calling it “collapsing” isn’t right, it’s more like those pictures of detroit with most of the lots bulldozed and in between the odd ruin, there are *huge* voids in education that simply do not exist.

I doubt I could even find anyone under 30 working in finance who both knows that % interest compounded is an exponential function, and what an exponential function is… I can show you 11 year olds that can’t do the 2 times table, I shit you not.

do you have any idea when that was implemented in the UK?

and do you have any idea how that tracks collapsing educational achievement ( assuming that’s a problem in GB )?

This is the logical outcome of a long process.

It’s not like your youth involved a lot of chastity and innocence, did it?

Supposedly, the 19th and 20th century public schools involved lots of homosexuality, and the amount of prominent British public school grads who turned out to be homos and pedos (Slim was a surprising one) certainly is a point in favor of the theory.

You can have two stable states-either sexual repression, chastity, separation of the genders and severe punishment for homosexuals, or total Caligula libertinism. Anything else is a transition state.

You also have to wonder how much of this is biological. Look up what Toxoplasma does to the host, and then compare to the behavior of the people you see around you. Now consider that Toxoplasma’s effects were not widely known until recently. Makes you wonder what else is out there.

back in my day we had “Primary school” which was 5 to 11 and at 11 you sat exams to determine what sort of secondary school you went to, and “Secondary school” was 11+ to 16, but you could stay on an extra two years if you wanted A or advanced level quals, which you’d need to go to Uni, and uni was “Tertiary education”

My primary school was a 2 room school with 2 teachers, so 4 to 7 and 8 to 11, as an education it worked. Maybe 40 or so pupils in all.

Notably it was a small rural community so secondary schools had a bigger catchment area and then you had “years” and each year was split into classes of 30 or so, in state schools the classes where defined by the teacher who’se class you were in, in private school the classes were defined by academic results in the last set of exams.. I went from 3D to 3A one term based solely on the end of term exams from the previous term, when I found out that the carrort held out to entice me to make the effort was bullshit I went back to not caring.

private or “good” schools were probably/certainly segregated on sex, all boys or all girls, mixed schools the kids usually lagged at least two years behind a segregated school.

Even in the 70’s it was known that going to uni made you a socialist liberal prick, because they were all hotbeds of new think and such shit… so nobody with any brains went to uni, they’d go straight into some sort of time served training.

Don’t forget schooling was *regulated* by then, and the experiments were ongoing, I was the last to sit an “11+” exam to determine what secondary schools would accept me, as by then such things were determined to be “unfair” to everyone who didn’t know how to multiply 1/4 by 7/64ths…

Formal teaching qualifications were also coming in, before anyone who chose to could become a teacher, you just had to convince the school to hire you, and the parents to pay the school for your efforts…. free market capitalism at work.

Up until 16 any teacher could take any class, so you might think Mr England was the rugby coach, and then one day he’d take your latin class, and another he’d take the physical geography class, because the expectation was that *ANY* adult teacher knew enough about EVERY subject to teach any pupil, their speciality subject was the one where you could come back from uni with your degree in that subject and he could still teach you shit.

Once you killed that, you no longer had pupils capable of becoming adults who were broadly educated enough to teach the next generation, so now you have geography teachers who not only have never heard of V over I times R, they don’t know who Cecil Rhodes was (Rhodesia was named after him so it is geographical knowledge) and they’ve sort of heard of Constantinople, it may be where jesus was born…

do you happen to know if there was a similar shift to extreme age segregation of the grades in the UK?

if that was a widespread change in pedagogy in the English language world post ww2, that might be a large part of the problem.

https://goodbyeamericainaphoto.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/down-is-up/