Learning to tie your shoe lace

The child is 15. He can't tell the time or do his shoelaces up, he is to all sense and purpose, illiterate.
What chance does he have in this modern competitive world of being able to make a living or raise a family, other than rely on help to get by. He doesn't have mental issues other than he was not encouraged at a certain age to learn the basics, instead his mother seems to have found it hard to insist on any sort of  performance level which we would all take for granted and work hard for our children to attain.
Tomorrow a number of parents are withholding their children from school in protest about their kids being made to sit tests at 6 years old.
Now I know that in some European countries the age when children start school is much later than what we demand over here and there is some evidence that these children catch up pretty quickly to the standard of the early starters. Perhaps it reflects the conditions which the children are exposed to in the hum drum pressurise society in the UK. Some societies such as ours are a pressure cooker where parents, especially mothers have to place  rearing their child on the back burner in favour of earning money to put food on the table.
Our society and our government insists on every able bodied person being in work and the role of bringing up a child is relegated to second place. The intricate job of raising a child properly is viewed as second rate and we see the result when, in this case the mother assumed it was someone else's job to follow the progress of her child. We all can be blamed for taking our eye off the ball and assuming the school will do what is required but in the modern ideological set up  where teaching basics by rote is out and a tender, communicative, child centred  supportive teaching formula  is practised  (in the Private sector rigorous testing is the norm) without bench marks to judge a child's performance many children fall through the cracks. The problem then is, in this world of "all are winners", the business of making excuses and avoiding any sort of conflict with the child takes over but we are left with the unpalatable fact that a child is on the scrap heap.
We continue to plummet down the international school tables with our home grown children being unable to cope with adult life. We have to rely on immigrants from societies who have no qualms in ensuring by what ever method, their children gain an education often in much more primitive conditions than our children are exposed to here.
With our child orientated mumbo jumbo, we are failing our kids as they become displaced by these people from overseas who are tough and willing to learn what they don't already know and make a contribution to the workforce.

When are we going to wrest away from the Teacher Training Colleges, where graduate learn all this psychological stuff and are inculcated with 'child centrist concepts', unable to recognise that their systems are not producing the goods. We need more Michael Gove like rigour in our syllabus but of course he was seen off by the teachers, and their union, a vociferous  lot if ever there was one.