Most irritating thing about the privately educated?

Being academic doesn't make a good politician, there many skills which are much more important.

Nice ad hom bro, and way to evade my points.

In a child's development what is important is how he thinks, not what.

And you can deny my comment about the general low level of sophistication in political thought all you like. It's just true.

Snobhead.



CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE THE 100TH PERSON WHO HAS SAID THIS TO ME!

Quite so. And having an Oxbridge degree doesn't indicate all that many assume - it means you are good at getting the highest mark from a very particular type of system, generally much more biased towards rather crusty and traditionalist approaches than at other more modern universities, and focused more upon exams than other places. Plenty of people there (and I'm speaking as an Oxford graduate myself) were nothing special in terms of intelligence, they had just been channeled in a certain way. I absolutely reject the notion that degrees from other institutions are automatically inferior - far from it, in many cases they are considerably more modern, forward-looking and progressive.

In a child's development, what is important is both how SHE OR HE thinks and what range of experience s/he has to draw upon. Many of the privately educated are seriously disadvantaged in this respect, because they only really know their own cloistered environments. Any amount of ivory tower theorising about 'problems of working class identity' and the like are utterly hollow without spending some serious time amongst working class communities, not just to judge and patronise, but to look, listen, and learn. And that is true of highly sophisticated political ideologies such as Marxism - without both Marx and Engels experiences of the hideous poverty they saw in London, Manchester, and elsewhere, their theoretical models would never have developed the same way.

The type of political thought you are promoting is itself extremely unsophisticated. And you can see its results just by looking at the current UK government, who loftily pronounce on benefits, education, health care, and much else, without the faintest idea or experience of what it means for those on the receiving end of their policies. Though this may be to give them too much credit - perhaps they are not actually even interested in helping such people, just using empty rhetoric to legitimise a series of policies designed to decimate the public sector and punish the poor and low-paid for the actions of their friends in banking and the City.