First this week it was the former Government consultant Sabisky’s eugenics and the (at best) mistaken idea that it is possible to work out who the ‘right sort’ of people are to take humanity forward’.
Today the equally unknowledgable Priti Patel, Home Secretary, has announced that there wont be visas for overseas workers who are low skilled and hence low paid, as if the skill someone has is measured by their pay. If that is true Ms Patel is hugely overpaid.
The roots of all this can be found in Charles Dickens schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind. His view was summed up thus:
“a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket…ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic”
Except its not. Its about people, all kinds of people.
Ms Patel is indeed hugely over-paid 🙂
Something crossed my timeline this morning about ‘consequences rooms’ in academies (and elsewhere within the modern school system). Gradgrind would surely have approved of them, too.