Has Our Education System Failed Young People?

[Kromovaracun]

Interesting article on things not to say to a young unemployed person:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/telling-young-person-get-job-education-employment

In particular, I thought this part has been true for huge numbers of people I know:

//Today's youth has spent years chasing qualifications no one ever asks us about. The notion that algebra would ever be useful seemed fishy, but the grownups insisted: education, no matter how apparently arbitrary, leads to jobs.

But the minute we graduated, something switched in employers' heads. The same generation who had us sit Sats and the 11-plus and the 12-plus and Sats again and mock GCSEs and real GCSEs and AS-levels and A-levels and BAs and MAs and MScs and PhDs decided education is an afterthought. Experience is what's really important. Which none of us had, because we'd been busy pretending Romeo and Juliet weren't just horny teenagers and Pythagoras wasn't the most tedious bastard that ever existed.

We were told that education was a ticket to employment, when really it's more like vague directions to the station.//

Have young people been let down by the previous generation?

[jno]

I think the education mantra was no bad thing; but it's rather like printing an article on an undiscovered travel destination: it instantly becomes a discovered one. Printing a story that a degree will give you an advantage is fine - unless everyone reads it and goes there, in which case everybody has the same advantage, which means nobody has.

Still, it's difficult to say what the alternative might have been. Everyone leave school at 16 and get a few years' head start in being unemployed? (It's hard to believe a worse educated population is a good idea.) Apparenticeships would be a fine thing but companies don't seem to want to spend money on training people any more; presumably they'd prefer to hire cheap Bulgarians who've learnt their trade in Plovdiv. Somebody has to pay for all this; and in hard times, who?

[jno]

... but I must say it would never have occurred to me to reject a candidate for wearing white socks. Perhaps I'm just not choosy enough.

[New Judge]

White socks !!! Whatever next !!!

No wonder some people cannot get a job. :-)

[emmie]

going on experience i have known the interview panels to be somewhat racist, sexist especially, and most definitely ageist, some of the comments when the candidates left the room would make you wonder how they got the job in the first place.

[rheaj]

The education system has become a business in itself with more and more people focussing on generating money rather than provide quality education. Where on the one side employers are asking for experience rather than education, on the other side if you don't have an education then also it becomes a problem. It arises the question of whether to spend so much on schools and tuitions or save the money spent on extra classes and learn from e-learning platforms available. Eduauraa: https://eduauraa.com/, is one such company which aims to democratize education by providing world-class education at affordable prices.