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Comment by DanEdge | Hacker News Reader

A couple of quotes from comments on the Guardian's version of the story:

"There is no need to teach people in the UK how to be a computer programmer because the work can either be shipped out to India or companies can employ people from India to work in their IT companies in the UK."

Which is bad enough, but this one really takes the biscuit for me:

"How can this be true when our exam pass-[rate has been climbing for yonks? The guy's obviously talking crap. What would hr know about education? We should listen to our teachers and ignore capitalists like this."

Wow.

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I think you might need to put your sarcasm detectors into British mode.

Questions around outsourcing, the standard of secondary education, and how education meets the needs of industry all loom fairly large in the British political landscape.

Except I honestly don't think these answers weren't meant to be sarcastic. I sometimes skim through Guardian comments and these seem par for the course.

Poe's law? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

I've lived in the UK for way too long now, so my sarcasm detector is finely tuned... and I do think those are satyrical comments. It'd be hard for a clueless idiot to hit these buttons quite so precisely. Must be some smart commenters on the Guardian website!

*satirical ...

now now swombat. i can't tell at all whether you are being sarcastic here. (newcomer to HN, won't be surprised to fail the tuning test)

> How can this be true when our exam pass rate has been climbing for yonks?

If anyone wants to see grade inflation UK-style in black and white, take a look at these two pages:

http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/a-lev.htm

The bottom table on each page gives the overview across all subjects.

For those not familiar with the British system, GCSEs are taken at age 16, A-levels at 18.

So, for example, in 1989 when I did GCSEs 45% of grades were in the range A-C. This year it's 69.8%.

When I did A-levels in 1991, 78% of grades were in the range A-E. This year it's 97.8%.

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