This is a national education story with a difference:

The Chelsea chairman, Ken Bates, was today branded a "disgrace" by the education secretary, Charles Clarke, because his football club was the only one in the Premiership not to be involved in a scheme aimed at boosting children's grasp of the three Rs.

Impressively adopting suitable football vernacular, Mr Clarke said Mr Bates was "out of order" and added he was showing the Chelsea chief the "yellow card".

Mr Clarke declared: "He won't sign up. He has got to ask himself, is Chelsea a serious community club or is Ken Bates just looking for a fast buck?" Mr Clarke added that he hoped relegation-threatened West Ham won their match against Chelsea when the London rivals meet on Saturday. A defeat for Chelsea would seriously undermine their ambitions to play in the lucrative Champions League next season.

Mr Clarke, speaking on his way to open centres at Burnley and Preston North End, was criticising Chelsea's failure to set up an after-hours study centre for primary and secondary pupils who struggled with English and maths, under a scheme known as Playing For Success.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this story. On the one hand, the fact that just one out of all the football league clubs in the land has resisted this scheme strongly suggests to me that a great deal of government money is involved or how come all the other clubs did sign up? On the other other hand, the basic idea of the scheme is a good one, which I have already myself invented without realising that the government was a couple of years into attempting approximately what I had said someone should try. The basic idea is: don't rely on crusty old corduroyed failures and peacenik wimmin to nag children into learning to read and write; instead get a few sporting jocks to sell the message and jolly them along.

"All the other Premiership clubs recognise that football provides motivation and excitement for young men and women. Most of them recognise they should use that to redistribute money and show a bit of commitment," he said. The latest evaluation of Playing For Success showed almost nine out of 10 children thought the centres were fun and interesting.

I don't know anything about this scheme other than that the Department for Education and Training says that it is it is working, but then it would, wouldn't it?

The average "maths age" of primary pupils rose by 17 months and that of secondary age children by two years. While primary pupils failed to make significant progress in reading, secondary pupils' literacy improved by about eight months, according to a survey of more than 1,300 children by the National Foundation for Educational Research.

The foundation said: "The football/sports club setting proved attractive to pupils and was a strong element in motivating pupils to become involved in Playing For Success. They felt privileged to be selected rather than singled out as in need of extra help. Once at the centres, pupils responded positively to many aspects of the initiative, especially using computers and the internet.

"They enjoyed the work, felt they had made progress and were grateful for the help they received. They also benefited from the opportunity to meet people and make new friends."

That sounds good. And Mr Clarke's abuse of Chelsea Chairman Ken Bates is probably just his way of making sure that what he's doing gets noticed. He reckons this is going well, and not everything he does is such good news, so he's beating the drums about this, one of the drums being Ken Bates. It got my attention, didn't it?

I'm not bothered about Bates. He can look after himself. But this story does give you a taste of the bullying and grandstanding that less resilient individuals are now being subjected to by Mr Clarke. Imagine being a Head Teacher whom Mr Clarke has taken against. Imagine deciding whether to apply to be a Head Teacher in the first place when you read a story like this about the man who could be breathing down your neck.

Other doubts. It all seems to be being "rolled out" in a bit of a rush. It could all go terribly wrong when some angle I hadn't thought of any more than Mr Clarke has turns out not to have been thought through, and in two years time, instead of being a national success story, it could be a national scandal, like that racket when the same ministry lost fortunes "helping young people" to learn about computing skills, and the money just disappeared into the pockets of the various crooks and conmen who stepped forward to run the various "training schemes". That couldn't happen again, I don't suppose, but something else equally bad might. Suppose half the clubs are only going through the motions, and suppose the kids involved smell this and lose interest themselves, and the money keeps flowing in exchange for a lot less than at first looked likely. If I had to bet what the bad news would end up being, I'd bet simply: it'll end up costing too much per head of educational improvement.

Perhaps the biggest bad news that could lie hidden in this story is all the initiatives along similar lines, but more exactly along lines that they truly approved of, that these various sports clubs might have launched by themselves and in true cooperation with each other, un-badgered and un-bribed by the likes of Mr Clarke and his minions. It might have started more slowly, with only a few clubs involved at first, but if it had worked it might perhaps have ended up doing a lot better, and eventually on a far bigger scale. Now we may never know. This is the crowding out effect, and the problem is, not only do you not foresee problems like this before they strike, you are liable to miss them during and after also, because the heart of this effect is a great absence of activity, a great might have been, a great nothing where they only might have been something.

The idea of this scheme is that state education will feed off the dynamism of the non-state-run world of professional sport, and be newly energised. But what if what really happens is that a little bit of nationalised education is simply dumped down in a corner of each sports club, and then settles down to cause trouble, confusion, political grief and general bad news, and in a way that ends up innoculating all such clubs in ever having anything further to do with education?

What if Ken Bates has seen something that I and Mr Clarke haven't seen that might go wrong, and is keeping clear for a good reason, despite all the bullying and the bribery? Although, it could just be that land in Chelsea costs more than anywhere else in Britain and Bates isn't been paid or bullied enough to take the loss of surrendering his valuable space, even for a few hours every week.

Well, I've done this piece now, and even if no else reads the BEdBlog archives, I do, and I'll try to remember this story and get back to it, to see how it develops.

Antoine told me that in his opinion the much crowed about ignorance of American adolescents (where's Iraq, what's its capital, etc.) compared to their European equivalents may now have disappeared. Quite what his evidence or reason for thinking this was I can't tell you, either because he didn't tell me, or because he did but my drink-befuddled brain spat it out immediately.

But this got me thinking. If Antoine is right, why is he right? One reason might be the decline of military service in Europe compared to the USA. Remember that piece I did about how the British Army educates? And remember that little Three Week War we've just watched on our tellies? I reckon that a society with lots of military activity in its midst is, other things being equal, likely to be a better educated one.

This is because, in my opinion, soldiers tend to be better at teaching than teachers, and ex-soldiers tend to make better teachers than regular teacher-teachers, other things being equal. This, also in my opinion, is not because soldiers are any less stupid than teachers. It is because military discipline is now much better than civilian school discipline. Both may have slipped a little in recent decades, but regular school discipline has slipped more.

Plus, I think soldiers teach better because handling kit or preparing for an operation which if mishandled might kill you or your mates concentrates the mind wonderfully. What were all those soldiers who just won the Three Week War doing for the previous six months before their Three Weeks of glory? Learning, that's what. They didn't know it was going to be so easy, and it only was because they assumed it might not be. So they really paid attention to their teachers and did their homework properly. They'll spend the rest of their lives that much better educated than they'd otherwise have been. And that much better at teaching.

The phrase "learning experience" is usually an American euphemism for a screw-up. But preparing for, and then fighting the Three Week War really was that, I'd say.

Even more significant may be the enormous size, compared to all others, of the current US Navy. Navies teach obsessively, because if you mishandle a ship that can get very nasty, and very expensive. And that's true all the time, not just when war looms.

Submarines, in particular, are floating academies of extreme excellence and intensity. Remember that character that Sean Connery played in The Hunt for Red October? He was known as the "Vilnius Schoolmaster". Well, the Vilnius Schoolmaster is teaching no more.

This is not an argument for every country having regular wars or a huge navy, on educational grounds. As I said about the Baccalauriat thing in the first of these two Antoine postings, I'm just saying.

We're at my nearest pub, and I ask my friend Antoine Clarke what I'm going to put here. I also tell him I mustn't get too drunk and fail to put anything at all.

First, he tells me about what's been happening to the French Baccalauriat (what with him having been French educated), which is what French boys and girls do while ours are doing A levels or GCSEs. It used to be that they got very little choice of subjects and were obliged to generalise. But recently, they've greatly increased the number of subjects from which you can pick, and that means that if you want to you can pick five subjects in a very closely related area, and end up doing a very specialised clutch of studies. I'm not saying that this is good or bad. I'm just saying. Meanwhile, there's talk in England of copying the original version of the Baccalauriat, to get our boys and girls to specialise less. So it looks as if we and France might be doing a switch here.

I try to avoid filling up BEdBlog with mere comments on national news stories, but this story, which was also all over the front page of today's paper Guardian, is a hard one to ignore. I wonder what my friend the boss of Transport Blog, Patrick Crozier, makes of this:

Jarvis, the engineering contractor at the centre of the police investigation into the Potters Bar rail crash, has been awarded a three-year government contract to help rescue failing secondary schools.

The decision, made in January but never publicly announced, has been met with astonishment and anger by teachers and headteachers.

With the first anniversary of the derailment and death of seven passengers less than a fortnight away, it has emerged that Jarvis has been given a £1.9m contract to help advise the 700 worst-performing secondary schools in England and Wales. Jarvis has never had an educational contract of this type before.

It was condemned as "shocking", "extraordinary" and "a joke" by headteachers' leaders and teaching unions, who say the move shows that official attempts to pull struggling schools into line are becoming dangerously "incoherent".

Unlike the Guardian, I have no idea whether this contract will prove to be a good idea or not. But one point does need to be made about all such schemes. It is this. The government hiring "private sector" enterprises to help run its nationalised system of schools does not a free market make. Hiring Jarvis like this doesn't mean that all the schools which are altered in accordance with its advice will partake of the dynamism, innovativeness and general fizz and creativity of the private sector. It merely means that Jarvis is a collective civil servant.

Dave Barry (archiving mess – scroll down to Wed April 23) calls this his "educational site of the year". Yes it's Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu, the Prime Number Shitting Bear.

I actually learned quite a lot about Prime Numbers from this eccentric animal, like how around 1,000 they are a lot more frequent than I had supposed, nearly as close together as they start out being.

I don't have to have it explained why mathematicians find Prime Numbers fascinating, because they find anything mathematical fascinating by definition, but do Prime Numbers have any uses other than as something for joke bears on joke websites to emit from their recta? I've heard they're used for encoding things, or maybe for making it impossible to decode things. How does that work?

And do primes have other uses? Surely they must. Commenters who know maths? Here's your chance to broaden the minds of all the maths-phobic humanities snobs who flock here by the thousand.

And linguists! What language is "Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu", and what does it mean? I'm guessing it's Russian, and it's the bear's name, but what do I know?

I've just done a quite long posting on Samizdata about the influence of children's toys on later artistic tastes, so I haven't time for much profundity here. But I did attend a social event last night at which I picked up a couple of titbits of interest here.

First, I learned that however interesting a figure Maria Montessori might be in herself, not everyone admires her influence, in the form of your average Montessori school. On the contrary, I encountered the opinion that Montessori schools are employment opportunities for dimwitted women who would otherwise have no place whatever in the teaching profession, and that in general they tend to be extremely disappointing and unsatisfactory places, full of kids being bored to death with pointless objects and just meandering around doing very little. Well, I'm just passing on what I heard.

The other little titbit I gathered up has a bearing on the bilingual raising of children. One of my friends told me last night that she knows of an Anglo-Dutch couple, with a kid. Dad talks to the kid entirely in Dutch, and Mum talks to the kid entirely in English.

The kid is not yet at the stage of talking. He's only at the repetitive nonsense words stage. Nor does he read books yet, for real I mean. But he is at the stage where he turns over the pages of books he already knows from them being read to him. Now, get this. When he "reads" books that his Dad has read to him (in Dutch) the repetitive nonsense noises are Dutch noises, with lots of "ch"-ing from the back of the throat, but when he "reads" Mum books, English books, the noises he makes are different, more of the "Grrrrh!" variety. I love that. I've no idea what it proves, or if it proves anything at all, but I love it.

At the party I also met up with occasional contributor here Julius Blumfeld, who had some very interesting things to say about the role of bias in education (he's for it!) which I urged him to write down and send in. If he doesn't do this reasonably soon, I hereby serve notice that I myself will attempt here to summarise what he said.

Yesterday I linked to this site and at it I today found this piece, which includes the following quote from Maria Montessori herself:

Like others I had believed that it was necessary to encourage a child by means of some exterior reward that would flatter his baser sentiments, such as gluttony, vanity, or self-love, in order to foster in him a spirit of work and peace. And I was astonished when I learned that a child who is permitted to educate himself really gives up these lower instincts. I then urged the teachers to cease handing out the ordinary prizes and punishments, which were no longer suited to our children, and to confine themselves to directing them gently in their work.

Of all the notions I've so far got today from my further reading of Paula Polk Lilllard's book about Montessori, this is the one that has most intrigued me.

I don't yet know whether Montessori intended this idea to apply to older children as well, but it certainly makes sense to me that it might.

When someone rewards you for what you've done, it is as if they have taken possession of your work. They've made it theirs rather than yours. Accordingly, you lose interest, because it isn't yours any more.

This idea also reminds me of an earlier posting I did here about a lecturer who once visited my school. Intrinsic to the enormous pleasure I remember taking from this event was that nobody tried to test me later to see if I'd been paying attention to it properly. I decided what it meant and which was the best bit and why it was so good. And I recall once refusing a prize for some work I did during a holiday from the same school, about town planning, as if shaking off the unwanted attentions of an over-affectionate relative.

The organisation Taking Children Seriously also makes much of the notion that there is something deeply manipulative about rewarding children from doing "good work", an idea which I must say didn't make that much sense to me when I first encountered it, but which I think I get better now. I wonder if this lady, the leading light of TCS, had read lots of Montessori before she got into her TCS stride, or whether it was just a case of a good mind echoing a great one independently, or perhaps just breathing the air that had been perfumed by the great one.

If Montessori has been as influential as I surmise, this might also account for some of the fierceness with which many teachers oppose the current government-lead enthusiasm for academic testing. What such critics presumably have in mind is that lots of literacy testing, for example, may indeed create a generation of children who certainly do know how to read and write, but it may also create a generation of children who don't actually like to read and write very much.

Taking the same idea into early adulthood, it is a familiar story for recent university graduates to be repelled by the whole idea of intellectual activity for about two years after they leave university, because while there they forgot how much fun thinking seriously and systematically can be.

No less then one email flooded in noting my absence yesterday. An American. The mistake I made was that what with the Monday after Easter being a bank holiday, which may not register over there, I was in Sunday mode, and only realised this morning my omission. Apologies to all who had their day ruined by being without their fix of Brian rambling educationally.

However, I have not been ignoring education. Last Friday evening I was given dinner by friends, one of whom is a Montessori teacher. And they also lent me a book on the subject.

Until now, Maria Montessori (1870-1952) has really only been a name. I expect to have more to say about matters Montessorian over the weeks, months and years to come, but in the meantime I note how very influencial this lady's ideas have surely been.

A core Montessori notion is that you mustn't expect to start children straight away with academic 3Rs type teaching. They must instead be allowed to explore their physical environment and to develop their various senses, of sight, sound, touch, and so on. And now that stuff is so cheap and ubiquitous, almost every child in the West now possesses a cornucopia of toys and educational objects of all imaginable shapes and sizes. Meanwhile, children's TV shows have encouraged children to explore their physical capacities and senses by playing with all the useless yets perfectly safe and clean detritus of the modern food and toiletry packaging industry. Here in Britain, the TV show Blue Peter has become the object of endless good natured and nostalgic teasing for its various schemes to convert toilet rolls and fruit juice cartons into houses, dolls and spaceships. I'm guessing that Montessori had a lot of influence on all this kind of learning by playing.

There was, you might say, an interlude between a world in which children lived a rural life surrounded by the stuff of nature, and our own world where stuff also abounds. Unlucky children during this transitional period would sometimes spend their entire early lives in unstimulating places like orphanages, with no stuff to play with and effectively not doing anything, and as a result they grew up permanently stunted. A key Montessori insight is that by "playing" of this sort (although she actually called it "working"), often very repetitively, the child is developing its own brain. Children, said Montessori, have short periods of intense focus on particular topics, so to speak, and if their eagerness to explore colour, for example, meets no response in the form of a colourful environment with colourful stuff in it, their lives are rendered permanently less colourful. (As Montessori realised, a child who grows up without hearing language spoken can never later get to grips with it.)

The book I've been reading is called Montessori: A Modern Approach, by Paula Polk Lillard, and it was first published as long ago as 1972. However, I am already very struck by how many of Montessori's ideas chime in with the latest fashions in evolutionary psychology. I'm also currently reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, and the intellectual overlap is remarkable.

I haven't got to the bit where I learn about Montessori's views about reading and writing, but I'm looking forward to it very much.

Once again, my apologies for the blip in service here. I wish I could be sure that it will be the last. I will leave it at promising that such interruptions will be rare.

I have just been reading Sean Gabb's one hundredth Free Life Commentary, which is called The Value of Education and is about the importance of an all-round education of the "useless" variety, as opposed merely to the acquisition of marketable skills.

I know of schools that teach information technology but not history. Again, I do not dispute the value of technical skills. I am proud of my ability to build computers and to make software work: my own website is almost entirely crafted by hand in HTML. But history also is important. An accountant who is ignorant of the French Revolution, or cannot recognise sonata form, or knows not a line of poetry, is nothing more than a skilled barbarian. In a nation where only a small minority is truly educated, legal equality becomes a hard concept to maintain, let alone political equality. In a nation without even that minority, public life must inevitably become savage and arbitrary - a thing of wild, inconstant passions, led by those unable to perceive or follow longer term goods.

That is where, I think, we are now fast approaching. We have a Prime Minister who cannot spell, and is not ashamed of the fact. We have a political class in general that lacks nearly all skill of persuasive speech and seems ignorant of the past. Of the first Ministers appointed to serve under Tony Blair, apparently, the majority listed football as their main hobby in their Who's Who entries; and not one listed any humanistic pursuit. I doubt if the Conservatives are much better. Perhaps the Judges and permanent heads of department will soon follow the trend. Little wonder our freedoms are being given up, one at a time, to moral panics and appeals to administrative convenience.

That catches the drift. I remember having a similar argument at my school, with a Latin master inevitably. He spoke of Ovid's writings about bees, claiming that to have read this was to have learned something useful. So my school was already rotten with the importance of being useful, or he would have found a quite different way to defend Ovid. However else you sell it, you can't sell Latin as better science than science.

Sean's piece doesn't convince me of much, but it is, as always, beautifully written, and Sean does at least explain nicely why such a thing is good to have. It makes your own company more pleasing. A liberal education – in the sense of lots of interesting things to think about and the habit of thinking intelligently about them – is accordingly an economic benefit every bit as palpable as an education in html or accountancy.

The availability of such writings as Sean's on the Internet illustrates that a liberal education is now easier to obtain then ever before. And even if the Internet didn't exist, there are all the newly liberated TV channels, a few of which provide quite cultured stuff, in among all the rubbish, that is to say in among all the stuff I don't care for. And then there are the remainder shops, which are now an amazing source of wisdom and learning.

As to the loss of our freedoms, would a different educational syllabus during the last few decades really have made that much difference? They had philistines in the nineteenth century. They may have known more Latin than the present cabinet does, but they were philistines nevertheless. And by the same token there are plenty of widely read people now, who acquaint themselves with many different things, but just with different different things to their grandparents. There's a certain sort of person – Sean and I are two such, although our preferred fields of study are not at all the same – who pride themselves on the broadness of their reading and thinking. Such people will always dig beneath the surface of whatever they learn, useful or useless, to the deeper meanings and profundities of their civilisation, and of other civilisations. Even if our exam results driven and vocationally obsessed schools stop bothering with such things, they will still continue.

Insofar as our bit of civilisation does need its freedoms rescuing, such a rescue is far more likely to come from the philistine USA than from the educated elites of continental Europe, whose critiques of American culture - i.e. lack of culture - Sean partly echoes. Those vulgar Americans seem to have at least as firm a grasp of our freedoms and their tendency to get lost as any product of Balliol or the Sorbonne. And the texture of their civilisation isn't that bad either.

I'm tempted to observe, so I will, that a liberal education is merely the mastery of a few techniques which happen to be obsolete, like sonata form or composing Latin verse, plus some history of a sort that has now been updated out of regular existence with the passing of time. Why concocting appalling poetry in a dead language is any better for your mind than playing adventure games on a computer or training to be a surgeon I truly do not know, and learning about sonatas dates from the time, now gone, when if you wanted to listen to music that was even adequately musical without going to a rare and expensive and probably hard-to-get-to concert, your, or your wife, or your friends, or your servants, had to make it for you. Knowing sonatas used to be a skill as relevant to enjoying life as knowing html or how to set the video is now.

I dare say that in centuries to come, people will not be considered truly educated unless they have a smattering of at least two obsolete programming languages.

But please don't let me put you off reading Sean's piece. No doubt many readers of this will agree more with him than with me about these matters.

Today's electronic Independent has an interesting article about home schooling. It's not all that negative, and it's there. That's the big story here, not the details of what the story says. The Internet features prominently, as the means by which parents can obtain educational materials, and of course it is also one of the ways that parents learn about the home schooling option in the first place. But, inevitably, the "socialisation" objection to home schooling is also raised.

Amazing as it seems to those who can't wait to offload their kids in the morning, growing numbers of parents are educating them at home. With the resources of the internet it is easy to replicate classroom work at home, but harder to provide the teamwork and playground games, the fallings-out and makings-up, that are as essential to a child's growth as mental maths and basic literacy.

What the author of this piece, Hilary Wilce, suggests as the answer to that dilemma is a compromise. Some home schooling, and some regular schooling.

Look west and you will find a primary school in Devon that takes one child in for two days a week, and another for three, under an agreement with their parents that the rest of the children's education will be at home. The head's view is that half a week in school is better than none, and that it works if everyone co-operates.

But, as any home schoolers reading this will not need to be told, it is precisely the "socialisation" offered by many schools that they are often anxious to avoid. The kinder, gentler rhythms of family life are not merely preferred on narrowly education grounds, but precisely because it provides a superior sort of socialisation, in the form of a more gradual easing of children in to the wider world.

Consider this article which today's Independent also carries:

Children as young as four are being traumatised by a regime of formal school instruction in the Three Rs that has turned early learning into a straitjacket, teachers said yesterday.

Delegates at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' conference in Blackpool said children, especially boys, became disruptive when starting maths and English lessons at too young an age. They were not ready to accept regimented lessons at four.

They called for the formal school starting age to be put back to six, as it is in most European countries.

The central point of this piece, alluded to in that last quoted sentence, concerns an old argument about when formal schooling should begin. From what I've heard and read, the continentals do this better, as this piece says. They provide a softer social landing for children in the transition between home and school.

But what the piece also illustrates is just one of the many ways in which a school can be deeply unsatisfactory, and thus home schooling loom larger as a preferred option. Here we have a new kind of bad British school, in the form of the examinationally neurotic school, which straps little tots to desks two years too soon so that they can get ahead in the exam race and hopefully stay ahead. All that actually happens is that their socialisation is messed up, in other words it is exactly where schools are supposed to be superior to home schooling that such regular schools actually fall down.

The more familiar form in which regular school "socialisation" is so often found wanting is that schools are too full of bullying not, as in the above case, by teachers of tiny pupils, but of pupils (and teachers) by other pupils. There is a huge national debate in Britain, which will never end because what it debates shows no sign of ending.

This Guardian article puts a new slant on this familiar theme by talking of the nastiness often inflicted by teachers on one another:

More than half of teachers and lecturers are being bullied by their colleagues or the parents of their students, a survey revealed today.

Responses to a questionnaire from 2,000 members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers showed a "grim picture of isolation and intimidation" in schools and colleges, the union said.

That just may be somewhat of an exaggeration, but it makes the point yet again that many schools are, precisely in their "socialisation" effects, deeply unsatisfactory places.

I'm struggling with the appearance of my two blogs just now (here's the other), to say nothing of my website (which is so embarrassing I refuse even to link to it), and a friend has just told me about w3schools.com, which is dedicated to turning people like me into people like most of you.

Until now my only method for making headway as an internet operator has been to morally blackmail any www-fluent friends I can inveigle into my www-web. This only gets you so far. Sooner or later you need to know something of what you are doing. Now one of the moral blackmailees (who runs this blog himself) may have given me the vital piece of information, which is where to get a whole lot more of it, for myself.

The site gives me confidence, which is important in a teacher, is it not? I just have the sense that what I am being told is true, and important, and complete, and worth learning, and arranged in a way that is going to work and is accordingly going to be worth persevering with. The thing has authority, more than many human teachers I've known.

By the nature of what is being taught, I able to do and am being made to do that which I want to learn to do. I am not merely being informed about the skills I seek, I am practising them, an important distinction I think you will agree. I get to see, at once, the consequences of what I am doing. I have the main page open, where the instruction is to be found, another window where I am typing commands, and a third where the visual consequences of my commands are almost instantaneously displayed.

And unlike with the usual sort of human teacher, who insists on attendance in his classroom, there is no upper limit to the number of pupils that w3school.com can handle, every one of us at our own pace.

As I say it's very early days, but so far so good. I'm impressed.

In an earlier posting here I made the guess that the reason why English children now seem to be doing quite well at reading is that they are making headway because of their parents, but despite their schooling.

Natalie Solent took exception:

Brian's Education Blog comments in detail on the surprising success of British children in international reading tests, reported in the story a few posts down. He thinks credit is due the parents. This is undoubtedly true, but it's not just them. I think Brian does not realise the extent to which "Look and Say" is very much on the retreat even in schools. At the moment I think that the State orthodox system of how to teach reading is a fairly good system; it has been pretty good for the last five years or so.

Well, I did say I was only guessing.. Neverthelss, it is no fun to have one's speculations, however speculative, so publicly corrected.

I acquired many of my prejudices about literacy matters from reading such things as the output of the Reading Reform Foundation. The people associated with that organisation have a very different view of the efficacy of British state literacy teaching to that expressed by Natalie. What I needed was for them to join in the argument, so that I could try to confront them with one another. Is Natalie right that literacy teaching has got quite a bit better? Or are the RRF corner right to feel frustrated that things are still not being done right?

At which point two commenters on my original posting materialised through the magic of the Internet, Vicki Lynch and Debbie Hepplewhite, Debbie being the editor of the RRF newsletter, no less. I would have been delighted by such commenters at any time. That they should have come forward at the exact time when I was most hoping for exactly such people to do so was, I felt, little short of providential, and cheered my up greatly.

So, another guess to keep the discussion going, which is my attempt to reconcile the two points of view which on the face of it we can only choose between or inflict a crude compromise upon. Here's my revised guess as to what is happening in the teaching of literacy in Britain.

It hinges upon whether literacy teaching is a matter of degree or an absolute right-or-wrong matter. Are there literacy teachers who are hopelessly bad, pretty bad, okay, quite good, very good and excellent? Or is it simply a matter of doing it either rightly, or wrongly, with no half measures?

The RRF give off the vibe that you either do it right, or forget it, you are part of the problem.

I surmise that for the vulnerable minority of children, the ones who, if not taught really well are doomed to permanent confusion, not as bad as it was is not good enough. But for the lucky majority who, maybe with parental help, or maybe just because they are smart, make sense of the now improved clues that swirl around them, and, to use a frequently used metaphor from the world of literacy teaching, they crack it. They put enough of the pieces of the puzzle together to do better than children who are taught in a wholly confusing way. For the majority, I surmise, the government's half-baked and half-hearted embrace of phonetics as "part of the mix" and "one of the many approaches that can work" has been an improvement. Which explains Natalie Solent's attitude.

And this same half-hearted embrace exasperates the RRF people, because, dammit, why not do things completely right, in a way that almost all children can benefit from? In that sense the RRF people are right. Is the literacy teaching glass half full, or simply not nearly full, like a fraudulent pint in a pub? Take your pick.

That's my best second guess. I hope there are further reactions, and thanks to all those who have reacted so far.

I have a longer posting to put up Real Soon Now, but I don't want to rush it, so in the meantime here's a quicky, in the form of news that a private sector in examinations may be nearer than most people think.

The public examination and testing system in England and Wales is under such strain that it is close to breakdown, according to a report from MPs due to be published today.

Youngsters also suffer unacceptable pressures from constant testing, according to the investigation into A-level standards which will be released by the influential Commons education committee.

The report urges ministers not to introduce changes to the secondary school exam system for change's sake, and to proceed warily with plans to replace A-levels with the more challenging baccalaureate exam.

It wants schools to do more internal testing themselves in more informal situations, and warns that the shortage of markers this year is likely to be a major problem despite moves to improve the situation, such as giving teachers time off school to mark.

Etcetera etcetera. As other bloggers with lives to get on with say: read all of it.

Inspired by the amazing Honda "one take" advert, I googled "Honda" and came across ASIMO, the Honda humanoid robot.

As I have already said here, to near universal derision, there is an educational revolution embodied in mechanical beasties like these. Kids like them, and will – after a few decades of tweaking have gone by – be willing to learn from them. I mean, this was how the Tellytubbies operated. They were human, and they had TV sets in their stomachs to reinforce the various ideas they wanted to communicated.

Last time I tried to say stuff like this, commenters sneered. Horrible. Won't work. Too difficult. The parents won't allow it. Or maybe that was just people I talked to, I can't really remember.

Well, I don't care. I say it's the future. Not all of it, just a rather interesting aspect of it.

Like Natalie Solent (blogger archiving buggered blah blah scroll down to April 10 2.51pm) I am intrigued by this in the electric Indy the day before yesterday, which says that English children are doing really quite well at literacy, compared to children from other countries.

Children in English primary schools are among the world's best readers, although they spend more time watching television or playing computer games than their peers in most other countries.

A survey of reading standards of pupils aged nine and ten in 35 countries put the English in third place, beaten only by those in Sweden and the Netherlands.

Two immediate responses: Wow! and: Why? Aren't English schools supposed to be all over the place literacy-wise? That's certainly what I've been saying here.

What follows is only guesswork, but for what it is worth, here is my guess, at least concerning where to look for an answer about what is going on here.

The more I study literacy, the more I am convinced of the vital, pivotal, crucial role of parents. When it comes to teaching nuclear physics or brain surgery or medieval French, no good schools means no good students, but the lower down the education tree you go, the more parents can and do contribute. Although even at the very top they make a big difference, by pushing their kids to learn things that they themselves may not understand.

Suppose your kids are being "taught" at a "look and say" dominated school. Suppose, that is to say, they are being mis-taught, in a way that, uncorrected, would slow them down horribly and might well make them dyslexic. What do you do? Complain? That would almost certainly do nothing except make enemies of your child's teachers. Send them to another school? Home school them, perhaps? Maybe, but these are horribly big and disruptive procedures. The sensible thing to do, and if I ever have kids it is quite possible that this is what I and/or mumwill do, is teach them literacy yourself, for about a quarter of an hour per day, probably making use of the reading material that the school is supplying.

The Anglo-Saxon world has been fraught with rows about literacy teaching, and this is because the state of official literacy teaching in the Anglo-Saxon world has been uniquely chaotic, uniquely deranged by look-and-say methods. It's another big, big question why that is, but my theory is that because English spelling is so all over the place compared to most other spellings, just giving up on phonetic spelling is, although horribly damaging, a more tempting error IN Angl-Saxonia than elsewhere.

But if that's true, what is England doing right? How come we came third in that survey, rather than twenty-third or thirty-third?

Well, something else that has happened in the Anglo-Saxon world is that there has been a ferocious counter-revolution in response to look-and-say. Organisations like the Reading Reform Foundation, already referred to here on several occasions, most recently in this posting, have lambasted the educational establishment, screaming at them and begging at them to mend their ways.

Most of this screaming and begging has failed, if by success you mean beating sense into teachers, and into the Men from the Ministry. The new "national literacy strategy" is and remains a shambles. Things are improving slowly, but nothing like fast enough to explain England getting a literacy bronz medal.

But what if, although the RRFers have mostly failed to spread enlightenment to teachers, they have succeeded in spreading enlightenment, if not to all parents, at least to a great many of them?

Plus, maybe you do have to give the government some credit here. They haven't improved literacy teaching very much, but they have at least made a great fuss of the matter - "national literacy hour" and so forth, to the point where parents are noticing, and, unlike most of the teaching profession, they are now applying their commonsense to the matter of teaching their own children.

And that's not even to mention the explosion in private tutoring that is now occurring. This too is, of course, parent driven.

Because of their failure to straighten out most of the teachers, I have tended to regard the RRF and their ilk as, although right about reading and writing, inept about politics, and I think that's true. But what I think this survey may be picking up is that when it comes to simply spreading their ideas among regular people, the RRFers may have started to win a huge victory. Thanks to them, and allies of them like, if I may say so, me, parents all over the English speaking world are now giving a few minutes a day to teaching their kids letters and sounds, and maybe buying "synthetic phonics" videos, and then later helping their kids with their homework in a way that actually helps. And this may now be adding up to a huge educational success story. And if the teachers take the credit for all this, well, so what? The important thing, from the parental point of view, is to get the job done.

There is much talk from people like me about the "educational private sector", by which I mean alternative schools. But by far the biggest educational private sector is the home.

The newspaper story I've been quoting from makes much of exactly how much time children spend watching TV. If they spend all night, they don't learn literacy skills well. If they watch quite a lot, but not all night, they do much better. The implication is that this may throw some light on the educational value or lack of it of TV.

I think what it throws light on is the differences between some parents and otehrs. It doesn't take long to teach literacy, provided you do it approximately right. The big difference is between doing a bit per day (or so), and not doing any. The TV findings, I think, point to that difference. TV all the time kids are being raised as near barbarians, by near barbarian parents. TV some of the time means a much happier story.

If the story that I'm telling, about parental educational input, is right, it would also make sense of another finding that literacy surveys like this one always find:

The report, by the National Foundation for Educational Research, also confirmed the findings of a recent study that the gap between the highest and lowest performers was greater in England than in most countries.

… my take on that being that parental input is more important in England, where official literacy teaching is so bad and where the rows about this have been so loud, than elsewhere.

As I often say at the end of my more speculative blog-postings: I don't know, but it makes sense to me.

The British government is going to start up a new TV channel devoted to teachers and teaching, presumably in order to recruit more teachers.

The usual story put out by all who preside over failing policies, in this case the policy of trying to contrive more and more effective state teachers, is that "the message isn't getting across". But usually the message is getting across only too well. People just don't agree with it.

Who among us does not know that the British government is desperate to get more good people to go into state teaching, and once in, to stay in? So why don't we become state teachers? Because we don't want to, is why.

This new TV channel will cost quite a lot, and merely publicise the government's policy failures, either by being putrescent propaganda which fools nobody, or by telling the truth. Either way it will be an embarrassment.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (on page 222 of my 2002 BCA/Penguin paperback edition) says this, of schooling:

Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.

The central point Pinker is trying to make here is a true one. Stick a clutch of babies on a desert island with lots of food and drink readily available, and come back in ten years time. By then they will have their own language, crude yet effective, and they'll be speaking it fluently and grammatically. What they will not be doing is reading or writing in it, because that is not "natural".

But there is more to human nature than cognitive skills, as Pinker tells us at length, elsewhere in this same book. It is in the nature of children – little children especially – to pay attention to adults and to copy them and to learn from them and even to hero worship them, their parents especially of course. It is in the nature of children to tune in to the culture around them. If their model adults and their wider culture includes arguments and propaganda in favour of learning to read and write, and help to do these things, then they'll pitch into such tasks – naturally. Even though these tasks are, in another sense, not "natural" at all.

To put it another way, the artificiality that a complicated mind makes possible is a natural part of being a human. A skyscraper is as much a natural phenomenon as a beaver dam.

And all of that means that going to "school" is only one of several ways to learn to read and write, and not necessarily the best one by any means. Especially when you consider how bad at plain old teaching so many schools are these days.

As lars says in his comment on this:

There are children who learn to read without lessons. Surrounded by a world with words everywhere, where people get around by reading signs and know what to buy by reading the labels on packages and where the information from the words on the video games helps to play the game and where people enjoy reading books and newspapers and magazines, learning to read as one is interested in learning it happens. Having someone to read things to them, when they can't read it for their self (books, games etc), to ask if this letter makes what sound, to think up and play games about letters/words with when the interest is there- helping a child learn in ways that are interesting to them- I think that is the way to 'teach' reading. Though, I don't think of it as 'teaching'- that seems like a concept laden with authority that can get in the way of learning. I think of it as helping to learn.

Indeed.

But let's give Pinker the benefit of the doubt, and accept first, that he's not really thinking about the home-schooling, home-learning, school-schooling debate. Let's allow him an elastic meaning to "going to school", and agree that if by learning to read and write "naturally", we mean children learning these things without anyone or anything laying them in front of them or making good noises about them, then indeed, children do indeed have to "go to school".

But if that's what is meant by "school", then there is more than one way to school your child, and your local school may be one of the worst.

My understanding of literacy teaching is that children who depend only on their school to learn literacy skills are right away at a near crippling disadvantage.

I did a piece yesterday on Samizdata about the piece I did here about the training methods used by the British Army. And a comment has appeared there of just the sort I was hoping for, from "gearweasle", whoever he might be.

EDIP, Explain, Demonstrate, Imitate, Practice: another child of WWI 's Charles R. (Skipper) Allen's four step training method for training shipyard workers in the United States, and revamped in WWII by AT&T's Michael J. Kane (working for the US's Training Within Industry program).

Kane's revamped method was Allen's four step method expanded to seven steps:

1. Show workers how to do it.
2. Explain key points, tricks, knacks
3. Let them watch you do it again.
4. Let them do the simple parts of the job.
5. Help them do the whole job.
6. Let them do the whole job -- but watch them.
7. Put them on their own.

Anyway, the USA in 1940 had just realized it needed to begin production on a massive scale, and was going to have to train millions of people in war work, while losing millions of trained people to the armed services.

Training Within Industry, an advisory service formed by the National Defense Advisory Commission, developed eventually three training programs (JIT, Job Instructor Training; JM, Job Methods; and JR, Job Relations), which was well written about by Bird McCord in: Chapter 32: Job Instruction, in Training and Development Handbook 2nd Edition – a guide to human resource development, edited by Robert L. Craig, sponsored by the American Society for Training and Development, ISBN 0-07-013350-6.

The easy read of the "J" Programs is the 1943 Reader's Digest (US editions, sorry) series of three articles over the months of September, October, and November. Gives good feel for "how they did it", that is, how they trained the trainers to train the people who did the jobs, and how to train them how to look at the jobs.

And for a fascinating overview of what it meant to conceive and start up these gigantic coordinated industries – just for airpower – read General Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold's Global Mission. Wowser.

Postscript. Come to think of it, EDIP is only the JIT portion of the "J" Programs; they also worked on worker relations (Job Relations), and motion economy training (Job Methods).

Well, I don't know how many of us will be doing all that homework, but you do get a sense of the sheer power of the USA and its culture from that. I do, anyway. It may all sound rather impersonal ("human resource" development, etc.), but it's all part of the American dream. If they treat you as a human resource, they are at least treating you as human, which for a lot of people then was a big step in the right direction.

There has been argument here already about whether mere "training" has anything very much to do with the profundities that constitute "education". I say that training has a lot to do with education.

Think about how much is got across in the "training" that the gearweasle man describes. I don't think these guys (and girls) only learned how to fly (or build) an airplane, or to wire up a telephone exchange. I think they learned a whole attitude, a whole new confidence in their own power to get things done, things in general.

Okay, it all sounds a bit Big Businessy, in a bad way (in bed with the Government) as well as a good way (big because so well organised). But these guys were the people who took the USA from the Great Depression, through World War 2, to the deadlock in the Cold War that the next generation was able to turn into another huge win. And now we are witnessing this latest Iraq operation, which, whatever you think of its wisdom or moral justification, has been a miracle of coordinated human skill and savvy such as the world seldom witnesses.

In early February Julius Blumfeld did a piece here about why he favours homeschooling for his children. Today, long after it would be noticed by anybody in the normal course of events, this very scary comment was attached to Julius's piece, from one Moira Rogow. I want, as they say in California, to share it with you.

My husband and I never (and I mean NEVER!) thought of home-schooling our kids, but I used to threaten them with homeschooling from time to time and it really put 'the fear of God into them' as they say. We were in no position to follow up on this threat, but the kids didn't know and the thought of being stuck at home with one of us instead of at school often helped 'bring them around'.

I didn't remember that until I read your blog!

Ah, happy days.

It kind of puts a new slant on the relative attractions of staying at home or going to school, doesn't it?

I don't know what this story proves …

It is time to get "completely ruthless" and "take out" headteachers who are not up to the job of raising standards in their schools, the education secretary, Charles Clarke, said yesterday.

Far too many comprehensives were not doing as well as they should, he insisted, urging local education authorities and school governors to "take out" incompetent heads as soon as possible.

Mr Clarke spoke not just of schools in urban parts of England, but also of outwardly successful schools that were content to coast along. "I don't think you can say [the problem] is particularly the cities or particularly the areas of poverty, or whatever, I don't think that's true. In fact, I think some of the more pernicious complacencies are in schools which are relatively OK, in areas where they are relatively unchallenged but they don't do well enough for their children," he said.

"You've got this big, big group in the middle of schools who feel they are OK, but I'm not certain that they are driving forward as hard as they need to."

Even though the number the number of seriously incompetent heads was small, Mr Clarke stressed, they could not be allowed to remain in post. "Where the issue is the head's the problem, they must not be allowed just to go along."

... but what I think it proves – well, illustrates – is that New Labour education policy is starting to become seriously unhinged. Prescottised you might say. It has entered its manic, neurotic phase. Normal, patient, sensible, quiet-voiced policies have all failed, or at any rate have not achieved the miracles promised, and are only making the teachers angry and cynical, and neurotic themselves. So now, out comes the ministerial Big Stick, the Chopper. Mr Clarke will Get Tough, Sort Things Out. He will, that is to say, shout more frequently.

The result will merely be that many schools that are now doing an okay job – schools which are now "outwardly successful" – will also now start to descend into neuroticism.

Some people, who favour policies that are the opposite of what Mr Clarke wants, will use his latest outburst to excuse the sacking of Head Teachers who are actually doing quite a good job.

It's just the same mess only louder. I can't remember when it was exactly, but not so long ago the Ministry of Education or whatever it's now called – Department of (for?) Education and Training? – was saying that Head Teachers needed more autonomy, freedom of action, etc. etc. Now they are to have freedom of action – except that if Mr Clarke doesn't like them, he might try to have them fired.

But more portentously, it's the atmosphere, the tone of voice, the sense that the educational equivalent of Sir Humphrey is now starting to exchange meaningful looks with his colleagues when the Minister has one of his rants. That's what must be worrying everyone.

It could be that the newspaper stories which I rely on to learn about all these various initiatives (I don't read the original press releases – maybe I should, God help me) exaggerate the drama of these things. But I thought these people were supposed to be Masters of Spin. Surely if they wanted a more low-key atmosphere, they could arrange it.

Well, of course, they can't. They have a command-and-control, Prussian model of education policy. Prussianism can't improve education policy any more dramatically than it can improve education itself. When their Prussianism fails, these people are at a loss. Their job is to make things better and the spotlight is still trained on them, but they don't know what to do. It's enough to make anyone shout.

Julius Blumfeld passes on some grim news about home education in France.

Not quite hot off the press, but the latest edition of the Education Otherwise Newsletter contains an alarming account by Dr Amanda Petrie of the clamp-down on home education in France (and elsewhere in Europe). Apparently the law in France changed in 1999 with the passsing of a draconian new law. Since then, French home-educators have had to comply with specified curriculum requirements, registration is compulsory and a variety of "professionals" (including educational sociologists and psychologists) have a right of entry into the home. This is Dr. Petrie's account of the passage of the new legislation:

One of the French Members of the Assemble during the debate claimed that children who did not attend school were subject to the influence of sects and that the children were at risk of being marginalized and incapable of developing an independent spirit. When he finished his speech, the whole of the parliament erupted in lengthy applause.

This sort of thing sends shivers down my spine. As Britain prepares to sign up to an EU Constitution drafted by the French and the Germans (where home-ed is almost totally illegal), the need for vigilance by British home educators who enjoy relative freedom compared to their continental friends will become even greater.

Julius

There are some things that you can only learn how to do by doing them, and for me, teaching people to read is one of them. Try as I will, I just can't get the exact detail of what exactly is involved merely by reading things. The last time I witnessed reading and writing being well taught was when I learned to read and write myself. (For I was taught very well. My mother had picked up on this look-and-say nonsense almost as soon as it began, and she carefully chose good teachers for me and my siblings.)

I did a posting on Samizdata yesterday, based on the nonsense words in Ruth Miskin's Nonsense Word Test which is to be found in the latest issue, Number 50, of the Reading Reform Foundation's newsletter.

I played it for laughs, listing all the nonsense words themselves. My idea was to bring "synthetic phonics" to the attention of readers who otherwise might not bother with such stuff. And it happened. Many of the comments were about silly words in science fiction, rather than just comments about phonics, so that was definitely mission accomplished. I mean, that's why I put the posting on Samizdata rather than putting it here, where only education enthusiasts assemble.

Nevertheless, in the course of all the joking around, I attempted a description of what "synthetic phonics" actually is. This was me:

This means – warning: I may get this somewhat wrong – first learning what sounds are made by which letters and letter combinations, and then spelling out the entire word by spelling out each letter or letter combination. Something like that.

According to commenter Kevin Marks I did get it wrong. Answering another commenter who, like me, doesn't find it easy to learn from the RRF website itself what exactly "synthetic phonics" is, and who is wisely dubious of my sketch of the matter, Kevin said this:

There's a clear summary of the idea on the Phono-Graphix website.

Brian has it wrong. Words consist of sounds, and letters (or letter groups) are pictures of these sounds.

The first thing to learn is to break the words you speak into sounds, and then learn what symbols represent these sounds. English is hard because not only do we have multiple symbols for the same sound, but we also have overlap, where the same symbol can represent several different sounds.

Careful ordering of the teaching of these symbols can help children cope with the ambiguity, but you have to understand that the sounds are primary and the symbols secondary, not vice versa.

Yeah, okay, I did say "first", but all I meant was that you spell out words letter by letter before you do what I now do, which is recognise most of them straight away without having to spell them out. First of those two things. I was assuming you'd already done your phonic analysis of the spoken language. My understanding of the very first, first thing you do is simply get the kids in groups and make them chant the noises "eeeee!" "aye!" "oh!" "duh!", "chuh!", and so on. And no doubt that is somewhat wrong also, and if it is, then with luck someone (maybe Kevin again) will correct me, and Brian's Education will be pushed along some more.

But as I say, I want to learn how you actually do all this, and I don't think it will be something you can learn in forty five brisk minutes listening to a Powerpoint Presentation, although here is one matter where I suspect that a Powerpoint Presentation might be of some real help, what with the order in which you do things being so important.

At the very least I'd like to watch it being done by someone who I believe is doing it properly. Because of course the only reason this is such a fraught topic is that all over the world, "teachers" who regard themselves as experts at the teaching of reading and writing, ain't.

There was an email last weekend from a certain Simon Austin.

I notice that you run an education blog.

Correct.

Is this because you work in that sector?

No but I'd quite like to. My plan is to use this blog to learn lots about education, and thus get a better job than if I just trained and applied, and then got hurled into a room full of juvenile delinquents, which I think is a silly way to start, and a pretty silly thing to be doing at any time..

I am in the wonderful businesses of TV, music and media. Rights ownership to be precise.

I was wondering whether you could comment on the following since I would really love to get your opinion and ideas on this tricky subject:

1 How to attract better people into teaching in the first place, especially Maths, Technical & Science teachers.

2 How to attract people back into teaching once they have left.

3 How to attract professionals who wish to make a radical lifestyle change into
teaching.

4 How to positively change people's perceptions & pre-judgements (usually negative) about the profession.

5 How to improve the media's reporting of the sector to show it in a better light.

The reason that I ask these questions is because I am to make two TV series about these issues over the next two years in addition to all my other light entertainment and factual stuff. I wish to redress the teaching and education knocking that has taken place over he last three years by offering real solutions to these very real problems.

The difficulty that I have is that a lot of the knocking is quite well deserved.

I hope that you will have a few suggestions for me.

Well, not very many, and very few that I haven't done half to death here on several occasions. Here's part of the problem, from an education.guardian.co.uk story today.

Disruptive pupils, league tables, a lack of opportunities to renew their knowledge and budgetary "game playing" are preventing science teachers from fulfilling their capabilities, claims Save British Science, a pressure group aiming to improve the scientific health of the UK.

The organisation has been briefing MPs on the concerns of teachers ahead of a members' debate tomorrow into the state of science education in secondary schools.

The organisation claims that teachers cannot give full attention to their main role of educating and inspiring young people about science, engineering and mathematics, because they are wrapped up in layers of bureaucracy.

But if you believe that "bureaucracy should be got rid of", what control, if any, should there be on the activities of maths and science teachers?

One of the reasons why free market ideologists like me think as we do is that the market not only provides an arena of freedom, but also one of control. It supplies the alternative that is necessary if bureaucracy is to be done away with. In the market, maths teachers with their own ideas about how to do things can offer what they believe in, but if they get no takers, they'll have to change their ways or else stop. No forms need be filled in. No tyrant from London need impose "best practice" with a blizzard of questionaires. The teacher can just get on with teaching. All steps away from bureaucracy towards a free market in education are, other things being equal, to be welcomed.

But if the government is simply expected to hand over money to maths and science teachers without having any control whatsoever over how that money is being used or whether any good teaching is actually occurring, well, you can expect all you want, but it can't happen. The present horror, of bureaucrats out of all control, will merely be replaced by another horror: teachers out of all control.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am an admirer of the Kumon maths system. (I know less about Kumon English but am prejudiced in its favour based on what I've seen of the maths.) Kumon makes use not of brilliant teachers, but of a brilliant system, embodied in a mass of documents and procedures. In its way, Kumon is just as "bureaucratic" as the state system, in the sense that you either do it their way or they won't let you do it at all. The difference is that it works.

Maybe others can do better.

One of the creepiest meetings I have ever attended was a university management meeting concerning I can't for the life of me remember what, and nor for the life of me can I remember what I was doing there. What shook me was the appalling extent to which the ghastly prose of management-speak had taken over from the plainer and clearer English sort, such as I had always imagined Universities to favour. In the corner of politics that I inhabit, it is widely assumed that structuralism and post-modernism are now all the rage, and that it is that sort of decline that Universities are now suffering from. I suspect that managerialese may be a bigger problem.

In today's education.guardian.co.uk there's an article about the Open University, and about the changes unleashed upon it recently when they called in the management consultants.

The consultants were summoned because Geoff Peters, the pro-vice-chancellor in charge of strategy and planning, wanted to be sure that the OU's advertising and promotions were giving value for money. He chose a firm called Cognosis, run by former marketing executives from the drinks giant Diageo, partly because it had no experience of universities and could apply the perspective of the commercial world.

… Michael Laird, who led the Cognosis team, says Peters and his colleagues were "standing on a burning deck" and weren't really aware of the flames. …

The diagnosis from Cognosis was, essentially, that the OU was still behaving in the same old way while all around it was raging the higher education revolution of the 1990s. The OU was still taking a fortnight to respond to brochure inquiries and telling applicants for more popular courses to come back next year. In the outside world, burgeoning new universities were becoming more seductive and flexible and the government was pushing for half the population to go into higher education.

"The OU brand was still very much about lonely and dull distance learning," says Laird. "It was about hard work and worthiness and watching TV programmes at two in the morning which involved a bearded man in a kipper tie talking in a dull way about physics. And meanwhile there were new competitors - other universities doing distance learning and local part-time study.

I don't feel so uncomfortable about this article as you might suppose, given the first paragraph of this posting. I think that's because real management consultants aren't trying to destroy university education with barbarous verbiage; they are at least trying to help it along, with smart thinking. And anyway, the Open University is not anything like a regular university, and improving its "managerial logic" is no fundamental threat to its nature.

Even so, I was a bit startled by this:

The response to the Cognosis report has been a series of changes which Peters says has dramatically changed the culture of the OU. The supplier-driven, take-it-or-leave-it model which most universities have followed for 800 years is being replaced – to use the language of consultancy – by a focus on the customer in a competitive market.

To me the interesting thing is what all this says about traditional universities. They are dumping their 800 year old model, it would seem. I can hear the likes of Kenneth Minogue and Roger Scruton grinding their teeth.

I think what's happening here is that whereas our culture used to be one of a relatively small minority of educated people supervising a majority of toilers with the 3 Rs and little else by way of education, now we live in a world where, in a country like Britain, an actual majority has to learn how to think logically, and how to present and communicate logically coherent notions to others, and to the new workforce, which is computers and robots as well as the remaining few human robots. It is this reality that both the old universities and the new Open University are all responding to, as best they can. As with all big social changes there's grief and dirt as well as happiness and enlightenment, and much of grief is in the form of the pain to persons like Scruton and Minogue that comes from apparent grotesqueries like drink marketers telling university departments what is what.

And what's what is that if these New Workers are expected to do nothing but arse about in old-fashioned universities until they are nearly thirty, in addition to spending the best part of forty years being "retired" (that won't happen either, kids) we can kiss the British economy goodbye. I say, chuck most of the kids out of school as soon as the hormones kick in and they can't be doing with teachers and want to earn some money. And then, when the serious partying is calming down and they want to settle down again and make some career progress, entice them with TV ads for working smart as well as hard and doing something like an Open University degree or a distance learning programme run by some ex-normal university (which has now become mostly just another "open university").

While the universities slowly morph towards being internet-based factories for churning out New Workers able to give Powerpoint presentations, or to learn how to analyse a medical sample without disaster, where does that "supplier-driven take-it-or-leave-it" attitude go? What happens to institutions concerned more about the truth of the truth than about the number of student-customers they can sign up to study whatever the student-customer wants to study and damn the knowledge? What happens to that 800-year-old model?

The truth is that Truth was always, and will always remain, a minority enthusiasm. It won't expand vastly, but nor will it ever die. One of the sillier ideas behind "university" expansion has been that with it there should be a vast expansion in "scholarship", and in "research". This can't happen, and if you mean by research good research, it is not happening, not very much. Instead the uncompromising quest for truth and intellectual righteousness has for some decades now been quietly migrating towards industrial R&D departments and Think Tanks and to various other Post Grad Temples of Excellence, like the famed Centre for Advanced Studies at Princeton. The traditional universities are still deeply involved in all this, but they're now doing a lot else besides. And good luck to them.

More from March 2003