Having recently worked for the local college in their community learning department and with twins at primary school, education and skills are a subject that I deal with daily. Living in a ex-mining area, it’s easy to see how children slip through the net early – if you can’t read at 5, you’re unlikely to catch up later. Once you’ve left school, it’s almost impossible to catch up.
The current education system is based on Victorian ideals that were unfit for the 20th century let alone the 21st. Many young people are written off by a education system that focuses on tests and league tables rather than the individuals skills, interests and abilities. We are sorely lacking in people with practical skills at the same time.
Many schools pay large sums of money for software that many teachers are unsure how to use, so they spend more money on training. With open source in education the software is free which frees up money for training, plus because the software is free pupils can have the exactly same system at home.
Open source can benifit students of all ages and at any stage of their life.
and I am not the only one that thinks so.
http://www.osor.eu/news/uk-open-source-is-core-to-education
and you can even sign a petition
Having been brought up in a similar area to the mining places of England mentioned here and during the 50;s & 60’s from a broken home I have also witnessed first hand what has happened to our education and training of the young.
Any country is like a pyramid with its training and skills at its base and the public echonomy and daily life above it.
Since leaving school with no education in the form of exams etc, I did a modern appretiship in engineering and have worked for many different types of workshops and skills in order to survive, of course a lot of what I managed to learn and convert to since is down to my own abilities,
but I can say that I seaked out the information from those willing to share it to learn what I neded to know, in order of doing that job, today this is not so easy as most of the old school are now dead or at the age where they are unable to do anything.
My Grandfather told me all those years ago that, making someone work for nothing and giving someone something for nothing does not work and in the long run will come around on itself, then fail, this is like those many boom and bust decades, where we build up and then bailled us out, for profit, where money has become more important than skills education and life itself
This is what has been happening since the British Empire branched out around the world and has slowly but surely taken away all of our manufacturing base, together with it our apprentice program, and we have needed to import doctors and other skilled personell in order of getting things done.
Every day we see some kind of trade or business leaving our shores for foreign climbs in the name of profit, together with over 50,000 of our most lucratively aged persons (working tax payers) who do have that trade, these are the very people we really need to keep at home, the ones who could train others,
Of course your going to say that we can train new pupils but that takes years not months, and if you try to get someone to run before they can walk we are going to become a coutry full of managers and office workers who are watching over those doing nothing, but hold out their hands for doing something for nothing.
Next time you buy that bargain that you paid next to nothing for, then remember someone somewhere else has had to work for next to nothing, as long as this happens we will loose out every time and the only one who benefits is the share holder of the company you used to work for that has taken your factory abroad to make them richer.
As the world’s echonomies grow the competition will grow also and we will all be competing for the every decreasing world resorces, as those natural resorces come to an end then the whole process starts again, our own people will need each other to survive, the education program will then kick back into line to train the people we need to make the things we need.
I hope this asnwers some of the questions, we need to look after our own, instead of our ever greedy pockets.