Following on from last day . . .

There is somebody I know, a builder, a comparatively young fellow in his late twenties. And as he will tell you himself, he effectively left school at fourteen in order to go to work. He's a very good builder, very competent. But more than that, I would class him as being near genius. It is amazing to talk to somebody and find a mind working a consistent three steps ahead of your own. He is a builder, but he could have been anything. In terms of native ability and 'can do' capacity, there is nothing he couldn't turn his hand or mind to and not be succesful at. I would have the utmost confidence in him in any field—he is endowed with a sort of 'fire and forget' capacity: just show him a problem and turn him loose on it and you no longer need to even think about it.

Nor is he an isolated case. The world is full of people like him, possessed of a fierce unacademic intelligence, able to cut to the heart of the matter in an instant and knowing almost instinctively what to do about it. Guys with an eye to problem solving, seemingly pre-loaded by nature with those skills that higher education cannot teach, or, if it can, then only inadequately. I know what I am talking about, for I worked with some of them. And as often as not they were mechanics or fitters or carpenters or labourers or somesuch—part of the great support apparatus underlying the whole artificial superstructure of modern society. The other thing significant about them was that, in general, they loved what they did—as do, in fact, most people who work with their hands for a living.

The fact is that the world isn't full of labourers or gardeners or hairdressers or whatever, crying into their pints over thwarted dreams of being lawyers or doctors or accountants. And yet this is an undeniable implication of the policy of stampeding everybody into the third-level system—the whole thing made even more amazing by the fact that it is often, and especially in Britain, the erstwhile socialists who are the main architects of this implicitly patronising idea.

Now I am not suggesting that the world is full of 'cheerful, horny-handed sons of toil', all of whom are secretly geniuses. Far from it. Many, if not most, workers are arguably dissatisfied with their lot, especially those on the repetitive production-line side of things. But, then, so too, one imagines, the same might be said of psychiatrists and lecturers and chiropodists etc. It is part of the human condition.

What I am trying to say is that people's life-choices are made for a whole pile of reasons, and not simply for money or status. And to use these latter factors as the sole yardstick for measuring success or failure is to totally misunderstand life. The same thing with education—ideally intelligence and ability should be the prerequisites for entry into its higher spheres; but that does not translate into the idea that educational qualifications—especially in this modern era of dumbing down—can in any way be the sole measurement of ability and intelligence. They are not and have never been.

The truth of the matter is that nowadays there are more idiots with degrees, than we poor idiots without them.