The figures on rising unemployment (and also rising youth unemployment) were announced on the day when a BBC Radio 4 poll shows that parents in Britain are losing control of how their children behave. The survey also suggested that more than three-fourth of people interviewed think the way parents raise their children in Britain has deteriorated in the past decade.
Both the findings are seriously worrying for Britain but do we have reasons to equate them?
There is a structural side to the woes Britain is facing economically. The global economic balance has now significantly shifted towards Asia with the rise of China and India . Technological changes have made sure that the chain of production continues uninterrupted. Abundance of labour force in China and India have transformed these two countries into global production houses. The huge internal markets have not only stretched the innovative and productive capabilities of the domestic industries and service providers there but also lured foreign companies. Anxious parents of school going students are now abandoning Latin and German for Mandarin and Hindi.
The number of products and services thatBritain can now sell to the outer world are very limited. Even its internal market is dominated by cheap Chinese, Indian, Malaysian and Indonesian products. Large number of immigrants and a significant floating population are also draining out a proportion of British financial wealth outside its national territory. Dadabhai Naoroji had attributed India ’s poverty to the drain of resources by the British. Had he been alive today, he probably would have been very happy to see some form of a reverse flow.
The number of products and services that
"Three-fourth of the parents surveyed admit they have no control over their children’s behaviour and 65 per cent of the respondents blame the teenage gang culture on poor parenting". My hunch is that a survey on primary and secondary school teachers would have produced nearly similar results. Britain has chosen libertarianism overlooking the importance of discipline in individual life.
Given the decline of British manufacturing and the tumbling of the British financial empire, it seems Britain can now rely on the knowledge economy (using knowledge as an economic good). Even today thousands of foreign students make a beeline for British universities, which are still considered to be of global standard. But for the knowledge economy to deliver, Britain first needs to look internally and assess the standard of primary and secondary education that are on offer as compared to other leading countries of the world.
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