Summertime brings a slower blogging pace as well as the joys of catching up with friends, eating outdoors and not wearing a watch or making a to-do list.

Dmitry Orlov writes at Club Orlov a thought-provoking piece entitled “You don’t have to go to school”.
“A small but already by no means negligible number of Americans is starting to realize what their future looks like: no retirement, no job, no savings, plus they are getting old. Their only possible means of support in old age is their children.

“And so, in the meantime, let’s continue to mindlessly send our children off to “learning” institutions, where they will be properly supervised at all times, bored half to death, medicated into submission should they rebel, even by simply refusing to pay attention, not taught anything worth knowing by demoralized, underpaid public servants, and then spat out into the world with their spirits crushed.”

He goes on to provide a translated account of a Russian woman’s experience taking her three children out of school. I highly recommend it.

The Guardian earlier this month ran a story based on a survey of 226 top employers in the U.K. showing a 25% fall in vacancies, a slump in recruiting levels not seen since 1991. The study, carried out by the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), showed that competition for jobs is much fiercer, with an average of 48 applications for every graduate vacancy. Vacancies in engineering have dropped 40%; only energy, water and utilities have registered an increase of 7.1%.

So what to do? Umair Haque has come up with a good template for discussion called the Generation M Manifesto. The M’s refer to “movement” and “meaningful stuff that matters the most”. “Every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity”.