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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6236688" data-attributes="member: 22424">It's pretty okay, provided they can fit you into one of three niches:The science route: take Maths, Physics, Chemistry at S-grade (plus some others to fill out the timetable), then the same at Higher, and then into something science-y at uni.The language route: take English, plus one or two languages (usually French plus either Spanish or German)... and so on.The 'arty' route: take either Art & Design and/or Music and/or Drama, and English... and so on.The problem comes if you don't sit neatly in one of the niches, or if you want to change streams - because at each step you're building on what was done before, and because at each step you're choosing a subset of what you've done before, it's easy to get 'locked in'.Also, our provision of 'vocational' subjects is pretty awful - some of them have managed to get turned into degree subjects (often leading to lots of wasted time spent reading books when you should be learning by doing), while others are still apprenticeship-based (which means you get to waste several years at high school and then, if you're very lucky, slot into an apprenticeship).For the people the system works for, it works very, very well. But there's a not insignificant number it fails quite badly. Meaning we have to import, for example, skilled doctors and nurses from abroad while simultaneously having a sizeable number of young people who just can't get jobs.Problem is that people genuinely have different aptitudes (not to mention interests). Had David Beckham and I been swapped at birth, we wouldn't have ended up in the same places - chances are, we'd both have ended up miserable. So, encouraging someone who doesn't enjoy it and/or isn't good at, say, engineering to take such a course is not really the best solution.Besides, all those starving artists and actors and writers and so on have hugely significantly enriched my life through their output. So it would be nice to think people could continue to make a living in those fields. (And, ideally, it would be better if the arrangement was not that one person got to be JK Rowling, with more money than she'll ever spend, while 99%+ get to never make enough money to live on.)</blockquote>

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