`Ello, me lads! Mouse ‘ere, from jolly old England, reporting on the sad state of manual labor both here and abroad. Fortunately, I’m just back from North London which is a doddle to find your way around, thanks to the Tube.
Over the last four decades and likely more, young chaps have been soundly admonished by academic gobermouch’s to do three things. Go to college! Go to college! Go to college!
However, over half of Britain’s youngsters leave school and spend three years basically studying their own belly buttons. It’s time to ditch the degrees and teach our kids skills they can actually use, such as bricklaying, motocar repair and plumbing.
If you can lay bricks or cut hair, you’ll always be able to work, so long as buildings keep going up and hair keeps growing. I dare say youngsters shouldn’t rule out being an undertaker either. Death is the one certainty of life, my relatives have done a lot of it. Plumber. Carpenter. Electrician. Roofer. Concrete work. Welder. Scaffolder. Fisherman. The list goes on. Businesses and trends come and go, but some trades will always remain.
Think about it, what did a social studies degree ever train anybody to actually DO? What possible redeeming quality is there in a degree in lesbian dance theory, other than teaching at LaSierra or Berkeley? Sound questions indeed.
Let me throw some numbers at you. Around 4,500 students in the UK graduated with a degree in 1920, and that went up to just over 50,000 by 1970. It was almost 80,000 in 1990. By 2011, it was 350,000.
And by 2020? Almost 2.5 million people were in higher education, most studying for their first degrees. Over half of all youngsters went to university, which had been Prime Minister Tony Blair’s target in a speech he gave in 1999. And it’s even worse in the States, I hear.
Fair enough. That’s their choice. But their choices are manipulated by a western culture that is dead from the chin up, bent on heaping tremendous debt on young people.
They’re not all studying medicine. They’re not studying maths and physics, chemistry or engineering. It seems to me they still run in packs and follow the latest trends. That’s just human nature. Some kids choose a course because it might be a laugh, maybe a mate is doing it. Maybe they simply didn’t get the results required for a tougher course. They were never destined to be doctors or dentists, physicists or lawyers.
New research has found that most parents would prefer their child did a vocational qualification instead of a degree when they left school. The Social Market Foundation and Further Education Trust for Leadership found that 48% favored a trade for their kids, with 37% preferring university. A paltry eight percent said their offspring should go straight into the workplace.
What’s more, according to the research findings, graduates were far more likely to regret having gone to university in the first place. The majority of people who left school to learn a trade, though, didn’t regret having never attended uni. They were right side up on their own home while their beleaguered college counterparts were staggering around under a mountain of debt like a pachyderm on a skateboard.
Higher education, you see, doesn’t necessarily train kids to actually DO a blessed thing. I’m not sure they’re even being taught critical thinking, but they most assuredly are being taught Critical Theory by academic eggplants.
Take my own past life trade, a retired journalist. I have been a hiring boss, a carpenter, a farmer, and a news editor, on several unhappy occasions. And if I spotted a degree in ‘media studies’ or ‘communication studies’ on a wannabe hack’s CV, most likely it went straight in the bin. Journalism is a trade, same as carpentry. I wanted to see proof the candidate could knock up a couple of proverbial shelves; meaning they’d done work experience on a local paper, they’d had their byline on an real story. That sort of thing. As a farmer, I wanted to know if a chap could plow straight, distinguish weeds from corn, and cross the field in a three furrow stride if there was need for haste.
Media studies teaches kids how to worry about the impact of a story instead of finding a story in the first place and then standing it up with research and conducting interviews, and then hammering out the words. For sure, it’ll have no impact if nobody ever publishes it. I wanted to see proof they could ‘bring home the veggie bacon’. Not pontificate about the moral justification of the meat industry.
And come on, what use to any employer are ‘education studies’, ‘consumer behaviour’, ‘cities’ or the study of clocks (horology)? And what about ‘David Beckham studies’, ‘golf management’ and ‘surf studies’?
I have a theory, as yet untested by rigorous research, but it’s high time somebody created a course on this subject – that if you plotted on a graph this increase in not-very-rigorous-study degrees, one could plot on that same sheet of graph paper the ever-increasing rise in woke nonsense and related hysteria.
Treating college as the new high school hasn't benefited students who waste four years of their lives and pick up staggering debts which make it harder for them to buy homes and start families, but it has benefited the liberal arts infrastructure, which, despite the liberal spin, is just as good at handing out useless degrees with no career path as any for-profit college. And it has benefited the liberal politicians, which rightly sees college campuses as recruitment grounds and liberal-voter-training seminars.
Just over the past year, we’ve learned that Jane Austen’s tea drinking needs to be examined due to its links to Britain’s evil colonial past. Richard Dawkins was sent to social media purgatory in April for questioning transgender dogma. Tens of thousands of National Trust volunteers are being forced to go on anti-bias training. The list goes on.
A whole generation, you see, left their studies to find work in the market place, fancy that. And all those media mafflards really learned how to do was, well, study their navels.
It’s not a great time to be leaving university with a degree, Mickey Mouse Studies or otherwise. Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year found:
“Experience from previous recessions tells us that graduates will be less likely to find work and will start off in lower-paying occupations than they might have expected. Given the likely scale of the Covid downturn into which they will be graduating it is likely to take at least five, and perhaps ten, years for these effects to wear off.”
Education is a booming industry. Almost 450,000 people are employed in UK higher education right now. So, if you have a kid who refuses to learn to cut hair, hammer nails or lay bricks, you could always help them find work in a college.
Education has long ago given way to indoctrination, to political finishing schools where it's hard to learn anything worthwhile, but easy to learn the habits of intellectual snobbery and entitlements, while simultaneously hating the greatness of England and America.
There was a time when you could not graduate from an Adventist Academy without having first learned a trade. It’s time to bring those skills back, lest our debt-laden descendants join the sidewalk-defiling mumblecrusts of Westminster, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
God has much better things for us, such as real knowledge. You don’t need a college for that, especially if you are a good reader. And it can save a lot of unnecessary debt.
Cheerio,
ChurchMouse
“And make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, as we commanded you” (1 Thessalonians 4:11).