Re: Huf Haus on last night's Grand Designs

[Bob Mannix]

This mut be a wind up or a first- a thread on uk.d-i-y where everyone is agreeing AND talking sense !

[IMM]

The customer chose large glass areas. You can have the bare minimum of window area if you want making a Huf highly energy efficient. The design is on, I think, 1.2 metres grids. So you can have a large variation in that in design.

[IMM]

Venetian blinds solve a lot.

[IMM]

Starting with the two snotty ones.

Oh another one!

In Germany they do not have BCOs, the builder is educated and qualified and certified. he self certifies the build. It works. In this country, we have an attitude that all workers are cowboys and have a layer to check their work.

It like the idea of CORGI in principle, but not the way it is run. Any inexperienced man can easily get a CORGI ticket. It needs to be tightened up.

Each trade should have a similar system, where education and experience matter. Then we will stop the shoddiness of the average British worker.

This has nothing to do with universities, of which only about 10% of the people in this country have a degree. The countries that shine have a high level of higher education, and lots of it. The UK suffers in ignoring the so called lower skills. This has to be addressed.

[IMM]

Political correctness has nothing to do with it. The country is turning to a high tech economy. The government has to prepare for this. So the other

50%, if it ever gets that high, who do not go to higher education shall be involved in the basic skills we all know and need. That 50% is a lot of people.

[IMM]

All I have read is bolocks.

[Colin]

How does that work with DIY projects? Do the Germans have to get a qualified builder in to certify the work?

Colin

[Bob Mannix]

I'm sure there are those here(not me of course) who might say that just made it perfect ;o)>

[G&M]

Not sure that's common. Even the poorest of schools are proud when they get students into Oxbridge. I got called into the headmaster's office to explain the 'mistake' on my university application form as I seemed to be applying for electronic engineering degrees rather than doing something proper like physics at Cambridge or Bristol.

[G&M]

I thought the Germans were sticklers for this 48 hour maximum week nonsense. Didn't seem to apply here.

[Julian Fowler]

Some are. some aren't ... I have first hand knowledge, though, of teachers who have advised pupils not to even think about applying to Oxbridge because of the perceived "elitism" of those institutions.

Julian

[Owain]

"IMM" wrote | "Andy Hall" wrote | > Also the political correctness of having a target of 50% of the | > population "going to a university". | Political correctness has nothing to do with it. The country is | turning to a high tech economy. The government has to prepare for | this. So the other 50%, if it ever gets that high, who do not go | to higher education shall be involved in the basic skills we all | know and need. That 50% is a lot of people.

But I don't see how someone who gets GCSE Reading and Writing and then spends 3 years reading for BA Sociology With Macrame is being prepared for either a high tech economy or essential basic skills.

Even the traditional skilled manual occupations are becoming much more technical. Most of the construction of that Huf House wasn't what we would traditionally call building, it was precision fabrication and assembly, not the sort of work that can be carried out by the average British gibbon with NVQ Level 1 in Pushing A Wheelbarrow.

Owain

[Andy Hall]

Normally you write it...... .andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[Owain]

"G&M" wrote | Not sure that's common. Even the poorest of schools are proud when | they get students into Oxbridge.

The schools might be; the parents may rather their children got a job in Kwik Save and a council house and were no longer dependent on them financially.

The Scottish news the other night had a report from a comprehensive school in Glasgow, where the pupils who normally would have considered applying for Oxbridge are all applying to Scottish universities instead, because of the costs of studying in England.

Owain

[John Rumm]

I expect that most would agree that any government ought to try and create a framework to support all aspects of the economy not just the high tech economy. However they show no indication whatsoever of having the slightest clue how to do this. Their actions indicate that they are achieving the opposite!

ISTM that political correctness has everything to do with it. The government has decided that it will further their political ambition, and bestow a nice warm fuzzy feeling on the electorate, if they make bold statements to the effect that anyone with the desire to attend and graduate from a university can now do so. They have created a fundamental problem for themselves.

The reality is that only a very small percentage of the population are currently able to graduate from university - 90%+ of the population do not. There may be a few of those who are "excluded" for various reasons, but the hard and inescapable fact is that most do not have the required basic levels of intelligence or ability required to study at a (traditional) university level; let alone graduate. This is especially true in the hard sciences and technical areas so vital for the so called hi-tech economy. This is not a question of "accessibility" or "inclusiveness" or eliminating "elitism" - but simple bell curve statistics - half the people can not have an intelligence equal to the top 5%.

The only way you are going to achieve this stated ambition of 50% to attend university, is if you lower the standards required to enter and graduate. Either by "dumbing down" or by introducing all sorts of non academic courses ("media studies" and the like). This is not only unfair and counter productive for the students who fall for this line, it also devalues the reputation of the universities themselves and their former graduates.

With the current trend for government and media inverted snobbery, they claim the universities are "elitist". Well good - so they should be in the true sense of the word. They should offer the best education to the best and most able students. To do anything else will fail those most able students, and devalue the reputation of those that have graduated before them, as well as the reputation of the university.

If the government could loose its fixation on universities as the only way to achieve further / higher education and training then they would have a much better chance of achieving a useful result for all, without saddling large quantities of the young populas with intolerable debt burdens to meet the ever expanding cost of providing education of a diminishing value.

Is that sufficiently brutal un-PC for you?

[Andy Hall]

It has everything to do with it.

But it doesn't serve the needs of the economy or the individuals concerned to engineer education such that 50% go to a university by dropping the standards to make that happen.

Devaluing the education system as a whole because of some misplaced notion that some skills are "higher" than others in terms of their value to society doesn't achieve anything. It isn't an issue of higher and lower or one skill being better than another. The important point is matching the education resources to the abilities of the individual.

Skills are rewarded according to supply and demand. Individuals can choose the extent to which financial reward is important to them as well as many other aspects of a career.

Dropping academic standards removes the incentive for those with academic skills to strive for achievement. More and more we are in an international business environment. Fortunately, we still have high standards in some of the universities and they are able to compete with the best in the world in terms of academic achievement. If this deteriorates then we will be in real trouble.

Yes and they are equally deserving of appropriate education and training. .andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[IMM]

LOL, such fun.

[IMM]

No proof of this.

[IMM]

"perceived"? It is real. Elitism is not the word, more pretentiousness. If you are not one of them they will phase you out. Better go to a proper uni that is not obsessed with teaching Ancient Greek.

[Julian Fowler]

Indeed, and in doing so are creating a situation in which not only will it be *more* difficult for those able to benefit from an academic education to have unfettered access to it, but the "faux-university or nothing" approach will continue to erode at the base of exactly those skills needed to build and maintain a high tech economy.

I believe that some Media Studies courses have, in fact, significant academic content, and that MS graduates actually have a surprisingly high success rate in gaining graduate-level employment. Its more damaging, I think, that universities are offering courses in technical subject to which students are admitted with qualifications and capabilities totally unmatched to the subject -- resulting in a "dumbing down" of those courses (since the universities cannot afford to have either high dropout rates or a public perception of numbers failures at degree level). Hence, for example, students being able to gain degrees in "computer scince" that leave them at best equiped to undertake relatively menial tasks in IT infrastructure maintenance or perform first-line tech support in a call centre.

Absolutely -- I fail to understand the obsession of successive governments that there is something *wrong* with being elitist with respect to academic ability and intelligence -- if the same criteria were applied to sport, for example, would we see demands that 50% of the population should be playing for a Premiership football team. Or, in the arts, that 50% of the population should be playing in a major orchestra or be a published novelist ...

Just as wholesale tinkering with the secondary education system led to good grammar schools, once available to all within a local authority area, to go private denying access to all but those able to afford to pay their fees, there is now a good chance that within a generation we will see Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, Edinburgh, and others removing themselves from the public sector, and setting fee levels comparable with the Ivy League colleges in the US (with which they would then be competing for the able students of the affluent).

Couldn't agree more.

Julian

and for IMM's benefit, you can use the following to save yourself some typing: