I can just imagine the latte-sippers seeing you around town, assuring each other that you are just another ignorant bogan. Heh, heh.

It is like when I go (very occasionally) to fancy restuarants, and having been sized up as a nobody, put them through their paces in a way they will never forget.

Maybe studying Latin leads to a love of economics, ceteris paribus. Libertas supra omnia.

What’s more, we now have all these “allowances” like scribes and longer times for completing papers etc for students in “special circumstances.” Handy. I would hit my thumb with a hammer the week before the HSC if I wanted an advantage nowadays.

What is weird is that, as the HSC has become less important, the media focus on how stressful it is for the poor darlings and their families has increased. Every year, we have finger-wagging social commenters and anguished students/families dribbling on about how brutal it all is.

I guess that’s what happens when Special Snowflakes have mini Special Snowflakes.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/second-chances–life-lesson-more-important-than-hsc-20121217-2bjc8.html

Yes I know its from the Silly Moaning Hilmer but these people basically flunked the HSC and now one is a crown prosecutor and the other is a medico.

I guess they must be bad employees though.

I’ve had some fun here for a couple of days, especially reading how bloody complex and structured people selection has become, and unecessarily so.

I looked back and remembered I’d noted your comments earlier in the piece:

“Work ethic?

Become a construction manager either through the trades or engineering profession.”

I spend each day around them and generally I agree, although our quality is dropping alarmingly fast. I have a view on why.

“If you are watching kids, get a pure maths degree.

It truly seperates the wheat from the chaff. It is the world’s greatest combine harvester.”

I value the ones who go on with it in the sciences because too few do.

At Sydney in the early ’70s I did a little pure maths for a term, probably because Dr Pat Apps was an attractive blonde. Well, she might as well have been speaking Swahili! She was brilliant and remained so for years but I pulled out ‘cos I couldn’t keep up and research, and stats wasn’t on my professional career target.

I came away with an admiration of those who clicked swiftly onto the magical logic and applications. I maintained a career long interest in maths, thought it amazing that HP developed the 12C calculator then soon after the power of Lotus 123 and later Excel delighted me and I developed great expertise in them.

“… there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once.”

Fortunately I haven’t encountered many like that. When the projects must make a profit one doesn’t have the luxury of too many poor selection decisions. I think our simple, biased selection criteria – undisturbed by academic theory – served us well.

“If private education is the key to a great work ethic …”

I do not think it is. It is a handy guide if they’ve had it, valued the opportunity, used it well and mixed that with other things. I am not at all impressed with the plummeting worth of the public schools system.

heckman also stressed the returns on investments in early childhood development.

if it is all decided by the time you are 18 or well before, why go to uni? signal you had a good childhood?

Hence my earlier cynicism.

Mick, the children of migrants go to university, and some are successful. If private education is the key to a great work ethic (despite being nothing like having a job), then it is foolish not to match it up with a rigourous enlightenment or aptitude testing of applicants.

I give you Nicola Roxon as an example.

Remember what the German General von Manstein said in his famous military manual about the third of four types of different officers?

Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once.

“True work ethic generally does not belong to students that belong in that category but rather those who live in less wealthy areas, who do not have an ideal learning environment at school and do not have tutors always present …”

What a lovely, heart warming story, straight out of the industrial psychologists’ lecture notes – Dad as a weary boiler-maker in Irish Town, denying himself university so he could manage a local band to bring in some extra, clerking at Elcom, Parliament and then onto the PM’s job (1990).

Or a layabout smoking dope with haters, uncertain who father is ‘cos mum was a bit popular, equal opportunitied through school and university (no record of attendance), suddenly $300,000 pa “organising communities”, then Senatorised and onto …

I can introduce you to three – no, four engineering project managers from Durban, Italian Somaliland, Cape Town and Johannesburg here on the Gold Coast, with the best degrees their wealthy families could afford whose work ethic would make your knees buckle and your eyes bleed.

The factor they could not control was whether they may have to pull out the gun when they were at home studying.

Comparatively, their Irish counterparts from struggle street (there were lots here when the desalination plant was built) were generally unreliable, unprofessional, shonky and untrustworthy. They were most often on the dodge looking for the quick and easy solution.

I could go on with examples of the confident attitude of the chiildren of wealthy Asians, who dare not ease off the pace.

I say your contention is fanciful.

It certainly helps with having a more structured understanding of English (as does study of living Romance languages). A prestigious academic friend of the family (now aged 69) learned Latin in high school, and would annihilate everyone in the dictionary game played at Christmas gatherings and the like. You just couldn’t fool him when it came to the meaning of even obscure English words. Come to think of it, especially obscure English words.

OK, so not very useful, and totally irrelevant to his field of expertise, but still impressive.