Julian Simon throws light on the dishonesties of the education world with this recollection:

One of the findings of modern psychology is that people tend not to be consistent about whether they are "honest" or "dishonest". An experience of mine illustrates the principle. After I got out of the Navy I took a summer course in organic chemistry to complete my qualifications for entering medical school in the fall; most of the other 200 students also were pre-meds. There were two hours of classes and six hours of laboratory work every day – forty hours a week, with lots of homework. The instructor put tough competitive pressure on the students to obtain high yields on their lab experiments. The tension in the laboratory rose so palpably that it became obvious that students would begin to cheat. I passed on that observation to a lab assistant, but nothing was changed. Two-thirds of the way through the course the cheating began, and then the system broke down completely. The wholesale cheating was not due mainly to the characters of the students, but rather to the structure of the system.

My thanks to Chris Cooper for these links to Simon's stuff.

This is the world British education is heading towards. The extreme recent case is of that headmaster who simply rewrote his pupils' exam papers afterwards to improve them. In a different world with different incentives he wouldn't have behaved like this.

The throw-good-foreigners-at-it solution will be no solution at all.

I've always liked success books. That was what got me into career counselling. A friend said: "So how does all that stuff apply to me?", and off I went. If I ever manage to wangle my way into the kind of teaching life that I now want, having read all these books will then also be revealed as having made me a better teacher.

One of the more admired of these books is Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and blogger Mike Saunders has made the ideas in this book the basis of a number of posts about how to be a Highly Effective Blogger. Because let's face it, most of the people who read this are bloggers or blog readers, not Education Ministers. They may also be teachers, or concerned parents, but blogging is what we most of us here, now, have in common. So I'm going to read Mike's stuff on all this, starting here.

I've started. It's good, and I will continue.

Just to say now, I think that ideas like those of Covey apply just as strongly to quite small children as they do to adults. It's never too soon to start learning to be Highly Effective.

My thanks to Instapundit for the connection.

The details of this story, courtesy the Korea Times, don't interest me so much as does its overall tone. You surely wouldn't see a British newspaper, of any political hue, talk so candidly about the "education sector".

Foreign universities will be allowed to establish branches here leading local language institutes and other education providers to face tougher competition in the near future.

This is part of the government's recently-finalized plan to open up various service sectors to the foreign market, officials from the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development said yesterday.

The proposal to open up the educational sector will be submitted to the World Trade Organization by Monday as part of the commitment under the Doha Development Agenda that calls member countries to develop a list of ideas to open domestic service sectors to foreign competition.

The ministry said it is inevitable to open the educational service market in the face of the new economic round to increase competitiveness of local educational institutions.

A constant theme here is that if a nation is flagging in its commitment to education, merely chucking teachers at the problem won't change things very much. (Example: Britain.) South Korea, on the other hand, reads at least in this article like a society that contains within itself such an urge towards educational advance that no amount of mere pedagogic inadequacy can hold it back. Demand simply demands its own supply into existence, or in this particular case, it sucks supply in from foreign parts.

Natalie Solent links to a delightful article by Philip Hensher earlier this week for independent.co.uk about Westminster School, which is a literal stone's throw from my flat, although they seem nice enough boys and I'm never tempted actually to throw stones. Hensher had written an earlier article attacking private education, and so now he's taking a close look at what he criticised, the way you do, so that he can say yes to the question about whether he's ever looked at one of these places close up.

So he made his day trip, and he captures all manner of things very well. In lots of ways he's impressed. However, he does capture the ghastly confidence of privileged boys of that age particularly well:

I had lunch with some of the Queen's Scholars, whose fees are partly, and in some cases entirely paid on their behalf. None of the ones I met was from a noticeably different social class from any other boy, and their manners, over a spectacularly repulsive sausage in a bun (I went away and had lunch in Soho afterwards) were exactly the same. They took me to task in a grand way over my original article, and when I was not to be goaded, moved on to other columns of mine they had found on the internet, to them, no doubt, just as inexcusable. The words "Let us move on, now, Dr Hensher, to what you wrote in November last year about the Brighton pier" were never actually uttered, but it was a close thing.

Bored, I took charge and asked them what they were going to university to study. One boy was going to Oxford to do English with Russian. "I don't know whether it's changed," I said sociably, "but in my time, you were handed an Anglo-Saxon grammar and a copy of Alfred's letter – King Alfred, you know, to some dull bishop – and told to come back next week with an accurate translation. Rather terrifying, actually." "I expect," the boy said generously, "that if one has some knowledge of languages, it is rather less terrifying." I made no response. It would have been easy to suggest that there was no reason to think my grasp of three European languages had been any less than his own. I also wondered whether, when I was 18, I would have so confidently talked down to a visiting novelist of some small celebrity and critical regard old enough to be his father. I would have it no other way; I wish I had, in fact, had something of that confidence. But by money and social class I was barred, and in some ways still am barred, from that certainty.

One of the relentless messages of these places is that you are indeed privileged. You are getting a superb education. All others are far less fortunate. Those who go to less grand fee-paying schools are inevitably less superior persons. And Heaven help those who go to state schools. I know what this is like, because for a decade this was my world also.

But it's hard to imagine how any school system could ever be completely otherwise. Suppose, as Hensher recommends, that all social classes were forced into each other's company, by the illegalisation of fee-paying schools, or by their incorporation into the top reaches of the state system, with the cleverest poor children being shoehorned into what are now the poshest fee-paying schools, and the dumb hooray-Henry or nice-but-dim Tim types elbowed aside into bog-standard comprehensives or the like, to make way. What you would get would be John Hughes high school movies, riddled with class warfare. There'd just be different miseries and different humiliations, different triumphs and different varieties of arrogance.

A prison is still a prison. If you have to go to one of these things, and when there you are the object of an industrial process that is done to you rather than the subject of a life that is done by you, you'll take it out on others. There'll be class warfare, and pecking order savageries.

Even if, as I favour, you release the boys (the boys especially) from prison and let them run their own lives, they'll probably find new ways to be insufferable. Allow them to be film directors, futures traders, ditch diggers and private detectives at fourteen, and they'll still find ways to piss off the likes of Philip Hensher. If you fancy yourself as a mini star in middle-age world, teenage boys who don't know you and don't especially want to know you are going to get under your skin, politely or rudely, but one way or another, no matter how the education system is configured. You'd still have verbal dog fights with the younger dogs, and do sneaky things like letting them have the last word on the day without fighting back, but then writing your last word in The Independent. Not the least of the pleasures of this piece is what a ruthlessly revealing self-portrait Hensher supplies. Simply, he takes himself more seriously than they all do, teachers and boys alike. It's a genteel dog fight from the moment he sets foot in the place, starting with them getting his name wrong, and him getting huffy about that.

As for what he thinks should be done about it all, Hensher doesn't just exaggerate how much social melting would go on in his big nationalised educational pot. He also forgets how much worse all schools would become if (a) present Sovietisation trends continue in the state ssystem, and if (b) schools which are presently semi-independent of the official national system such as Westminster get much more completely swallowed up in the same mess as well, as he recommends. What Hensher is arguing for is a system that he hopes would be equally better for all, but would actually be unequally worse. It wouldn't achieve equality of happiness; just more and unequal misery.

However, my basic point is that Hensher's is a good piece. He went to a particular place and recorded what he actually saw and heard, and how he felt about it. I don't share his policy prejudices. Nevertheless this is real stuff, not waffle based on phoney statistics such as you so often get in the national education media pages nowadays. I recommend the whole thing.

Here's some more chapters and verses on the theme of how excessive form-filling and paperwork is driving people out of the teaching profession, this time from novelist and journalist Emma Lee-Potter, who fancied the idea of trying to become an English and Media Studies lecturer. Until, that is, she actually started studying for it. The idea of a journalist and novelist exercising her own judgement as to what it might make sense to teach young people, and how to set about doing it, seems to me very obvious. But that isn't how things are done nowadays:

No, what infuriated me was the teaching profession's emphasis on self-evaluation and reflective practice. Every lesson plan had to be accompanied by written rationales for the teaching methods we had chosen. Tutor and student feedback on every lesson we taught had to be repeatedly scrutinised and analysed – not only verbally but on special self-evaluation forms.

And this didn't just mean checking that you had fulfilled your aims and objectives – there were issues such as whether the seating, lighting and classroom temperature were up to scratch, whether handouts and acetates were easy to read and what teaching principles the lesson demonstrated. We then had to draw up detailed action plans for future teaching. I don't know of any other profession where you sit down at the end of the day and fill in a self-evaluation form. Isn't it common sense to learn from your mistakes and try to avoid making them again in future?

The biggest bugbear was having to keep a private "reflective diary" or "learning log" to record your thoughts and feelings about your "teaching experiences". Looking back at mine, it is full of angrily scrawled comments such as "increasingly unsure" and "so irritated – this doesn't seem relevant to teaching". I'm all for learning from experience and striving to do better next time round but in a profession that's already overflowing with paperwork, it seemed mad to create yet more.

Sounds like compulsory blogging, doesn't it? No doubt that too will come.

When you hear the word "safeguards", this is what you must imagine. Another form for someone to fill in.

The bottom line is that teachers are not now trusted by the government, and the result of all the schemes to force these untrusted people to do their job properly is to make it impossible for them to do their job properly. The good ones, like Emma Lee-Potter, leave. The ones who remain are the ones who would find any other job harder to come by than talented persons like her. They're second-raters, in other words. So the official education system degenerates still more, which causes further distrust. Which requires more "safeguards", etc. etc., until meltdown in achieved. Being a legally recognised teacher becomes literally impossible.

I have no direct experience of this downward spiral, but I am reading and hearing so many people writing and saying this stuff that I am starting to believe that western official education really may be heading for Soviet-style collapse.

Sadly, this collapse will probably be disguised. Out here in reality-world, people are learning all the time, under their own steam, just the way I'm learning under my own steam about official education. There'll be a completely hopeless official education system, the wreckage of which floats in an ocean of unofficial, self-powered progress and success. And nobody except me will notice.

At the Libertarian Conference in Krakov which I have recently returned from, I had the chance to talk with some of Poland's brightest and best young people. In yesterday's posting immediately after I got back home, I sketched out the story of the upper reaches of Polish education, and told of a generation of seriously wasted not-quite rocket scientists.

It so happens that I have a tiny moment of experience of these people, because I visited Warsaw in 1986, where I was supposed to collect information about the computer hardware needs of the Polish political underground. I was as completely out of my depth as I have ever been in my life. Talk about level of incompetence. These guys knew more then about computers than I will ever know.

I don't believe it mattered, because the message I took back to London was very simple. Just send us anything you can, they said. Whatever you send, we'll get it working, they said.

So I learned then of the nascent Polish computer software miracle, and I also learned the reason for it. At that time, computer hardware in places like London was rocketing forward, leaping ahead in power, plunging in price, much as it has been doing ever since. Not so in Poland. Hardware there was called "hardware" because it was so hard to come by, and once you got your hands on a computer, you made it do things scarcely dreamed of outside Silicon Valley. If you were Polish in 1986, for example, you made a laser printer print out the Polish alphabet. Only God and the Poles knew how you made that happen, then, if the thing wouldn't do it already. Thus the Eastern European software miracle. These guys were and still are largely self-taught.

Then, following the collapse of communism, along comes the internet.

Now as in 1986 I got hopelessly lost when confronted with technical detail, but one of these software wizzes sat next to me at the final supper we all had after our Conference had ended, and he told me of how the "open source" software movement, or world, or tendency or whatever it is, provides the first rung on the ladder from smart Polish kid to highly paid computer wizz. So is the Internet a case of "you ain't seen nothing yet"? Then as now, they knew the story far better than I did. You bet, they said. Cue a long exposition of, approximately speaking, the convergence of portable phone and computer technology.

And these guys told me something else that I found a little easier to understand. I've already written here about how the Japanese have a tough time learning all the Japanese that the Japanese have to learn in order to become fully functioning Japanese persons. Well, something similar apparently applies to the Polish language. This too is, compared to English, a very elaborate and unwieldy language, with none of the colloquial short cuts and variations that we have to enable us to say what we want. Translating from Polish to English can apparently shorten things by as much as thirty per cent, because in English you can say more with less.

I had given a talk at the end of the Conference in my usual under-prepared, but I trust reasonably thoughtful, witty and provocative way, which made up in rapport and entertainment value what it lacked in ready-scripted coherence. I wanted to provoke thought, not merely to elicit respectful admiration. I hope they enjoyed it. They said they did. But they said something else. They said: "You couldn't do that in Polish." Polish can't be juggled with the way English can. You can't, they said, think about it while you're doing it. Your brain couldn't cope with the complications of Polish, and thinking, at the same time.

So does that mean, I asked, that once you've learned Polish, other languages are a relative doddle? Correct, they said.

And computer software likewise. Once you've mastered the unforgiving complexities that must be got right in Polish if your Polish is to be right, you are ready to do software, where logic and consistency and elaboration are also the rules, rather than slap-dash say-it-how-you-feel-it expressiveness.

I'm back from my trip to Krakov, and am in a position to tell you a little about the state of Polish education. My informants understandably concentrated on the top end of the system, both in age and in academic attainment, because that's the bit they all have most and most recent experience of.

I'll tell the story in two parts. First, there's what happened during Communism, and second, what has happened since.

Under Communism, the cleverer young people of Poland worked ferociously hard. Life did not offer many means of self advancement, but the people in charge of Eastern Europe did want weapons technologists. But there were not very many university places for such people. So, these places were keenly sought after, and the successful applicant got such a place by scoring percentages in maths exams, for example, that I still suspect of being an elaborate practical joke at my expense. I mean, 96 per cent? And in a test that most British maths graduates wouldn't get higher than 70 per cent in. Apparently so.

The point of this is that not only were the scientific and technological elite superbly diligent pupils; so too were all the ones who were trying for these positions but who would eventually fail to get them. The failures became, I don't know, minicab drivers I suppose.

My hosts were at pains to point out that this wasn't any sort of government plan. It hadn't been their deliberate intention to crank out a generation of semi-brilliant maths and science and technology wizzes. That's just the way it turned out. And to reinforce their point that none of this was deliberate, it occurs to me that this "policy" may have had quite a bit to do with the downfall of communism. First you stir up their minds and make them very, very clever. Then you treat most of them like empty milk bottles. Not clever politics.

What has happened since communism confirms one of the Continuing Theories of this blog, which goes that the private sector reflects the gaps and failures in the existing system. Whatever the official system does well, the private sector ignores. Whatever it does badly, it compensates for.

And what the Polish education system under Communism did really badly was, as I have just explained, educating the not-quite so-bright kids. It subjected them to an idiotically competitive exam race, and then just when it ought to have carried on educating them pretty well considering, it spat them out like so many failed Olympic gymnasts and forgot them.

Since the fall of communism there has been a huge eruption of free market education, in the form of what in Britain are called "minor public schools", and their university equivalent. There is no Winchester or Eton, where the richest and best get the best teaching there is. The state system continues to educate the brightest and best very well. But there are now lots of newly emerging private schools and private universities, of very variable quality, some of which are pretty good and improving, but many of which are decidedly dodgy, to teach the capable but not dazzling.

Some of them said the state system in general was descending into rack and ruin. Others said it wasn't that bad, and that the big change wasn't anything getting worse, but rather the sense that averagely clever averagely hardworking young people now have that if they work hardish and smartish they now had a chance to make something of their lives. And as you would expect, the people saying that things were getting worse were the people who had made it to the top under the old system, or who would have, while the optimists were the ones who didn't or wouldn't have been winners.

Which illustrates another point I probably go on about rather a lot here, what with it being true, which is that educational effort and educational attainment is anything but a mere matter of throwing quality teachers at pupils and watching them teach up a storm and crank out super-educated people. There is also the incentive structure of the wider society, which I would say is more important. If you have so-so teachers but seriously good reasons for people to want to study like hell – in other words if you have Poland under late communism – you get educational fireworks. If you have good teachers, but pupils who have no particular reason to do anything except sex, drugs and rock and roll, sex and drugs and rock and roll is what will be done.

If you want to know why state education in Britain is, at the bottom end, in decline, don't leave it at blaming the teachers, the teacher training colleges, the professors of education, etc., dreadful though a lot of these people undoubtedly are. Ask yourself this. Why does the teaching profession – and most especially the teacher teaching profession – consist largely of out-of-their-depth mediocrities, or worse? Is it inherent in teaching that it attracts only the dregs of society? I think not. The other explanation is that good, positive, optimistic people join the teaching profession by the thousand, and are either turned into incompetent miseries by the idiocy of their circumstances, or they leave and do something else where their goodness, unlike in state education, has the chance to do some good.

Well here I am, and I didn't miss a day. And for me, it's already been quite a day, let me tell you.

I'm in an internet cafe in Krakow, which is in the south of Poland. This morning I and a handful of others (we'll all be attending the Libertarian Conference here that begins tomorrow morning) were driven to Auschwitz concentration camp - museum, and remains of. Quite an education. It's in two bits, separated by real life, so to speak, in the form of the industrial area where during the war Auschwitz inmates were used as slaves, and where people still now work, but in far more civilised circumstances.

The small bit, Auschwitz itself, Auschwitz I, is where the official museum is. Lots of black and white photos, which is how these events are now most vividly brought back to life and to mind. Heaven knows, this was ghastly enough, but the life of a reasonably well educated person has included a look at a few of such photographs and recollections, and nothing there hit me hard enough to really hurt.

But Auschwitz II, Birkenau, is if anything even more terrible than Auschwitz I, because it is so huge.

The horror of the Holocaust is not only what was done to individual victims of it, but the sheer scale and ambition of the enterprise. And at Birkenau you see this scale. Most of the huts have been ripped down, but the layout of the place remains exactly as it was. And it is big, about the size, I should guess, of somewhere like Fords of Dagenham, or of a medium-sized city airport. Hut after hut after hut, each with its own tale of horror to tell. As we walked, often briskly, at exhausting length, and on a sunny but bitingly cold morning, we all brought what we knew of all this to what we didn't know, which was the size of this damned place. It was all so horribly organised and industrialised. It was a huge storage facility for humans, one of my companions said. A giant filing system, but for people rather than paper.

I could say a lot more in a similar vein, but let me confine myself to an educational angle, as befits this blog.

I don't know quite what I was expecting, but for some silly reason what I was not expecting was that the overwhelming proportion of the visitors would be in the form of quite large parties of very obviously Israeli teenagers. These were either high school or college students, I couldn't tell which and I didn't ask.

At first I stupidly thought that some of these young people might not have been taking everything totally seriously. They were dressed in generation-X logo-decorated late C20 plasticated garb - the garb, in my country, of indifference to such things as grandfathers telling tales of the past. On the other hand, the big blue-on-white Star of David flags said that they were very serious, and indeed they were. As did the identical woolly hats that many of them sported, in exactly matching colours to the colours of their flags. What they looked like, now I think about it, was crowds of football supporters, supporting Israel United, you might say. Oh, they really meant it.

When wandering about in one of the little Auschwitz I buildings, I climbed some stairs at random and encountered a group of about thirty or forty of these people, singing along to a tape recording of Hebrew songs played on what sounded like a accordion. The room was dark and they were in a big triangular shaped circle to fit in the space left by the exhibits, if you get my drift. All were visibly moved, some were in tears and being comforted by friends, perhaps thinking of dead ancestors.

I have already touched lightly on the teaching of history here - sorry I'm not equipped to supply the link back, but it was in connection with a similar matter, namely the Hitlerisation of school history, in Britain. But this was different. This was no mere accident of the syllabus. This was history red in tooth and claw, being drunk in like newly found water in a desert, by the next generation to those that got it in the neck. This was history teaching with a hell of difference, that was going to make a hell of a difference.

I've heard it argued that the state of Israel faces a strategic predicament so difficult that it could end up being totally engulfed, and its citizens being subjected to a new diaspora. But after seeing all those Israeli youngsters with their flags and their songs of sorrow, I have to say that I now doubt this. I don't know how they'll hang on in there, but hang on they are surely determined to do. Everything about them - their presence in this place in the first place, the flags and woolly hats, the singing - said: Never Again. And I'll bet that the older people who were instructing them in loud and mournful voices about what it all was and what it all meant were saying Never Again in those exact words.

Apart from the singers, the other memorable group I chanced upon was the one being told about the exact place, for this is what it was, where the nearest thing to a violent uprising that Birkenau witnessed during its horror years actually took place, one of the very few such places in all of Nazi Europe.

You know the kind of thing. A few dozen inmates, deciding they had nothing to lose, dying with dignity instead of without it. You can imagine it. A major shrine of the soon-to-be born State of Israel, I should suppose.

All very different from education back in Britain. But education nevertheless. And how.

Well, it's just before midnight as I write, and I'm nowhere near done with my travel preparations, so here I am, still wide awake.

And I'm watching a fascinating last-minute change to the TV schedule in the form of a documentary about William Tyndale, the first man to translate the Bible into English. Dynamite. No time for a prolonged discussion of this, but one little phrase caught my attention, even as I sat typing something else, about the war that people say is about to happen.

People learned to read, just so that they could read Tyndale's Bible.

The "powers that be" (William Tyndale's phrase as well as ours) knew at once what a dangerous man Tyndale was and what a dangerous book his Bible was. Because of it, people were learning to read. And people who know how to read are an order of magnitude more powerful – and therefore more dangerous and troublesome – to those powers that be than are illiterates.

Indeed, you can plot the course of modern history by studying literacy rates in different countries. As soon as large numbers of people get literate, trouble. This never fails. Never. German Reformation. English Civil War. French Revolution. Russian Revolution. Islamofascism. And there's more to come after that.

I don't have time to elaborate, but I'll try to do so when I get back from my trip to Poland.

Well, that was Thursday. I wonder if I will be able to manage Friday as well.

UPDATE 12.30 am. Apparently the 1611 Bible, the so-called King James Bible, is largely the work of Tyndale. about "80 per cent", so they said. I didn't know that. I thought the Authorised Version was the work of a committee of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

TV. You learn something new every day.

I'm off to Poland tomorrow to speak at a Libertarian International Conference. This means that tomorrow and on Friday of this week, I will, for the first time since I began this, almost certainly not be posting anything here. The almost is because (a) I may manage to get my hands on an internet connection while there, and (b) I may, and this would be even more remarkable, even manage to get it to work. But don't hold your breath. Libertarians are famously well connected people, and I expect the Conference to be bursting with laptops. But it may not be so bursting with laptops with internet connections. I'll try, is all I'll say here. Also, I might manage something at 12.05 am tomorrow, if I can't get to sleep any earlier than that.

But, if you hear nothing from me tomorrow or the next day, use the time to catch up with your homework, or read a good book.

Now that I am probably about to break this rule of putting up something every week day, let me now emphasise that at least come Monday, the rule will be back as if nothing had happened.

I am interested in education as it is, and not just as it ought to be. And one of the dogmas of education as it is is that teachers should Keep On Coming. It's one of the great teaching cliché's of our time (because true) that whenever a new teacher arrives in a class room, there is a huge power struggle, during which the teacher tries to stay and the pupils try to make him go.

Partly of course this is just a pure blood sport without blood, the thrill of the chase, and the chance to chase down a week member of the hated adult herd. Life in prison is like this.

But there is a rational point here as well. The pupils don't want to commit to a relationship which isn't going to last. Remember that moment during other relationships where he/she (usually she, I suggest) moves from best-face-forward romancing to seeing if you have staying power. Okay, with pupils versus teachers it goes straight to phase two, but the principle is somewhat the same. Far better the stability and emotional continuity of uninterrupted hostility to Them, all the time, than committing to one of Them, and then possibly being abandoned.

Thus it is that the Average Teacher, a person I do want to communicate, despite my severe criticisms of a lot of what he or she does (and because of it of course), sets great store by just keeping on keeping on. Like marriage, teaching, as it mostly is now, requires a daily effort, a daily grind, a constant gritting of the teeth and biting of the tongue. And, an absolute ability to resist the temptation to commit any acts of violence.

And talking of marriage, I also want to make some sense to the Average Parent, and also to the Not So Average Parent who is into home educating, child autonomy, and other such besandled exoticisms.

I don't think teaching and parenting has to be this hideous daily grind and nothing else. But insofar as both consist at least partly of simply looking after and out for children, they do required a daily commitment from someone every day of the week. (Actual teaching can often be done very well in a much less relentless and dispiriting fashion, in my opinion. See the posting immediately below this one.)

Well you can see where I'm going with this. If I can't even manage one little blog posting every day on the mere subject of education – with the whole world of education to choose from, and with a completely non-captive readership, none of whom are forced to be present and none of whom therefore require to be quietened or fought off by me without me being sued by their psychotic parents for assaulting them before any of the quieter ones can even hear what I'm saying, to say nothing of filling in a hundred forms every week explaining what I've been doing about racism awareness, the School Bullying Policy, the encouragement of foreign languages and computer skills, oh and the fact that two of my alleged pupils (whom I've never met) have just been done for armed robbery and three of them are pregnant, etc. etc. – then what the hell right to I have pontificating about anything educational whatsoever?

Well, the logical and true answer is that I have every right. But I wouldn't feel comfortable doing this. I wouldn't, that is to say, feel comfortable posting for this blog in the lackadaisical way I post stuff on my other blog. I wouldn't feel that I had any place in the world of education if I couldn't even do this small thing.

One of the orthodoxies of blogging is that you should only do it when you feel like it. Well, for this blog, I feel like doing it five times a week, minimum, at least once every working day.

This rule has, I'm sure you agree, resulted in some very so-so postings here. But I believe it has also resulted in me writing things which have turned out better than that. All serious writers have a daily routine, and I do too. Writing daily here just means fitting this blog into my routine.

So, on Monday, I'll be back, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday …

With any luck at all I'll have discovered all kinds of educational wisdoms and thinkings in Poland, from Poland itself and from the various other libertarians assembled.

One of the better books ever written about salesmanship is How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

It's some years since I've looked at this book, but as I recall it, its central message is as follows.

You start by stating, unambiguously, your sales pitch. You are selling double glazing, which means that if the guy you are talking to ever wants to buy double glazing, you want him to buy it from you.

Having stated your message, you then switch to discussion mode, and you let him set the agenda. You talk about anything he wants to talk about. If he has questions about double glazing, you of course answer them as best you can, emphasising the benefits of double glazing for him, reassuring him about possible problems and how to avoid them. On the other hand if he would like to discuss golf handicaps (this book is a very golf handicaps sort of book, from the discussions about golf handicaps era, i.e. a previous one to ours), then you talk about golf handicaps. Whatever he wants to talk about is what you talk about.

And then, eventually, he decides to buy some double glazing.

I mention this because I was recently asked by a Parent how to persuade Parent's Child to get serious about learning to read. I replied with the above salesmanship doctrine.

Parent starts by hard selling learning to read to Child, in one memorable session, amassing reasons, rhapsodising about benefits. Then, thank Child for listening to the sales pitch, and for agreeing to think about it. Then, shut up and let Child decide, answering any questions but not doing any more selling.

A common technique of persuasion used by parents is the quite different method of relentless nagging. Every day, in every way, Parent gives a little sales pitch to Child about Child learning to read.

The drawback of this method is that it doesn't allow Child to arrive at Child's own decision. Instead Child is forced to defend itself for inaction, and this may result in the creation by Child of a cast iron reason for not reading. Nagging, in other words, may stimulate resistance, and in general associate in Child's mind reading with unpleasantness and nagging.

The say it once and then shut up method works because the Child assimilates the sales pitch, processes the sales pitch thoroughly in Child's own mind, and thereby makes the decision Child's own.

Well, that was the idea.

And it worked! Child is now busily learning to read. Parent is helping, answering all questions, providing feedback of all kinds, making suggestions about how to organise the learning effort, but Child is in charge. Best of all, Parent and Child remain good friends, instead of soldiers on the opposite sides of a domestic war.

I'm sure I've somewhat oversimplified this happy story, and am even more sure that the above exaggerates my own contribution to it. Nevertheless, that, as I understand what happened, is what happened.

I surmise that perhaps what makes so many people so very suspicious of the idea of children deciding what they will learn and when, is that this is confused with parents not giving any advice or opinions to their children about such matters at all. Parental decision or parental nothing are assumed to be the only choices. Command, or indifference. Given only that choice, I too would probably go with command.

Old fashioned hard-selling salesmanship is the happy medium, combining concern for the autonomy and independence of Child with concern that Child does indeed learn what Child will need to learn.

Our culture – and most especially the basic intellectual tools (the 3 Rs etc.) for getting to grips with all the rest of it – does have to be communicated to the next generation. But the way to do this is to sell it to them, not force it down their throats. If the 3 Rs are as essential as most adults think they are, and they are, then the sales pitch, for that reason, ought to be very persuasive.

And that's how to do it.

Other sales pitches won't be as persuasive as the Learn to Read pitch, and that is as it should be.

This story is about an attempt by a London primary school head to chuck out the children of what seem to be some particularly malevolent "traveller" families has been rumbling along for some time now. It's yet further evidence of the vital importance of teachers not having to teach people they don't want to teach.

A head teacher fears for the future of his primary school after being told he must continue to teach children from two traveller families after a vicious attack on a parent in the playground.

Police have been stationed at the school gates following the violent incident, witnessed by 300 children, in which a governor was also injured.

It has left parents, pupils and staff traumatised but the local education authority has refused to move the children of the families allegedly responsible and the head teacher has been told he cannot exclude them.

Last year the Government pledged a "zero tolerance" campaign against violent parents and Stephen Twigg, the education minister, said pupils could be excluded in exceptional cases for the misdeeds of their parents. But Colin Lowther, 48, the head teacher of Southfield Primary in Ealing, west London, says he is powerless to act against the families, and parents are moving their children to other schools because of them.

The incident is alleged to have followed four months of aggression and threats from mothers and two 14-year-old girls.

A parent governor has resigned and another has transferred her daughter to another school since the attack on Tuesday last week.

This story is the crisis in domestic policy of our present British Government in a microcosm. The Government is flailing about like a spoilt child. It demands "inclusiveness", and it demands that all those whom it "includes" shall behave themselves properly or else!! It is zero tolerant, and it is infinitely tolerant.

In other settings the Government demands rising prosperity and rising taxes. It demands train fares that are "reasonably" priced, and it demands that all trains run on time, or else, without any accidents, ever ever ever!!! It demands a world class national health service costing little or even nothing at the point of use, and demands that there be no queues for its ever more chaotic services. It tells the army to be the world's social worker, but won't even buy it proper boots let alone guns.

And this is me taking it to one side and patiently explaining that reality is reality, and that there are some things you can't have. You can't spend the pocket money I gave you today on sweeties, and be able to spend the same money tomorrow on a nice present for granny. You'll only be able to buy granny a present now if I give you a present of more money first. The universe works the way it works. And telling the universe that it's not fair won't impress it one bit.

Sorry. I'm getting too political. I'll go and stand in the corner and think about what I've just said.

One other Big Issue that I've not mentioned so far this week, which cropped up in my conversations last weekend with my Kent teacher friend, is the matter of gender segregation.

My friend works in a huge boys-only school with nearly two thousand pupils. Discipline-wise and learning-wise it is all over the place, the way he told it. Not wise at all, in other words. But, just across the road is an all-girl school, nearly as big, where things run much more smoothly.

The consensus to the effect that this is exactly what we should expect is one that I've already referred to here. That girls tend to do best in an all-girl school, while boys do worst in an all-boy school, was strongly confirmed by my friend, both from his direct experience, and from the general teacher-gossip he's picked up over the years.

Here is the same fact cluster being referred to by Joan Bakewell, in some comments by her about the St Hilda's College Oxford row. St Hilda's have narrowly voted, again, not to allow men in, and JB is pleased, but fears that the decision may eventually be reversed.

But of course if this prejudice is right that girls need all-girl schools while boys need not-all-boy schools, then something has to give. A commenter on my earlier posting pointed out that "the market would solve it", in the sense that some people care about these things more than others, and the market would enable the necessary trade-offs and compromises to be made. But that is still a compromise.

So here's a possible answer that is not a compromise. Leave the girls in their all-girl schools, unless they are desperate to be one of the boys. But, abandon the idea of educating the great mass of boys in similar places to the girls, or to the places we try to educate them in now. Instead, put them in the company of men. Let them go to work.

What if, in other words, the trouble with all-boy schools is not just that they are all-boy in the sense of lacking girls, but in the sense of lacking human beings of any other kind whatever? – except for a few wretched "teachers", who scarcely count as humans at all, so outnumbered and overwhelmed are they.

If we allowed the boys out to work, they would be much more intensely taught, by a much greater number of men giving them a total of far more adult male attention than they get now from their "teachers".

Actual juvenile work, of the sort that the rest of us actually want to have done, not just trudging through GCSEs, also pulls the economics of this into shape, and pays for the massively increased adult-to-boy ratio that is needed to solve this problem.

Work will also give the boys some money, and more fundamentally some status in the world, such as they can now only carve out for themselves with criminality. Patient and studious boys now survive the long wait for adulthood. Most boys can't manage it without grief to all concerned.

We shouldn't abandon the idea of old fashioned education for boys – with the whole paraphernalia of desks and books and lecturers. But we should feed this into their adolescences gradually, not in an all-or-nothing great glob of academicness which they either stick with all round the clock or are chucked out of for ever.

The typical fourteen year old sould be spending most of his working day on the lower reaches of the adult male pecking order, learning to run a factory, learning to mind the shop or man the phones or guard the territory, making tea for senior bureaucrats and sitting in on the big male arguments in the canteen. He wouldn't be out tormenting the hell out of school geeks or getting the sillier girls into trouble or driving the police crazy, or not as much as he does now. He'd be learning some manners, from people he'd be willing to listen to. And learning a lot else besides.

Then, when our later-teenage box-shifters and till-minders and tea-makers get a bit older and can see the point of it, welcome them back into the academies, if they want to come back or if they haven't by now joined an academy in the real world, like a company training scheme.

Forcing young male noses into books when they want to be flexing their muscles and minds outside is a waste of everyone's time. Chucking them out of their schools at exactly the moment when, if nature had been allowed more naturally to take its course, they might have got interested in such stuff, is a further huge cruelty, a life destroyer.

Reversing this idiotic procedure would give the boys a chance to sample adult life before making irrevocable decisions about it. They could shift boxes, and see the world, and talk the world through with the older guys, and then later, make some intelligent educational moves.

My Kent school teacher friend added another crucial item of evidence. He reported that the Daily Mail and its readers are also right about the vital importance of a father. The correlation, he says between boys who's parents don't attend in a respectable male-female duet on parents' day but who only have a mother show up, or nothing at all, is so huge as to be unignorable. Boys with mums and dads behave during their early teens, during The Wait. Boys with only mums are the ones who are out of control. The present government policy is to fine our lone mum if her son misbehaves. Well, that might work, if the son truly loves his mother enough not to want to get her into trouble. But what if it doesn't work?

The real answer is to lower the legal school leaving age and legal working age, for boys (but for girls too if that's what it takes), to thirteen. (While we're at it, I'd give them all the vote.) The next best thing to a real dad is not a succession of "uncles", or the intrusive power of the state; it is male authority outside the failing home.

I am of course thinking aloud here. But that's all part of what I started this blog to do.

Here's a first. Brian's Education Blog has had its first detectable influence on Education in Real Life. It wasn't a very big bit of influence, but it was influence. Here's the story.

You may recall that I did a piece about my friend Sean Gabb teaching economics to a group of mostly Asian, mostly female students.

One of things I mentioned in that piece was a culture clash that I thought I detected between the Anglo-Saxon argue-your-corner tradition and the Asian defer-to-your-teacher tradition. Sean, being the Anglo that he is, wanted his students to argue with each other, and with him. I surmised that a teacher telling his Asian pupils to disagree creates a classic dilemma in their minds. He is ordering something, and because he is the teacher he must be obeyed, but what he is ordering is disagreement. Ouch!

Sean rang me to day to tell me that he had just instructed a class, containing several of the pupils I had watched him teaching, to debate some issue amongst themselves and come to a collective point of view, which they would then present to him. The pupils said they felt uncomfortable arguing in Sean's presence. The idea was that they should feel free to dispute some of the things Sean himself had said, but they didn't feel able to do this in a relaxed manner. So, they asked Sean to kindly leave while they had their discussion. And get this. They quoted my report. That's right, they used what I had written to explain the legitimacy of what they felt about this problem.

Sean had no problem with this, so he left, and while he was outside, relaxing, cooling his heels, having a fag, etc., he rang me on his mobile to tell me this. For which I am very grateful to him.

Okay, this is not the abolition of compulsory education, but it is a start. I have helped a group of pupils and their teacher to understand just that tiny little bit better than otherwise what they were doing together, and have helped them communicate with one another when solving one of the resulting problems. This pleases me.

I missed this piece in education.co.uk from way back. It's called "Why an award-winning young teacher wants to quit", and you know what the piece will say, to the point where you hardly need to read it. But it's worth a read nevertheless.

"There are too many initiatives, they are like polyfilla. They [the government] shove an initiative into a problem and it just leaves a mess. I love what I do and would stay if I had a choice, but what I do and what I want to do are teach, and you can't do it with the targets and initiatives and the expectations from government and society. That's why I'm at breaking point."

That was January 7th of this year. I wonder if breaking point has now been and gone.

Getting a prize is no substitute for being allowed to do the job you love properly.

Here's another little snippet from my conversations last weekend. My Kent teacher friend told me that the attitude of your average teacher towards immigrants and asylum seakers is: bring 'em on. He has some Afghans in his class, and they are by far the most studious of his students. He recalled a day when one of them stayed behind after a lesson had finished, to finish some work. The locals would never do such a thing. The Afghans, he reports, are decidedly critical of the locals for their educational indolence.

What's going on here? Partly, it is surely that immigrants and asylum seakers are often thoroughly superior people compared to your local yobbos, educationally speaking. We're talking doctors and lawyers and clerics, who are merely disguised temporarily as cabbies for the first generation of their time in England, but who will soon be reverting to type and sending their kids to posh schools where they'll feel more at home.

But I think something else is involved here. The Third World is now famously more enthusiastic about education, and is now famously more willing to pay the price for it, whether that's a cash price or a discipline price, than is the First World. Why? Well, how about that in the Third World the penalties for doing nothing very much with your life are so much more severe than they are in the First World, and immigrants from the Third to the First World bring the educational attitude that is caused by this economic fact with them. And how about that the economic benefits of education in the Third World are greater than they are here. As a result, the Prussian System of education, as I've been calling it here, still works well in the Third World, whereas it is increasingly obsolete here.

In a couple of generations, there could be a summersault. The Prussian System could by then have collapsed here, and been replaced by something a lot more voluntaristic and a lot better. Meanwhile, the Prussian System could be just entering its decadent phase in the Third World, while still being at the stage of the Third World equivalents of Daily Mail readers confining themselves (as here now) to saying that the only answer to the problems of the Prussian System is to make it more Prussian, by, I don't know, recruiting new teachers from Prussia, by imposing Prussian Drill classes on bad pupils, etc.

A different slant on the Bristol University ruckus from regular guest contributor Julius Blumfeld:

Following on from the Bristol University admissions debacle, Brian has written in favour of British Universities being free to decide who to admit. I’m not so sure.

Of course in the private sector, educational institutions ought to be free to teach what they want and to whom. If one University chooses to admit only poor bright students while another chooses to admit only rich thick ones, that’s fine by me.

But almost all British Universities are largely publicly funded and have been since even before the 1963 Robbins Report. For all practical purposes, they are State industries.

And like all State industries, decisions as to what they should produce and how they should produce it are necessarily political. It makes no more sense to say that British Universities should have the freedom to decide their own admissions policies than to say that the Army should have the freedom to decide who to fight or that the Health Service should have the freedom to decide which diseases to treat. Of course the bureaucrats in those industries will have a say in those sorts of decisions. So will the technicians. There may be room for a bit more autonomy here and there. But ultimately as long as the State is in charge, it will and must make the ultimate decisions. It’s one of the things that States do.

Indeed higher education is just an example of a wider problem with State-owned property. It is impossible to reach agreement on how State-owned property is best used because there is no agreed measure as to what counts as best use. I may think that Universities should be used for social engineering. You may think they should be used to churn out engineers. Brian may think they should be used to teach art and culture to the masses. Who is right? I don’t know and indeed there is no means of knowing. So we end up with such decisions being made by politicians (and, increasingly, I anticipate, by judges).

The fact is that as long as Universities remain in the State sector, it is inevitable that the State will make the decisions about what is taught and to whom. And it is equally inevitable that there will be hand wringing from those who don’t like the decisions that are being made. It could not be otherwise. It is only when the Universities finally wean themselves off their decades-long addiction to public funding and become private again (a process which this latest debacle will hopefully hasten), that they will become free to decide what to teach and to whom, and the whole debate will go away.

Julius Blumfeld

Following on directly from the posting immediately below, about the low quality of the people now trying to enter Britain's teaching profession, I expect the following two things (among all kinds of other things) to happen to British teacher recruitment over the next few years.

First, thanks to European Union labour mobility laws (which Britain, unlike many EU countries, takes seriously), I expect a flood of Eastern Europeans to flood (since that's what floods do) into British teaching.

But, second, I expect most of these Eastern Europeans to recoil in horror from their new jobs, and to end up doing only as much British teaching as they have to do, until they can find other jobs that are less stressful, like working as drug dealers or table dancers – or perhaps as actual, officially recognised Prison Officers, in jobs where it is clearly understood by all concerned that prisons are indeed prisons, and you can't expect to run them like holiday camps. The lucky few will get jobs in the British educational private sector.

The idea that the British teaching profession can be made wonderful simply by attracting wonderful people into it is false. It doesn't matter how wonderful a person is if what he has to do is impossible. It is not possible to imprison the proletarians of Britain without the use either of physical force or the threat of expulsion, and without any disruption to the minority of pupils who would quite like to make use of their prison time to do some learning. This simply cannot be done, no matter how wonderful you are.

It doesn't matter how successfully you may previously have taught in another school system, where you had the means to do your job to hand. In Britain, you won't be able to do what the government wants of you, because no one could.

You can be a combination of Maria Montessori, Plato, Carol Vorderman and the leader of the England rugby scrum. You still won't make this system work, because no one could.

Faced with this impasse, the government only makes matters worse by piling in with yet more demands and restrictions and bureaucratic oversights, as if the government threatening reality with the big stick of the law can somehow alter reality. They thus make a job which is already impossible, even more impossible.

But none of this will stop the politicians from persisting in the delusion that "better people" will somehow solve the problem. Thus the Eastern Europeans. For a few short years, they'll be presented to us as the saviours of British education.

Very few indeed of these Eastern Europeans will make a long term success of teaching in British schools. But that won't stop them being used as temporary political wallpaper for a few years, to wallpaper (since that's what wallpaper does) over the cracks in the system. But they will be revealed as no more capable of making the British state education system work than Brit teachers are.

The only good thing that will come out of this episode will be that it will show that the existing mess wasn't the fault of the average failing Brit teacher.

If the average failing Brit teacher had got a job in Eastern Europe, he or she might have done it quite well. Which is why many Brit teachers will actually migrate to Eastern Europe, to teach English to people who want to learn it.

There is another way to make use of Eastern Europe for British educational purposes, but I'll save that for a later posting.

So, what else did my Kent schoolteacher friend have to say?

Well, he did say that getting good people to become teachers in state schools is becoming harder. He did not, however, go quite this far:

Recruiting teachers can be costly, time-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful, according to a new report from the recruitment industry.

Select Education's annual True Time and Cost of Teacher Recruitment Survey revealed that recruiting a teacher costs a school an estimated £4,000. It showed that 60% of schools surveyed had unfilled permanent vacancies and the standard of applicants had dropped.

During 2002, 30% of schools surveyed recruited four or more new members of staff, with 9% (mostly in secondary schools) appointing 11 or more new teachers.

Many headteachers said they were struggling to fill the posts they were advertising, and 40% said they had fewer applications for each post advertised in 2002, compared with 2001. About 5% reported having received no applications for an advertised post.

More than a quarter - 28% - said the applications received were worse than the year before. Headteachers complained of spelling mistakes, poor presentation, "odd pen ink/colours used", and letters that were "pompous", "rambling" or "vague".

When it came to an interview, applicants were still not up to scratch. Interviewees, according to headteachers, showed a lack of enthusiasm, interest and character; their appearance was not appropriate and their were "personal hygiene" issues that needed to be addressed.

Heads also objected to interviewees chewing gum, wearing nose rings, bad-mouthing their present school, failing to show they liked children, not giving eye contact, having no knowledge of the school they were applying to and being unable to articulate answers.

What my friend said was that it wasn't just that only bad teachers apply. The problem is that good experienced teachers leave, and potentially good teachers, when they first start out, often find that they just can't take it and immediately run away to do other things.

The most memorable vignette my friend reported concerned an experienced teacher from Australia. This man had served for twelve satisfactory years over there, but after three days at my friend's school he'd had enough. "You won't be seeing me again." Running a school must be hard if an experienced Australian teacher can't even make a go of it.

He talked about the problem of how some head teachers aren't visible enough, spending too much time crouched over their desks ploughing through the tons of paperwork they now have to plough through, and too little time out there backing up their teachers and generally keeping in touch. I compared this to the complaints soldiers used to make during and after the First World War about commanding officers whom they never saw from one month to the next. Once again the appropriateness of the "trenches" metaphor was confirmed, because it was my friend who then said that indeed, fighting in the trenches is what teaching at a state school often feels like.

"Inclusiveness" he said, doesn't help, which confirms a regular theme here. A terrible proportion of teacher time and energy is spent persuading recalcitrant pupils just to refrain from busting up the lessons for everyone else. Add the new emphasis on not doing anything that could be said remotely to resemble assaulting the pupils (a policy which, taken in isolation, makes nothing but sense to me), and you have a recipe for chaos.

Given the kind of person I am and the kind of vibes I give off about the potential wonderfulness of education, my friend several times went out of his conversational way to emphasise how impossible it is to think of his job as "educating" in the sense he feared that I took it to be. There's no time for profound discussions about the Meaning of Life or the subtleties of History and Geography and Maths, etc. Almost all of his time is spent staying in some kind of control. He teaches science. Chemistry, actually. And his biggest problem is stopping the rowdier boys from destroying all the equipment.

In short, my friend confirmed just about every Daily Mail type right wing cliché about the horrors of state education that you care to think of.

The posh parts of the education system seem to be ticking over okay, and in some places I dare say, are getting even posher. But for the great mass of the kids of the ex-manual-labouring classes, things are getting slowly but steadily worse.

I made a point of asking my friend exactly this question. Do you, I asked, ever attend big gatherings of teachers? Not often, he said. I've done it a few times. Okay, said I, but is it you understanding that the conversation at such events among those who do regularly attend such things is upbeat, or pessimistic? Is the general opinion that things in general are getting better, or that they are, in general, getting worse?

Oh, getting worse, he said. This was said calmly and matter-of-factly. This is partly because my friend is a calm and matter-of-fact person. But I also got the impression that the fact that Things Are Getting Worse is so obvious to all concerned that it doesn't merit a raising of the voice to note the fact. Everyone already knows this, so there's no need to make a big fuss of it. Things are getting worse. Yes. Of course they are. Didn't you know?

Well, I'm back from the depths of Kent, and I did learn a lot of use to writing for this. However, I'm afraid I made a mistake about the "Assistant Head" bit. I was muddling my friend up with another of my friends. I don't know why I did this, but I did. Sorry to you all, and especially to him if he ever gets to read this.

As it happens, my friend's relatively low place on the teacher pecking order had a direct bearing on one of the many interesting things he told me, which is that boys behave well or badly according to the status of their teacher on the teacher pecking order. "Authority" is not something that you can just whistle up with some clever body language, or not completely anyway; it is also a function of your true place in the world, of how much clout you have with the other males who matter. So a new teacher is almost certainly fair game, no matter how much "charisma" he may have, or think he has.

Question. How much does clout in the "real world" - clout outside the world of the school - count for anything, in the eyes of these teenage boys, as they size up their prey and wonder whether to launch a pack attack?

After that posh prep school I went to, I went on to another posh private school (or a "public" school, as we Brits so confusingly call these places), a school called Marlborough. I mention this partly to impress everyone, of course. It's about damn time it started to count for something that I went to one of these places. But I do have a point. Which is: that Marlborough was full of teachers (or "masters" as they were called) with "real world" clout, and often of the particular sorts that most impress teenage boys, such as sporting prowess.

I was taught English by a man called Dennis Silk, whom I remember with fondness because he was the first teacher I can recall who seemed genuinely to enjoy the things I wrote. But more to my point, this Dennis Silk was a star cricketer. He made centuries in the Oxford v. Cambridge cricket matches (at a time when the standard of Oxbridge cricket was a lot higher than it is now), and he even captained an England touring team, to New Zealand. He wasn't the absolute cream of the crop, be he was pretty close to it. Later he became the President of the MCC. Non-cricket enthusiasts won't grasp all the detail of that, but my point is, we Marlburians did.

Another of my teachers was a man called Kempson, who taught me non-Euclidian geometry, or who tried to. I can't say I remember much in the way of non-Euclidian geometry, but I do vividly recall the immense merriment this man used to take in getting us to understand what it was all about, if only temporarily. And this Mr Kempson was, in a former life, a member of the 1935 Everest Expedition. (This was the expedition which included George Mallory, who, many people believe, did actually conquer Everest but who sadly died in the vicinity of the summit before anything could be proved, if there was anything to prove. Mountaineers still debate this, I believe.)

[UPDATE: Wrong. I've since learned that Mallory died on a previous expedition, in, I think, 1924. Apologies. Luckily this doesn't affect the point I'm making.]

There were plenty of other alpha males of this sort at Marlborough, teaching history and geography, maths and physics, reading the lessons in chapel, coaching sports teams, and generally keeping their eyes on things. I don't know for sure exactly how much difference it made to school discipline, because I can't compare matters with how they might have been in the absence of such people. But I'm pretty sure it did make a difference. I reckon these people kept us in order far more efficaciously than a staff would have that consisted only of non-alphas in corduroy jackets who knew nothing but the subjects they taught and had done nothing with their adult lives except teach them.

I guess your average bog standard (as the unlovely British phrase goes) secondary school doesn't contain many people like this. I've often thought that all those clapped out rock stars who now sit about in their mansions dreaming of making hit parade comebacks might make excellent school teachers. They have a been-there done-that atmosphere about them that might make a real contribution to the general willingness of boys to follow the lead that the schools are trying to impose upon them. Ah well.

This is not a posting about whether "imposing" on boys is a good or a bad thing. But I will now say that in my opinion a culture in which teenage boys are not in any way imposed upon by grown-up men is a culture which will have problems.

I'm not a voluntarist and a libertarian about education because I think that adult authority doesn't matter. I think that adult authority is, other things being equal, a very good thing. As I will, I'm sure, be arguing, in any follow-up pieces (besides this I mean) that I may manage to my earlier one entitled What is authority?, that the voluntary principle and authority go hand in hand extremely well. But authority and the voluntarism aren't the same thing, and places like Marlborough prove that you can have plenty of the first without a huge amount of the second.

This nugget of wisdom about status and how it relates to school discipline was by no means the only one that I acquired from my friend the Kent school teacher. I'm thinking now that I'll make the conversations we had into my theme of the week here. He knows who he is. My thanks to him for his wisdom, to say nothing of his hospitality.

Here's some scorching prose from Robbie Millen on the Bristol University entrance row, from last Thursday's Times that I've only just noticed. (Paper version, links don't work, blah blah.) This is a story that seems to appeal to lots of people, definitely including me. Anyway here's about the first half of it:

There is no one more impossible to reason with than a stupid person who is ignorant of his stupidity. Correction: there is no one more impossible to reason with thatn a stupid person who is ignorant of his stupidity because it has been disguised by forceful teaching.

Bristol University abounds with such people, the slow-witted but straight-A products of private schools. So does Edinburgh, Newcastle or any university that has been glitter-dusted with social cachet. These people may be good on the rugger fields or useful on the May Ball committee, but in academic terms they are a waste of space. A stupid person, who has been well-taught in the science of passing exams, is inoculated against thinking, immune from picking up new ideas, and a bore for tutors. They add nothing to the life of the mind; the purpose, lest we forget, of university.

They are currently very angry that Bristol wants fewer of them. But the university should not be afraid that the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, the bastion of creamy-voiced whining, has declared a boycott, crying foul over alleged discrimination. Rather, Bristol should be glad to shake off its dated image as a drinking den for blazered Sloanes and Alice-banded bimbettes.

Let Bristol go farther to find bright children from state schools, pupils who have been boycotting the place for years, put off by its reputation. A pox on quotas and top-down silliness about targets – but any fool must recognise that a B from a bog-standard is worth an A* from St Cake's; and any tutor would rather teach a student with untapped potential than some dried-up husk from a hothouse school.

That's telling 'em. There are several more paragraphs of class warfare to follow, and the good bit is that, lefty though Mr Millen is, he still interrupts the flow of his invective long enough to pour scorn on on centrally imposed quotas. Let the universities decide for themselves. He's just giving them the benefit of his advice. Great stuff.

This story, on the other hand, unlike the one linked to just below this, is deadly serious:

A teacher has been jailed for three months for tampering with test papers at two primary schools.

Alan Mercer, the former head teacher at South Borough Primary School in Maidstone, Kent, was sentenced at Maidstone Crown Court on Friday.

He pleaded guilty in January to 10 offences of forging Key Stage 2 assessments at South Borough in 2002.

The 46-year-old also admitted two charges of forging Key Stage 2 tests at Eythorne Elvington School in Dover and two charges of forging PESE Grammar School entrance exams at South Borough in 2002.

Mercer, of Prospect Row, Gillingham, Kent, had also asked for a further 140 offences of forging test papers to be taken into account.

Judge Keith Simpson said the case was "so serious" that an immediate custodial sentence was required.

He said: "If others were to act in this fashion the whole system would be immediately and utterly destroyed, and that cannot be allowed to happen.

This has got to be the most significant "sovietisation of education" story yet, or at any rate since I started this blog. This wretched man is like some Soviet factory manager who just went that bit too far in lying about his quota fulfilment.

For me, the key paragraph in the above report is the one about "if" others were to do the same. For of course they are pretty much bound to be others behaving similarly, only cleverly enough not to get caught. The right way to rig the system is by putting the effort into the priming of the kids, so to speak, just before the exam, surely.

There is an ever more inviting business opportunity here, in the form of a totally private enterprise, totally non-corruptible exam system, whose bosses are willing to be patient about building their reputation, and to subject any politician or teacher who tries to pressurise them to savage public denunciation (after maybe a couple of private warnings first).

The key to the success of the operation would be not to kiss the arses of the ed-pols and the ed-bureaucrats. For never forget that these people are now the biggest exam cheats, not the teachers, and not (as in the old days) the pupils. For it would not matter if the official pols and bureaucrats hated their entrails, following some row during which said pols and bureaucrats had received a public roasting from our heroes for having tried to get them to ease their standards a bit to make them look like less of a failure. Such rows would help, if handled right. The parents, the best schools, and the pupils themselves, would all, if the entrepreneurs in question were willing to be patient and to tough it out with their "official" competitor/enemies, eventually flock to such an alternative exam system. Why? Because it could become the one that schools, universities, and employers regarded as the best.

As the official, ever more politicised exam system degenerates into an ever more chaotic and uninformative mess, which makes comparisons between individual pupils, and between pupils from different years, ever more impossible and confusing, the opportunity for something unofficial gets ever more clear.

Meanwhile, I see that this wretched Head Teacher (and 3 months in jail is only the beginning of his miseries) is from Kent, like my friend the Assistant Head Teacher. So maybe I'll be able to pick up some further inside gossip about this case over the weekend.

Breaking news! The son of Minister of Education Charles Clarke (he of the sticking out ears) has been supended from school for swearing at a member of the staff, who had confiscated his football. I first heard this from BBC TV, but for a written report here's what education.guardian.co.uk has to say. According to the BBC Mr Clarke said that the school "acted properly". Hard to see what else he could have said under the circumstances.

This reminds me of the ruckus that happened when the Home Secretary's son got mixed up in Drugs in some newsworthy way that I don't now exactly recall. It's fun when the political gets personal, but my better self hopes that it all blows over quickly and is forgotten, which I'm guessing it will, and will be.

Tomorrow I'm off to visit some friends, who now have a young son. Plus, if I remember it right, he is an Assistant Head Teacher. That ought to be interesting on both counts.

And this expedition, to the outer wilds of Kent, is not just to see the family. There's going to be a party. Maybe there'll be other teachers present whom I can also interrogate. Stay tuned.

This piece in telegraph.co.uk by Jonty Driver is interesting. What does authority consist of? Why do some have it and others not?

While some have that personal authority almost as a birthright, others need to learn it. Most inexperienced teachers seem fair game to even well-behaved pupils. It takes confidence to trust the authority of one's position, even in a disciplined institution with clear boundaries.

A defining moment in my career came when I was a young housemaster. In my house was a clever and popular boy, captain of rugby and very much a hero in the school. He was doing no academic work at all, and every effort I made to cajole and - in due course - to force him to work foundered on his charming insouciance. His lazy influence was beginning to affect others in the house, so I asked the headmaster for help. "Tell him to see me," said the head.

Eventually, I took the boy to the headmaster - who happened to be weeding his garden at the time. The boy walked over to the head, who didn't stop weeding. The headmaster spoke - no more than a sentence. The boy stood for a moment, then turned away.

That evening, I found him at his desk, working. By the end of the year, he had a place at Oxford.

"What on earth did you say to him?" I asked the head when the reformation had taken effect. "Oh," said the head, cheerfully, "I told him to stop being such a bloody fool, and to get down to some work. That's all.''

And I do think that was all: it was the head's sheer natural authority - or call it personality, if you will - that did the trick. It made me realise that I had been trying too hard: what was required wasn't reason, or logic, or the apparatus of discipline (detentions, extra lessons, gatings), but just some straightforward authority.

One answer, of the sort you might expect here, is that this kind of "authority" is something that one should not attempt to exercise. And indeed, having been to one of these places myself, I can tell you that this is not the kind of school I would ever want to teach at. Very few of the pupils have much say either in whether they are there in the first place, or, once there, what they do from one hour to the next. The system ordains, and they obey, until they are old enough to be allowed to decide things for themselves, at which point many of them have had this trick beaten out of them so thoroughly that they have to spend the next five years learning it.

I know what I'm talking about with this syndrome. I used to be one of these posh but dim school leavers, and I'm now an occasional, amateur (but quite effective) career counsellor. Time and again this is the central agenda that I and my customer now find ourselves addressing. Well brought up English people are all too liable simply never to have mastered the trick of running their own lives and making their own big life decisions. Instead of truly deciding for themselves, they just do the obvious next thing supplied by the world around them. Which is okay, until it goes wrong and they find that they have to really think about what they would really like to do (because suddenly it is a struggle and only certain struggles are worth the struggle), and they realise they don't know how to think for themselves. Years of being subjected to the sort of "authority" described by the likes of Jonty Driver and his Headmaster can do that to you. Still, they mostly know how to think for other people, that is to say they know how to think, so the situation is usually quite easily corrected.

So far so libertarian. But, my libertarian duty done, I still find that the idea of "authority" means something. After all, even if everyone present at an event has chosen to be present and is not being coerced to remain, there are still some events which are bossed authoritatively, and which are thus pleasing and relaxing to be at and thus attract repeat business, and other events which are bossed badly, and hence which are stressful to attend, and those events fail or fizzle out. So, what is "authority"? How do you do "authority"?

Although the aptly named Mr Driver tells us that authority can be learned, he has no space in his short newspaper piece to tell us how, or to go into very much detail about what exactly authority consists of, other than noting that his headmaster just, you know, had it.

The mysteriously all powerful headmaster whose lightest word is immutable law is a stock figure of school fiction, and that's because this isn't only fiction. Headmasters are often just like that for real.

Why? How do they do it? Can authority be learned? Can authority, that is to say, be broken down into a decent number of understandable procedures that go beyond repeating the question by rephrasing it as "common sense" or some such vacuity?

I'm certain that authority can be learned. I write as one of those people – very common in the political world – who was not born with any natural authority to speak of, and who was when young mostly bossed about by his bigger and bossier contemporaries, but who nevertheless wanted to have authority, and who has gradually learned how to do authority as the years have gone by and as the experiences have piled up.

And – oh dear – I'm starting to run out of time. I just had a date, which sounds a lot more exciting than it was, but it took up most of the evening. So I'll call it a day for today, and start in on actually answering the question I started with … Real Soon Now, and hopefully tomorrow. I don't want to rush it. Apologies if I got your hopes up for an instant answer. Please be patient.

But, I do have time to tell you this, although it's a change of subject. Education Minister Charles Clarke is on Question Time just now, and it seems he went to a posh school, not the ghastly lower class educational sewer I was hinting at in my previous posting. His grizzly grey beard, his sticking out ears and his bulky figure make him look like a night club bouncer. But now I've heard him talking, and heard one of the others talking about the fact that Charles Clarke went to a posh school, which pretty much settles it. Think eccentric barrister. That's more the kind of person he is. Apologies for that also.

I have often alluded here to my indifference or downright hostility towards national education stories compared to flesh and blood stories concerning actual, individual people. This goes way beyond logic, for national statistics are not always lies, and often reveal big events even if not with the accuracy they suggest. But my attitude towards national education statistics is, basically, that I'm against them. The government knowing the national picture concerning the state of this or that variable is inextricably intertwined with the government seeking to control that aspect of the picture.

The ongoing ruckus concerning the admissions policies of the various faculties of Bristol University is all mixed up with a national government effort first to count, and then to increase, the number of non-posh people going to university.

Margaret Hodge, the Higher Education Minister, has already told universities that they will be set new targets for increasing recruitment of teenagers from low-income homes and where neither parent went to university. They will also have to give special consideration to applicants from schools with a history of poor results. But she was forced by Mr Clarke into an embarrassing climb-down on Monday from a plan to set a specific target for increasing the proportion of working-class students at university by 2010.

That's from the front page (top right) of today's Times, paper version, which is to say that it's a big row. Posh schools are threatening to steer their best pupils away from Bristol, and are generally getting on their high horses and blowing their trumpets, which of course they are perfectly entitled to do.

The Mr Clarke in the quote above is the Minister of Education, and I get the impression that he isn't nearly as posh in his background as Margaret Hodge is. If that's right, then it's the posh one who wants anti-posh quotas, while the non-posh one isn't so bothered. That often the way. The people at the top of the ladder turn around and meddle with it. People half way up just want the thing to stay still.

I've already explained here why I think that Bristol University has a point in pursuing somewhat anti-posh entrance policies. I have also explained that I am opposed to the government imposing any policy from the centre, however sensible it might seem, pro-posh, anti-posh or of any other kind. What started out as a scheme to avoid neglecting bright kids from bad schools who would, if given a chance, do very well at university, is all too likely, if administered from the centre, to degenerate into a scheme that fills universities with proletarian dullards and excludes the brightest and best of all classes. So it's a good thing that Margaret Hodge is getting a roasting, and that when the dust has settled, the universities will probably continue to go their own ways. That is as it should be.

Bristol University is extremely untypical of Britain's universities in general in that they have publicly stated that they are skewing their system in favour of lower class students of high promise, and against those they see as the pampered posh. I don't know if this is what I would do if I were running a university, but that's not the point. The point is that each university should be allowed to pick its own students, and to be as public as it likes in saying how it does this.

But what if actually the Margaret Hodges of this world (by which I mean Britain) are actually winning this argument? What if Bristol is but the public tip of a vast private iceberg of anti-posh animus, with universities everywhere all refusing to accept the bright posh ones, while calmly denying in public that they are doing any such thing?

If the British government does make this policy stick, it would be interesting to speculate what the consequences for the country might be.

The assumption behind most discussions of this kind is that Britain's universities are places of unalterable and unchallengeable excellence, and the only question is who shall be permitted to bask in their glow. But what if our universities are driven into a state of collective decline by policies such as this, and by many other equally dictatorial arrangements concerning other matters, such as there being enough lady professors and students, and enough ethnic professors and students, and so on? What if a job at a university or a university degree becomes an indelible mark of mediocrity? What if our brightest and best were to start going straight from their teens into Real Life? At present these people spend about five more years being trained to be academics. In Real Life this means being trained as a paper shuffler, otherwise known as a bureaucrat.

I suspect that what would be considered very bad for the universities could turn out extraordinarily well for the country.

Proposed theory for discussion. When Britain's universities have been regarded as doing well, Britain has declined. When Britain's universities have been a corrupt and philistine shambles, Britain has raced ahead. Discuss.

In a comment on this posting here last month, a distinction was made between "education" and "training", by Kamen Rider. But I wonder how genuine this distinction is. How much do these two words describe truly different activities, and how much do they merely describe different aspects of the same process? For even as one is being "trained" to do something or other, one also has a mind that is working away, learning more elusive and subtle lessons than the mere behavioural patterns one is also acquiring.

At the end of last week I was preoccupied with DIY. More CD shelves to be exact. And this reminded me of an educational- stroke-training episode deep in my past.

I went to one of those posh preparatory schools in the home counties of southern England, and one term, for some reason, a bus load of us were sent off to have weekly woodwork classes, under the supervision of a type of person we seldom encountered in the normal course of our lives. He was an aristocrat of labour, a classic NCO type. Under his watchful eye we learned sawing, and dovetailing, and glueing, and we all ended up with small wooden pencil boxes. I think I still have mine somewhere.

The same experience affects different pupils in very different ways, so I can't speak for the others. But I learned a lot from this man, who I thought then and still think was most impressive. I learned some carpentry techniques of the sort I still use, when erecting CD shelves for example. I got some training, in other words. But I also learned an attitude towards doing work which I had never come across before.

This man was obsessed with getting things right and doing things right. For him, technical correctness was a moral issue. People who put saw cuts through the middle of the line, instead of next to a line and on the correct side of the line in the way one should, were not just incompetent. They were wicked.

So, I was learning both some good carpentry habits, and I was imbibing something more like a whole attitude to life, and learning about a sort of person whom I had until then imagined not to exist, or to be motivated only by the most shallow and small-minded of motives. That a man could combine proletarian speaking habits and technical rather than "educated" interests with the moral passion of an Old Testament prophet was all new stuff to me, and it might still startle me a little if I came across it now. Training and education.

And what about those Kumon kids, who's mere "training" Kamen Rider was commenting on? Well, for some of the children I watched doing Kumon maths, there was a great deal more involved than merely picking up a few maths skills.

I recall a rather quiet, rather arkward boy, tending towards plumpness, by the name of Graham. Graham showed up at our Kumon classes, and did the sums as requested. He had very little to say for himself, but that didn't bother us. Talking is not part of the Kumon deal.

Only later did we discover that Graham's whole life had apparently been transformed for the better. His parents were much more stylish and articulate people than their son, quicker of mind and tongue than him, and, frankly, they were rather embarrassed by very ordinary-seeming child. What was wrong with him? How had they, such sparkling persons, had such uninspiring offspring? And of course this only made Graham all the more depressed and arkward. That seemed to be the picture.

And then Graham started doing Kumon, and turning in those near perfect scores that all Kumon kids get – because if they don't get near perfect scores they are doing the wrong sums. Finally, Graham realised that he was not this incompetent waste of space that his parents were so carefully not saying that they thought he was. His whole attitude towards life was transformed. He became more confident, more outgoing. He stopped apologising for being alive, and started to really live.

Graham's story is not at all an uncommon in Kumon. The way that children are "trained" to do maths (and a great many other things) in regular schools can do awful things to their confidence, in ways that affect a great deal more than their mere exam results. And correspondingly, good maths training of the sort that Kumon supplies can do a lot more than get a kid through some exams.

I wonder if "training" is ever only training.

There a fascinating posting by Gabriel Syme over at Samizdata.net, about the culture clash between text messaging and regular reading and writing as demanded by schools, in this case Scottish schools. Gabriel got up earlier this morning than I did, and even then I might have missed it, because few national education stories are as gr8 as this one, "gr8" being the only word I know in this new language so far. There are links to telegraph.co.uk stories (e.g. to this) today, and to pieces I have written on Samizdata way back, and to here, and the least I can do is do is connect the half dozen folk in the unverse to this delightful ruckus who read this but not Samizdata.

Because: need I add how delighted I am about this story? And it's not just that I'm a Vodafone shareholder, god help me. The essence of good writing is knowing who you are sending your message to, and what you are trying to get across with it. By this standard the average text message is excellent, and the average school essay is a pointless shambles of undirected waffle.

I certainly don't think that regular English spelling is a CWOT ("complete waste of time"), but I cannot believe that the education of children is necessarily harmed by this new craze. I suppose anything which might drive a moderately good teacher insane will probably do some harm. But once teachers have got used to this stuff, and once a few text messagers have attained managerial status in the economy, isn't fluency in text messaging something extra to put on one's CV?

Meanwhile, the English language will, as so often, hoover up a mass of new words from this latest patois, and become even more English than it is already ("cwot" perhaps?), that is to say, even more complicated and mysterious and weirdly spelt, even more completely the language of the entire world, and way more cool even than it is already. In short, western civilisation will race ahead, accompanied, as always, by proclamations from oldies to the effect that it is doing the exact opposite.

What's tXt for "discuss"? Although, please note that if you do want to discuss this, the logical place to put comments is on Samizdata rather than here, because that is where most of them will be anyway. My guess is they'll be a lot of fun. I wonder if any regular old-school school teachers will try to stem the tide of gleeful postings in the new lingo with serious explanations of why it all ought to be stamped out, along with all other forms of modern communication, like TV, computers, pop music, chains of bonfires, etc.

More from February 2003