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Originally Posted by RizzyKing
Your absolutely right Stuart and i hadn't thought about it in those terms although it is one of the reasons i am in favour of a more vocatioanl approach to education from say age 13 to 18. I think we are lacking a lot of the skills that underpin our society and are in danger of becoming a surface culture where as long as what we see is ok we don't know about or care about whats under the bonnet so to speak.
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I agree. Computing is one example of an industry having trouble finding qualified people in England. It's by no means the only one.
I remember reading an article a few years ago comparing and contrasting the running of two similarly sized projects. The construction of Terminal 5 and the construction of Wembley. While it certainly wasn't the point of the article, one thing that the people in charge at both projects apparently found was that they had trouble employing enough qualified British craftsmen to fulfull the needs of the project (IIRC the guy in charge of building terminal 5 said he was having to offer builders £30-£40,000 a year). This was probably the catalyst for the large number of Polish craftsmen coming to this country.
I don't think the only source of the problem is what the schools are teaching, it's not. A lot of teenagers have the idea the world owes them something, or that they shouldn't need to work hard to earn money (you can thank any number of 'slebs and footballers for this). Unfortunately, the world doesn't work like that.
However, I do think that (and I think Incog will agree with this) if a teacher is good at their job, they will manage to engage the pupils attention and those pupils will learn a lot more, and maybe more inclined to study further in that industry.
Take, for example, a friend of mine. She is a part time lecturer in Mathematics, as well as being a researcher. Now, I'll be honest. While I am perfectly capable of understanding how and why things work mathematically, and do alright at mental arithmetic, Maths is not a strong point of mine, and I've never really found it that interesting.
I saw her lecture once. Somehow, she managed to do something that I'd never thought I'd see (and certainly haven't experienced at School, College or Uni). She managed to make Maths come alive and seem relevant to everything (i know Maths is relevant to everything, but I'd never seen someone demonstrate that effectively). We need more teachers that can do that.