Educational qualifications can be, and often are used to maintain the status quo – the existing social order. When I lived in the Netherlands, you had to have qualifications to be able to open a shop. Sounds fair enough, you might say, but the exams were only available in Dutch, which is not one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world.
If Mohamed Al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods, wanted to open a shop in the Netherlands, he would have to learn Dutch or circumvent the regulations by hiring local managers.
While I can see the need for people (shop keepers in this case) to provide evidence of an understanding of the law of the land, some countries take it too far. They make education a weapon of class warfare.
After all, it allows the ruling class to say that they are only trying to raise standards, while not providing the means for the poor to reach those standards. By not providing a universal education, they are in fact ensuring that the best jobs stay with the richest families.
There is a subtle way of modifying this scheme so as to make the gentry look innocent – they can put schools in every village and then stock them with low-grade teachers by making the wages and conditions awful, and simultaneously open the universities to all who have reached the requisite level of education.
This method also keeps the riff-raff out but allows the rich to maintain the illusion that a university education is open to all. This is the most common tactic in the Developing World.
In richer countries like Europe and America, the glass ceiling is put in place by making higher education expensive and offering ‘cheap loans’ to students who wish to continue their education.
In the UK, at the moment, the cap on university fees is about $14,000 per annum, so after a typical three tear course, a student comes away with a degree, which is no longer a guarantee of a job, and a $40,000 overdraft.
That is enough to deter the riff-raff too.
So what is the solution to this subtle form of the poverty, or at least, the social status trap?
Means-tested grants used to work just fine.
A student has to be able to embark on an educational course without having the distraction of worrying about money. Rich kids don’t have to worry about their finances at or after university, so why should poor kids? Let’s make it fair.
Britain as a whole had this enviable system for decades, but Scotland is the only country within the UK to maintain it. Welsh students have to pay something, I think, but not as much as English kids.
This will probably result in more Scottish and Welsh graduates per head of population than English ones in the near future. The Celts will love that, but it doesn’t seem fair on the English working class.
One of the reasons why Lek in ‘Behind The Smile’ did not stay at school was because the family thought the the cost seemed to be too high for the benefits that they could see it delivering. This is not the state’s direct fault, but it does result from a lack of ambition in people who have never known anyone in their family go to university.
Behind The Smile : ISBN: 978-1-475-21688-2 : Published by CreateSpace 19-4-2012 : Paperback and eBook.