The modal attitude towards education in the UK is, at best, indifferent and, at worst, hostile. For all sorts of socioeconomic and cultural reasons, huge swathes of the population think it's normal to leave school at 16, clutching a few paltry GCSEs, with little understanding of just how many doors in life have been closed to them and even less aspiration to find out. The students I see are the elite - children of parents that have mostly been to university themselves and have carefully shepherded their offspring through the few schools that prioritise academic attainment.
Government figures for 2007 (the most recent available for England) paint a depressing picture:
- At age 16, 79% are in full-time education (1 in 5 have already left!)
- At 17, this has dropped to 67% (one-third are gone)
- By 18, only 44% remain (more than half have abandoned the educational system)
Some leavers are absorbed into various vocational training programmes, and some of these may eventually re-enter education (through, for example, roundabout entries into university) but such individuals represent the exception rather than the norm
Compare these to Eurostat figures (for 2006, the most recent available year) for 18-year-olds in full-time education:
- UK average is 47% (slightly better than the percentage for England alone)
- EU average is 77%
- In Europe, only Cyprus (31%), Malta (43%) and Turkey (39%) are worse than the UK
The government likes to compare UK performance to other major political powers on any available dimension, but such comparisons are notably absent when the topic is education. With good reason; Eurostats show that the UK can't compete with the big boys and girls:
- In France (with a good international reputation for education), 79% of 18-year-olds are still in full-time education
- Germany (with a long history of valuing educational achievement), the figure is 86%
- For comparison, the United States figure is 63%
Nor can the UK overshadow several smaller countries with lower per capita budgets available to sink into education:
- Ireland has 89% of 18-year olds in full-time education (twice as many as England)
- Slovenia also has 89%
- Near the top of the table is Lithuania, at 93%
Why am I bothering to sift through these statistics? One simple reason: I'm growing weary of living in a country that places such a low cultural importance on knowledge, intelligence, betterment, intellectualism - whatever you care to call it. I'm uncomfortable working in a developed, industrialised, wealthy country where the overwhelming majority of its populace appears to view education as an optional, irrelevant extra.
The British class system is far from an archaic relic - it's a thriving, deepening stratification of society. The only difference is that, rather than rigidly separating the minority upper from majority lower classes, it now separates the educated from the uneducated.
