Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google Read Online Free PDF

key stage two SAT results’?
    Of course, having great qualifications can open up many great jobs in the same way that having no qualifications can lead to a life of poverty and underachievement. But there is not a direct causal link, at least not in the West. There are people with great qualifications and no jobs, or lousy jobs, and there are many, many examples of people with no qualifications and great jobs. In other words, qualifications alone are not the maker or breaker of careers. We’re back to attitude and a whole range of other skills like emotional intelligence, communication and creativity.
    And if you decide you would rather not take the word of some American business guru, then how about this from David Frost, the head of the
British Chamber of Commerce
speaking in August 2007:
    Employers want someone who does the job and if necessary they will train them to do a particular task and give them one to one training … Qualifications actually come pretty low down the agenda.
    Yet, in schools, we still perpetuate ‘The Great Educational Lie’–do well at school and you’ll get a good job.
    Remember, nobody is saying here don’t bother getting qualified. There’s a great line from Bill Gates I share with young people, ‘Get the best education you can and keep on learning’ and that’s relevant whether you’re 7, 17, 27 or 57. Another thing I do is get them to write the word ‘learning’ on their paper and then ask them to put their finger over the ‘l’. ‘What have you got?’ I ask them. (‘Ning!’ came back the reply once. Pesky kids with mittens … .)
    An article in
The Economist
in 2006 entitled ‘The Battle for Talent’ stated that, ‘The bottom line is you can buy almost ten Indian brains for the price of one American one’ 1 and this is something supported by a story in
Fortune
magazine that same year. The biggest threat from outsourcing wasn’t to factory workers but ‘those college-educated desk workers’ who were looking ‘more outsourceable by the day’. After all, as the article points out, you can’t outsource truck driving. In 2004, graduate earnings had dipped by 5.2 per cent whereas the pay packets of high school graduates had risen by 1.6 per cent. Again, the article wasn’t encouraging people not to get an education, but it was a shot across the bows of those perpetrating ‘The Great Educational Lie’:
    Higher education still confers an enormous economic advantage. Just not as enormous as it used to be!
    (
Fortune
, 20/3/06)
    Several years ago I interviewed James Dyson and posed the following question to him. You have two students in front of you about to leave school – one has stacks of qualifications, all A grades, and the other, Mr Dyson, has none. (Interestingly in schools we talk about young people who leave the education system ‘with nothing’, when what we mean is they leave with ‘no qualifications’. If you have over a decade of failure in the same system, you don’t leave with nothing do you? Have a think about what is in the ‘emotional suitcase’ if you will of the children who leave our care with no qualifications. I suggest that what they leave with is no qualifications and a whole crate full of baggage about how bad they are. Which isn’t ‘nothing’. ‘Nothing’ would be us in education, who oversaw that decade, getting off lightly.) Anyway, Mr Dyson, what would be your response? To the students with the grades he said he would say, ‘You’ve shown you’ve got a brain, now go away and use it.’ In other words, you’ve shown there’s something there, now the work really starts.
    Before I tell you what he said he would say to those with no qualifications let us look at another, more hidden, more pernicious conclusion to be drawn if we choose to promote ‘The Great Educational Lie’. If you can only get a good job by doing well at school then, because I haven’t done well at school, it is clear that I will
never
have a good job.