Education

MatC · 145891. Mon Feb 12, 2007 7:49 am

The police forces have the highest proportion of graduates of any UK employer(s).

Can this be true? Compared to, for instance, universities? If so, I feel it has GenIg possibilities.

S: My only source for this at the mo is a novel - in which it was clear from context that the author thought it to be true - but I daresay I could find a better source, if it was thought of interest.

MatC · 149485. Tue Feb 20, 2007 12:15 pm

Cuba has the most teachers per capita in the world - one to every 37 inhabitants.

S: Morning Star, 6 June 06.

Vitali · 149532. Tue Feb 20, 2007 2:22 pm

So had the USSR where teachers were among the three lowest paid professions (alongside doctors and lawyers - I am serious!). A teacher's salary would be about three times lower than that of a bus driver. To keep educated classes (the so-called "intelligentsia") underpaid and hence easier to control was one of the main principles of Lenin/Stalin. Looks like Castro has learned a lot from them.

Bunter · 149540. Tue Feb 20, 2007 2:39 pm

MatC · 149559. Tue Feb 20, 2007 3:29 pm

Bunter · 149633. Tue Feb 20, 2007 6:11 pm

Flash · 149652. Tue Feb 20, 2007 7:20 pm

Oh good, a bit of radical polemic for a change. Much as my instinct prompts me to side with Mat on this one, I don't follow his argument in this case. Vitali's post, put either another way or the original way, seems to say only that Cuba and the USSR value(d) buses above education, healthcare and the Rule of Law. I mean, maybe Cuba does

dr.bob · 149725. Wed Feb 21, 2007 5:03 am

Lots of education statistics around the world here:

http://www.nationmaster.com/cat/edu-education

I couldn't find figures for salaries (at least for Cuba), but Cuba does come top of the list of education spending as a percentage of GDP with a whopping 18.7% of their GDP spent on education. Second is Vanuatu with a mere 11%. The US is 39th with 5.7%, the UK is 47th with 5.3%, and Russia is way down in 89th with only 3.8% of GDP spent on education.

Some other interesting stats come out of that website. One that caught my eye was Library Books Per Capita. As you would expect, the top 5 are dominated by tiny countries with small populations which can easily skew the statistics:

Position : Country : Library books per capita : Population
5th : Iceland : 2.83 : 307,261
4th : San Marino : 3.70 : 28,117
3rd : Liechtenstein : 4.97 : 33,987
2nd : Monaco : 9.78 : 35,657

However, the runaway winner is not a small country at all. With a population of 4,661,473 people, Georgia is the library capital of the world with a massive 16.34 library books for every person living there.

Of course, it doesn't specify if that's 16.34 different books :)

MatC · 149738. Wed Feb 21, 2007 5:26 am

Vitali · 149801. Wed Feb 21, 2007 7:59 am

Dear MatC, you can't be serious. There was no priority to either health or education in the USSR. In reality (because the doctors were so grossly underpaid), it was impossible to get a decent treatment without a bribe - and everyone knew that (true, you could have been sucessfully "treated" to death for free. A popular Soviet joke: a doctors' consilium discussing a patient's case. Chief physician takes the floor and says: "So, esteemed colleagues, shall we treat this patient or shall we let him live?").
Another QI detail: The Oath of the Student of Medicine (future doctor) started with: "I solemnly promise to study diligently the theory of Marxism/Leninism and the History of the Communist Party" - that was the 1st point. The second one was "I promise to study medical science" (heard it myself a number of times). The priorities are quite clear, aren't they? The quality of education as such was apalling, and the sheer number (world's highest) of doctors and teachers (just like in Cuba, I assume) was but another classic instance of window-dressing - one area where totalitarian systems have always excelled.

Flash · 149891. Wed Feb 21, 2007 10:03 am

Link to the Oath of Lasagna, the modern Hippocratic Oath which we discussed otherwhere - good for the notes, anyhoo.

MatC · 152254. Wed Feb 28, 2007 7:39 am

Workers in Havana cigar factories employ readers - called lectors - to read to them while they work.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the tobacco workers of Havana were the most organised and militant in the country, strongly influenced by anarchist and syndicalist ideas. (In 1902 they organised Cuba’s first general strike, which was only broken by the threat of US military intervention).

There was a hunger for self-education amongst the cigar rollers, and they began the practice of paying for lectors out of their own money, to read to them from newspapers, magazines, novels and non-fiction. This wasn't too popular with the employers, who wondered what sort of uppity ideas their employees might be taking in, but the cigar workers were too militantly unionised for the bosses to be able to put a stop to it.

(Some sources, by contrast, suggest that the famous cigar manufacturer Don Jaime Partagas Ravelo hired the first ever lector, to keep his employees entertained while they worked.)

One of the best known and most prized brands of Cuban cigar is the Montecristo. It’s named for Dumas’s character the Count of Monte Cristo, as that was the most popular choice of lector reading amongst the workers in the factory that made the cigar.

The position of lector was well-paid and of high status. Since the lector was paid by the staff, not the company, the really popular ones were in very high demand. They would sit in chairs elevated above the factory floor, so that everyone could hear them. Traditionally, the day began with readings from local and international newspapers, with some fiction or philosophy later on. The book was chosen by workers’ votes. Many or most of the workers were probably illiterate, but thanks to the lector system they were intimate with the works of Shakespeare, Voltaire, Zola and Dumas.

Today, the tradition still continues. More than 200 people, mostly women, are employed at the Real Fabrica de Tabacos Partagas cigar factory.

“They work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a two hour lunch break. Every morning, they listen to a reader go through the day's news reports. In the afternoon, excerpts from novels are read to them. Radio music fills the rest of the day, while Cuban musical groups perform at the factory every Thursday.”

I’ve been unable to find mention of lectors in any other trade; but is it possible that such an idea only ever arose in one place and profession? I suppose a later equivalent was the radio, with programmes like Workers’ Playtime; some large firms in Britain used to have their own in-house radio stations, in the middle of the last century.

Sources:
www.cubancigaronline.com/Partagas.htm
www.habanos.com/6festivaldossier_marcas.asp?i=ing
www.kwabs.com/artman/publish/article_1418.shtml
www.historical-museum.org/history/tobacco/tobacco.htm

Links: Employment; Entertainment.

MatC · 186192. Thu Jun 28, 2007 3:22 pm

MatC · 195977. Mon Jul 30, 2007 3:44 am

For instance ...

MatC · 215870. Tue Oct 02, 2007 8:57 am