I love this statement made by Charles Adams on Progressive Pulse today:
[I]t is the pursuit of knowledge rather than the pursuit of wealth that has produced the most significant gain in our standard of living.
The claim, which I think to be self-evidently true, is made in a piece by Charles (who is a professor of physics at Durham University) on the folly of the government's new approach to appraising the value of a university education as if a student is a consumer. As Charles puts it:
The problem for politicians is that you cannot buy knowledge, you have to create it, by yourself, sometimes with help from others, but always by hard graft. Students are not consumers, they are workers, working on acquiring the knowledge and skills that help to make the world a better place. More enlightened countries like Denmark pay their students to refine their skills. We used to do that too.
But we no longer live in enlightened times.
Which explains a great deal about the UK today.
I recommend reading Charles' piece.
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I would have thought that his statement was so obviously true that it hardly needed stating. If everyone pursued wealth the pot of wealth would not grow and society would just atrophy. Maybe that is the state we are now in. Interesting that a physicist says this because I am a physicist and a lot of my research was involved with growth of bubbles and precipitates in solids. There is a process called Ostwald Ripening where large precipitates grow at the expense of small ones. Fascinating stuff. St Matthews gospel has the wonderful statement – to those that hath shall be given… you know the rest of it.
Rod White says:
“I would have thought that his statement was so obviously true that it hardly needed stating. ”
But sadly it does need to be said over and over again because it is not believed. What is believed, although it is not by any means consistently true, is that it is clever to be rich; that wealth is inherently a sign of virtue, when often the very opposite is the case.
Spot on, and what an intriguing field, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econophysics
http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/school/overview/educationact1944/
One of my University lecturers used to remind us of the importance of the 1944 Education Act, how soon we forget.
Pushing the topic slightly perhaps beyond where it belongs, but perhaps pertinent to the field of education and misinformation:
Chris Giles in the FT says today:
“Philip Hammond has encountered many critics during his 20 months as UK chancellor,” ….(quite reasonably so in my view) “…..but his decision to move to one Budget a year and cut the amount of fiddling with the tax system has been met with almost universal praise.”
This is nonsense isn’t it? There’s only ever been one budget; with an Autumn statement to allow tweakings.
What Hammond actually did was to move the Budget to Autumn and tweak in Spring. That makes sense, and allows accommodation to changes before the turn of the financial year.
Shouldn’t we be able to trust the FT get this sort of thing right and offer praise where it’s due rather than peddle political sycophancy. Or am I being picky ?
It is nonsense
You are right
Do Education and the NHS have to balance their books annually, i.e. annualised budgets?
BR had to and it drove them crazy.
Technically they do
Actually, they don’t