[pikey]

Oh I think I smell a rat
I think I smell a rat
All you little kids
Seem to think you know
Just where it’s at
I think I smell a rat
Walking down the street
Carrying a baseball bat
I think I smell a rat

Oh I think I smell a rat
I think I smell a rat
All you little kids
Seem to think you know
Just where is at
I think I smell a rat
Treating your mother and father
Like a welcome mat
I think I smell a rat

The Most Noble and Excellent White Stripes ~ I Think I Smell a Rat

[pikey]

@tinkerbell wrote:

I think some people just like causing trouble just for the sake of it.

Oh do shut your cake-hole.

[pikey]

Black catter.

[pikey]

Horse poo, like most herbivore poo, is harmless. As some have intimated, positively beneficial. Dog poo, on the other hand, is a menace. You can blind toddlers with just the proper application. There is a reason you have to clear one up and not worry too much about t’other. Silliness.

[pikey]

Teachers certainly do coach for success at exams. Like I say, I don’t blame them. I’ve had many a friend tell me stories of how the grapevine communicating the ‘flavour’ of the upcoming tests works. The brighter kids go in to tests having a fail-safe selection of essay answers ‘rote’ learnt.

[pikey]

What hateful rot.

[pikey]

It is not incidental, I’m sure, that the major upturn in the graph is at the time Thatcher decided that exam results for schools should be published with a view that schools then begin to compete in a market based around those results. A policy decision Labour were shockingly eager to endorse and strengthen.

[pikey]

Private (Public) schools generally get better A-Level results than state schools and colleges. What’s more, I think it’s true to say, the gap between the two has been widening – even under Labour’s recent investments that have coincided with rising state school results.

[pikey]

Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it. ~ René Descartes

I don’t think A-Levels have got easier. A quick scan of the past papers on t’interweb will show that.

I think the difference may be that there has been a shift in the teaching profession’s ethos from educating to A-Level standard to coaching students to pass A-Level exams. Not necessarily a good thing but you can hardly blame them when they are judged solely on exam results.

In my experience, centred mainly on the undergraduates arriving at universities since the early nineties, I think the proportions of talented scholars and thickos in each year have remained pretty constant.

I suspect universities aren’t tarred with the same Gazlanist brush as is the ‘real’ world, though. I do agree that there is a growing sense of the futility and meaningless of some aspects of modern life and this is bound to manifest itself with a certain ça ne fait rien attitude amongst those that otherwise might prove the most able.

[pikey]

I’m sorry, Minim. I didn’t mean my reply to be a criticism of your ambition to study. I think that would be a fine endeavour. I was just airing my philosophical ideas about the whole thread, rather than your post.

I tend to think that when you diagnose, say, depression, you are actually labelling something in the same way you would, say, a broken leg and then proceeding accordingly. This works in cases of broken legs because a broken leg is a broken leg. I’m not sure one depression is the same as another, though. It’s a general problem with all the ‘softer’ sciences, I think, because they can never just point to an equation on a bit of paper, like a physicist or a chemist might, and say ‘but look, it’s true’.

However, as I said, I would hate to think my misgivings would ever count as a vote against studying anything.

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