We don need no educashun....?

[xsnaggle]

I think that the degrees youngsters get now are devalued by the number of them that are handed out each year. Universities used to be snetres of excellence but when you start calling places like Llandaff Tech a university I think you may well invent a new qualification that people can get at 16 or 18.

As another poster said, time was when you would go out at 16 and get a job, work your way up and with diligence and motivation you could be the things you wanted to be in life. now we have graduates serving me in KFC. It seems pointless, not to mention the debt they accrue in the process.

That said, we are where we are, and I don't know the solution any more than anyone else.

By the way Cyclops, both my parents were born in the first decade of the last century and they finished school at 12, not 14.

[Cyclops]

By the way Cyclops, both my parents were born in the first decade of the last century and they finished school at 12, not 14.

It happened. Dad finished school before his 14th birthday. There's a note in the school logbook "25 July 1918. Sam xxxxxxxxx has been granted three months leave of absence from school from July 24.’ Probably to help with the harvest - or shoot some rabbits.
Mum, on the other hand went to a High School.

I've often thought it would be a great series of magazine/TV articles/shows to contrast the lives of two sets of grandparents. My paternal grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of a woman who had at least four children out of wedlock. Her husband started school when he was seven and he was a ploughboy, aged 12. His brother was a ploughboy, aged 8. On my maternal side, my grandparents met at Southampton University and my great aunts were married to knights of the realm and someone decorated with an OBE.

Needless to say, I'm really mixed up. If I'm threatened, I'm torn between diplomacy and stabbing the offender with a pitchfork.