A million monkeys with a million GCSEs

Well, today we got to glory in the fact that our children are officially better qualified to sit around and wait for a job opening to pack boxes.

The debate about GCSEs getting easier isn't a real debate. To the vast majority of society in the UK, GCSEs are the end of the line. You go into school, see that you've managed to get those all important 5 Cs, and wander away to do some unfufilling job for the next 50 years.

Except there is a problem, right there.

There is no jobs for these 16 year olds graduates to go into.

Ever wondered why there are so many young drunks, vandals, drug addicts and general underclass? This isn't a fault of parents, or in fact the often blamed "society". The fault is that these kids see a simple, logial path for their lives. It goes, simply, High School -> Unemployment -> Job -> Marrage/Divorce -> Kids -> Death. To put it simply, mine is a tad more complicated than that. Why bother getting these GCSEs? Their parents will never have the money or conviction to send them away to University, where the real qualifications are gained. Many of them are simply not bright enough to gain qualifications that people genuinely need to break out of the Poor Group. So what can they do? They have nothing to live for. Their parents are out of work thanks to all of Britain's blue-collar jobs turning into luxury apartments or supermarkets. The remaining jobs are often worse than packing boxes or making toothbrushes. Like flipping burgers or stacking shelves. So these kids decide that they might as well not bother. Even the ones that hold on until GCSE results day finally give up. I have numerous friends (which in itself is suprising) that have simply not seen the point in trying to break the system and simply decided to stay in Accrington and do nothing.

You could give a million monkeys a million GCSEs, and you'd still have an ape. The real solution is to put children into Path For Life education, where those kids that will never become doctors or scientists can learn the best techniques for doing jobs that are both important and fufilling, like learning how to repair motors and fit windows. The worst thing that can happen is when, in today's vague Point Them In An Upwards Direction system, when a kid that could become a doctor ends up becoming a salesman because of his teachers deciding that the school should do Single Award Science rather than Dual Award or Seperate as that would fill their quotas for 5 Cs for each pupil.