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I’m not sure how long the epoch lasted, but I am one of the few, the proud, the dumb sounding, who were lucky enough to transit through the Victorian education system at a time when it was thought that to pass English, you didn’t have to know anything about it.

In fact, you really didn’t have to know anything about anything to pass anything. What seemed a great situation for a whipper-snapper hoping to become a school leaver is actually, I would say, partially responsible for the scourge that has become Generation Y, and thus, without exaggeration, the crux of all that is evil in the world today.

I arrived at the door of the higher education system at a time when the train of political correctness first jumped its tracks and started careening headlong through old, but actually quite functional social norms. As a result it became nigh on impossible to fail anything. This was achieved using a cunning combination of piss-simple concepts and a rating system that replaced any form of grading with a simple “Satisfactory” or “Non-Satisfactory”.

Thus passing became a mere formality. What about a Non-Satisfactory, I hear you ask. Well, the threat of actually failing someone was disrobed in a stunning pincer mover that would have made Rommel weep.

Firstly the syllabus was dumbed down to the point where kindergarten children were in danger of being awarded a VCE if they sent their letters to Santa to the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Board by mistake. At the same time this bold move to remove any academic prowess from the academia was enacted, it became nigh on impossible for a teacher to actually get away with giving someone a Non-Satisfactory. As political correctness reared its festering head, failing a student was seen as discriminatory and damaging to their poor little self esteem. Thus finding someone Non-Satisfactory and, justifiably, failing their sorry arse, required such a lengthy train of counselling, encouragement, re-testing, tutoring and remediation that it became easier for a teacher to do the bloody assignment themselves. Better that than risk the wrath of heads of department, principals and parents for having the audacity to fail a student under their care, even one who had only showed up to class once all semester, and only then to flog glassware from the chemistry lab to make bongs with.

So there you have it, if you actually bothered to listen in class, the material was so easy you couldn’t fail. But, even if you didn’t listen you couldn’t fail anyway. Brilliant!

Before I’m accused of being unfair, or over simplifying the matter let me retort. Of course I bloody am, it’s my article and I can do what I want! However I will offer an example.

Take the study of English. You might be forgiven for thinking that someone who received the exalted mark of Satisfactory for English might be proficient in spelling, grammar and comprehension; but alas, no. To this day I know that a noun is a thing and a verb is an action. However, what a pronoun is baffles me and I’m pretty sure an adjective has something to do with assisted masturbation. No, in our English class we read books and studied media articles. So my ability to accurately and confidently construct a sentence, something I would argue to be a fairly fundamental skill, was traded off so that I could be taught that the media will sometimes misrepresent the facts. Wow, really?

Of course things only got worse when my fellow alumni and I entered the tertiary education sector. While the standards are a little higher, they are no more ruthlessly enforced. The knowledge that should have been imparted during our higher education, now takes up the first year of our tertiary one, and while there is more responsibility, there is no more pressure. So while students need to pass minimum standards, they are given as much time as they need and your three year science degree becomes a six year meander though all manner of topics and subjects until out the other side you appear with a piece of paper that says “Give me a fucking job, your fucking job - I’m highly edumacated” which you can give to potential employers.

So having ‘Satisfactorily’ completed their education, we set off into the world armed with our business, arts and commerce degrees and demand executive salaries as soon as we enter the corporate world. No starting in the mail room like the baby-boomers who built the post war world for us. They’re old. Their ideas are outmoded. We’re the most “highly-educated” generation ever.

So bugger off while we run the place, and do it far better than you could ever hope to.

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