Does anyone read this blog regularly, but not this blog - Rational Parenting - regularly? I guess there must be some (and definitely vice versa of course). To those few I say, do make a point of reading this latest posting today, about the value both to parents and to children of parents having a network of friends. Quote:
… nobody needs support networks more than parents do.
So far so relatively obvious. But this is where it gets really good, I think.
But I wonder how many people think of the advantages to the children, of having extra adult friends around? Whether or not those adults want to be "babysitters", interaction between them and children can be beneficial on both sides, and lead to very satisfying and mutually educational friendships, with none of the baggage of the conventional parenting role. And it seems likely that children who get a chance to observe adult interaction, and listen in on adult conversation, and have their questions answered when they are interested enough to ask, are learning something very valuable indeed.If you tell people ideas verbally, they can pick them up rationally. If you demonstrate ideas in action, a whole lot of inexplicit extra material is added to the theory. This is what I think is conveyed by the expression, "Actions speak louder than words". So, better than just helping your child have all the friends he wants and solve the problems he finds with them in good ways, is also helping yourself to do the same and making sure your child knows about it and sees it in reality. There are things we can learn from watching people interact that we can't easily learn any other way.
As I say, really good stuff. Although me now being part of Alice's own network of friends, I am very biased.
BEdBlog readers may be interested to know that a large slice of the speech I heard the other night by Damian Green is now up and readable at education.guardian.co.uk. As some of us have already explained, the Adam Smith intro was a bit sneaky, but the guts of Green's talk was not half bad, by which I mean half good. And since the good half is what he is saying should now be done, that's good enough for me, given that this man is a front bench politician.
Sample quote:
But this process of centralisation has now gone much too far. The tide of centralisation in education policy which Jim Callaghan set off in 1976 is doing more harm than good. We need to spend the coming decades setting schools free, and giving more choice to everyone involved in education, from teachers to parents. This is certainly the central thread of Conservative policy-making. The key is to ensure that these new freedoms do not lead to another lapse in basic standards, and to do that we need a combination of simple but effective outside monitoring, and genuine parental choice.
But, spot the undeliberate horror. That's right: "… everyone involved in education, from teachers to parents." I remember gasping internally at that last Tuesday. What, the children aren't "involved" then?
The truth is that for the great bulk of the people at whom Green is aiming his rhetoric, the children are indeed not involved. They are to remain the object of a process, not people in their own right who are to have any influence over the process being done to them. The complaint of middle England is not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with process all these children-as-objects, merely that the processing should be done more efficiently. The freedom of mere children is a problem to be got around, rather than any sort of animating principle. Schools must make our kiddies stop wanting to be pop stars and footballers and should turn them instead into doctors and dentists and merchant bankers or, if all else fails, computer geeks. If they're too thick for any of that, at least keep them out of jail and stop them having babies too early and going off to live in caravans or squats or under bridges. That's the attitude. And I don't completely disagree by any means. I just think things could be so much better than that.
In Brianschool, the idea will be that what the children want to do, so long as it isn't criminally nasty, will be the starting-out axiom. Footballer? Fine. Pop star? Great, go to it. Which is why the thing will get very few customers to start with, or probably ever.
Just had an email from Junius:
I've just blogged about a matter that I think has potentially serious implications for freedom of expression in British universities.
Thank you Junius. His posting starts thus:
A report into Mona Baker's decision to sack Israelis from the editorial boards of journals she edits has recommended that British universities should take on extensive powers to regulate the external activities of their staff. As regular readers know, I thought Mona Baker's actions were wrong, repellent and stupid, but this rings alarm bells ...
I won't quote further. Go there to read more.
However, a more general point about BEdBlog. I am especially interested in focussing on British stories, and, more generally, and no disrespect to that fine country intended, non-USA stories. (You will note that my first Official Guest Writer – and isn't he doing well? – is a fellow Brit.) This is not me dissing the USA, merely a belief in the value of the division of labour. If I wanted to, I could keep this blog plenty full enough by doing nothing but piggy-back stories from the USA. Often I can't resist joining in on a USA story, and I'm certainly not saying that I'll never do that. But a better service to the blogosphere in general, and to the USA's edu-blogger's (and to their readers, linked to here), is to bring British stories to their attention, or, as in this case, help to do that by adding my voice to a hubbub someone else is busy creating. Presumably I wasn't the only person Junius emailed. If I was, all the more reason to respond here.
Besides which, Britain is where I live. I like the place. It's where I am being educated, and am educating from. Nothing wrong with being patriotic about your own little corner of the world. As I often say about another blog I also occasionally write for, Transport Blog: see the world in a grain of sand …
An email has flooded in, from Andrew Wood, which I assume he won't mind me reproducing.
Dear Brian,I quite often read your blogs, and generally enjoy them.
Very sporting of you, my dear chap. I almost always enjoy your emails, so much so that I often read them.
I was interested to read this remark in your latest education blog: "At the beginning of his lecture, Green quoted Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in support of his support for the principle of state-funded education, and revealed a gaping hole in this alleged support which I didn't previously know about."I wonder if anyone has drawn your attention to this essay by David (son of Milton) Friedman where he makes a similar remark.
Incidentally, Friedman says on his web page that he sends his children to a school where attendance at lessons is strictly voluntary and the children have a large say in how the school is run. I think it would be worth inviting him to write a piece for you about this school and how well he thinks it works. I'd certainly be interested to read it.
Best wishes,
Andy
Joking aside, thanks very much Andy. I'm terrible at acting on good suggestions like this, so don't hold your breath. I merely record here how extremely delighted I would be if David Friedman (whom I greatly admire and enjoy reading) were to hear by psychic emanation that such a piece of writing would be welcome, and were to supply such a piece. So, someone emanate him please.
Here's DF's first paragraph:
It is often said that Adam Smith, despite his general belief in Laissez-faire, made an exception for education. That is not entirely true. In the course of a lengthy and interesting discussion, Smith argues both that education is a legitimate government function, at least in some societies, and that it is a function which governments perform very badly. His conclusion is that while it is legitimate for government to subsidize education, it may be more prudent to leave education entirely private.
To expand a little on what Damian Green (see below) said, what Green said was that Adam Smith supported the principle of state provided education "for a very small expense", although I don't know if those were Smith's words or merely Green's. The latter I suspect, although he made it sound like the former. But the system of state funded education that Green then went on to support, and in his imagination only to tinker with somewhat, can hardly be described as involving only a "very small" expense.
And DF is quite right. If you actually read what Smith thought about education, you find that he actually had an extremely sceptical attitude toward state provision or payment, and, unlike later "liberals", strongly supported fee-paying. See also this essay by the late great E.G. West. It's only an acrobat file I'm afraid, but it is worth printing out and reading in full. I did the former last night and am now about half way through doing the latter. Expect further bloggage here about that.
I've just got back from attending a lecture entitled "Setting Schools Free" organised by the Adam Smith Institute and given by Damian Green, the Shadow Education Secretary, i.e. the Conservative opposition chief complainer about education. It was given within walking distance of where I live and was just about worth the walk, if only to give me something to write about here.
Green said that there is too much state central control of Britain's state schools. The government should stay in the business of funding education, but should reduce its central control, and instead allow parental control to increase and school managerial autonomy to increase with it. Instead of schools being disciplined by a stream of central diktats from the Department of Education they should be disciplined by the fear of competition from other schools which parents might prefer.
The essential change Green proposed is that consortia of teachers, financiers, whoever, should be allowed to set up new schools and compete with the existing ones. The money would follow the choices made by the parents. Education vouchers without the name "education vouchers" attached to it all, in other words.
The government would still be deciding what a school is, and under mild cross-examination from the floor it turned out that Green's understanding of that is probably very different from what the readers of this would like it to be. Hundreds of children all being polite and studious, as in a "good" school now. A bit of hippy-ness would have to be tolerated here and there for the sake of school autonomy. A primary school would need to have a minimum of about fifty children at it. See Holland for the sort of rules he favours.
Damian Green is a new name to me. Based on a few minutes googling during which I encountered the initials "TRG" (which stand for "Tory Reform Group"), it would appear that he is a member of the "wet" wing, the "one nation" wing of the Conservative Party, and accordingly I probably have Conservative acquaintances who regard this man as the spawn of Satan, for being insufficiently rabid in his support for the free market. For being, that is to say, not as rabid in his support for the free market as, to name someone totally at random, me. And indeed I favour an educational world far different from the one that he wants to set about contriving. Professor Dennis O'Keeffe made a little speech from the floor favouring a much more free market approach, from which Green of course deftly distanced himself.
But I can't get very worked up about this fact. It was often the case during the Thatcher years that "wet" cabinet ministers were better at moving towards a free market in whatever it was they were dealing with than were their more overtly ideological and "Thatcherite" rivals, not least because a self-proclaimed Thatcherite ideologist alerted the opposition to the threat being posed, whereas a wet could just get on with things more quietly, while emitting bromidic (is that a word? – it is now) speeches such as the one I've just been listening to. In practice, one step in the right direction is the most that you can ever hope for from these people, and whatever future steps they once dreamed of taking when they were starting their climb up the greasy pole really don't matter that much.
At the beginning of his lecture, Green quoted Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in support of his support for the principle of state-funded education, and revealed a gaping hole in this alleged support which I didn't previously know about. But I'll deal with that another time.
Not a word was breathed about home education, home schooling, or any such radicalism, which I also cannot find it in me to regret. Ask a man like Green about all that and you never know what might come out of his mouth, and once he's said it, he might then want to tbe consistent.
More from Julius Blumfeld, who, by the way, is happy to receive whatever email anyone wants to send him here.
The 2002 Education Act is a classic of its kind. Two hundred and seventeen sections and twenty two schedules of new rules and regulations to gladden the hearts of officials and teaching unions. And tucked in amongst that lot is a particularly worrying section entitled "Independent School Standards".
You might have thought that parents who send their children to private schools are hardly in need of "protection" from the State. After all, they're paying thousands of pounds a year to give their children the best possible start in life. Surely they can be relied upon to spot bad schools a mile off? Apparently not. The Government has decided that there is a loophole in the law and that it is time to regulate “the quality of education provided at independent schools” and “the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils at independent schools”.
The idea that the Government is better than parents at judging the quality of their children’s education is silly. But the idea that the Government is going to regulate ”the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development” of children strikes me as downright Orwellian.
The implications for home educators are worrying. The Act defines a “school” as any place where five or more children receive full time education. So if two families with three children apiece get together to teach their children, the Act will apply and the parents will have to satisfy various officials that the children’s spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is up to scratch.
It makes me wonder what would happen if a few hard-line libertarian parents and teachers got together and set up a little school. What if the children were taught that the Government has no business banning drugs, that the modern State is a criminal enterprise and that taxation is theft? My guess is that under the 2002 Education Act, they wouldn’t last five minutes.
Julius Blumfeld
I keep trying to think of profound things to say about the British government's education policies, but nothing about these policies seems very profound to me. Mildly harmful, but not profound. A relentless drizzle of initiatives. Threats to get rid of silly exams. Threats to introduce different and slightly sillier exams. Policies to allow educational organisations to do new things, like charge higher fees to the people they are teaching, but combined with regulations to ensure that the institutions thus blessed also let in an appropriately diverse intake of students. Fuss, fuss, fuss. Decline, but masked by constant fiddling with the instruments that might have registered decline more clearly. Ever more centralised control by people who have no great optimism about what it might achieve, but who simply don't know what else to do. The British Government doing its thing, in other words.
What effect is our new education minister, Charles Clarke MP, having on British education? Much the same as all his recent predecessors, it seems to me.
From where I sit, by far the most striking thing about this man is the remarkable appearance of his ears, which stick out sideways and make him look like an elephant. This is the best picture of this man I could find, at his own website. (I was reminded of all this by seeing Mr Clarke being impersonated on TV this evening by Rory Bremner.)
I'd be delighted to read opinions about this man and his potential impact upon British education which are more serious than that. If I arrive at any such opinions myself, I'll let you all know.
I will now exploit the ambiguity of my blog's title by emphasising the Brian's Education aspect of it.
I need to understand better than I do what is meant by the words "permalink" and "trackback". I do links to other blogs by just mousing around until I find something that seems like a link, and then later I check that this does indeed take my readers to the posting I'm referring to. But is there a system that automatically tells the linkee that this has happened? I get e-mails about how people have linked to me, sometimes. How does all that work? On this blog I have the time of the posting, which seems to be a link of some kind, and then a trackback, but no permalink. Is the time bit the permalink but called something different here. And what is a trackback?
You can tell that other people did all the setting up of this, can't you? I once asked Perry de Havilland of Samizdata about this stuff but couldn't understand his answer, so I thought I'd try you lot.
Someone, please educate me. Thanks in advance for any comments.
But please don't anyone say that it's up to me to discover it all for myself, and that your job is merely to enable me to do this.
I haven't seen any reference on any home-education friendly blogs to this story (School's out for ever – September 11 2002) and now earlier this week this story (Home truths – January 22 2003) for the Guardian by home-educator Alice Douglas. This may be because I am several links short of a blog when it comes to keeping up with absolutely everything of relevance to my blog. I mean, a day or two ago the TV news people were saying that what the government was saying about education that day – something to do with reducing the size of the National Curriculum (I think it should be reduced to no National Curriculum at all) – was its most important education policy announcement since the death of the dinosaurs. Did I refer to any of that here? I don't recall doing so.
So, in case you missed these Alice Douglas pieces, well, now's your chance to correct that. Unlike a government policy announcement they tell a particular story accurately (presumably). Ms Douglas certainly has some big ideas about education and what it ought to consist of, but unlike the government, she's not trying to force them on anyone else. She's just doing the best she can for her own two kids.
Who's names, by the way, are Tybalt and Hero. Tybalt is a character in Romeo and Juliet and Hero is a lady character in Much Ado About Nothing, and the theatricality of these names is presumably because of Ms Douglas herself being an actress. I wonder what the folks at Rational Parenting think about children being given somewhat eccentric names like these. The two vets in All Creatures Great and Small, Siegfried and Tristan, also spring to mind in this connection. Personally I'm for this kind of thing. It certainly makes doing a personal search on the internet for all references to yourself a lot easier if you are called Tybalt, rather than John or Phil or Simon, followed by something equally mundane. (I love that I'm the only Brian Micklethwait on this planet that I know of. No need for me to be called Mercutio.) And check out the Dad, by the way. He sounds like quite a character.
I like what Ms. Douglas says about the first few years of regular education that most people in Britain endure:
In this country, we start school younger than almost anywhere in the world. Legally, we don't have to enrol our children until they are five, but in order to secure a place it is often necessary to attend from the age of three. Within three months, though, children who begin at five have not only caught up, but even overtaken early starters. In many northern European countries, education doesn't start until seven. When Hero reaches that age, if she is keen to try school or I feel that I am not meeting her needs, we might think again.
That was last September. Now it's colder:
Those long, lazy summer days when the zip wire, trampoline and climbing frame were in full use as friends and their children converged at our place are just a distant memory. Freedom vanished as work and school took over and Hero's friends evaporated into classrooms while we questioned whether reading in bed with tea and toast until way too late counted as schooling. Suddenly, we were on our own.
At the end of her piece there's a hint of the Conservatives one day adding their little pennyworth of misery to this whole story, in the form of "government help" for home-educators.
I also wonder how we will afford it all. At the Conservative party conference, the shadow education secretary Damian Green gave one of those opposition pledges to fund alternative methods of educating children. His terminology was typically evasive but seemed to suggest that they would be willing to pay parents wishing to home-educate, which is the norm in many other countries. But such a measure hardly seems likely in the near future.
I'm sure I hope not. Once they start paying you, then repeat after me what part of the male anatomy they have you by. Does anyone know where these other countries are where paying parents to home-educate is the norm?
Oh well. The important thing here is that the Guardian is a great British national institution, and home-education, home-schooling and all that is slowly but surely becoming a thing that all Guardian readers have heard of, and which many of them will, in future years, consider. It reminds me of natural childbirth. First it was a few freaks, then a few more freaks, now it's a standard parenting option.
But that stuff about government help gives you a clue about what the government may end up doing about all this. Maybe it will always be allowed, but it will only be allowed if it is done the way the Guardian and its readers say that it must be done.
Article by Alice Thomson in the Telegraph. Claims (I have no way of knowing whether it is true or not) that private schools in the UK will, when confronted with non-academic pupils, seek to find things that they can excel at. She contrasts this with the state approach in the same situation which is to prevent anyone from succeeding.
Also includes the claim that state education (on a per child basis) is now only fractionally less expensive than the private sector. Again, I have no way of knowing whether it is true or not but it is pretty devastating stuff if it is.
Friedrich Bowhard put up an outstandingly interesting piece yesterday, about a second-career maths teacher trying to make sense of the mismatch between what they teach teachers to do, and what teachers do do.
It's a classic illustration of the folly of trying to apply Theory Y thinking (see the post immediately below this one, here) to an institution that is still run on Theory X lines. The pupils have to attend, and have to be in class whether they want to be there or not, and must be badgered into learning whether they want to learn what they're being taught or not. At least in a factory that aspires to become Theory Y people are being paid to be there, and agree to be there even if they don't always like it much. But this school is for many of its inmates only a very thinly disguised prison. Theory Y can't work in a place run that way.
Friedrich's teacher is especially good on the nuances of desk arrangement, and of the "discovery" method as applied to the learning of maths. (I intend to say a lot more about that, you may depend upon it.)
As is always the case with such mismatches between the philosophy being aspired to and organisational reality, the only time when things work properly is outside the official timetable periods. The teacher has to do things in a Theory X way during classes if all hell is not to break loose, but he also runs an unofficial lunch-hour period (attendance strictly voluntary) where a Theory Y atmosphere really starts to take hold.
This reminded me of a story told by Waterman (again see below) about a starting-out young factory manager who came to realise that the only time the factory he had been put in charge of worked properly was at the weekend. Why? Because at the weekend, he didn't "manage" it (in a Theory X way). It managed itself (in a Theory Y way). And of course it managed much better.
One of the great managerial fashions of the eighties was the book In Search of Excellence, which was about how to get companies to do well and make lots of money, by doing a bit more than just make money. The "senior" author was Tom Peters, whom it is now as unfashionable to admire as it was once fashionable. I still quite admire the man, and believe that his triviality as a thinker and writer about management is now exaggerated. But I have also enjoyed reading stuff by the "other" writer of In Search of Excellence, Robert H. Waterman Jnr., who is a more calm and down-to-earth sort of a character, and who is now growing old rather more gracefully. So when I saw a later book by him in my local Oxfam shop on sale at £3 I gave it a go. And indeed, it is quite good.
One of the core concepts of books like these (this one is called The Frontiers of Excellence – well, it had to be called something) is the contrast between Theory X management and Theory Y management. Waterman recycles this concept yet again, and this is the version of it that he offers:
This is Theory X:
Most of us have an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if at all possible.We need to be directed, want to avoid responsibility, have relatively little ambition, and want security above all.
We need, therefore, to be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with punishment if we're to put forward adequate effort.
And this is Theory Y:
Putting forth physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest.Most humans don't inherently dislike work, though they are often placed in jobs that give them plenty of cause for unhappiness.
External control and threat of punishment are not the only means of getting us to work.
Commitment to objectives is directly related to the rewards attached to achieving those objectives; the most important reward: satisfaction of our own ego needs.
Under favourable conditions most of us learn not only to accept, but to seek, responsibility.
The capacity to enact a fairly high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
All of this was first spelt out to the big wide world by Douglas McGregor in his book The Human Side of Enterprise in 1960, and notions like these had been doing the rounds in management theory circles since at least World War 2, not least as a result of the productivity miracles that had been lucked into by America during that same war. The men who would normally have been bossing them around being absent fighting the war, American simply had to trust the most unpromising looking and most second class of their citizens (such as women and negroes) to get the industrial job done, and – surprise, surprise – they did it.
Do I have to spell out how this Theory X/Theory Y contrast applies to education, and to our assumptions about the nature of childhood motivations? Surely not.
That's it, that's this posting, pretty much finished. But I'll just add one big point in a very few more words. It's one thing to accept the truth of Theory Y; quite another to apply it successfully, and without creating new and improved versions of Theory X torments for your underlings. And it is especially difficult to apply it in circumstances where Theory X has been ruling the roost without apology for the previous few decades, as Robert Waterman makes very clear. Which might explain why many and probably most schools nowadays are no nearer to doing Theory Y than they were half a century ago. Nevertheless, as a statement of the sort of world that a lot us now want for children, for the way they work and the way they learn, it still does very nicely, I think.
More from Julius Blumfeld
In this week’s Spectator, James Tooley writes of the remarkable success of private education in Africa and India. And he’s not talking about schooling for the elite. These are schools for people who, by our standards, are very poor indeed. The figures are remarkable. Apparently 45% of Ghanaian children go to private school and in Hyderabad the figure is 61 per cent. According to Tooley, this is happening in many parts of Africa and India – all in response to the abject failure of the State education system in those parts of the world.
Why, then, has nothing of the sort emerged here? After all, our State education system is also a shambles and British parents presumably value education no less than parents in Africa or India.
A political culture in which fee-paying schools are regarded as morally reprehensible doesn’t help. No doubt there are also many to whom it would simply not occur to pay for something the Government gives them for nothing. But even allowing for that, my guess is that there are still plenty of people who would willingly stump up a few quid a week to get a half-way decent education for their kids.
The real problem is cost. It‘s just too expensive for most people to send their children to private schools. But why is it so expensive? Teachers are not highly paid and you don’t need much space to start a small school. A church hall ought to do. Or even just a large room in a house. So where are all the small, cheap private schools á la Ghana or Hyderabad?
The problem, I suspect, is that the private school business is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country. As a result, opening a new private school is rarely economic at any price that would make it affordable to the majority of people. And this doesn’t just apply to would-be competitors to Eton. The 2002 Education Act decrees that that an independent school is one with five or more pupils. So if you want to start a little private school with five children, the State piles on a mountain of regulations and if you don’t comply with them, you’ll be shut down or locked up.
So there it is. The State takes over education, makes a complete dog’s breakfast of it and then makes it impossible for anybody else to compete. There’s no law that actually says “small cheap private schools are hereby banned”. But there might as well be.
Julius
A preoccupation of this blog is the influence on education of technology in general, and computers, the internet etc., in particular. People with preoccupations like this (such as me), are constantly to be heard saying that the effect of computers, the internet etc., is to make it possible for education to be individualised rather than massified, free range instead of factory. And computers, the internet etc., do indeed make that easier to contrive.
However, I had a conversation with my friend Sean Gabb this evening (Sean is among other things, a teacher of politics and economics at college level) which put a slightly different slant on this familiar story.
When I was a student, one of the most annoying facts of student life was that at the very moment when I wanted a particular book from the university library, I couldn't get it because there were also a couple of dozen other students all queueing up to read the same book. Eventually I got my turn, or else bought a copy of the book if it was important and not too expensive. But it was all most inconvenient.
Contrast this muddle with the situation of Sean's students. Sean no longer recommends books to his students; he recommends instead material that is available on the internet. Setting aside the question of whether this change presages the Collapse of Western Civilisation As We Know It, this procedure does have one huge advantage. All the students in the class, provided only that they have access to the internet (which they all do one way or another), are able to access this material without treading on each other's toes or in any way inconveniencing one another. There is no queue to read the relevant stuff. They just read it, exactly when they want to.
One inefficiency of Normal Education is that the classes are so very, very big, with the inefficiency of all the students in them being expected to proceed at the same pace. This they might not want to do. Electronic technology creates a personal library for each student that each can learn from at his own pace.
But another inefficiency of Normal Education is that sometimes the classes are so very, very small compared to how big they might be, if it were only possible for many hundreds – even (by using a bit more technology) thousands or millions – of students all to be consulting the same texts at the same time, in response to their teacher's recommendations. There are surely some teachers who are so excellent at teaching that thousands would want to learn from them, and would be quite willing to proceed at whatever pace such a teacher chose to set.
Maybe a future generation will decide that "the age of mass production" is the phrase we now use to describe that part of the real age of mass production when production costs were still actually quite high. Now the cost of mass producing texts, at any rate, is plunging towards zero. Good teachers can now, with the aid of the latest technology, achieve economies of scale undreamed of in the past.
I like to think that there may be some people who come here regularly, but not to Samizdata. If so, these few especially might like to know that I've just done a posting on Samizdata about home-education, which refers to the Julius Blumfeld posting here, to Michael Peach's posting yesterday, and to Daryl Cobranchi's fierce response to Blumfeld. Here are the guidelines which are the current focus of the argument.
Already, as I write this now, there has been a comment on the samizdata posting, which refers to this, well I was going to say home-education story, but actually it's more like an on-the-road-education story. I hope there'll be more titbits like this. The Samizdata hit rate is currently running at well over a thousand per day, and although I don't want to abuse my position as a Samizdata contributor, I regularly feed interesting stuff from here to there.
And this debate is very interesting - but, sadly, in the Chinese sense.
The latest issue of the BBC Music Magazine (February 2003 - strictly paper so no point in a link) has the usual kind of brand X BBC article about "music education". If your child is keen on the cello, here's how to encourage them. Don't push them too hard if it's you and not them that's ambitious. Watch out for when they hit the Yehudi Menuhin school and get discouraged by the other better infant prodigies. These are the good choir schools and here's how they work. Here's how much they cost. That kind of thing.
You get no sense from reading this article that the classical way of making music is in any sort of crisis, although the evidence of this crisis is abundant throughout every issue of this magazine, and throughout the rest of this issue. If this were a piece for my Culture Blog, I might perhaps go into elaborate detail. Suffice it to say here that in the classical music business, an ever increasing flood of expert young musicians are chasing an ever diminishing pool of jobs. Major orchestras thrash about in a state of permanent financial crisis. Star soloists and conductors lose their permanent recording contracts. And government arts bureaucrats ask with increasing urgency what the point of it all is now supposed to be? But never mind, my little Susan is going to be the next Jacqueline du Pre.
In order to be a capable educator, it seems to me, you do have to have some idea of where the world outside and beyond your little academy is probably moving, and "classical music" needs a torrent of average classical instrumentalists like it needs a hole in the head. If the children you are teaching are just in it for the fun of it, and to stir up their brain cells (which classical music making is famously good at doing, by the way) before they all go off and become systems engineers, fine. But if the idea is that this music teaching might lead to some kind of musical career, then a major change of attitude is in order.
If the universe decided to play an evil joke on the rest of itself and to make me into a music teacher, the instruments I'd focus on most obsessively would be not the violin or the cello or the oboe, but the tape recorder and the personal computer. I would encourage my charges to make recordings as soon as they could manage them, and the questions I'd then ask would not be: Do I Like It? – or: Would Mozart have liked it? No. I'd ask: Do You Like It? Is this the kind of stuff that you and your friends might enjoy listening to?
The world of professional music making has all the recordings of the Elgar Cello Concerto it can now use. New ones are sometimes interesting, but they won't pay the rent. But what music, all music, still has is a voracious appetite for new stuff, expressing new impulses and feelings, for new audiences. There is the territory where livings can be made.
The Next Big Thing for classical music making is for all that instrumental skill to be applied to the making of new kinds of music.
When classical musicians talk like this, the phrase "cross over" is often used, and the results are usually dire in the extreme. But there is a reason for this. You can't imbibe one style of music making throughout your childhood, and then switch at the age of thirty seven to making stuff that will storm the album charts and actually earn you a living. This is the equivalent of trying to write a popular novel in a foreign language.
The language parallel is actually very apt. I recall reading in one of Steven Pinker's books about the difference between children brought up in a multilingual culture, and adults trying to make sense of such a world. The adults can only ever "translate" in a very self-conscious and laborious way. For them, the new multi-lingual world will always be that: multi-lingual. But mix up several languages in a group of children and leave them to get on with it, and you'll get a genuine new language, a "creole" language as I believe these things are called. If classical music is ever going to get beyond Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc., it is going to have to teach the next generations very differently to the way Yehudi Menuhin and Jacqueline du Pre were taught.
Don't get me wrong. I love classical music with maniacal adoration. My classical CD collection is the talk of libertarian London. But the job of making this wonderful music available to the musical public has now, give or take a few more rarities and oddities, been done. The teaching of music should now reflect that fact.
My guess is that in lots of places it already does.
A further posting from Julius Blumfeld:
I've been wondering why Brian asked me to contribute towards this Blog. It's true that I am a libertarian. It's also true that I am a parent of home educated children. But they are not home educated because I am a libertarian and I didn't become a libertarian because they are home educated. Nor are most home educators in the U.K. particularly libertarian. If anything, they tend more towards the green end of the spectrum. Yet Brian presumably thinks that home education has some significance for libertarians. Does it?
At the moment, I think I would have to say "not really". But if you were to ask me again in ten years, I think my answer might be very different. Here's why.
Home education in England and Wales (and to a lesser extent, Scotland) is probably easier than almost anywhere else in the Western World. By "easier" I don't mean that British children are genetically predisposed to learning at home. I mean that the State puts very few obstacles in the way of British home educators. Here, if you want to home educate your children, you just do it. There are no forms to fill out. You don't need to get permission from anybody. You may get the occasional visit from the Local Education Authority, but that's rarely a problem. You don't need to have any certificates or qualifications. You don't need to follow any particular curriculum (or any curriculum at all). If your children have never been to school then you don't even have to tell the authorities you're doing it.
But I predict all that will change. At the moment, home education in the U.K. is off the Government's radar. It's just a quirky thing for a small minority. It's nothing to worry about and it's not worth bothering with.
Yet as more parents home educate their children, it will become increasingly visible. And as that happens, the pressure will grow for the State to "do something" about "the problem" of home education. The pressure will come from the teaching unions (whose monopoly it threatens). It will come from the Department of Education (always on the lookout for a new "initiative"). It will come from the Press (all it will take is one scare story about a home educated ten year old who hasn't yet learned to read). And it will come from Brussels (home education is illegal in many European countries so why should it be legal here?).
That's the point at which home education will become a major libertarian issue in the U.K. So Brian is right (as usual). He's just ahead of the curve.
Julius
Michael Jennings quotes from this Telegraph story:
Eighty-six per cent said it was now more important to teach about environmental issues while 80 per cent agreed that "geography should teach pupils to respect and reconnect with nature". Many teachers went further. Two thirds thought that teaching about "sustainable lifestyles" and the pupils' roles as "global citizens" was more important than teaching basic skills such as reading maps.
I've posted the most pungent thing Jennings has to say about the notion of "sustainable development" over at Samizdata, as the slogan of the day. As for map-reading, he responds with, in part, this:
… if we want our children to grow up to be good world citizens, there are few better things to give them than good geography lessons. Give people maps to look at and study, and the names of countries and their capitals and other cities to memorise, and explain why cities have grown where they are, and what languages are spoken, and how all these facts interrelate with each other, and children will slowly get a sense that the world and human culture is bigger and more complex and more extraordinary than can be understood from a few years of life in one town or country. Look at a few maps, and start asking questions, and suddenly the whole world jumps out at you. In short, a very traditional way of studying geography is a very good aid for people in figuring out their own values and attitudes.
Agreed. How can you think globally if you don't know what the globe actually consists of?
A while ago I did a posting saying that I was in favour of Muslims having the right to home-school, on the grounds that Muslim families are less likely to be Islamofascists than Muslim schools. My thanks to Daryl Cobranchi for the link to this story, which makes me a lot surer now that I was right than I was when I first said it:
The Saleem family is part of a small but growing number of American Muslims opting to teach their children at home. As do home schoolers of other faiths, Ms. Saleem says teaching her children herself ensures they absorb a strong religious identity.But since Sept. 11, she says, a newer set of fears is pushing Muslim parents toward home-schooling: Concerns about their children's safety in public schools and, on the flip side, the possibility that they'll be exposed to extremist views in private Islamic schools.
"I'm scared for my children," she says. "Any of our children can get caught in someone's rhetoric."
It's not just that these good people are in my opinion less likely to be Islamofascists than the people running Muslim schools. That is their opinion also. And that is a huge part of why they are doing home-schooling.
I should have realised this at once, but at least I have now. Meanwhile the presumption of liberty did me proud, and I said the right thing anyway.
It was never my intention that all the writing on this blog would be done by me - Brian Micklethwait. From the start I hoped that others who were ideologically sympatico would in due course be persuaded to join in, and liven things up samizdata-style. So it is with extreme pleasure that I introduce the first of what I hope will be many contributions to this blog by Julius Blumfeld. Like me, Julius lives and works in London. Unlike me he is a parent and a home-educator. Enjoy.
These last few weeks, we've been 'coming out', which means answering the question that all home-educating families come to dread:
"But what will you do about socialization?"
Roughly translated, this means:
"You're mad. If they don't go to school then they will turn into sad misfits."
Yet we can hardly blame people for asking. We thought much the same when we started out. We planned in minute detail how we would compensate for the lack of school socialization. They would go to choir. They would join the local drama group. They would go to dance classes. They would meet with friends every weekend. If we worked at it hard enough, then hopefully they would become socialized just like school
children.
Well of course it didn't work out like that. They don't go to an endless stream of clubs and groups. They do meet with the occasional friend at the weekend. But that's only for a few hours and it's not even every weekend.
Yet the funny thing is that they seem to be turning out pretty normally, in spite of the dismal failure of our Five Year Socialization Plan.
It turns out that we were wrong. Socialization is not something that has to be worked at. It's not like learning a second language. It's more like learning your first one. All a child seems to need is contact with other people. It doesn't seem to matter much who those people are. They don't even have to be other children. Now we tell people that you'd have to keep a child locked in a room for ten years for it not to become 'socialized'. At least that's our story and we're sticking to it.
Julius Blumfeld
I admire Michael Peach's blog, and my admiration was hardly diminished at all by the mistake he had at the top of it until Diane Patterson pointed it out. I noticed it too, but I was already starting to wonder whether "it's" as the possessive pronoun of "it" is a mistake, or perhaps something a bit more interesting than that.
Point one. Michael isn't the only person who perpetrates this mistake, or maybe "new usage". You see it all over the place. It's everywhere. (Ha ha.) And it's – it is – indeed sensible to make a distinction between "belonging to it" and "it is".
But if "Brian's Education Blog" has an apostrophe after Brian, why shouldn't "libertarian unschooling at it's best" be spelt that way as well, with an apostrophe after "it"?
What, in such circumstances, does it mean to say that "its" is correct, and "it's" (for belonging to it) is incorrect. Words mean what people say they mean.
The turning point would really come if some people started using "it's" in this way, on purpose, on the grounds that to them it makes more sense. But even if that doesn't happen, a collective failure to do things the "correct" way could be enough to result in a genuine change.
Take the rule that all written "sentences" (clutches of words between this full stop and the next one) have to have verbs in them. Nonsense. Not true. Stupid. Verbless sentences? Fine. No worries. Not a problem. It used to be that although you wouldn't be sent to prison for talking like that, you couldn't write like that. You just could not. Not done. Not the thing. But now, because of writers like me who say that this "rule" is dumb, the rule simply does not apply any more.
Or what about the (to me) utterly vile habit of just not using upper case letters even at the beginning of each sentence. I hate this. (I even originally wrote this paragraph in this all lower case manner, but then I hated it so much I changed it to regular again. Interestingly, Word For Windows agrees with me!) But if enough people decide they are going to do it, who else can stop them?
I'm starting to wonder if there might perhaps be something about our culture now which makes standardised spelling and standardised grammar more difficult to sustain and defend. I suspect that the printing press had a lot to do with the establishment of standard spellings and grammatical rules in the first place, and I further suspect that the gradual erosion of the printing press as the dominant literary machine, so to speak, by … well , by this stuff, is making standard spellings and grammatical rules gradually harder to sustain.
All of which makes teaching that much more interesting.
There. I think that counts as a decent day's EdBlogging.
("EdBlogging"?!?! … Just what kind of a neologism from hell is that? Have you no standards man? Are you some sort of damned barbarian? …)
Well I finished that other homework that I was working on. But once again I am rushing my duties here more than somewhat. But it didn't take me long to find a juicy quote, seconds into the Guardian education page, on the constant theme here of Sovietisation.
The government's targets for extra university places must not be met by increasing the numbers on "mickey mouse" courses, the higher education minister, Margaret Hodge, warned yesterday.
There they go again. They set up a "target", and right away the thing ceases to be a sane measurement of anything sane. Here's how many courses we want! Oh, but did we mention that we want them to be sensible courses, not silly ones?
Okay that fulfils my daily target of one posting however mickey mouse every weekday.
Now let me see if I can't do another one, and exceed my quota!!!
There is an interesting story in the latest TES (that link is to the publication website but not to the piece itself), under the headline "Congestion fee forces teachers to quit jobs" (TES Jan 10 2003 page 12):
Teachers facing congestion charges which start in London next month are quitting their jobs, while parents are planning to move children from city centre schools.
Well, that was the idea.
In general, I suspect that one of the reasons why homeschooling may be growing in popularity in Britain is that our transport system is becoming ever more shambolic and clogged up. Complaints about "congestion charging" seem to me to blame the messenger (the price system) for the message: "Travel costs more these days."
This topic was briefly mentioned in the discussion that followed my talk last Friday, but the general notion that homeschooling is an economic as well as just an educational phenomenon (which I had hoped to talk about) didn't really get much of a mention. But it surely isn't just that the schools themselves that are a problem; there is also the increasingly fraught battle to get the kids to school every day.
Yet it makes perfect sense. I regard modern mass education as an economically ridiculous arrangement, never mind how nasty and mind-dumbing it is. Why on earth do schools have to be so big, and as a direct result, so far away from most of their "customers"? Why can't children, especially younger ones, just gather in someone's front room to learn things?
I've spent today wrestling with another article for another blog, which I still haven't finished. However, I am aware of my BEdBlog duties, so here's my posting for today.
Which says: Welcome to Rational Parenting, the new specialist blog being run and mostly written (so far) by Alice Bachini. There's been lots of stuff there since it got started just over a week ago, more than enough to convince me that it will be sticking around and have new things to say most days.
My favourite bits so far have concerned an interesting parental duty, namely the duty to be happy:
Having grown up surrounded by the powerful bad meme that money-earning work is a total pain that just gets in the way of real life, I think that giving your children a definition of work as an inconvenient endurance test is very wrong and very destructive indeed. It's easy to do, all it takes is to arrive home exhausted, only ever say negative things about your job, never show signs of joy at getting up and going out of the house in the morning, and most of all, never do anything to remedy this appalling state of affairs if you can possibly help it (due to being too fed up and tired from the job). This way you can make your children think the following:
a) adult life is horrible,
b) having a family destroys your freedom, permanently,
c) the point of life is weekends and a comfortable retirement.
I think that's rather profound.
In a comment on this, Alice has already said that Rational Parenting is getting a very healthy hit rate. I'm sure this will climb a lot higher as the word gets around. I expect to learn a lot from it, and regularly to be commenting on and reacting to its contents.
Well, my talk on Friday night seemed to go well, indeed I was surprised at how well it went. (No need for a link. Just scroll down for the other relevant posting here.)
In my experience, giving a talk to an audience all of whom know you, as turned out to be the case for me that night, can be a serious let-down. They already know your rhetorical devices, jokes, comic mannerisms, and basic ways of thinking. What to people hearing you for the first time might be quite funny, charming, illuminating, even profound, can come over as merely dull. If they are friends, they may face the additional problem of how not to tell you this too bluntly afterwards. Plus, they're thinking: my god, if he's one of our cleverer and sparklier people, how stupid and dull must we be? Not good. An unknown visitor, however mediocre, would have been far preferable.
But, unless I am seriously deluding myself, it wasn't nearly that bad last Friday night. Why not? Because of blogging. Blogging has educated me a lot during the last year. As a result of it I had new things to tell these people, new experiences, new stories, new thoughts.
One new thought in particular which I found myself clarifying concerned the immense virtue of –and of course I've been getting a bit ahead of myself - visiting lecturers, occasional teachers, here-today-gone-tomorrow pedagogues. It is sometimes said that you can't teach unless you are prepared to settle down for the long haul, commit yourself, stick around, blah blah. Well, not all blah blah, of course. All establishments need loyal staff and regular workers to keep them ticking over, year after year. But the visiting teacher can also contribute mightily.
I reminisced about a talk given at my school some time in the nineteen sixties, by a man called Herman Bondi, who was then the Chief Scientific Adviser (or some such grand title) to the British Government, no less. Lesson one was what a funny little bloke he was, dressed no better than I was last Friday night. So, right off, we all learned something, those of us who didn't know it already. In order to become something like a Chief Scientific Adviser to a Government, you didn't have to look like a film star.
Bondi talked about the Theory of the Universe. He covered a blackboard with common-sense statements like: the universe is the same density throughout. The universe isn't moving in an particular direction, any more than the tea in a tea cup is going anywhere.
And then he said: "Why is the sky dark at night?"
Because you see, he went on to explain, if all this stuff on the blackboard here is true, then no matter where you look, even at night, you ought to see a star. You ought to see light. So: "Why is the sky dark at night?"
By the end of his talk he had us all convinced of the Expanding Universe Theory. And then he buggered off back to London or wherever it was he'd come from and we none of us set eyes on the man ever again.
My point being: I've never forgotten it. I still treasure the memory of that talk. (It probably also helped that no one was going to test us to see if we'd listened properly.)
Bondi's talk didn't turn me into a scientist, but it did turn me into a lifelong science fan. It taught me that one of the great things about scientists is, not just their enthusiasm to discover obscure things, but their ability also to register amazement at the commonplace. Commonplace facts like the fact of gravity. We all know that "gravity" – or something like it – is a fact. But what is it? What, deep down, does "gravity" – this bizarre tendency of things to fall to the ground for no apparent reason – actually consist of? It takes an Isaac Newton to think like that, at a time when people as a whole tended not to and even to forbid themselves from such thoughts, and to carry on thinking like that until he had an answer that satisfied him.
Bondi may have inspired some in his audience that day to become practising scientists, but not me. What he did for me was not to tell me anything about how to make money or be more "successful". What he did for me was make the times I already found myself living in more interesting and entertaining and profound and enjoyable. Bondi didn't teach me anything about how to get what I liked. But he did teach me about how to like what I had already got – the life of an educated citizen of the then twentieth century – that little bit more, which is really something, I think.
That last point in particular (about teaching me to enjoy my existing life rather than anything about how to get a better one) is something I had never nailed down in my own mind until I heard myself saying it in my talk. And it is, I suggest, a pretty important point about the meaning of the word "education".
As I say, the same bloke droning on yet again can sometimes work, but there's nothing quite like a visiting shooting star for lighting up the world. Failing that, if you are that same bloke droning on, at least try to talk sometimes about different stuff from your usual stuff.
I've just had a phone call from my friend Tim Evans, who alternates with me in running Friday speaker evenings, mine on the last Friday of each month, his on the second Friday. Tim being a person with a far higher metabolic career rate than I, he periodically sits down at his desk and fixes the next year or so of speakers, but periodically he also finds that he has a meeting coming up VERY SOON, and hasn't fixed any speakers AT ALL, even for TONIGHT, let alone for the next entire year. (I just tend at any particular time to have the next one or two speakers lined up.) And so it is today, for the first of Tim's meetings of 2003. So, not being able to arrange a proper speaker at such short notice, he has asked me to speak, about my educational blogging activities. What's that about? Why blogging? Why education? Etc.
I'm a blogger because I've always been a blogger, long before official blogging was invented and computerised. The natural span of a blog posting (which I now believe to be as much to do with the size of the computer screen as to do with attention spans) has always suited me. I used to do "jottings" for Sean Gabb's Free Life, and it was those which told my fellow Samizdatistas that I ought to be one of them. How right they were.
Blogging also suits me because, although not lazy exactly, I am not good at what is called "research", that is to say, prolonged self-immersions in bodies of thought or activity with nothing to show for it until all the immersing has been done. I like to dabble in things, to flit about, to hop from flower to flower, and to pass on whatever little half-masticated titbits I discover to other members of the hive, without having necessarily made full use of or fully comprehended each titbit myself, on a "don't know quite what this means exactly but it sounds interesting" basis, rather than being fully sure for sixteen pages. I've always wanted to do lots of "research" about education, but I couldn't face all those piles of books and reports I thought I would have to lock myself away with and plough through, before writing anything. Blogging, for me, is an alternative way of learning, nearer to conversation. For me, blogging combines most of the virtues of conversation, with most of the virtues of publication. See my earlier remarks here on blogging as a method of self-education. As I am fond of saying, the ambiguity embedded in the title of this blog ("Brian's Education") is entirely deliberate.
To put the above in another way, if blogging does deal with an attention span problem, that problem is not so much with the readers of blogs as with the writers of them. There's probably nothing wrong with your attention span. But the sustained concentration over a minimum of several days that old fashioned writing requires, is, on the whole, beyond me. And a man's got to know his limitations.
(And by the way, just as I was always one of life's bloggers, so too, in a similar way, I was always a desktop publisher. Long before that got computerised I was doing desktop publishing with scissors and glue – literally cutting and pasting like some three-year-old at a nursery school, and for once the word literally literally means literally.)
The topics I expect to touch upon tonight may include: the politics of homeschooling (possible laws against it), the economics of homeschooling (a cheaper way of sending the little darlings to Eton and Balliol, basically), the "Sovietisation" of education (a persistent theme here), the impact on education (or lack of it so far) of computers (ditto), and, you know, whatever else pops into my head or anybody else's head on the night.
I hope also to touch upon the general topic of specialist blogging, if you see what I mean. Basically, I'm strongly for it, because it keeps the stuff separated out. It doesn't deluge readers with stuff they probably don't want to read, in among stuff that they might. Specialist blogging improves the information to noise ratio. I predict, for example, that Alice Bachini's specialist parenting blog will get more regular readers than Alice Bachini's personal whatever-comes-into-her-mind-at-that-moment blog, even though I personally love the second one especially.
Although come to think of it, Perry de Havilland gave the last talk for Tim in Putney, on samizdata blogging, and we covered specialist blogging then. So I guess I ought to talk education education education, rather than blogging blogging blogging. Probably a good thing.
Address to attend the meeting: 19 Festing Road, Putney, London SW15. Get there between 7pm and 8pm.
You may recall me writing here about educational software. I persist in expecting good things along these lines eventually, if only because this kind of thing has only to be cracked once. This - and my thanks to Joanne Jacobs for the link to it - is the kind of thinking I had in mind:
Education is a proven means for investing in our future. But while American schools are notoriously under-serving their students, kids are rushing home to learn how to succeed in alternative universes. Video games compel kids to spend dozens of hours a week exploring virtual worlds and learning their rules. Barring a massive overhaul of our school system, Nintendo and PlayStation will continue to be the most successful at captivating young minds.Over 60% of Korean homes have broadband Internet access. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are immensely popular there; increasing numbers of people spend hours each night fighting monsters together online. The largest Korean textbook distributor Daekyo and an independent software design firm JMCJ (Interesting & Creative Co., Ltd.) have joined forces to make a massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which children can study math, science and history: Demiurges. These people intend to make it possible for people to play in a virtual world saturated with real-world knowledge.
I suspect that children learn somewhat more from those 'commercial' games than Justin Hall goes on to imply, but that aside, I like his attitude.
This was from a piece he did in response to a question about what President George Bush should be thinking about science policy. My answer to that would be as little as possible, and if the answer to Justin Hall's answer is that President Bush decides to throw government money at educational computer games, my answer to that would be that this will, as always with government money, impede that which is being 'helped' and not help it at all.
Michael Peach, who, by the way, has moved to Movable Type, reproduces the full text of a press release from Schoolhouse, the Scottish homeschooling group. Go to him and to Schoolhouse for the full story, but meanwhile here's my favourite bit of the press release, favourite because of the delightful metaphor at the end which I'm sure lots of readers of this will already have heard many times but which was new to me:
In the face of blanket opposition, the Executive had to admit they got it badly wrong. However, they still seem intent upon interfering without justification in the lawful educational choices of those whose dissatisfaction with school education in Scotland has reached unprecedented levels. According to the results of a New Year poll, 30% of parents would home educate their children, which is hardly surprising when we consider research findings which demonstrate the superiority of free range learning compared to the factory schooling model.
"Free range learning". "Factory schooling". I like these phrases. To be spread about, I think.
From Daryl Cobranchi comes news of Karate classes for homeschoolers. Interesting. Entrepreneurs advertising their wares direct to homeschoolers. Sports activities are an obvious niche market here. Homeschoolers tend to be rather intellectual types, not given to instructing children in the delights of violent physical activity, or so I guess. So, send them to some classes. Have them join a local sports team.
There's recently been a row buzzing along in the USA about whether homeschooled children should be entitled to participate in school sports teams. I can't for the life of me see why they should have any such "right", but the USA being the litigation-mad place that it is, it apparently suits some people to claim such a right. However, what homeschooled children clearly should be allowed to do is apply for membership of sports teams/clubs/classes that are happy to welcome them. Classes like these Karate lessons.
At one of the places where I was helping out my friend who ran the Kumon maths centre, there were sometimes Karate classes going on in the room next door. Some kind of "martial art", anyway. The guy in charge was as excellent a teacher as I've ever caught a glimpse of in action.
First, he was in charge and he did things his way, without serious challenge. Polite request when confused, yes, often. Challenge never. This was because, at any moment, he could decide that any particular misbehaving child was more trouble than the money his parents were parting with, and exclude him. Or her, because there were quite a few girls taking part. End of all "discipline problems" right there. Everyone present behaved impeccably. Any newcomer who thought he could make mischief never stood a chance.
What struck me, so to speak, about these "martial arts" classes was that although the children present may have supposed that all there were learning was how to be more violent, what they were really learning was no less than civilisation itself.
The children were all told to get changed into their Karate kit in an orderly fashion, and to put their regular clothes in sensible little heaps. They all lined up the way he said. They all turned up on time. They left the place impeccably clean when they'd finished, all helping to make sure that all was ship-shape and properly closed-up when they left.
Were these children being "coerced"? Certainly not. They didn't have to be there, any more than The Man had to teach them Karate if he didn't want to. If they wanted out, then out they could go, with no blots on their copybooks or markings-down on their CVs.
What I remember with the most pleasure about those Karate kids were the splendid ceremonial greetings that The Man taught them, of the kind they did before and after all their Karate contests. Hands together Indian-style (or small Christian child praying) combined with a Japanese style bow. Whenever I met any of them, they and I would take great pleasure in thus greeting one another.
As I say, these children may have thought that all they were learning was how to be more violent. What they were really learning was how to control their own violence, how to apply it only when that was appropriate, and in an appropriate way. And more fundamentally, they were learning how true authority is exercised – for the time being by someone whose authority they recognised applying it to them, but in the future, you may be sure, by their older selves, when their turn comes to hand the torch of civilisation on to the next generation.
Should children keep their privacy? What happens when a doting mother turns her three year old daughter into a global internet celeb? Or a doting father? (You need to scroll down a bit until you get to "Gnat" references.)
The doting mother, in particular, has lots of very sensible and nice-sounding things to say about how to raise a little girl, and it all seems to be going well:
I'm a little obsessed -- too much so -- about her reading development because both Darin and I could read by the time we were three and I've wondered, Is this sort of thing hereditary? Should I be encouraging it? As it is, I don't think I'm pushing her beyond being receptive to her questions about letters and words. We read her books, we gave her foam letters and numbers to play with, we let her see us reading and writing all the time. She's clearly interested in reading. But there are no flash cards, no enforced sessions of teaching her words or anything. When she wants to, she will. Believe me. When Sophia wants something, she's extremely determined.
Great. Lucky little girl to have such a nice and sensible mother. But are there circumstances in an imaginable future when mother will regret having written so freely and so publicly about her daughter? I really hope not, because I find this sort of stuff delightful, and it is infinitely to be preferred to hideous puffery from politicians about how their next national or even global educational initiative is finally going to sort out all of education for everybody.
I'm told that the email discussion groups associated with/spun off from Taking Children Seriously have an ethic embedded in them that you do not publicise the details of your children's lives, because that isn't fair. Alice Bachini evidently has a child/children, but we remain in ignorance of what it/they consist of (how many - which gender - how old etc.), and that is, I'm sure, entirely deliberate.
However, the problem with this anonymity policy is that if you are attempting some new, improved way of raising children, and are also recommending your methods to others, it helps a lot if you can allow yourself to talk in public and in some detail about how exactly it is working out for you.
Personally I think that objecting to parents boasting and chattering about their darling little ones on the internet – how well they (the children) are doing, and how well they (the parents) are doing bring them up – is like objecting to flooding on a flood-plain. It happens. Yes, there will be problems attached to it, just as there are problems attached to women voting, to the lower classes being allowed to switch jobs or switch houses just because they feel like it, or to growing up as the son of Tom Cruise or of the Queen of England. Like it or moan about it, this is what childhood, for many children now, is going to be like, and everybody involved is going to have to get used to it. Which they mostly will. But I'd love to hear other opinions about this.
I've not been healthy enough to say anything profound of an educational nature today, but luckily, Paul Marks had this to say, in a comment on this yesterday over at samizdata. I trust he won't object to me lifting the whole thing and reproducing it here:
The context here was that Dr Tucker was dealing with a study from the University of Arizona that showed an inverse relationship between a rise in the new test scores and performance in SAT tests.In short as children were put through endless rote learning to get them through the new "high powered tests" so teaching children general problem solving skills ("how to think") went out of the window.
Dr Tucker was using this study (which was undertaken by statists - not libertarians) to show that the conservative reform plan for government schools (lots of factual tests on core subjects and teaching geared to pass the tests) was having unintended consequences.
Another problem was the practice of High Schools encouraging children they thought would fail the tests to drop out - so that the school test average would be higher (and it would get more money under the "market socialist" incentives that the conservatives believed in).
It was much like the old Soviet practice when they wished to reduce the death rate in the hospitals - kick out the people who are going to die.
Dr Tucker's basic point was that a government school system will not work - whether it is the hands of liberals or conservatives.
In other words, as soon as you decide that one particular symptom of the nice world you want should be maximised, then at that exact moment it ceases to be any use as a measurement of niceness or of progress towards niceness.
From the invaluable Michael Peach, further evidence of the Sovietisation of State Education, as experienced by the teachers:
SO, OVERWORKED AND UNDERFUNDED, bullied, blamed and finally, inspected, fast track dismissal could be a blessed release. But, why should I hand an easy victory to knee-jerk, macho management? When I’m not quite so tired, I can hear the seductive voice of that other reality, whispering, “Why take risks? If you don’t try to tell them like it is then they can’t subvert your warnings into recommendations. Play safe and sell them short. Intone the mantra ‘Just say No’. They’ll all switch off and you’ll get your tick in the Great Ofsted Book of Competence”.
This stuff reads like the best of the Soviet dissident literature of the seventies and eighties.
Mike worries that as home-education spreads the System will react with laws to compel attendance for all. I wonder. I don't just hope he's wrong, I actually think he could be wrong also, as I'm sure he hopes he is. There will be an ever more voluble debate, as the number of home-educators grows and as many more parents think about doing it also, and as the home-education support industry gets into its stride. But I can't see any government wanting to stick red-hot pokers into the lives of some of the most intellectually self-confident and mouthy people in the country.
And think of all those Christian home-schoolers. Does anyone fancy making martyrs out of them? Christians love being martyred. And all those hyper-well-educated home-schooled kids themselves, trading conversational grenades with the compulsion freaks? Tabloid TV will love that.
No, I think it just as likely that home-education will do a boil-the-frog job on the state system. By the time the frog gets the danger, too many will be doing the other stuff, and, politically, it will be too late.
Again, the comparison that suggests itself is the USSR, in this case the collapse of the USSR. How many people prophecied how limp, abject and downright peaceful that would be? Not me. I thought that at least some mad (but stylishly dressed) tank commanders would be screaming defiance, and some unreconstructed Stalinoid politbureaucrats would try to stitch together some kind of damn-you-all Stalinoid government. At least as the ship sank, I thought there'd be some bands playing and some officers saluting.
Actually, a few Stalinoids did attempt something like this. It lasted one day. On the Monday Bernard Levin was saying in the Times that it wouldn't last more than about five years. On the Tuesday he wrote another piece saying: I told you so.
Might not the dream of compulsory state education for all wither away like the old USSR did, not with a bang but with hardly a whimper?
It's been a regular theme here that the new information technology is making life hard for a lot of the people who run old-technology institutions, such as most schools and universities still are. (The new technology is icing in these places, not the cake of how they are actually run.) First it was Elvis Presley and his many successors, making the world outside the classroom so much more enticing than it used to be. Now, cheap computers are finally making their presence felt in the classroom, because now they are cheap enough for students to own them. (As we all know, a computer you don't own is hardly a computer at all.)
This is from today's New York Times:
In a classroom at American University in Washington on a recent afternoon, the benefits and drawbacks of the new wireless world were on display. From the back row of an amphitheater classroom, more than a dozen laptop screens were visible. As Prof. Jay Mallek lectured graduate students on the finer points of creating and reading an office budget, many students went online to Blackboard.com, a Web site that stores course materials, and grabbed the day's handouts from the ether.But just as many students were off surfing. A young man looked at sports photos while a woman checked out baby photos that just arrived in her e-mailbox.
The screens provide a silent commentary on the teacher's attention-grabbing skills. The moment he loses the thread, or fumbles with his own laptop to use its calculator, screens flip from classroom business to leisure. Students dash off e-mail notes and send instant messages. A young man who is chewing gum shows an amusing e-mail message to the woman next to him, and then switches over to read the online edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Now me, I'm all for chalk and talk. But my background is political propaganda rather than regular teaching (even though these activities have much in common), and I take a rather contemptuous view of "teachers" who can only command attention by commanding it. Haven't these people ever heard of the ancient art of rhetoric, of getting and keeping the attention of an audience, of explaining to them why they should listen, why the subject matters, or even (whisper) why it is actually rather wonderful?
There are two basic propositions being banged on about here, day after day, in among ruminations about other educational things. One is that treating pupils like condemned criminals is not nice. But the other is: because of the nature of the modern world, treating pupils like condemned criminals doesn't work any more. This story illlustrates the second of these two propositions with great vividness.
I'm still not very well, but I'm well enough to thank David Farrer for the general plug for this blog, and for news about Schoolhouse, a Scotland-based home-education support group.
This from their website:
Schoolhouse Home Education Association (known as "Schoolhouse"), a recognised Scottish charity (No. SCO26965), was founded in 1996 by a group of home educating families who wished to raise public awareness of, and begin to tackle issues surrounding, home education in Scotland. The Association offers support and information on a Scotland-wide basis to those who wish to take personal responsibility for the education of their children; families who have chosen, or are contemplating, home-based education; and those who wish to defend the right of families to educate in accordance with their own philosophy and with due regard to the wishes and feelings of their children.Reasons for choosing home-based education are many and varied. Some parents educate at home through active choice, whereas for others it is a reluctant decision taken as a direct result of school-related difficulties such as school phobia / anxiety, bullying or special educational needs. Approaches to home-based education are similarly diverse - some families choose a relatively structured model while many favour autonomous learning. Happily, the choice is entirely theirs since the 5-14 curriculum guidelines do not apply to home educators and they are free to choose the approach which best suits the individual child.
That the rise of the internet seems to be happening alongside a rise in interest in home education is anything but coincidence. The former makes the latter so much easier to hear about, and to do.
David says he's going to read this blog every day. As already stated, the weekends may go dry, but I intend to put something up every weekday. In general, I hope David doesn't have cause to change his mind about this blog.
I wish I could show you a sick note. Just look for the Beecham's All-in-One adverts. I wish you all a happier new year than I'm having, and hope for a lesson a day for the next few days, but don't assume it. Bring books, and try not to disturb the other education blogs.
