Report to the People
1st December 2003
Brave New World?
Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World paints a
picture of a future in which everyone is conditioned to slot into and love their
place in society. Even before
you’re born, the level of education you will receive and the type of job you
will do are fixed.
In
1953, some 21 years after Brave New World was first published, the apartheid government in
South Africa tried to turn fiction into fact through the introduction of the
Bantu Education Act. This was to
ensure, said chief architect of apartheid and then National Party Minister of
Native Affairs, Dr. Hendrik F. Verwoerd, that children would be educated in
accordance with “their opportunities in life.”
If you were black, these “opportunities” were, for the girls,
becoming a maid and, for the boys, a labourer. What
then, Verwoerd famously once asked, “is the use of teaching a Bantu child
mathematics when he cannot use it in practice?”
You
might expect the man behind one of the modern world’s most iniquitous regimes
to employ this sort of questionable logic.
But what you may find more surprising is that something not entirely
dissimilar is being pushed by certain Scottish politicians.
Believe
it or not, some individuals are suggesting that if young people haven’t set
the academic world alight by the age of 14, they should abandon the study of
arts and sciences and learn non-academic skills like, say, chimney sweeping.
Dividing
children up for their roles in life at the age of 14 would turn the clock back
35 years. Back to the days when leaving
school at 14 and 15 was the norm. Back
to the days when, if our supposedly secure jobs ceased to exist, our lack of a
broader and more formal education made it much more difficult to find work
elsewhere or to retrain.
If
a proper school education teaches you anything, it teaches you how
to learn. And that stays with you, if not for life, certainly long
after you’ve forgotten what the capital of Peru is.
Young
people leaving school today can expect to retrain and change career several
times in their working life. To
deny a swathe of them the education they need to be able to do this would have a
disastrous effect on the economy – not to mention the young people themselves.
There
might be a perceived shortage of skilled workers in parts of the country. But
effectively lowering the school leaving age to 14 is clearly not the way to
tackle it.
Schools should be there to raise our young people’s expectations, not confirm them.
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