Want to work 40 hours a week, for 40 years of your life to retire on 40% of your salary?

[Forthehealthofitjourney]

Well when it's spelled out like that, being a full time employee doesn't look so appealing..

.. So why do we still preach to children that they should study hard, get good grades, go to university, get a job, work hard,and work our way up the company? In this day and age we should be putting more of a focus on being our own boss, entrepreneurship, taking ownership of our career destiny and understanding that working for someone else is not the only route available.

From the minute we step into school we are conditioned to believe that working eight hours a day, 40 hours a week is “normal.” However this is such an industrial way of thinking; it was invented by Henry Ford during the Industrial Revolution! Factories needed to be running around the clock so staff often ended up working 10-16 hour days. Henry Ford changed this to ensure his staff didn’t burn out, but also to ensure they had free time. So now we are in the Information and Technology age, why haven't we moved away from this model?

Do you think the education system needs a shake up?

In the words of Les Brown, “the richest place in the world is the graveyard.” Think about all the multi-billion pound ideas that weren’t developed, never pursued, never investigated and died with the person, what was it that stopped people?

 

[APW]

Not everyone has the vision or the drive that people who run their own businesses have. Also getting a full time job is a safe option, no worries just clock in and clock out then get paid at the end of the month.

I know loads of people like that and they are so happy in their roles that they wouldnt think of going for a promotion or better themselves.

School is to learn the basics in life, get the eduction for the safe option first.

 

[Bill1954]

Thing is, if everyone was a boss, who would work for you ?

 

[APW]

Thing is, if everyone was a boss, who would work for you ?

Children?

Treat them badly and inspire them to become a boss. Thats what made me start my own business, although I was a teenager.

 

[Mr A P Davies]

Nope.......

That ain't the way the economy works. (Opinions, opinions......I have this argument quite a bit)

Kids are trained to become consumers. That's what we need.
All they need is enough to let them get a job, where they can earn enough to get, and pay off debt. More crippling the better, so long as they keep paying it off. That's what keeps the economy going, so producers can keep producing, funnelling money from the pillage of natural resources, from the hands of the least well off, into the hands of the wealthiest in the world.
That's a good economy.

It takes a certain kind to disconnect from that formula, and so it should.
If someone has what it takes, they will do it, regardless of their education. or lack thereof
Not every body can do something different, because then it wouldn't be different.

You could equally say, why don't we teach kids how to produce their own food? Why is every back garden not growing spuds, every patio not got pots with veg growing on it?
All it would take is an hour a week, to teach kids how to grow their own, amazingly cheap, healthy food. It's an absolute no brainer. Why don't we do that?
(It wasn't that many generations ago that this would have been perfectly normal behaviour)
Because it suits certain people to have huge amounts of perfectly good produce rejected by the supermarkets.

We don't want to teach kids to become adults who think for themselves. That causes trouble.
We want kids to become adults who unquestioningly obey authority and suggestion, who are contented to allow the media to do their thinking for them, and be good little cogs in the wheel.

Nice world, innit?

 

[fisicx]

it was invented by Henry Ford during the Industrial Revolution!

Eh?

Industrial Revolution: began about 1760
Henry Ford: founded company in about 1903

And just about everything else in your rant is wrong as well

 

[john1989]

Being a business owner isn’t just about flogging something or inventing something.


What about business owners that make money from their chosen profession such as accountants, conveyancers, surveyors, graphic designers, IT consultants etc. They would also an education and gaining work experience is important.

Education is very important for employees and business owners.

I work 37 hours per week but it’s flexitime. I can turn up to work between 7:30 am and 10:30am and leave between 2:30pm and 7:30pm. As long as I get my hours in, nobody cares when I leave and arrive. It means I have a lot of flexibility that a business owner has, but have a regular income and a decent pension to boot.

 

[Bill1954]

There seems to be a perception in this country that being the boss is some kind of cushy number. Far from it, a lot of guys I know work far longer hours than their employees and for the first few years at least, earn less. Any success achieved comes as a result of lots of hard work.

 

[Mark T Jones]

I would say we have gone far too far down the route of encouraging everyone to set up a business - including the abuse of the term 'entrepreneur' - the Government are also seeing this hence the desperate attempt to re-classify contractors as employees

Big business has a heck of a lot to offer both employees and the economy as a whole - for the most part I would encourage school or college leavers to get a job with a big business with structured training and career ladder.

Teaching 'entrepreneurship' is nonsense in many ways.

 

[john1989]

I think the recession pushed many people into self-employment. With little employment opportunities, self-employment was some people's only option to get food on the table.

I agree. The word 'entrepreneur' is overused. To the point it makes me cringe when someone identifies themselves as such.

 

[Mark T Jones]

I think the recession pushed many people into self-employment. With little employment opportunities, self-employment was some people's only option to get food on the table.

I agree. The word 'entrepreneur' is overused. To the point it makes me cringe when someone identifies themselves as such.

I'm inclined to agree, having worked extensively with the NEA scheme (designed to get Job Seekers to start businesses), I would say that most really wanted a job, others would effectively become self-employees whilst about 10% would really start a stand-alone business - and only a tiny portion of those would create employment or actually innovate.

Great for individuals but it actually creates stagnation in the long term

 

[MyAccountantOnline]

.......
From the minute we step into school we are conditioned to believe that working eight hours a day, 40 hours a week is “normal.” ......

I'm not actually sure that is the case.

Personally I think very little emphasis is placed on work and I say that as one who has a daughter in her final year of school. The only conditioning my daughter gets is how important it is to get good grades that seems to be the only thing her school has any interest in and I dont think her school is unusual.

I truly wish teachers were allowed to spend more time teaching and pupils were allowed to spend more time learning rather than constant reviews and assessments.

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

I'm inclined to agree, having worked extensively with the NEA scheme (designed to get Job Seekers to start businesses), I would say that most really wanted a job, others would effectively become self-employees whilst about 10% would really start a stand-alone business - and only a tiny portion of those would create employment or actually innovate.

Great for individuals but it actually creates stagnation in the long term

The problem is that the NEA scheme is a total disaster. I went through it and it was more of a hindrance than a help. My supposed experienced business mentor? An ex-civil servant who now worked for an Enterprise Agency and had never set up a business (or indeed ran one). I ended up just going it alone in the end. I'm sure it might run well in some areas but I've read so many bad things about it. God knows who says yes or no to the business plans you need to submit to get on it.

 

[Mark T Jones]

The problem is that the NEA scheme is a total disaster. I went through it and it was more of a hindrance than a help. My supposed experienced business mentor? An ex-civil servant who now worked for an Enterprise Agency and had never set up a business (or indeed ran one). I ended up just going it alone in the end. I'm sure it might run well in some areas but I've read so many bad things about it. God knows who says yes or no to the business plans you need to submit to get on it.

I'd describe it as a mixed bag - with some bias, as I ran their courses (and I do have relevant experience both my own and that of many clients). I flatter myself that I did encourage several motivated people to open better businesses. Many others went through the motions & ticked boxes.

The contractor I worked for lost the contract - it was handed to the lowest bidder who were utterly shambolic.

Without getting political, there was far too much emphasis on getting people off JSA, rather than encouraging quality or productive businesses

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

I
Without getting political, there was far too much emphasis on getting people off JSA, rather than encouraging quality or productive businesses

I suspected as much. It's a shame there's not much consistency across the country. The agency that ran mine were always pushing startup loans rather than actually doing anything useful.

 

[Carl Mintern]

I certainly think the education system needs a shake-up, my wife is a qualified teacher working at my local school and I have 3 children in education so see first hand so many things that I feel should be done differently.

 

[Clinton]

Do you think the education system needs a shake up?

Absolutely!

In many schools there's hardly any education going on and children leave after 12 years illiterate and innumerate.

OTOH, there are children who were home educated, who've never been to school in their lives, who are thriving in some of our top universities (and with better "social skills" than many of their peers who attended schools).

We need to stop confusing school with education. The public has becomed too conditioned to seeing them as one and the same thing.

 

[Jeff FV]

I think that the last thing that the education system needs is (another) shake up.

For most of my twenty years as a classroom teacher we've been in the middle of one shake up or another.

What we actually need to do is to leave education alone for a few years and leave those who know what they are doing - those that actually teach - to get on with it, not give them some new target to teach to, data to collect or policy to follow, dreamt up by someone who couldn't hack it in the classroom.

First period this afternoon I taught roots of polynomials to my Upper Sixth Further Maths set, next lesson I was teaching "time" to a bottom set year nine class. By the end of the lesson they were just about able to work out how long a journey starting at 0835 and ending at 1020 would take.

The best use of my time is spending time with those children (both v able & v weak), the second best use is giving me time to plan their lessons and mark their books. After that, pretty much all things that I have to do as a teacher have little impact upon the learning of those I teach. But experience has taught me that any new initiative will inevitably end up robbing me of my time and therefore having a negative impact on learning. So no shake ups please, just leave me to get on with what I do, and do well.

 

[Clinton]

The best use of my time is spending time with those children (both v able & v weak),

And what about the ones in the middle?

Only kidding.

Er, actually, no, I'm only half-kidding. The ones at the bottom often get pupil premium assistance or TA / SENCO support etc. The ones at the top are, let's face it, not properly catered for in schools - not by a country mile and I can go into great detail about how the system is "fixed" against them. And the ones in the middle are ... well, forgotten, as long as they tick some x levels of nonsensical (and highly subjective) "progress" every term in every subject. Someone should tell all the kid experts that children don't naturally progress at a constant speed in every subject throughout their learning years - at some points they are capable of going faster, at other points very slowly.

I sympathise with the marking and all the crazy changes including the new 1-9 grading, self assessment and peer assessment and all the other assessments - and I certainly don't condone the atrocious pay for the criminal volume of work teachers are expected to do - but imagine if we left teachers to their own devices to get kids through school: They'd zero in on GCSEs (because GCSEs matter for league tables) and teaching the "v weak" exactly the RS and history and physics theory they'll never use in their lives. Many of those kids have other skills - music / art / sports - that they could develop into a decent career (great example in this video) if they weren't spending so much time learning how to rotate funny shapes 90 degrees anti-clockwise.

 

[Jeff FV]

And what about the ones in the middle?

Only kidding.

Er, actually, no, I'm only half-kidding.

I taught them before lunch.

I, and I would suggest the vast majority, of teachers teach the best lesson that they can to the class in front of them, day in, day out.

It is the imposition of policies, practises and league tables from above (and that above is both inside and outside school) that robs them of the time to do that.

Anyway, must dash - lower sixth Statistics One first up today.