Another thing private schools screw up

Infact whilst private schools are the prime culprits, this issue is perhaps a complex generational phenomena I can't understand but probably has its roots in the practice of living vicariously. This is easiest to see in people my age out of an Asian Tiger Economy. Namely the hobbies of my university res buddies from Malaysia were almost like a poor impersonation of some 'western' stereotype. They were: going to church, playing tennis, playing classical piano. They just hadn't adopted the meat and three veg dinner preference which isn't really surprising as its hard to tell a lie to your own tastebuds.
When I asked why it was you could through almost any malaysian at a piano and they'll tap out a rachmaninoff, Harvard told me it was common as 'our parents don't want us to miss out on the opportunities they never had.' To condescending me there's something kind of quaint and primative, perhaps naive in believing what makes Europe and the US great is classical piano, christianity and tennis. But to bring it back to the subject which I have not actually got to yet this vicarious practice sighting opportunities is what I feel is possibly to our detriment as human beings similar to the now complete abscence of children playing in the street, tree climbing thanks to the wonder of Investigative Journalism and Litigation.
That is to say, my parents grew up in the 1970's and got higher ed. My dad at university and Janice at teachers college. Both saw value in education, thus their priority in sending myself and my siblings to 'good schools' for our education was winning a ticket to university.
But what 'good schools' my parents and just about every parent going fuck up is risk.
I had an epiphany when studying financial planning, and then again when training the new graduates in my department.
One at a time, financial planning (I have to say I am not qualified to give financial advice mother fuckers) there are a couple of main asset groups for any investor: cash, fixed interest, property and shares. Now profitability increases over the long term from left to right, cash your only real risk is that the interest on your savings will be less than the effects of inflation through to shares where a company liquidates and you as an unsecured creditor lose your contribution to the company. That being said there is a direct relationship between risk and return, generally it follows that the greater the risk the greater the profit potential.
No risk, no profit.
Okay keep that idea in your grey matter, training graduates. I am having immense trouble getting through to one of the new staff to 'go ahead and make mistakes' it just doesn't register. In my view its the most efficient way to learn though as from my experiences it's much easier to remember what you did wrong than remembering the whole correct procedure. Plus I want them to take some risks, suggest improvements and gamble once in a while, a robot follows a procedure I want thinking individuals to work with.
But its fucking hard, and this got me thinking about finincial planning because I thought 'this one if we risk profiled them would be risk averse' and this piqued my interest because I was thinking about the various challanges of recruiting. Any finincial planner has to profile a clients risk tolerance because you can't just put a persons life savings in international shares because in the long run you know they'll return the greatest profit but the client loses ten years of their life staying up at night thinking about losing their money and calling you the financial dvisor every ten minutes to ask if you saw the latest downturn in the share price.
It doesn't work.
Jeepers this is a fucking complicated nowhere post you've committed too tohm.
Sorry for the fragmentedness but if you look at some generational phenomena you start to build a picture of risk fucking up the education system and the potential of every young person in Australia.
Financial planning again, the problem with financial advisors (I think I've said this exact thing before) is that most of them live in the burbs and their clients are their children. And they have no qualifications nor any real understanding of investment, risk or the economy. They just tell themselves and their children to 'buy property' causing big economic distortions that will be a headache for someone. Property is incorrectly called a 'no risk' investment by most mum and dad financial advisors. It's true that in the long run property prices will go up, however people forget several features of property, its most important benifit is 'psychic income' that is people feel generally pretty wealthy and secure with property, which needn't be the case in reality. But there's other downfalls such as, boom bust cycles can be ruinous, property is indivisable (meaning you can't just sell a couple of shares to pay off a credit card, you have to sell the whole property) it can be cheaper to rent than mortgage and generally most of all you can make much more money through investment in shares.
But the overwhelming thing about the 'Australian Dream' is that its a risk averse dream, people believe it is safe as houses. Now the recent property boom has been driven by: Retiring Baby Boomers financing their retirement through investment property, Insufficient supply of well located property in inner city and coastal areas, relatively easy access to credit combined with negative gearing.
Its in a large part generational though right? Now similar to the views on property are the views on university degrees, their is surplus demand for uni degrees than their is supply of A) jobs and B) uni places.
Furthermore, whilst uni degrees may have been the ticket to a good salary back in 70's it isn't when the majority of your generation hold a degree. In the 70's a uni degree was a point of differentiation (the fundamental source of competitive advantage) but from the 90's onwards this strategy had been so widely adopted it became the norm. Nothing wrong with that, it raises the standard of education however, where we all go wrong as a human race is the risk attitudes.
Uni degrees are popular because they are percieved to reduce the risk you will live out your days unemployed. This is true, it also however reduces the risk that you will become phenomenally wealthy and never have to worry about money again.
And this is what is forgotten about risk in our education namely secondary system. A sink or swim approach to education will allow some students to sink, but it also allows some students to learn how to swim. And if swimming is the metaphore for 'educated' then what private schools do is stick you in floaties and tow you along behind a speedboat. In other words in its desperation to win more parents over by reducing the risk for them, it actually removes the education.
What is being paid for? uni places. This is the be all and end all of private schools. Enter scores in the most part are the desired outcome. So if the thing that determines the Enter score are exams you teach the kids to take the exams and nothing else, anything else is a waste of time, you may give the student a better insight into the issues and an independant way of learning, but they may not have the capacity of abstract thought to apply that learning to the exam. So you pour your resources into studying the exams, how the questions are set, what the criteria are, what past exams have asked etc. subject selection is important too, which subjects get scaled most generously (in VCE) and then more or less pick the subjects for your students literally or give them very little choice in subject selection.
I've been over the workings of private schools before but the important thing is this by specifically limiting the field of study to only that which is required to pass exams, the risk of obtaining a bad enter is reduced, but so too is the risk of producing an active thinker.
Observe, most of the wealthiest people, the statistical outliers in the world got their money through entreprenuership, namely they owned their own business risked dough and experimented on new practices and products. Although they own property this is usually the afterthought, not the source of wealth. On top of this most of the most accomplished people in the world have less to do with wealth and investment they sat around working on an idea for ten years earning shit willing to risk it all including ten years for an idea.
And then the observation that a lot of the 'owners' of the world are not university educated. Even those that do have been rare exceptions and leapt out of the relatively riskless salaried job to invest in their own business, something you need an ABN for, not qualifications.
And thats where it all falls down, the stakeholder in highschool is taken to be the parents because they are shelling out the money (but its the students life) furthermore a University is really a stakeholder for the secondary system because they are relying on it to identify the best candidates for its program and thus the ENTER determining process should not be openly distortable.
And the private sector (and to a lesser extent) public sector are stakeholders for the Uni education system because they want Universities to produce the best candidates for jobs that they can pick from, infact businesses and corporations are the primary benificiaries of the education system as they absorb mot of the risk in their income promoting activities and thus take most of the profit from employees endeavors.
As such the education system is looking really to the most irrelevant people, I read in a GW article that the largest source of stress now is obsessive parents not problem students or even office politics (why are teachers so fucking stupid) but really if there was anyone to ignore it was parents, risk averse parents desperate to distort the employee market by trying to reduce the riks for their child. And again its worse than just education as now there are lindfills worth of material on how to rort a job interview, resume etc and decieve an employer into hiring you.
Really corporations and businesses need to step up and say to Uni's stop sending us these spoonfed dipshits that won't take risks and need criteria and instruction on everything (which Uni thankfully remains a sink or swim environment mostly though I have heard hearsay that some uni's instruct lecturers not to fail international students, those cash cows, this was backed by a report that english standards are unnaceptably low for many international admissions) we want someone to make our jobs easier, not more time consuming. Then Uni's need to say to secondary in words much like this "you dickfuckers, stop throwing dumbasses into the 'best candidate pool' or we'll switch to surprise tests, which just test general intelligence, psyche profiling and learning capacity instead of standard fields of study motherfuckers, our customers are complaining." and then high schools can start saying to parents "well I'm sorry mr and mrs dipshit, but although we could teach your dumb monkey of a son to sit an exam and get a good result, he'll never be a genius its just not in his genetics and he'll probably perform mediocrely at best in the business world." and then hopefully mr and mrs dipshit can have the chutzpah to do what they should have done and sit down with dip shit juniour and say "well son what do you want to be, what do you want to do with your life? what do you enjoy doing? what would make you happy?" and dipshit can say "I want to work in real estate!"