I went to Oxford. I studied Physics. Yes, I learned to "wing it". If you can maneuver your way through a "tutorial" (2 students, one tutor) where the person evaluating you is one of the smartest people in the world and an expert with 40 years more experience than you, and you're hungover and didn't really study the material properly, and still come out looking ok, you can deal with almost any situation where you need to "wing it" in the future. It's solid training.
That said, most of those students were very, very, very smart. To me, Oxford was the place where I went from finding it fairly easy to get whatever grades I wanted to struggling and working hard to get the minimum I found acceptable (a 2:1, or Upper Second, result in the overall degree). That was because the final grades were all relative, and there were a lot of very, very smart students I was competing against.
And, as far as the subject studied is concerned, don't forget that in the UK people rarely go on to work in the subject they studied. Sure, it's still better to do hard sciences, but apart from lawyers and doctors, most people end up doing something else after university.
Which is fine, imho - university is not and should not be training for a job, but, instead, training for life. And as far as life is concerned, in the world as it is today, winging it is certainly a more valuable skill than quantum mechanics.
Small case-study I know but I work with somebody who just came out of Cambridge and did a CS-like degree.
He cannot program for shit and talks like he does but show him a bit of C(++), PHP, javascript (even bash or Python) and his eyes just glaze over. I was teamed with him but he was forever unable to get anything done. In the end I was left with it all and made much better progress and he was left to book to overheads.
I'm certain he's an edge case though, I've met a few others who went to Oxbridge and they are definitely on the ball. However, I've found those who went to Bristol, Imperial or Loughborough are people that are the smartest.
That's not really all that surprising - Cambridge's CS course is highly theoretical, and very grounded in mathematics. It doesn't really train programmers as such. I decided before going to uni that I wanted a more practical degree, but I think it's important for some universities to teach pure computer science as opposed to a programming/cs mix.
That's not a case study, just an anecdote. In my experience, there were almost no people in Oxford that I wouldn't consider "very smart". Probably the only place in the world where that's been true.
That said, I don't know how Cambridge's "CS-like" degree is/was, but Oxford's was very bad at actually teaching programming.
Then again, are you really sure he went to Cambridge? Smart people have no problem with learning to program when they need to. That guy doesn't sound so smart...
Yeah, anecdote is the correct term. He definitely went to Cambridge which is why we questioned his choice of employer (the hirers decision). It doesn't matter what language he's given a task in others are always curious as to why he's taking so long or when it's ever going to be done.
It's not like he's making a cathedral of every task as ctrl+c & ctr+v are his key tools along with a good smattering of ugly hacks(i get the feeling he has no grasp of OOP or VCS).
This phenomenon isn't limited to England. The one thing all Harvard undergrads learn (probably as much from one another as from the professors) is how to defend themselves in conversation. Some are smart, and some aren't, but by the time they graduate they all know how to sound smart.
I can vouch for it being present in France too. One of the best schools, Science Po Paris, has a widely known (in France) exam that used to be broadcasted on TV. It's called the "grand oral", all students are together in an amphithéâtre and they pass one by one on stage. Several professors are there with one declared purpose: to make them trip by whatever means short of screaming at them. A legendary exchange took place once, a student (obviously some future minister) was asked the depth of the Danube, and without missing a beat retorted "Under what bridge Sir ?"
The point being, geography was surely not his subject, but he was supposed to be able to "talk through it".
I think the effect is more significant at Oxbridge though. At Oxbridge you have "supervisions" or "tutorials" as an undergrad. These consist of a 1-on-1 lesson with a fellow or grad student where you are questioned mercilessly on every section of your essay or problem set for an hour. They ask you about every single sentence or step in your solutions. You have to prepare carefully, and even then you have to learn to wing it, because they're going to find flaws you didn't know existed. Given that there is no-one else to back you up or interject with an answer, if you don't learn to wing it quickly, you're screwed.
Oh, and most of this article about Oxbridge is complete crap. I'm working 10 hours a day for 6 days a week in order to prepare for my exams this term at Cambridge, and I'm one of the lighter workers (including English/Classics students). I've never been offered sherry (though I did get some wine at the end of last term), and the interview process is nothing like he described. It's bloody intense. I had 2 interviews and 2 tests in a day and felt like I didn't answer a single question correctly.
As someone else mentioned, if prospective applicants take this article at face value they're in for a nasty shock.
The author is right to skewer the particular targets of his essay in this way (the so-called Bullingdon set), but please don't take this as a skewer of the Oxbridge system itself, or you risk dramatically underestimating what it demands and delivers. I don't think that's what the author set out to do, and I think he perhaps does in fact colour the bullingdon set's experience of Oxford. I think he's particularly correct to attack how alien the British ruling elite is to scientific principles - uncertainty, testing, evidence, statistics, falsifiability. How fresh it would be to see politicians espouse such principles. This rejection is facilitated by their training in Classics, History or English Literature, and the ego boost one receives from Oxford when one is this particular type of person; typically, they'll be active in the Oxford Union, or be seen down at the Bridge club on a thursday night.
However, don't extrapolate this to a 'normal' undergrad's experience at Oxford.
I've never worked as hard in my life as for my MBiochem finals at Oxford - my law conversion is widely depicted as being intense, but didn't compare.
If the author of that article truly believes oxford tutorials are about defence, he's getting shortchanged, or he's looking to them for exactly the same thing our ruling elite gets from them; either way, he's shortchanging his readers in giving voice to such a view. The true aim of a tutorial is not to spend an hour defending what you wrote two nights ago, it's about letting that stuff fall into the backdrop to a cutting edge discussion with a leading (often foreign) academic; not just getting a better picture of what the cutting edge is, but where it's likely to develop to and what could be investigated over the next few years so we can get there. In UK undergraduate education, my understanding is that this focus on developing questions and probing soft spots in knowledge, rather than just assembling and defending answers, is pretty radical. And it certainly seems to run contrary to a fair amount of the article's claims.
Admittedly most of a tutorial's exchange of ideas flows to the student, but I rarely met a tutor who won't admit to having got something out of tutorials they have given, too.
A trait I've noticed when working with or arguing with the products of elite universities is the incessant ability to respond to most challenges in the form of a blank stare. Harvard grads in particular, but I've noticed it in some military officers as well.
They won't get riled up, they won't back down, they won't...well...do anything in particular.
While being incredibly infuriating, it also makes them nearly impossible to read or assess. Are they smart? Are they dolts? No idea!
This enigma-like quality can get one very far in certain contexts. The ability to operate in elite positions, without becoming ruffled is a tremendously valuable skill.
The downside of course is that if things really do go pear shaped, the normal response is to show some kind of stress reaction and hopefully buckle down and get to work. Not acting like there is anything in particular going on just makes those around you wonder if the ol' gears are actually turning at all. Are they out of touch? Do they care? It can be tremendously demotivating to those around.
A company I worked for early in my carerr had to let two people with this trait go (both top-tier uni graduates) because the management didn't think they were taking a then current crisis seriously enough. We came to find that with both of them, they were effectively doing no work at all as there was almost no extra work that came out of their leaving.
When asked why they were kept around for so many years, promoted etc., management simply responded that they seemed well poised, like they knew what was going on, attended tons of meetings, sent out lots of email...so it looked like they were burning furnaces of activity.
When the crisis struck, they kept plodding along this track, scheduling meetings, refusing to let them run long, sending out dozens of emails a day, long after the rest of the team had changed behavior patterns to deal with the issue. It became such a nuisance, especially the content free, but tightly scheduled meetings, that they were finally put under higher scrutiny.
It's a office-space-esque/dilbert-esque lesson I've kept with me through my career and have run into this trait dozens of times.
I've personally found it so infuriating a trait to work with that I'm loath to hire people from certain majors in certain universities under the assumption there is some kind of communications coursework that teaches people to respond with this blank stare.
I've coined the term "the management stare" for this phenomenon.
On the other hand, the people who I've found to be top performers were consistently the dynamic, emotive people in an organization. They responded rapidly and naturally to changing conditions, showed outward emotions and got really emotionally involved in conversations, meetings and tasks. They brought an energy to the company that drove the rest of their peers along with them.
I have consistently found the dynamic, emotive people to be disastrous in crisis situations. They tend to act rashly without thinking through the consequences and often make things worse. When faced with a technical problem I prefer dispassionate experts who can apply a discipled, scientific approach and never get flustered.
I think I'm phrasing it wrong. I'm definitely not saying that people prone to histrionics are good performers, just people who show that they are concerned about the situation, have some leather in it, and want to fix it above all else seem to be the people that actually get it done the best.
A rational approach to actually solving the problem is definitely best, I agree.
A blank stare, followed by business as usual, is a non-starter in my opinion.
Depends on the crisis. For crises where you have a 'book' on the situation, dispassionate, by-the-numbers execution is important. For situations where you do not, somebody had better be ready to stand up and lead.
Both approaches are valuable, but they do not address the same problems.
That article is a bizarre caricature, chock-full of misleading half-truths. "You probably did school exams in just three subjects. At university, you only study one" -- that's glaringly inaccurate. The underlying feature of the British education system is that from age 16 if they're going to university students tackle 3-4 subjects at "A" level, rather than a whole slew of them. However, the depth of study for an "A" level qualification is supposed to be (or was, in my day) roughly equivalent to finishing the first year of a degree in that subject. The "at university you only study one" reflects the nature of the British university system: rather than a hodge-podge of courses culminating in a major, British students focus on a particular area from the start -- other subjects are studied, but they don't rate separate examinations or qualifications. It's a system based on specialization: narrow but deep rather than broad but shallow.
Finally, anyone who went to Oxbridge having read that article and taking "nor is workaholic study encouraged" at face value is going to be in for a very nasty surprise ...
This is really noticeable if you go through A levels, then end up in a university course with a high foreign student intake. The first year is almost entirely catch-up, as those who didn't do A levels get the content pumped into them so that the course proper can start in the second year.
In my experience, Cambridge University Engineering Department rewards those who can at age 19 show on paper a sound grasp of all branches of engineering, from vector calculus, to materials science, to the physics of a transistor, to thermo dynamics.
Those who can do both that, and also speak well, are often 'poached' into consulting and banking, whereas those who can only do the former tend to pursue more technical fields. But to blame that on Oxbridge seems unfair.
On an unrelated note: I've worked with many Oxbridge graduates of Humanities, Classics (Greek, Latin) and English Literature - all of whom (by selection of my firm's hiring process) are very numerate. I.e. the two are not mutually exclusive.
That said, I'm American, went to Oxford and am now at Cambridge, and I can assure you that most Humanities graduates are shockingly innumerate--I seriously doubt most Arts students given the Math SAT would be able to do more than shake a stick at it. The best evidence is probably in PPE; the only people who stick with E(conomics) did Math/s at A-level. The system doesn't encourage it. You do your 3-5 A-levels, and people tend to focus on the Arts or the Sciences, with little to no overlap.
Also, I was never offered sherry at a tutorial, but I did have friends studying English who were offered wine~
As someone who went through CUED, I confirm that there are an awful lot of my friends in investment banking/consulting, however I know of a fair few (myself included) who now do startup's.
For example I do Mixcloud, and I have friends from uni days, who are founders in YC companies such as Heyzap, songkick, rapportive and webmynd. So not all of us turn to the dark side.... infact I would say a surprising number of them are now actively involved in internet startups.
There's a lot to be written on the subject of the British (or just the English, the other parts of Britain being a whole different ballgame) and speech. Certainly I don't know of anywhere else where a person's manner of speech tells you nearly as much about their geographical and socioeconomic origin. (But of course, I only speak one language so my attention is pretty restricted).
In Australia they say there are three accents: broad, general and cultivated, and which one you have is mostly about your socioeconomic level. In my experience, though, it's more of a spectrum, and the "broad" accent goes in several different directions depending on where you are -- I can usually pick out a Queenslander, for instance.
The most interesting thing I've noticed about American accents is that you can often tell someone's political persuasion, at least on the radio, if not from their accent then from their manner of speaking. Flip through the radio dial in some unknown area and you can instantly tell whether you're listening to a right-wing or left-wing show -- the right-wing voice is deeper and more aggressive while the left-wing voice sounds higher-pitched and a bit naggy.
I studied CS at Cambridge having previously come from a below average state school.
Although the article is a cliche of half-truths there is in my experience some truth there. I had 2 interviews to get in which lasted only 15 and 60 minutes. I only made it to about 25% of lectures and talked my way through supervisions. Through good exam technique and my own independent study, I walked away getting a first in each year.
So contrary to most people here I think there is actually a degree of reality to the article.
As the old joke (fact?) goes, Sir Winston Churchill was giving a speech in the House of Commons and someone nearby noticed that there was a handwritten comment in the margin of his notes: "Weak argument: talk loudly."
Churchill was not the smartest (from a technical perspective) cookie in the cookie jar, he was not a careful quiet thinker, he was a bit racist, from the "old school" and rather stuffy. But he was very very very very good at two things; patriotism and rhetoric.
Which, when you are in a war, is a good thing. The generals win the battles. The politicians win hearts and minds.
Think of the "talk louder" (I have heard to story too, and I think it is true IIRC) as simply a technical aspect of his ability, akin to the hacks, short cuts and pieces of useful code we programmers have hanging around to get things done faster :)
I think the article misses a point - in order to speak well, particularly off-the-cuff, one must first be able to think quickly and clearly. Looked at this way, judging people on how well they speak is a useful short-cut to assess their thinking skills (although not definitive).
> Nor is workaholic study encouraged. A South African relative of mine started his first “supervision” at Cambridge by confessing that he hadn’t read every single book on the reading list. “Good God,” said his supervisor, “nor have I. I put them down hoping that you’d look at a couple, and tell me what they said.”
That's just completely untrue. Just talk to some student from Oxford and you'll find that many of them are massive workaholics and very intelligent. It's not simply all 'talk'. You can't succeed in that environment simply by being good at talking!?!!
Indeed. Well, I'm not going to be able to create a good argument because mine is also based on the people at Oxford (and Cambridge) that I've met and how they've acted, too. (It could just be that I only meet certain kinds of people?) However, I suspect the author of this articles is speaking falsely because it doesn't match with the reality I've seen/heard. You have some of the brainiest people in the UK there and you expect me to believe that it always comes down to talk?
For instance, my brother comes back from Oxford and I see the amount of work he brings back with him. He reads and writes more in one term than many other University's expect from their students in a few years... There are folders and folders of notes proving the workload. The reading lists that he has been provided have not been finished. This is because they're pages long and it is impossible to finish them in the time they are given. He often spends full days revising or reading, and especially now that is exam time he gives himself very few hours to relax. Of course there is a mix of people: some that literally work from 8AM till midnight and others that somehow seem to mix this with being a socialite (perhaps those people don't do any work and just buddy up to the professors by telling them that they do no work!? To me, that sounds bizarre.) Despite the different kinds of people that are there I think it is disingenuous for somebody with a relative that goes there to argue that workaholic study is not encouraged. I have seen the opposite; I have seen people under way too much stress and pressure to succeed and work hard.
Okay, not very nuanced but maybe you see why I call it bullshit.
I have admit - I have a cousin that's been through Cambridge (went through a nanotechnology track, now taking a doctoral at Max Planck, will always feel inferior to him) and I do agree with you: he's barely poked his head out and reconnected with the extended family in ages. I'm interpreting this as "complete devotion to work" because complete disconnection is rather unheard of in the Asian family he comes from. So my observations line up with yours to some extent. I can't prove the existence of lack of of the opposite, annoyingly enough.
Yep. This rings true even of technical graduates. Makes them really hard to interview because they are so good at interviewing!
I think it's an under-rated skill outside oxbridge. I certainly think it's helped me and I only have the very edges of this skill that I picked up at Cambridge.
>Makes them really hard to interview because they are so good at interviewing!
Hmm. In my experience interviewing Oxbridge grads, I didn't find that. Being good at talking around gaps in knowledge works very well in free flowing conversations, but if an interviewer ask a specific question, and the interviewee cannot answer it, then the ability to talk round it does no good. E.g. I used to ask a question relating to the amortization of a loan, and I would ask the interviewee to draw a graph of time vs. loan balance. You can't talk your way out of not being able to do that.
You're right. I'm talking about the ones with the pre-requisite knowledge, not the total blaggers. It's hard to address their answers to the questions that don't have right or wrong answers because they answer so well.
This is hilarious :) I honestly thought it was a joke... but now I am uncertain.. he seems to genuinely think that Britain is like this :S
The best bit is the wonderful caricature of Oxbridge interviews, as if the modern world is left behind once you step foot in those hallowed halls :D One guy at our school that went to Oxford worked like absolute hell to get his grades, pass his entrance exam and pass the exhausting round of interviews (2 days, testing all sorts of aptitidue).
Sure; the colleges have a tradition of "sprawling on sofa's" while enjoying a glass of the good stuff. But it is just tradition!
Aged 18, perhaps hungover, you read out your pitiful but elegant essay. The tutor points out gaps in your knowledge. For an hour, you talk your way around those gaps.
Hahahahahahahahaha. Ahem. All of the friends I have that went to a really top flight university (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, etc) were basically working flat out for their exams from about January every year..
(I was the drunkard.. see "winging it" below)
Traditionally, elite Britons then leave education aged 21. Until recently they rarely bothered with graduate school.
Meh, classic nonsense confusion regarding the British and American educations systems.
Britain’s rulers still struggle to judge scientific arguments about nuclear energy or climate change
Very much struggling to see American, or indeed any other countries, "rulers" doing any better.
It was the urge to amuse that recently prompted Cameron to riff on an old TV ad and shout “Calm down, dear,” at a female Labour MP.
Failing to understand British humour, he only got it in the neck because at that level of politics you have to work with international norms.
Admittedly, ignorance sometimes saves Britain’s rulers from error.
And here we really get to the crux of it. We are not talking about "winging it", or an aptitude for rhetoric, but "ignorance". I'll be first to admit that the UK political elite are, to some extent, "clueless" on technical topics. But... how is that any different from any other politician in the world? Is that not why they have advisors? Hmmmm.
Nah, this is just some sneer-y anti-British hit piece. A caricature of the great and powerful of Britian as bumbling idiots who get by through a wing and a prayer.
But.
Winging it very much is a British tradition. One I have always been consistently proud of, because we tend to be fucking awesome at it. I winged it through school, university, life, career. And it works, brilliantly.
So, ba shucks ;)
I could go to America and make a casual, 2 second, assessment that the masses were pretty crass (seriously, the amount, scale and volume of advertising on your TV is terrible!), thick people and that the ruling elite were basically a bunch of manic argumentative idiots. Because they are the most vocal or visible types of people. I could go to France and make a similar assessment of the people there as rude and xenophobic. etc etc. But that would be a disgustingly shallow view. Quid Pro Quo. This is just thinly disguised xenophobia and the FT should be ashamed to print it.
The author, Simon Kuper, is British and studied at Oxford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuper), so while he may be wrong, it's not because he's unfamiliar with the country or the eduction system.
He has a British passport.
He was born in Uganda of South African parents, spent his childhood in the Netherlands, "also lived in Stanford, California, Berlin and London", and studied at Oxford and Harvard. He currently lives in France.
He should stay there :)
As someone who will be applying for Oxford this September, I wholeheartedly agree with you. Even just the work needed to get the grades is immense. This year the entrance requirements for Mathematics are A Astar Astar, Mathematics and Computer Science A A A and Computer Science A A Astar. There is no way I shall be winging it (for the first time in my life, I am seriously revising).
The article was 90% misleading bullshit. The three years I spent at Oxford studying History were invaluable from an educational perspective, equipping me with skills that allowed me to continue to develop further skills to succeed, and not just by talking well.
The 10% is there and undeniable, though. To be a leader you have to have good rhetoric, and that's drilled into you from day one. But there's no denying that you also have to learn when you have to.
There's not much mention of the lonely and stressful hours spent in libraries preparing for those tutorials where I had nowhere to hide and a lot of face to lose with a whithering glare from an academic that had better things to do than compensate for my youthful indolence. You don't get that from lectures.
As a current Cambridge undergraduate studying computer science, I find this absolutely outrageous.
The article seems to imply that the scientific fields simply aren't studied here.
The particular example of Lord Cherwell is particularly misleading, as his results were mistrusted by other scientists of the day.
Also, the application process is completely misrepresented. I had two interviews, with the people who would be supervising me. I didn't get offered sherry, they were sat respectably in chairs, and they asked me maths and logic questions.
My director of studies informs me that he then runs all our results (interview, A levels, personal statement) through a number of statistical tests to work out who are going to be the best candidates.
Also, it's strange, I didn't think that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had any effect on the legislative direction of America...
And the point about "workaholic study is not encouraged" is absolutely untrue. The full reading list probably consisted of about 3 pages of literature. The workload here is high: it's certainly not unknown to have a fifty hour working week here.
as an Irishman, it's instinctive to have mixed feelings about the British, our once brutal, now friendly neighbour.
In any case, they must be doing something right. They have some of the best institutions on the planet - the NHS, the BBC, and yes their Education system. And their police force is really the best in the world. I've never met a Bobby who wasn't professional, friendly, and reasonable, despite a very difficult job.
I'm pretty sure that if you put on an upper class accent (think Hugh Laurie) that would be enough to make the author of this article assume that you have the skill.
Yeah, I've heard it called that, but my Brit friends usually call it "posh." Incidentally, we have our own version of RP in the States, it's called the "Mid-Atlantic accent", many talking heads on news and radio are encouraged to imitate it if they come from the South of the US or New England.
FWIW : Oxford English and RP are different. Not to mention 'upper class English', which is a whole other ballgame. That is, of course, if you're English, when you can tell them apart within 5 seconds (yes, actually).
Personally, I have a 'perfect' RP accent (according to the Cambridge linguistics people who recorded me). But I find the whole class-antenna thing really irritating. So much so that I live in New York, where people just know I'm foreign, or putting on a fake accent.
This is a really horrible article, and it's clear that the author doesn't have a great grasp of English culture by the bad generalisations he makes.
While I haven't bothered with University, I did go to an expensive private school (a step below the likes of Eton) (fees paid by a scholarship), and I have had some links to Oxford University which technically make me an alumnus of an Oxford college and gave me the experience of the university without having studied there (long story). So I'm pretty familiar with the people this article is trying to talk about. For example I have been in the same class as the son of Peter Hitchens, the brother of Christopher who is mentioned as an example in the article, and also the same class as a boy from the Getty family.
Overall, I would say that as a country we value talking and arguing highly as skills, more so than many countries. It definitely becomes more noticeable the higher you climb on the social ladder, but that is generally just because the better educated you are, the more practise you get and the more you learn. It's not that middle/upper class education teaches people these things, it's just that, as with all subjects, private education tends to give people an easier ride.
The idea that at OxBridge it's more about talking than knowing. This was much more true before I was born, a few decades ago. It's certainly what many people who went to those universities in the 50s-70s would say.
"Traditionally, elite Britons then leave education aged 21." That has nothing to do with being "elite", simply that the majority of people who go to university don't study past their BA.
"When Tony Blair hinted that Iraq’s 'weapons of mass destruction' could hit London within 45 minutes, the establishment mostly believed him." Actually a huge number of us didn't believe him, but we blamed it on lies rather than mathematical difficulty. Many of us took to the streets in protest against these lies.
"Educated Americans would often praise Blair for arguing the case better than President Bush could." If you have to draw comparison with GWB to prove that someone is good at arguing a case then you've lost the argument already. I don't know a single working class person who doesn't manage to appear more engaged when speaking than Bush.
"But in general, Britain’s ruling classes are funny speakers." Nonsense. Britain as a whole tends to have a sense of humour, in my experience the upper middle class has less humour than lower classes.
"It was the urge to amuse that recently prompted Cameron to riff on an old TV ad and..." It wasn't the urge to amuse, and anyone who tries to suggest that Cameron, or frankly any of our leading politicians, has a sense of humour, hasn't spent enough time listening to them talk. That was Cameron's attempt to appear hip and youthful.
"Admittedly, ignorance sometimes saves Britain’s rulers from error." How can such a claim be made without given a single example or a single piece of logic to justify it. I don't know if it's a good or a bad point because, without any context, I've no idea what he's even trying to say.
There's a touch of truth in the article but for an ignorant elite they don't do too badly. They are around 4th in line for Nobel Prizes in hard sciences per inhabitant and well ahead in terms of large countries. The top 'winners' are Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark all with populations under 10 million (1999) though I am not suggesting that detracts in anyway from their achievement.
"Anyway, running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously – or at least not yet"
Good grades are certainly not enough, but they are almost always required. Oxbridge only invites the best students to interview, and even the top 5 most academically competitive schools in the UK struggle to send more than a third of their students to Oxford or Cambridge in a good year.
"Anyway, running a country on eloquence alone hasn’t worked out disastrously – or at least not yet"
The largest empire the world has ever seen whittled down to its homeland, a naval base in the med, and some godforsaken islands in the south atlantic. I'd call that pretty disastrous.
It'll only get worse. In an increasingly technical world, the brits have the wrong culture of Snow's two cutures running the show.
> The largest empire the world has ever seen whittled down to its homeland, a naval base in the med, and some godforsaken islands in the south atlantic. I'd call that pretty disastrous.
Actually, I would count the graceful degradation of the British empire (i.e without the entire country going to hell) as quite an achievement - particularly considering it happened with a surprisingly low level of long-term resentment incurred from the former colonies. Further, the claim that it was due to poor management more than, for example, two ludicrously expensive wars, is more than a touch disingenuous.
I suppose one could argue that the first of those wars was rather a waste, but Britain was hardly the only country to be affected by that particular insanity.
Yes... but all of the aforementioned was built by people even closer to the caricature he paints.
So I am unconvinced the problem is as described :) The problem is that the world became suddenly a lot smaller and social perspectives changed very very quickly.
The decline of the empire and being whittled down to 'just our island' has coincided with the best possible time to be alive in britain, very far from being a disaster.
As for having the wrong culture for the modern world; the UK for all its flaws, is an open and creative society and has been so for many generations, more than the vast majority of societies worldwide. There's no good reason to believe that the brits won't keep on taking in and improving on the best ideas form around the world.
Haha, the ending comments - yes, the lack of finance & maths knowledge really has impacted. It's soo frustrating that those in the cabinet office here don't even have basic maths knowledge.
I've no idea how this countries decline can be reversed. Knowledge based economy? What a joke :(
I wonder if there's any page listing the qualifications of all those in power in the UK. Have their grades deteriorated over time I wonder haha.
I tried to get into Cambridge. The first question I heard was "What make of car does your father drive to work?" I told them and they politely rejected me.
That said, most of those students were very, very, very smart. To me, Oxford was the place where I went from finding it fairly easy to get whatever grades I wanted to struggling and working hard to get the minimum I found acceptable (a 2:1, or Upper Second, result in the overall degree). That was because the final grades were all relative, and there were a lot of very, very smart students I was competing against.
And, as far as the subject studied is concerned, don't forget that in the UK people rarely go on to work in the subject they studied. Sure, it's still better to do hard sciences, but apart from lawyers and doctors, most people end up doing something else after university.
Which is fine, imho - university is not and should not be training for a job, but, instead, training for life. And as far as life is concerned, in the world as it is today, winging it is certainly a more valuable skill than quantum mechanics.