[What follows was written for a UK audience, but most of it fits the USA as well.]

A shortage of skills is a source of perpetual anxiety within Britain’s political class. Here’s Tory backbencher Dominic Raab, a few months back in the Telegraph:

The next great problem is our chronic skills gap, which saw Britain plummet down the international rankings in maths, literacy and science. Labour’s arbitrary goal of getting 50 per cent of youngsters into university led to the proliferation of what one of its ministers called “Mickey Mouse” courses, which have benefited neither the students nor the economy. A 2005 Ofsted report found that almost half of those in their twenties said their education had not prepared them for their first job. Far from blaming Europe for this, Michael Gove is rightly learning from it – promoting innovative Swedish-style free schools and a more German emphasis on vocational training.

If we put aside the sniping at Labour and the currying of Gove’s favour, most of this could actually have been written by any of hundreds of politicians from any party at any time in the past thirty years: the schools aren’t delivering the goods, and we don’t do near as good a job at vocational training as the Germans. The skills gap feeds an endemic collective anxiety, the root of the county’s endless obsessive-compulsive re-engineering of its education system – because, surely, finding the right curriculum, the right way to teach, to test, or to select and motivate and cull teachers, is the key to setting this situation right. As for vocational education and apprenticeships, the on-going, multi-party failure in that area could lead one to believe that our Oxbridge-educated leaders can’t bring themselves to really care about something so far from their collective experience: true, perhaps, but like the anxiety about primary and secondary education it misses the point.

The real problem, Continue reading →