Granny’s A-Z – E is for Educational Snobbery

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

E is for: Educational Snobbery (subtitled Not Everybody Needs an Effing Degree)

What is the ever-****ing matter with society? If a person wants to be a carpenter (or a plumber, or a mechanic, or whatever) that doesn’t make them any less of a human being than someone who has ambitions towards more academic achievement. But we seem to be absolutely hell-bent on shoving the young into the often unwelcoming arms of academia no matter their ambitions or abilities. 

And what benefit does a barely scraped BA in tree hugging confer on its possessor?  Mainly none. Except, perhaps, at least one STD and an enormous load of debt.

Which must lead the less blinkered to ask themselves why it is okay to sneer at anyone whose education hasn’t progressed past A-level standard. The answer to that is it isn’t okay.

To illustrate the point:

There are three ‘ladies’ in the darts team and we grew up in the close proximity of a small town. The first went away to university, returning with a pretty acceptable MSc and a useless twot of a husband. One messy divorce and a second (happy) marriage to a gentleman of the soil persuaded her that academic excellence isn’t the holy grail. The second stayed in the home town, where she became a nurse (this was an apprenticeship in our day, not a degree course). She remained defiantly single, and retired with a comfortable pension after working for nearly fifty years. The third girl, who rebelled against expectations at a very early age, left school with two GCSEs and a swimming badge, although she did amass a lot of very useful skills as she aged (including tax accounting and lock picking). She and her (late and genuinely lamented) spouse ran a series of very successful businesses and retired with sufficient money to buy most of the town should they have so desired.

Three wildly divergent paths then, but we’ve remained fast friends and staunch allies through thick and thin. The broad spectrum of our formal education has proved no barrier to friendship. And as Brenda, who is our de facto leader by virtue of her purple hair, would have it. 

‘An education is f*** all use if you are a lazy sod. But all the hard work in the world won’t get you anywhere if you aren’t prepared to learn.’

But back to Educational Snobbery. Most people you are going to encounter in this life will be militantly disinterested in where you went to school. And, unless they require your professional services, bored to yawning by the collection of letters you can append to your name.

So all you proud public school boys, and people who have their BA as part of their Internet identity, remove your head from your anus and get a life please. Nobody cares. Nobody much notices. And those who do will just think you are either a right-wing weirdo or a bellend.

Honestly? In 2024 knowing a plumber has far more social cachet than being the intimate of some posh twat with messy hair and a lot of illegitimate children…