Speaking of the British

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

Some of this resonates, but this does not:

Oxbridge’s teaching methods reward good talk

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.

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.

This writer writes well. Perhaps unaware of the gaps in his knowledge, he simply writes around them.

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."

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).

I'm british, but I have to say; this article is utter arse gravy of the highest order.

This article is complete bullshit:

> 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!?!!

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.

Learning how to speak and articulate what I am saying has been the most valuable skill I have ever learnt.

I am constantly blown away by how poorly grown adults converse.

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.

Odd that he mentions Margaret Thatcher without mentioning she was once a research chemist and had a chemistry degree.

Doesn't fit with his content free story I guess.

p.s. the link is bad, it's not moreover.com it's from the ft.com.

So for those of us who didn't go to oxbridge and didn't acquire this valuable skill, how do we acquire it as adults?

"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.

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.

This guy should stick to writing about sports.

Although I agree that the English value both 'winging it' on limited knowledge, and banter / witty repartee. But that is regardless of background.

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.

Why is this a link on c.moreover.com and not ft.com? All the sharing links at the bottom of the page use an ft.com URL.

Seems silly to suggest that articulate people are uneducated. If that's not an oxymoron, what is?

It's probably a humour piece.

The trouble is that many foreigners tend to take it at face value because it panders to racist stereotypes they hold about the British.

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.

By the way, does the FT have editors or something?