It has been a charge levelled at graduates for as long as
I can remember, that they turn up with all the gear but no idea, lacking what
was once considered a pre-requisite for a useful working life – common sense.
Long considered to reside in those with less lofty aspirations, the ability to
sort the wheat from the chaff and get down to business is nothing more than habits
acquired by experience to cut the crap and get on with the job. Given that
child-centred education has for so many years mitigated against anybody taking
personal responsibility for anything at all it’s little wonder that, once
again, employers are bemoaning the quality of graduates, even as the so-called
experts are tinkering around with what they collectively call ‘life skills’ and
we used to call simply ‘living’.
There is no future in just doing a good job any more, it
seems. No wonder bright youngsters are drawn to nebulous ‘consultancy’ jobs
where instead of getting their hands dirty they can simply tell others from the
safety of a remote desk how they should get their hands dirty. Instead of toting
dat barge they can charge far more for spending their hours locked away in
ivory towers drafting learned reports on how the colour of dat barge can
synergise more intuitive outcomes and enhance life chances. Meanwhile dat barge
remains untoted.
With unwavering certainty and against the evidence of
experience and yes, common sense, the expert tells us mere mortals that
diversity improves everybody’s lives, that the solution to overspending on
welfare is to spend more on welfare and that important ‘life skills’ can be
taught by ideology-stuffed young teachers who have yet to leave school
themselves. Wielding teetering stacks of research papers, drafted in isolation
and with no input from their subjects the theorists banish common sense to the status of
misinformed, knee-jerk and counter-productive reaction.
And worse, those elected to lead us, lacking any coal
face experience themselves, actually listen to these self-proclaimed, self-obsessed
experts and simply zone out the rising hubbub of those who will have to live in
their brave new world. In response to the common sense voices from the shop
floor the experts hold their unstable high ground and sneeringly tell us that
common sense is too simplistic, outmoded and represents a bigoted point of
view. The future is bright, the future is expert and all the narrow-minded ‘common-sensers’
are no better than, humanophobic Luddites.
It doesn’t even matter that in the long term almost every
‘expert’ proclamation on social engineering is eventually proved wrong – sod common
sense, let’s try it anyway - after all, it’s just another generation fucked
over and there’s always be another one to experiment on.
Which brings me on to a current expert theory about early
years education. Not content with simply not bothering to teach pupils the
boring basics of reading, ‘riting and ‘rtihmetic the edu-alchemists are now
saying we shouldn’t even start not-educating them until age seven. As Toby
Young argues in his excellent article, this is driven by the usual Marxist meddlers
and will produce a new generation of illiterates the like of which would have
Victorian schoolteachers burning their mortar boards.
Toby’s argument (and you should read it in full) is so
obviously correct that it will have lefties spitting into their frothy mocha-choco-lattés
at the indignity and the effrontery of the bigoted bloody common-sensers and
their damnedly un-nuanced reduction of a complex problem to a clumsy cause and
effect analysis, which may have made the Victorians into the most advanced
nation on the planet but will be inadequate in our glittering multi-faceted bright
orange future… where many kids will nevertheless still leave school unable to
read.
But for what possible purpose can those on the left want
to turn out yet another batch of entitlement-obsessed, unemployable welfare
fodder? Why would they even dare to propose more of the sort of social changes that
have reduced a once effective, if not entirely satisfied society to one where
even fewer have a chance of getting on? Why would they as they so caringly put it, rub
our noses in it? For our benefit? Really? Whatever their deluded common purpose
– and it’s by no means certain what that purpose really is - it defies common
sense.
