John Lewis slams UK education system and offers staff literacy lessons | Hacker News Reader

John Lewis slams UK education system and offers staff literacy lessons

retailgazette.co.uk

55 pointsgenghizkhan99 comments

There is a long and proud tradition in the UK of undermining the ability of the working classes, coupled with a fear/distain of the state education system.

The idea that comprehensive schools are producing illiterate and innumerate school leavers plays neatly into the prejudices of journalists and business owners (the majority of whom have been privately educated), whilst simultaneously justifying the poor pay and conditions on offer to shop floor staff.

Anybody who has spent any time around young people in the UK will know that they are, if anything, far more literate than previous generations, which should come as no surprise since they spend a greater amount of time reading and writing on electronic devices.

We see this with Dyson claiming every few years that they can't find enough engineers -- translation -- we can't find enough engineers for the salary we want to pay them.

I'm not sure about that. I do see a lot more intellectual rigor in the older techies than in the ones from my generation. Just basic grammar illustrate that well.

And it makes sense, if you can't rely on automatic systems to do part of your work, you will be trained by your daily tasks to be a more powerful thinker.

If what the company do is hard, being ok will not cut it. You cannot google your way into innovation, you can't copy/paste architecture design, and your calculator won't save you from a logical mistake.

I'm personnally very adapted to agile envs with margin of errors and a lot of feedback loops. But a waterfall is more challenging, because I'm not born in it. And you don't use scrum to build the path to moon landing.

More than that, I arised in the "a good dev is lazy" period, where working smart, not hard was praised. But hitting 30, reality calls back: there are no shortcut to awesomeness, you will have to work hard. And not many engineers are ready to do so. The ones who do often create their company.

> I do see a lot more intellectual rigor in the older techies than in the ones from my generation.

My experience has been the opposite - though as this is based on observation it's obviously subjective - and opportunities for selection-bias are also present (i.e. how many of the last-generation that didn't get promoted-out of being a technical contributor was because they were more valuable to the company that way?)

Your remark about automated tooling is interesting - because I feel that modern tooling (TLA+, Z3, constraint-provers, and cutting-edge languages like Haskell, Idris, and so on) really do require almost a postgraduate-level of understanding of the CS theory involved - whereas if you look at _the SE scene_ in the 1970s and 1980s - or even the mid-1990s, the tooling certainly did require you to do more planning and reasoning ahead of time (VB6, lol) but I can't see the entire industry of the time doing their modelling and verification entirely by themselves: on the contrary (and based on the horror-inducing programming code I've seen) a lot of it was ad-hoc and trial-and-error - Visual Studio didn't get built-in support for unit-tests until 2008 (or 2005 if you had the expensive edition). Also consider that the old SE processes used back then (Waterfall, boxed software, slow-moving-and-big release cycles, etc) meant there was more room for less-rigorous folks in large software dev teams.

> and your calculator won't save you from a logical listake.

For that, you need a spell-checker!

UPDATE: Ah, you edited your post, which ruins the joke :/

With all due respect, I think you are mixing apples and oranges here. "TLA+, Z3, constraint-provers, and cutting-edge languages like Haskell, Idris, and so on" is not exactly the bread and butter of IT work nowadays, so why do you think it is appropriate to compare it with "VB6, lol"?

(When you say "IT work" - are you referring to software-engineering work specifically - or "IT" in general? (I'm personally not a fan of "IT" as a term at all because it's unhelpfully vague[1]).

I wasn't comparing them directly like that.

My point is that in the 1990s if you used VB in production systems then you would effectively be forced into investing a lot of company resources - and mental effort - into all kinds of entirely disconnected approaches for formalising, proving and even testing your system. Whereas the state of the art for formalising SWE work today currently lies in tools like TLA+, Z3, and others and how it's significantly easier to map those formal models to our production program code back-and-forth (when written in more expressive and formal-friendly languages like Haskell, etc) than it was 20+ years ago.

Back then the sheer effort involved to perform even automated unit testing and integration testing of VB6 code, and other languages of a similar nature, was massive because, not least, the VB6 tooling completely lacked that functionality, and their lack of terse expressivity meant time spent just writing repetitive code with little value - and things were tenfold worse if you were using one of the myriad proprietary other 4GL languages of the time because most of those vendors swore-off any kind of interoperability or extension mechanism because they saw them as a threat to their business model (as a textbook example see Progress' utterly laughable defense of maintaining their position here: https://www.progress.com/tutorials/odbc/open-source-database despite their market-share shrinking and the company quickly pivoting away from their own database system and onto being a generic component/tooling vendor).

Even so, I'm not being ageist: VB6 wasn't state-of-the-art when it came out: Java is older and far better in that regard (VB6's type system is very anemic). I was singling out VB6 for criticism specifically because even back then it wasn't very good, it's just disappointing that so many people used it as the basis for production systems.

[1] Whenever UK friends and relatives refer to me as "working in IT in the 'states" I outright deny it: I really don't feel that I work in "IT".

Whoa, a fellow PROGRESS user?!

Anyway, thanks for the answer. I am not sure I completely agree with you, but at least now your point is more clear.

I’m not a Progress user. Instead I get paid lots of money to help companies move-away from Progress to Postgres :)

(Which in practice just means figuring out how to get their bloody “SQL Broker” processes running then dumping everything over ODBC. In order to circumvent the arbitrary and unfair “Users/Connections” licensing restrictions I reversed Progress’ super-seeekrit program code to figure out how their license keys worked and made my own keygen in a weekend, that was fun - I got paid to do that too!). The fact it’s possible to slam out software within a few days while drunk-and/or-stoned (I don’t remember, lol) that undoes Progress’ entire business-model built-around vendor lock-in shows what a house-of-cards they’ve built for themselves.

I would like to say I have a job for you but I am afraid that this kind of decisions is way above my pay grade.

Still... drop me a line in mailbox, maybe? (You can find my contacts in the profile).

VB6 > TLA+

> I do see a lot more intellectual rigor in the older techies than in the ones from my generation

I have a theory on this. An architect in private practice told me a couple of years ago how he was having trouble getting good junior architects, so was resorting to graduates. He felt his small practice was not the best place for a rigourous training. He recounted that in the past there was a giant pool of qualified and experienced staff coming from the councils, railways and public utilities. There was also a similar pool of state supported industry, Rolls Royce, BA etc. These positions took graduates (or even apprentices) and trained them up. These were also jobs for life with opportunity for progression and final salary pensions attached. Most of these have been squeezed out by 30 years of privatisation and The Cuts post 2008.

I personally worked at a company that had grown out of a government research agency some years before. The majority of employees were from that original batch of junior engineers transferring over, even filling roles like HR, Health and Safety, purchasing etc. I don't see how this could happen today.

I feel like in lusting after what Silicon Valley has, we have undone what we had with nothing to replace it.

I gather that Dyson does actually pay fairly well in the UK, the problem is the UK as a whole really doesn't pay engineers that well - and not just SWE, but chem-eng, civil-eng, mech-eng, and so on.

I'm British myself but I've been living in the US west-coast for the past 7.5 years because I get paid 2-3x more here for the exact same work (heck, even 4x if you don't count London).

The reasons for the disparity are as complex as they are legion - but I believe the size of the market you can sell to matters the most - and with the UK out of the EU the size of the effective market it can realistically sell to has shrunk considerably, so I don't see things getting better at all for the UK eng sector.

...secondarily, the UK is having the same problem the US is having with boomer-generation people still working and occupying senior positions... and housing... which limits opportunities for nominal upward mobility in younger professionals, which in-turn suppresses total-comp. This is especially a problem given the UK's entrenched business culture which I'm not personally a fan of.

A Quora answer from a UK based headhunter on this. He argues that if you are an engineer who wants to make money, you are best off going to Goldman Sachs.

https://qr.ae/pGP3SR

That does not say good things about the engineering culture in the UK.

> about the engineering culture in the UK.

I remember reading an article here on HN within the past year (lost the link, sorry) that ascribed it to traditional/establishment UK managerial thinking that all departments of a company, including engineering, are strictly subordinate to management. Consequently engineers of any level won't be involved in managerial discussions nor to set the direction of the company. Management wants people they can give orders to and won't have to listen to, and who they can sack if management's ideas fail, and keep the rewards for themselves (naturally). Of course the inherent problem with that approach is you lose-out on good ideas for the company's direction from engineering, and miss important early feedback.

Whereas my experience working here in the US, the west-coast, at least, is that eng is part of the decision-making processes at every level - though my experiences are necessarily limited as I only really have direct personal experiences with software-engineering companies - but I see that other west-coast companies do take their own SWEs seriously - take Nordstrom for example, they still run their own e-commerce division instead of just farming it out as other retailers would do - not to mention Amazon.

This is absolutely true. I worked at a large engineering organisation, I was a manager so I could literally list the salary boundaries for different experience levels. Now I work doing the exact same job but in a finance related company. I earn ~6x what I earned in the traditional engineering org. It's insane. Also, the quality of the engineers is no higher, and in some cases comically lower.

The exception to this are companies that pride themselves on their silicon valley culture (Google etc) although some of those still choose to take advantage of the cheap local market.

Has the advent of electronic devices brought more reading and writing for the current generation? Any sources on that? I’m strongly hoping that any such study would count texting as neither reading nor writing…

Whether they can read a bottle of aspirin is the example in this report:

https://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/building...

i would invite you to justify why reading and writing messages doesn’t constitute reading and writing, on some level.

> Anybody who has spent any time around young people in the UK

I don't think this is sufficient as people tend to group with people like themselves. For example, I do not believe I know any adults without a university degree. I might erroneously conclude that virtually everyone goes to university. Most people do not have one.

> Most people do not have one.

Statistics...

According to the 2019 AEI report on postsecondary attainment, the UK currently has 51.6% postsecondary attainment amongst those then aged 25-34: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/International...

Reports for the entire working-force (e.g. 25-65) will skew much lower due to the significantly lower percentage of postsecondary education in the overall population that started to rise through to the 1990s.

The strange thing is, it's not always apparent whether someone is functionally illiterate or innumerate.

It's disturbingly routine, in the US at least, to have a degree with barely even a grade school understanding of math. And although total illiteracy is uncommon among high-school and college-educated people, you would be surprised how many can't write a normal paragraph or follow a written argument.

You can't necessarily see this with normal public or workplace interactions, but it is real.

For most people, math and writing aren't part of their jobs. Skills that aren't used aren't remembered.

I've seen this in myself. In high school, I got up to precalculus level math. I've been trying to relearn it, and when I started, I was amazed that I'd forgotten Algebra 2 level skills.

You are misunderstanding the concept of literacy here. It doesn’t mean “reads slang fan fiction on Twitter”, it means “reads exemplary works of art created throughout history.”

I doubt the average young person even knows that Homer is the author of the Iliad and not a character on The Simpson’s.

You, and not OP, are mistaken. Literate here means C+ grade in English language, not literature.

These are linked. Students don’t have basic language skills because they don’t engage with exemplary works. If your only input is “Twitter speak and memes” then it’s not surprising that no one can communicate intelligently.

Being able to read "exemplary works" is a really strange and narrow definition of literate.

I also have to disagree that "twitter speak and memes" is not intelligent communication -- just because something is new, doesn't mean it's less intelligent.

Engaging with exemplary works mostly improves your ability to appreciate exemplary works. Children don't start out with that ability, so unsurprisingly they are not keen on reading them. There's an argument that we should force them to read them anyway, but that's for promotion of culture, not functional literacy.

If we want them to read safety notices correctly then we're better off teaching J. K. Rowling than Shakespeare.

> Engaging with exemplary works mostly improves your ability to appreciate exemplary works.

No, it helps you gain a richer understanding of the universe and your human place in it.

When I was in school, they taught astronomy in physics class.

Another benefit of artistic/literary courses is that you learn about concepts like "metaphors" and "figures of speech."

Why should reading the Iliad be our standard for literacy? Our standard should be can they apply for jobs, understand bills, understand basic contracts for housing and jobs, read food and drug packaging etc. Those are the things that allow people to successfully navigate modern life.

If the goal is just to pump out functional proles, then sure, we only need the absolute basics.

If the goal is to provide meaning and purpose to life, to build creative thinkers capable of pushing humanity forward, then reading the high points of human civilization is probably important.

I don't disagree that they're important but they're clearly of secondary importance to the literacy skills that allow people to function in society.

We don't need just the absolute basics but we definitely need the absolute basics first. And atm it seems like we're putting a large emphasis on the skills you're promoting but largely failing on the basics.

This exacerbated due to many people who (understandable) struggle with the 'high points of society' thinking that they're stupid and thus dismissing their own abilities before they master the basics.

Are you suggesting that this is what John Lewis is looking for, someone who read the classics? It may be true, but that is not what I understood from the article.

It also means "read Harry Potter". I wonder how many of these kids got to that stage.

This is for John Lewis sales assistants. I don't think they're expecting people well versed in Greek literature.

And John Lewis is owned by the staff

I never quite understood how that works when they want to sack people.

Because if they didn't the company would struggle and eventually everyone would loose their jobs.

Sure, but does the sacked person still own part of John Lewis?

> greater amount of time reading and writing on electronic devices.

It's not like they are reading anything well written or writing elegantly by themselves. Volume and quality are two different things.

It’s a bit of a judgement call to assume what they are reading. I’ve also seen weird studies on wether “kids these days” read “classics” or not, and people using the results to look down on those who found more interesting stuff for themselves.

or you can also safely assume that kids left to their own devices will find a pretty low bar common denominator like wasting time on tik tok.

Every new generation is said to be wasting their time on frivolous things on their own device.

We’ve also reached a point where there’s legitimately better “educational” content on youtube than on any other media. I don’t have any idea on what’s actually on Tik Tok, but I wouldn’t look down on it just because it looks shallow from where we’re looking from.

Anecdote is not data. You might rarely meet them but many adults in the UK are functionally illiterate - I.e. unable to process even basic text. They might still be able to read a roadsign or similar but struggle to read anything much beyond this. Those in this aituatipnyare usually deeply ashamed of it and think they are alone in this.

That was me surreptitiously Googling "aituatipnyare" to see if I was less functionally literate then I believed.

This is either masterful trolling or bad typing. Either way- you made me google it.

I'm not a teacher, parent or someone with any formal education at all, but when I was at school (UK) I thought (and was told my teachers) that I was dumb and wouldn't amount to much. I had no idea that I had intellect until I left school at 15 and my education finally began. Some people simply do not learn well in the factory worker style education system.

I'd also say that I think schools in the UK (and I would imagine other countries) totally fail at teaching essential skills required for life. Financial literacy, basic cooking skills (I did home economics but it was the same course my mother did at school 30 years prior), how to actually learn things yourself (one of the most valuable skills in my opinion), how to plan and organise yourself for life, how to deal with problems that come up in life (bills, relationships, pets, whatever), how to fix things, drive/maintain a car, how credit ratings work, the value in travel and new experiences, etc.

My comments are based on an experience from 20 years ago but it seems that not much has improved since then. I've no idea how to solve these problems and prepare future generations, but its something I'd love to help figure out. My current assessment is that youtube feels like it provides a more valuable education system than state run schools.

I'm just not sure this is true. There are plenty of things wrong with the education system in the UK, and no doubt many individuals are completely failed by the system. But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well enough that they can get a job / engage in further training.

Room for improvement? Yes, hugely. Total failure? I think that's hyperbole.

> But most kids do learn to read, write, perform basic maths and handle social situations well

Kids learn to read nowadays at 5 or 6 (so some of them enter school already being able to read), learning to write and perform basic maths is not that hard either. The fact that you use these measures as a baseline shows that the education system is a train wreck.

Kids enter school at 5 or 6 with a range of reading abilities - some can recognise simple words, but very few are fully literate. The UK currently has a literacy rate of 99% -- something is going right.

Learning to write and perform basic maths doesn't seem that hard to us, but for most of human history was the reserve of a select few. Perhaps the fact that it seems so easy is actually because school can be quite effective at times?

No fundamental changes to learning are required when you push literacy rates from 10% to 99%, it is simply a matter of including more people into the learning process of a few years that existed for several millenia. If kids had a retention rate of at least 10% after 11 years of schooling and “are you smarter than a 5th grader” couldn’t be a thing, now that would be impressive.

I don't entirely agree. School certainly gave me no formal help with learning to handle social situations. I learned the majority of those skills through hobbies at Uni.

While I did learn reading, writing and math, my writing skills were subpar and this was never spotted or addressed. More importantly most of the writing skills taught were essay writing or letter writing. The former isn't particular relevant to the writing I do in day to day life and the latter was archaicly formal. The most valuable writing skills I got from school were actually science report writing (helped a lot with documentation and communication in a work setting) and even then I've learned far more from organisational roles in my hobbies and during my career than I ever did at School (or the formal education part of uni).

But would you have been able to learn from those roles if school hadn't laid the groundwork?

You can't expect a school to teach every child every skill they need for their adult life. It sounds like you were able to teach yourself the skills you needed to succeed -- in my eyes, producing children able to self-teach is the sign of a very successful school system.

I suspect so though I can't definitively say. Most of my later learning involved making a ton of painful mistakes many of which I'm certain could have been avoided with some basic help. I genuinely can't link very much I learned in school to helping me learn later in life. Science report writing, one product design class and a school show I performed in are about it.

I can on the otherhand link many things I did outside of school at that time to things I learned later in life.

I don't disagree with your view that the point of school is to teach children to self-teach. But I do disagree that the school system I went through helped very much with that.

Fair enough, although I think you are maybe thinking a bit too narrowly about what school taught you. To get you to the point where you can write a scientific report takes an awful lot of learning... seems unfair to dismiss all of that.

Perhaps. I could already read well and write a little when I got to school at 4, so I'm perhaps dismissing it due to natural ability and good parenting.

This I would love schools to teach critical thinking, how you country works, citizen rights and responsibilities, financial skills, how starting and running business work. All the plumbing that you have to deal with in the real life. However I don’t think schools are set up for this either in skills or willingness.

..or time. Schools in the UK have already got a curriculum that's pretty full. Everyone will have their own different list of "essential life skills" and trying to fit them all into the curriculum is impossible.

One thing that is often missing from these conversations is that arguably the goal of education isn't really to teach you any specific skill, but rather to give you the capability to learn things by yourself.

Part of this process will necessarily mean teaching you things like reading and writing, but whenever I hear "My school didn't teach me X, so I had to teach myself, wasn't my school terrible", I think "no, probably not."

FWIW, we covered critical thinking in lower-sixth (16-17yo) as my school offered it as an elective, and I did 2 years of critical media studies as part of my english-language GCSE (ages 14-16). Not every school will have offered those subjects to their student body though. Another factor is that I was in the top-sets which meant every course was available for me - if I were in a lower-ability set/group I would have had less opportunities for critical studies courses.

(Paternalism warning:) My main take-away from that experience was that the people that I feel would benefit the most from media-literacy and critical-thinking are the ones who wouldn't have been given an opportunity to study it at secondary-school in the first place...

I used to be a teacher in a school system that emphasized against rote learning, knowledge memorization, and numerical calculations (for physics). Well, we did do that stuff but it could only get the student a grade D or E. The massive problem was that even the teachers didn't understand what the mysterious higher level skills we were supposed to be teaching were or how to teach or assess them. The students had no hope of fair treatment. The official assessment criteria were wholistic and wordy. Numerical grades were forbidden, as was averaging scores from multiple assessments into the final, so teachers made up some grades based on feelings, or secretly used a spreadsheet that added a little random factor to make it look non-formulaic. Anyway, point is, some modern education removes the old low-level skills (mainly memorization) but doesn't replace it with anything nor even keep the useful parts of it (eg. mental arithmetic).

Counterpoint. Few people who the education system worked out for are going to be working on the department store shop floor.

Not that I disagree, but the opinion is coming from a very specific view point. If the kids had strong educations, would they be okay getting paid £10 an hour / £16k a year.

>£10 an hour

Is that terrible in the UK? That's like $14 an hour and large swaths of Americans are expected to live on that with much shittier welfare than the UK.

It is. These days most things are more expensive in the UK than USA. Particularly housing.

Although overall the US is more expensive that the UK, albeit not by much.

Sources: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100214/what-cost-li...

Maybe you are both right: maybe the US is more expensive if you plan to live off savings, but the UK is more expensive (in units of labor) for the average worker because the average pay is lower.

In other words, almost all statistics on cost of living do not take into account differences between countries in the ease of getting money.

It's a common wage for shop staff - most of the big supermarkets pay that amount. Smaller employers may only pay the "living wage" which is £8.91. The UK national minimum wage is £8.36.

In provincial England, I pay my cleaning lady 15.00 GBP per hour (she is very good at what she does, and I'd be lost without her), so 10.00 GBP is pretty low.

Is she your employee or is she billing you 15 GBP/hour?

It's terrible in that the average house north of £250k and average rent is £1000 and that John Lewis is a fancy brand, and thus is more likely to be found in above average areas. Compound this with that they're only clearing ~£1200 and you just gotta ask, what are they expecting?

Well put.

It's not at all dissimilar to walking into a conference of learned and decorated economists, and being disappointed that only a handful know how to administer First Aid.

I would have thought Mrs White might recognise the limitations of her data, as a scholar would, given her Economics degree from Cambridge and her Masters in the same, gained at UCL.

Presumably, John Lewis has an application & interview process which would have been successfully navigated by the people is talking about.

Methinks her motives are not perhaps not pure.

I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that young people going directly into retail jobs have poor functional numeracy or literacy. Firstly, those with academic skills or other skills will either be getting further education or going into a trade. So you’re left with quite a specific group of people. Then consider- is this specific to this group? I got a masters in engineering, when I turned up on day 1 was I a good engineer? No, I had very little practical experience and that matters. The idea that education makes you ready for a job is a slightly absurd standard unless we re-work our education system to have a far more practical set of courses. We can do that but that will equally have short comings.

Here is some background for people not in the UK, or perhaps not familiar with how things have changed in post 16 education. I am not an expert but I am planning to employ some people under these new schemes so have been reviewing it.

At 16 you can either enter more education or do an apprenticeship that includes training. Classically one might study A levels until 18 and apply for university, or go the vocational route and do an apprenticeship.

Companies in the retail sector like John Lewis, created retail apprenticeships. This involves getting paid £4.30 (for reference minimum wage for an adult over 23 not on an apprenticeship is £8.91) an hour to stand at a till. The company is supposed to in return provide a qualification and allow the staff 20% of their time to study for it. The government pay for the training, although larger companies have to contribute. One might suggest that the people applying for retail apprenticeships are going to be at the lower end of academic attainment.

Now I read this article, and I see John Lewis complaining that they are having to train there people they have contracted to train and are working for a pittance to get.

I think that this may have a lot to do with Sharon White looking to be a big beast in the Labour party in pretty short order. A stint at Ofcom followed by time at JL gives good credentials for a front bench position, possibly from the House of Lords.

You’re probably correct. It will be interesting to see how long she remains in the John Lewis role.

We've cut the education budget every year for decade (edited down from decades). We've made people stay when they don't want to. We've poured money into the kids with the worst outcomes at everyone else's expense.

So this is very predictable when you actually think about it.

It's just that we've build a whole society around not paying for things, not investing long term, only paying attention to the loudest dumbest voices and no one thinking more than 1 election ahead.

I think the same seems to be happening in a lot of English-speaking countries (USA, Aus etc)

actually the education budget (in real terms) peaked in 2011 and has been flat since then.

Yeah, new labour actually did well until 2011. Since then it's fallen in cash terms I believe? I should have said "a decade".

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14369

This is without accounting for any of the other factors: closure of special needs schools, forcing more kids to stay longer and take all classes, banning expulsions, etc.

We also spent a tonne of money on things like Academies and other political pet projects.

Focus on social skills, have less requirements on actual skills to ensure social status quo, everyone applause until the kids reach 25 and look for a job.

Relevant quote : “To have done ten years, 11, 12 years of education, and not having, in many cases, functional literacy, certainly, pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, ten, 11, means that they may then have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team but that’s almost out with the education system,” White said.

This is a pretty consistent theme around the world. A lot of the gains in educational attainment seem to have come from reducing the standard required to obtain the credentials.

Are there any tests or exams with guaranteed unchanging requirements?

For example, 100 years worth of exam papers could be written all at once, and questions shuffled so the exam paper each year has the same difficulty.

Take an old book for primary school written in the 70s, then 50s and 20s, fairly large differences between the 3 eras already, now compare that to a typical textbook from our era.

For France, it was eye opening ( and the same for the French side of Switzerland)

> For France, it was eye opening ( and the same for the French side of Switzerland)

How so?

(talking about France here, I can provide some websites with old manuals or student notebooks) Two examples : past simple is no longer required to be studied in primary school and dumb down kid books with much less vocabulary and grammar (actual incorrect grammar) being re-edited like the Enid Blyton (The Famous Five) ones.

One needs to understand that kids are spending at least 2 less years in school from 6 to 18. We are lying to the kids, parents and ourselves.

https://www.reseau-canope.fr/musee/collections/fr/museum/mne... some examples of old notebooks.

Cultural changes would make that difficult. Nonetheless, here's a 100 year old exam that mostly still makes sense today and actually tests practical life knowledge, literacy and numeracy:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744...

Not sure any kid today would understand the sentence "Decline I." though.

For those curious to see the test, the link in huffpost has been moved to https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...

The state run comprehensive education system in the UK has been a disaster.

Maths geniuses are hardly going to be applying for John Lewis jobs.

They are not asking for math geniuses?

John Lewis Partnership chair Sharon White: “To have done ten years, 11, 12 years of education, and not having, in many cases, functional literacy, certainly, pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, ten, 11, means that they may then have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team but that’s almost out with the education system,” White said.

Glass houses.

Note that this is John Lewis the British department store, and not John Lewis the recently deceased American civil rights icon.

Although this John Lewis also has a history of fighting for workers rights.

Easy enough to find, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Partnership but very interesting. The essential detail being "The company is owned by a trust on behalf of all its employees" which gives you some idea of the company's motivations.

John Lewis is a great example of a socialism-inspired (employee owned , workplace democracy) that ironically mostly caters to the upper-middle class.

The British education system is too busy being involved in political movements to actually educate children.

We have a huge issue with the degree-laden failures of society ending up as teachers as pay is terrible and the bar to entry is extremely low.

These teachers couldn't function in the real world with their beliefs , and so they take it upon themselves to brainwash their young and captive audiences in lieu of actually educating them.

Where did you read all that guff?

My experience of British teachers is entirely contrary to this. I would employ most of them if they came to work for me - almost all of them are "get job done people people" and they care about their work.

- an acquaintance who is a teacher takes breakfast (at her own expense on a tight salary) into class for all her 8-9 year old students because she knows that some of them don't get fed at home

- my daughters teacher started and runs an engineering class after school for the kids using donations of machinery and components from parents (I gave them a defunct hedge cutter which they stripped down and then rebuilt to show how the motor works)

- the head of the other primary school in town goes to the traveler camps out in the country side and goes door to door to engage the families and persuade them to send their kids to school. He is physically frail, openly gay and anyone who has gone to those camps knows that this is a genuinely risky thing to do - but he does it, every summer, because he cares about the kids. Btw, the fact that he brings them into his school means that he has an extra cohort of really challenging problems every summer which slamdunks into the toilet his chance of further preferment and performance related pay.

I think you should spend some time in schools, perhaps you could see if one of them near you needs a governor - you might learn something.

The only failure of education that I see around here relates to the schooling of HN users who don't have the wherewithal or self awareness to understand that they're pushing ignorant, prejudiced and unkind opinions.

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