Ritchie shoots wide of the mark again

My friends and I really like to go 10-pin bowling, a couple of mates go every weeks and with that frequency of games there are more stories.  One of those stories was when one of them (accidentally) managed to bounce his ball out of the gutter in his lane and into one of the adjacent lanes hitting the ball of the person playing in that lane, ruining that frame for them.

Ritchie has managed to do something very similar with this post.

Firstly, what Ritchie sees as indoctrination, I see as a good first step on the career ladder.

There was a time that this type of training contract/apprenticeship was much more prevalent among British businesses, for example, my brother did his degree on an apprenticeship, he is in a much better financial state than I am because he was paid a salary while he earned his degree and started his career.  Similarly, most of the senior managers on the site that I work earned their degrees on training contracts/apprenticeships.

Two other industries that operate similar training practises as this are Law (many budding solicitors and barristers will enter training contracts to help them afford the fees for the LPC or Bar) and the Military, a childhood friend of mine earned his degree with help from the Army, the Navy and the Air Force operate similar training schemes.

There is a reason that businesses and professional bodies enter into these sorts of agreements with centres of education, so that they are sure that those who graduate have the appropriate level of skill and knowledge in the right areas to be useful to them.

Secondly, the following line cracked me up:

Second, doesn’t this deny 95% of the benefit of going to university, which in my experience was to have the opportunity to learn  and question independently...

Ritchie is living in a dream world.  Long gone are the days of training young people to think and question, that only starts at post-graduate level and only if you have a lecturer who encourages their students to think rather than taking their word as dogma.


As for social and political opinions, you are influenced more by the people you associate with than the place at which you are educated or work, think about the undercover policeman who 'went native'.  (Oh no another story) Benzs made me question the conventional wisdom of social welfare, taxation and liberty.  Both of us then made another of our friends question the views he held as a Labour voter and so on and so forth until we had enlightened our friends (as much as they chose to care).

The TL;DR of it is:
1. Business supporting degrees is good in the long run for the individual
2. Education has changed a lot in the last 40 years
3. Places do not influence people's opinions, people influence people.

Update:  Timmy Worstall does his Timmy thing and once again points out Ritchie back tracking on previous complaints about the Coalition government.