…..Indians will take your job, warns Uncle Bush.

“It’s important to understand if children don’t have those skill sets (in maths and science) needed to compete with a child from India, or a child from China, the new jobs will be going there,”

This happened at almost at the same time that the education minister of Maharashtra has proposed to make maths an optional subject in the state, replacing it with options like Computer Science, Agriculture and Handicrafts.

I think that one of the things that went wrong with the west, was its completely crummy educational policies. Rather than provide competitive skills – including language and numeracy – they dumbed down education so that the lowest common denominator would be advantaged.

As a result skills, rather than being widely available, became scarce. And, scarce means dearer. And dearer skills means a more expensive work force. Rather than provide better support for the less advantaged, the educational policies ended up churning out functionally illiterate people – who could barely manage to add 2 and 2 together. Who could barely manage to string a comprehensable sentance to gether. Today western jobs are suffering because of inappropriate and insufficient skill sets.

In India too, instead of making education more interesting and appropriate so that everyone benifits, education policy makers are looking to dumb it down to make sure that no one benefits.

A long time ago, when I was a student in London – i remember buying something worth 32 pence and giving a pound for it. While the shop assistant was busy hunting for the calculator I told him that the change was 68 pence. They called me a genius, and I sniggered in my mind. Last week, I was at a shop and spent 35 bucks and gave a hundred to the shop assistant. As they dived for the calculator, i had an awful sense of dejavu.