Here’s another example of British craziness: this photo in the Financial Times showing a protestor holding a sign saying “Judge Potential Not Postcode”.
What a classic!
First, the idea that universities should choose who to “offer” places to on the basis of “potential” is cack. It may superficially sound good, but the notions that you have a RIGHT to go to university if you have the qualifications, a RIGHT to get good grades if you work hard and answer the questions right, and that human beings are NOT born with differing amounts of “potential”, but all with the same enormous potential – these three notions top it.
Second, don’t say “postcode” when you mean class or caste. Say class or caste. Postcodes don’t tell you a person’s class – or sometimes they do when you take the whole code which covers on average only about 15 properties, but the bit before the last three characters doesn’t and sometimes even the string that end before the last two characters doesn’t either. There are streets for example in which some children attend the local dump school and others go to one of the Clarendon schools. And moreover not all children who attend Clarendon schools are from the ruling class. The basis of the “education” system is not postcode but CLASS.
Moreover, use of the term “postcode” makes it sound as though the ruling class craps on the working class and stitches working class children up educationally because the ruling class is using an “objective measure”. Well no, they are not. They are subjective, mean and arrogant, extremely class conscious, and full of hatred against the lower orders. They know they are the ruling class. They don’t think they’re the “ruling postcode”.
Third, the protestor’s basic idea may be that awarding grades by teacher prediction is preferable to awarding them by “algorithm” (i.e. basically by what school you go to, but described using Californian Google-Apple-advertising language). Well schoolteachers may think they are “good at spotting potential”, but what they actually do is seek fanatically to cue children into their assumed “Brave New World”-type hierarchy and they get vicious when children (or even worse, a child’s parents) baulk.
What a classic example of “opposition” on the enemy’s terms – literally using the enemy’s psyops terms.
OK this is a young person and it is good to see her protesting… But still…
We live in a class society ruled by the ruling class.
The class that produces wealth or makes the wealth of nature available is the working class. It is not moneylenders or landlords or those who invest capital in production – they produce NOTHING.
That is not or at least should not be difficult to understand.
I have had enough of hearing about “meritocracy” and “postcode” and “potential” and such avoidance and euphemism.