A 16 year old leaving school and starting work is unlikely to command a wage of more than £18,000 a year before stoppages. Starting out in life, it would be reasonable if no tax was due on a necessarily low income; but when the first band of tax is doubled then a young worker is almost certain to be pushed into debt by New Labour's tax ferocity. There is no redress, even if the young tax payer suddenly faced with a doubling of their tax rate would be willing to submit to the means test. For there is no benefit, universal or means-tested, available. There are benefits for the workless, for the young mother, but not for the young worker, just punitive taxation.
There are benefits for the young who continue their learning outside the workplace. But for the 16 year old continuing to study, the means test is applied to the generation above them, to their parents, despite there being no certainty that a student can access the wealth and income that belongs to others. So although the age for entry to independent study at university level is 17, many are beginning university level courses at school with, by definition, inferior teaching and inadequate library and laboratory provision; and again, it is the New Labour regime that has removed universal free tertiary education and maintenance grants to the qualified, as it opened expensive and valuable resources to many unable to use or benefit from them.
Post 16 school and college allowances are determined by parental means testing too, so that fierce disincentives to continuing to study are systemically present. When the appalling policy of raising the obligatory school-leaving age to 18 is added to these factors, it is clear that a determination to infantilize and control the young is operating.
The working young should be encouraged in their independence by not facing punitive taxation. The young pursuing learning should be encouraged in their work by the provision of grants either means-tested on their own means - though numbers of independently wealthy among 16 to 21 year olds are miniscule - or support should be a universal benefit for those qualified to undertake the course of study.
Poverty does indeed result in inequality. All the young are poor and have a claim upon the generosity and resources of our society, but New Labour should stop discriminating among them wearing ideological blinkers that produce perverse rewards and crippled life chances in the name of fairness and opportunity for all.
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Do you think so many should go into further and higher education, or does "more mean worse"? What would happen in government policy if students were classified as unemployed?
I reject absolutely the 'more means worse' standpoint, S. I would regard all young people as having a social, not just familial, claim on the resources of all of us to achieve independent lives. The generation above mine were very generous, and I am committed to returning that generosity to the generation below mine.
We have the physical infrastructure and we have the know how to provide the intellectual infrastructures. What doesn't seem to be there is unity of purpose. I am for education for its own sake, because it provides personal happiness and gives maturity. Others use the education system for their ends, many of which are inimical to the hopes and expectations of such a view. As usual, the government and those of its mind set want to block off the use of educational resources to people like me who chart their own course through what is on offer. So they standardize what is on offer and refuse funding to any alternative vision.
The pretence that this is done in the name of fair chances and equality and removing disadvantage is particularly nasty. As a result of their bossiness large numbers are dragooned into a hopelessly inappropriate use of their youth. So they escape, but many not into a knowledgeable and competent home schooling or alternative, more appropriate system, but into not a lot, and often real delinquency. Of course anyone escaping the state coralling during the 5-16, soon to be 18 years is criminalised anyway now. The education part of the New Labour Project has been conceived by a lot of frightened old kill joys.
" I am for education for its own sake, because it provides personal happiness and gives maturity."
What on Earth went wrong then, HG ?
Why so many grammar school graduates inflicting all of this upon us ?
I feel that education for its own sake produces exactly the sort of meddlers we have in parliament. Ambitious brains trained to no useful purpose and afforded higher status than warranted.
Another crippling issue facing the young. Personal transport. At £2k plus insurance for a first car is prohibitively expensive.
My ambition for my boys is that they emigrate as soon as they can.
What an indictment on a government.
I appreciate your passion for ooportunity, HG; but if tertiary education is State paid, there's an affordability limit. And now that it's student paid, the expense seems to have put off a lot of those in lower income groups.
We seem to be spending more and more in making it harder and harder to make a start on grown-up life. Authoritarians, like New Labour, always go for regimenting and corralling the young first. They used to expect the older incorrigibles to die off quite quickly, with a little help for the particularly stroppy ones. Now we are all surviving via antibiotics I wouldn't be a bit surprised at a cull - unattributable of course. Just a tragic series of events.
When a country deindustrialises what happens to the workforce, S? The only mass change in activity on this scale I can think of was the shift from agriculture; but there it was pulled by industrialisation as well as technical innovation. We are deindustrialised with no other work opportunity. Education alone cannot bear the weight of this level of change.
I've answered a question with a question, but the answer to yours has wider confines than education and the use of the tertiary education sector. If a young person is qualified to use the teaching and resources they have a claim on the rest of us to enable them to do so. If they qualify for employment I do not want them taxed into dependency. It's bad enough coping with dramatice economic shift without coping with a government that is all about controlling the population and particularly the young. And in the name of righting wrongs and helping the disadvantaged too! They create the disadvantaged. They stifle initiative. They reward conformity. They wreck markets.
HG: ... a cull...
It is just what I think is happening, and at both ends of life. Genetic testing is less likely to lead to cures than to pressure to abort (Byron wouldn't have made it, with his club foot); medical treatments take into account age and "quality of life" issues; and we're heading towards euthanasia and the decriminalisation of the murder of the disabled. We may as well not have fought the Nazis.
And as for deindustrialisation - I have had before, mental images of a return to peasantry. Perhaps the hoodies are an unconscious reflection of our slide backwards to mediaeval times. Except the process of going down from 60 millions to 4 would completely destroy the ecology. I'm clapping my hands for Tinkerbell.
Did you ever see Alastair Sim as Captain Hook, S? He reduced entire theatres of children to hatred; we clapped our hands off when asked the question.
Such a clever man. There is this quote in his biography:
'As I passed imperceptibly from a beautiful child to a strong handsome lad, I wanted more than anything else in the world to be of all things, a hypnotist. I practised on gentle dogs...'
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