Get It Together by Zoe Williams

Author:Zoe Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473518520
Publisher: Random House

Your gardener must be able to read

What is education for? What kind of adults do we want to produce? Where will they slot into the jobs of the future? What kind of lives will they be able to build with the things they have learnt? Mass public education, as it was originally conceived, had this idea: you take all kids and you train them in deductive reasoning, and the ones who are really good at it become scientists (or engineers), and the ones who are a bit more poetic become philosophers (or poets), and the ones who are less good somehow manage to shuffle themselves into jobs that don’t require deductive reasoning in such large quantities (almost all jobs). It was never designed to educate everybody to the same degree: rather, it started off on the assumption that some humans were inherently superior to others and would always have more sophisticated minds, worthy of more refinement; so you sent those to the Russell Group universities, and you made sure everybody else could read – and we would all arrive well prepared for the role in life that had been determined by our birth. Some Conservatives still basically think like this. I interviewed Michael Heseltine once, and we were talking about equality of opportunity; or at least that’s what I thought we were talking about. His answer was: ‘Your gardener must be able to read. Otherwise how can he be expected to determine the word “poison”?’ Apparently the question he thought I’d put was: ‘What’s the point of literacy in the lower orders?’

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