We have more people than jobs, and the number of jobs is shrinking. Some are going overseas, others are becoming obsolete or need far fewer people doing them, with businesses becoming automated and centralized. So the employers ask for what they want.
And yet the underlying philosophy in this "free market" society is the very communist "he who does not work does not eat" with a footnote "unless his parents left him a tidy bundle." So what are we going to do with all those people for whom there are no jobs? Lending them money to bide their time in colleges seems relatively benign.
Classics in school and education in general
Not looked at this thread before, can't think why. sorry if I have just scanned it.
Just to cover a point as a ancient historian/digger and the father of a bone fide classicist
http://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/hopkins.html
and another who is just doing his GCSE latin I have a bias. It should be studied but it may not be for everyone, in the same way that maths and geography and chemistry is not for everyone.
Nonetheless as nothing has really changed that much in the last 12,000 years the wisdom of the ancients has plenty to teach us.
Classics is of course very challenging, at Oxford the Honour mods which is taken in the second term of the second year is considered by some to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour_Moderations
to be the hardest public exam there is.
To address the points offered more recently, working with folks between the ages of 16-21 i am continually amazed how little independence they show. They have grown up in an atmosphere whereby they are led by the nose by their teachers and have very little experience or capacity for independent learning.
Just to cover a point as a ancient historian/digger and the father of a bone fide classicist
http://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/hopkins.html
and another who is just doing his GCSE latin I have a bias. It should be studied but it may not be for everyone, in the same way that maths and geography and chemistry is not for everyone.
Nonetheless as nothing has really changed that much in the last 12,000 years the wisdom of the ancients has plenty to teach us.
Classics is of course very challenging, at Oxford the Honour mods which is taken in the second term of the second year is considered by some to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour_Moderations
to be the hardest public exam there is.
To address the points offered more recently, working with folks between the ages of 16-21 i am continually amazed how little independence they show. They have grown up in an atmosphere whereby they are led by the nose by their teachers and have very little experience or capacity for independent learning.
Since 1410 most Welsh people most of the time have abandoned any idea of independence as unthinkable. But since 1410 most Welsh people, at some time or another, if only in some secret corner of the mind, have been "out with Owain and his barefoot scrubs." For the Welsh mind is still haunted by it's lightning-flash vision of a people that was free.
Gwyn A. Williams,
Gwyn A. Williams,