Giles Coren - Does education stifle your creative spark?

Giles Coren thinks so. Writing in The Times he said:

"It is more and more widely recognised that education cripples you, strips you of your originality and wit and spark."

He continued: "According to Jaron Lanier’s book Who Owns the Future?, the big tech companies are even now paying the brightest and best at Harvard and Yale to leave university and work for them while they are still fresh, uncorrupted and full of ideas. It is a given at the cutting edge that dropping out of college — like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg — is the mark of worth, not graduating.

He made an interesting observation on British universities, the democratisation of third level education, its effects and fees. He said:

"And if the internet were not enough to kill universities, then the determination of successive British governments to send every feckless dolt in the land into tertiary education, regardless of aptitude, has finished the job by necessitating the introduction of fees that will increasingly drive any genuinely bright candidate away from dusty halls full of dunderheads and straight into the workplace."

Children start school in nappie

This is how the Times of London covered it:

"Some four-year-olds arrive at school in nappies and are unable to speak or recognize their own name, a report has warned. 

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a right-of-centre think tank set up by the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, said that it was “heartbreaking” that some children starting school were unable to socialise and acted as though they were 12 to 18 months old.

The study into the roots of educational failure in England also warns that white working-class boys are in danger of becoming an “educational underclass” because they lag far behind the majority of pupils. 

The report, Requires Improvement, was drawn up by a group of education experts chaired by Sir Robin Bosher, of the Harris Federation of Academies and a former primary school head teacher. It also claims that six per cent of boys between four and five years old do not know that English is read from left to right and top to bottom. 

It says: “Staff.. are increasingly expected to deal with basic development issues like potty-training. In some schools, we have heard that it is so common for the pupils to need help going to the toilet that teachers must routinely carry disposable hand gloves."

Read in full here.