School's Out Forever.

So a significant number (15% in Nottingham) of eleven year olds have a reading age of seven after six years of schooling, which suggests, if you’re a Guardian reader, they will struggle to keep up with your precocious four year old. It also raises the question, is a command of English and maths important these days. As even graduates end up serving in Waitrose and the till calculates the change, maybe not. So long as your arse is up to seven hours on a checkout chair and you’ve mastered, “have you got a Nectar Card?” you have a career. So long as you’ve mastered one to ten you’re OK with the remote, and if your log onto Facebook is automatic then after that anything near an intelligible word will do. Ditto your mobile. I think that covers all the essentials. There’s actually no need to count beyond ten or master spelling unless you want to use Wikipedia, which is unlikely. There’s no need for grammar because it’s outdated or logical thought because one has one’s emotions to deal with complexity. And then there’s all the special powers and magic that most young people have been introduced to by TV to come to your aid. I mean it would be totally illogical to expend energy on learning stuff that’s not necessary, wouldn’t it? Lets face it schooling was invented to provide workers for the burgeoning industrial revolution. They needed to be able to write acres of plans, reports and count up accounts. They needed to supply the English language to the world. Now we don’t have much industry and computer programs to do the basic necessities, so why have education? Obviously it’s not deemed necessary by its participants and currently crucifying its providers. It’s interesting, at this time of information overload, that we’re feeling it unnecessary to be able to do anything with it.