would suggest that you're not being entirely consistent, and consider the competence of the graduates, and the excellence with which they run the city of London, the professions and Westminster...
"British people just don't value or notice this because the children just magically wind up educated somehow, through the inhalation of pixie dust perhaps, in spite of the shitty parents that they often have and the avalanche of distractions that they usually go home to." It seems to me that those kids who have that home environment don't "wind up educated" at all. If you want your kids to do well you have to educate them yourself, even if you live in a leafy suburb and they go to a highly ranked school. The teachers are just overpaid babysitters, not necessarily through any personal failings, but simply because of the class sizes.
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