More on the Diane Abbott story, in the Guardian today:
The veteran campaigner for state school education Diane Abbott yesterday admitted that her decision to send her son to an independent school was "indefensible".Commenting for the first time on her decision to send her 12-year-old son to the City of London school at the cost of £10,000 a year, the MP for Hackney north and Stoke Newington said she would not, and could not, defend the decision.
"At the end of the day, when I'm on my deathbed, would I regret having been skewered on this show at 12 o'clock at night or doing the right thing by my son?," she told the BBC's This Week programme last night.
"In my position everything you say just sounds self-serving and hypocritical, and there is no point in defending the indefensible. I know it's an indefensible position and I have spent five days not defending it – what more can I do?"In the past, Ms Abbott has been critical of decisions made by her Labour colleagues - including the prime minister – to send their children to fee-paying schools.
Last night she said: "In Hackney schools, only 9% of black boys get five decent GCSEs against a national average of 50%. I really wasn't prepared to put my son through that system.
"I have campaigned for nearly 10 years on what happens to black children in British schools, but at the end of the day I had to put my reputation as a politician against my son, and I chose my son."
Commenting on my previous reference to this story, Paul Coulam said this, with which I agree:
The point about Diane Abbott's hypocrisy here is not so much that she sent her child to private school while arguing for state education but that she denounced both Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for not sending their children to the local comp and then went on to do precisely the same thing herself.If I denounced you for cashing cheques from the BBC and then went and did it myself then I would certainly be a hypocrite.
But better to be this kind of hypocrite, than the kind of monster politician who sends her own child to a lousy school just to avoid admitting it. (See my first piece concerning this regularly recurring argument.)
However, before Paul Coulam says it again, she is still not getting it right. And nor is the Guardian for saying that she "admitted" that her decision was indefensible, because that implies that it was.
But Diane Abbott, in sending her child to the best school she can, is now doing the right thing, and apologising for that. Instead, she should be apologising to Tony Blair and to Harriet Harman, for having said the wrong thing about them.
Via the Guardian, news of a how a campus newspaper made a classic cock-up, and had to grovel. I'm sure the blogosphere has already had a good chortle about this, but I missed it back in September when it happened.
In case the links don't work. They at first had a picture of the University's Dean of Student Life which was actually a picture of Osama bin Laden, and then they said sorry.
Who's bankrolling vouchers? This is an article written by the sort of schmuck (I think that's the American technical term) who believes –and for the sort of organisation which believes – that "bankrolling" anything is automatically evil. But I was interested. Who is bankrolling vouchers? Here's the (bank)roll of honour.
There are some very wealthy folks out there – many of whom work together – who fuel America's pro-voucher movement. Some names for your file:
1. Wal-Mart heir John Walton, the movement's most prolific giver, gave seed money to the pro-voucher group CEO America and $2 million to Michigan's 2000 voucher ballot initiative. Walton bankrolls a massive private voucher program along with financier Ted Forstmann and runs a charter school management company. And through the Walton Family Foundation, Walton supports advocacy groups, think tanks, and legal nonprofits that promote vouchers and tax credits.2. Financier Ted Forstmann recently funded a multimillion-dollar ad campaign attacking public education. Forstmann wants to scrap public schools in favor of an ATM-like system that would dispense taxpayer-funded vouchers for tuition at schools run by anyone who wanted to start one.
3. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper spent more than $26 million last year on an unpopular California initiative - defeated by a 70-30 margin - to give publicly funded vouchers to children from even the wealthiest families.
4. Alticor Inc. President Dick DeVos directed the 2000 Michigan voucher initiative and, with family members, spent $5 million on this measure - which voters rejected by a 70-30 margin. DeVos and his wife, Betsy, are continuing their anti-public education assault through a new nonprofit organization that promotes a skewed report claiming that 90 percent of Michigan's public schools are failing.
5. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee makes generous gifts to provide a reliable funding stream for vouchers, from courtroom to the classroom. Among the beneficiaries of the Bradley Foundation's largesse: Milwaukee's privately funded voucher program, Harvard researcher Paul Peterson, and the Institute for Justice, a pro-voucher legal defense group.
6. Texan James Leininger has poured money into political campaigns to promote a conservative agenda that includes vouchers. Leininger provides the bulk of the funding for the Horizon program in Texas, a privately funded voucher program that's draining money from San Antonio's Edgewood public schools.
7. Insurance company executive J. Patrick Rooney, the founder of an early privately funded voucher program, went national after unsuccessful attempts to push vouchers in his home state of Indiana. Rooney has been a key figure in several pro-voucher groups, including CEO America, the American Education Reform Council, and the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation.
8. Economist Milton Friedman uses his modest-sized foundation to supplement his four decades of voucher advocacy. Friedman supports ad campaigns, conferences and publications, think tanks, and advocacy groups to promote public school "alternatives."
9. Richard Mellon Scaife exerts his financial reach through four family foundations. Scaife, who joined other voucher regulars in supporting the 1993 California voucher initiative, provides core support for think tanks and advocacy groups, private organizations that offer vouchers, and public interest law firms that promote vouchers and tuition tax credits.
10. In 2000, the voucher movement found itself new benefactors. Univision CEO Jerrold Perenchio gave more than $1 million to the California voucher initiative. Former Circuit City CEO Richard Sharp gave $100,000 to both the California and Michigan initiatives. Michigan's big-giver list included Wolverine Gas & Oil CEO Sidney Jansma, at $470,000; Domino's Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, $350,000; and the computer company Compuware, $361,000.
And that's all of it. The whole thing.
Is this supposed to cheer up the people who are opposing vouchers? Why don't they just put a giant sign up at their website saying: "WE ARE LOSING AND THERE'S BUGGER ALL WE CAN DO ABOUT IT!"
Time was when these people knew how to do propaganda, and from those far off lefties of the time when time was, I have personally learned a lot. But this is extraordinarily inept. It's just a list of how big and powerful and just plain mean the opposition is, with no explanation whatever of what is going to be done about it.
I particular liked the bit at the beginning about how many of these "very wealthy folks" actually "work together". What swine! They believe in the same thing. They're on the same side. They work together. Is their no limit to the perfidy of these monsters?
This is only a little question, not a plea for a two day course at no cost. Simply, if I do a posting with a link in it to another Movable Type blog (Samizdata, say), but then revise it a couple of times after it's already been put up on my site (as I have just done), does the linkee (Samizdata) receive three separate "trackback" messages? It sometimes does happen that Samizdata will apparently get four trackbacks, but on inspection three of them will turn out to be the same trackback. Have I just described how that happens, or is some other mechanism involved to create that pseudo-impressive effect?
However it happens, it's not good, I say.
My problem is that I find it hard to really proof-read unless the thing is already published for real, and, theoretically at least, already being looked at by The World. Something then happens inside my brain to make me really notice mistakes, the way I don't when it's only in draft. (Something to do with it being in a different format?) My defect, I'm sure. Must I learn better habits?
Mike Alissi of Hit & Run comments, and then Robert Clayton Dean of Samizdata follows up, on how New York's inner city school system is failing to make use of the many high quality applicants who apply to it for teaching posts. Excerpt from the Washington Post report:
A new report on the study, "Missed Opportunities: How We Keep High-Quality Teachers Out of Urban Schools," concludes that those school systems alienate many talented applicants because of rules that protect teachers already on staff and because of slow-moving bureaucracies and budgeting delays."As a result, urban districts lose the very candidates they need in their classrooms . . . and millions of disadvantaged students in America's cities pay the price with lower-quality teachers than their suburban peers," wrote researchers Jessica Levin and Meredith Quinn, who were given rare access to the inner workings of school districts in four U.S. cities.
It was standard procedure to let impressive applications sit in file drawers for months, the researchers found, while the candidates, needing to get their lives in order, secured work elsewhere. One district, for example, received 4,000 applications for 200 slots but was slow to offer jobs and lost out on top candidates.
This is a classic illustration of how fallacious the Fixed Quantity of Education Fallacy is. Here are lots of people wanting to supply more education but the system doesn't allow it to actually be supplied. This education doesn't go elsewhere. It goes nowhere.
Joanne Jacobs has added a special and separate list to her sidebar of teachers who blog, as she reports here.
I looked at the top one, here, and was somewhat taken aback by the complete absence of capital letters.
I went to the second one in Joanne's list, here, and finally came across (on the left hand side) something I've been … not looking for exactly, but waiting to find, which is students blogging. Not older students complaining about their college professors being lefties, but younger people writing short entries with their thoughts, in order to get better at writing and thinking.
This guy, for example:
I liked working on the internet in my weblog. It was a lot of fun. I got to work on the computer. Mrs . Pritchard tought me alot about computers. It was alot of fun working on the computers.I liked when the teachers wrote to me in my weblog. It helped me work better . It was cool knowing that teachers wrote to me. My weblog helped me work better because I would try to work harder because anybody could read it and I don't want them to think I was dumb.
That was the latest entry, on June 5th. It sounds a bit dutiful and "What am I going to put?" to me. He doesn't really sound like he's having alot of fun. But if he learns to spell better because he doesn't want people thinking he's dumb, that would be cool I suppose. And see also Feb 21: Girls Can Be Good At Computers. You learn something new every day.
At least he knows about capital letters.
Also (see immediately below) at the ASI blog Alex Singleton weighs into the debate about pro-comprehensive politicians (this time it's Diane Abbott) who send their own children to private schools, as does David Carr at Samizdata.
I have already said my piece about this sort of thing here.
A new slant on what for this blog is perhaps getting to be a very repetitious argument, from Eamonn Butler:
In 2001, UK police recorded 870,000 violent crimes, far more than the next worst, France, at 279,000, and nearly five times Germany's 188,000. Burglaries, at 470,000, were again well ahead of France (210,000) and Germany (133,000).You can probably suggest reasons why things have got so bad. I can think of several possibilities – and they start with a state-monopoly school system that is no longer prepared to instil in kids that some ways of living are simply wrong, because - as we are now discovering to our cost – they are socially pathological. Insist on parental responsibility and, through parental choice and competitive supply, put parents back in charge of education: that, I think, would have more long-term effect on crime than any number of razzmatazz government "initiatives".
So there.
I'm in a rush today, or rather this evening late in the evening, and have no thoughts of my own to offer. But I started reading what looks like a very fun book over the weekend, by Bernard Levin, called Conducted Tour. It's about Levin's travels to and attendance at a succession of music festivals during the summer months of 1980.
If I have any more to say about this book, it will almost certainly be at my Culture Blog, in other words. But in the Introduction, there is this little (musical) educational aside:
In 1980, the educational authorities of one or two of the English counties discontinued, as an economy measure, the provision out of the rates of individual tuition for children whose parents wished them to learn to play an instrument, and a very great fuss was made about it, from which it would have been perfectly possible to deduce that the counties in question had made it illegal, on pain of summary execution, for any child to learn to make music, rather than that they had done no more than decide that one form, and only one, of the learning in question should no longer be paid for by other people. I mention this to show what a long way we have come in a fairly short time; my mother certainly must have found it very difficult to pay for our music lessons, but it would never have occurred to her to ask her neighbours to foot the bill.
This is in connection with a music teacher who was hired by Levin's family to teach him, when he was aged 7, to play the violin.
When I think of what now followed, and by what hair's breadth I avoided acquiring a lasting hatred of the very thought of music and an even more intense loathing of its sound, I offer up a Heilige Dankgesang to St Cecilia, and beseech her to intervene, as she surely must have done for me, on behalf of I know not how many other children who, with no innate musical aptitude, fall into the hands of teachers who are quite unable to convey to them any sense whatever of what music actually is, apart from the notes on the paper and the horrible noises that the unprodigious infant makes in an attempt to reproduce them. Such a teacher was the well-meaning soul who took my musical tuition in hand, and who, for two and a half years, before I finally struck work and refused to spend another minute practising in such torment, left me in complete ignorance even of the fact that there were such things as works of music - sonatas, quartets, concertos, even symphonies - let alone that it was possible to go and listen to them, and derive much enjoyment from doing so. For two and a half years I laboured at this joyless thing they called music without so much as learning the name of a single composer, or indeed discovering that such people existed. Up and down the scales I went, progressing in the end as far as a rendition of 'The Bluebells of Scotland'; I have detested that tune ever since, and it is a mercy I have not grown up with a similar abhorrence of bluebells, or even Scotland.
What does that prove I wonder? Well, I guess one thing it proves is that the customer, when it comes to education, is not always right. Because the customer is the parents and the product is what some ghastly teacher does to a child.
Here's an interesting little educational aside on the financial and managerial strength of two of Britain's most distinguished educational establishments, Oxford and Cambridge Universities. It's from a Telegraph article of 1999 in which Giles Worsley looks back over the architecture of the previous decade. He refers to the way their long-term attitude enabled Oxbridge to build when others weren't.
Few professions felt the impact of the early Nineties recession more keenly than architecture. The Lawson boom of the late Eighties had seemed a moment of infinite promise as the property market soared and there was plenty of money for architecture. Bright young architects left the security of the big practices, only to see the market collapse and with it their prospects. Older firms that had expanded exponentially were ruthlessly cut back to size. Even leading architects began to wonder where the next commission would come from.There were beneficiaries, particularly Oxford and Cambridge Universities, whose perspective stretched beyond immediate building cycles and who were able to take advantage of falling building prices and architects' keenness to build. The wave of new building included John Outram's Judge Institute, Jeremy Dixon Edward Jones's Darwin Study Centre, Norman Foster's Law Library and Michael Hopkins's Emmanuel College Common Room in Cambridge; Richard McCormac's St John's College building and Demetri Porphyrios's new quadrangle for Magdalen College in Oxford. The results revealed the diversity and strength of British architecture when working within tight physical constraints but to a relatively generous budget.
Despite all the attacks on them by governments like the one we have now, Britain's two top universities have evidently retained quite a lot of their financial independence, or they wouldn't have been able to buck the trend like this.
Too bad there aren't more British educational establishments able to think in this way.
More from the ew York Times, this time on the subject of cram schools. It reads like the direct response, but four days earlier, to the New York Times article featured in the previous posting here. First few paragraphs:
For children of Asian descent growing up in and around New York City, cram schools are a part of life.Starting in the third grade and continuing through high school, hundreds of students drag themselves to these private tutoring classes, long a tradition in the Far East, day after day, after school, on weekends and over the summer.
The goal? The schools' signs, dotting storefronts in Flushing, Queens, and other communities with large populations of Asian immigrants, clearly state their ambitions: "Ivy Prep," "Harvard Academy," "Best Academy."
Now, growing numbers of non-Asian parents are enrolling their children in the schools, hoping to emulate the educational successes associated with Asian students.
The key thing here is that if one group of children are rescued by their parents by being switched to the private sector, other parents will follow. The usual theory is that the smart/lucky kids can improve the lot of the not dumb/unlucky ones only by sticking around in state schools and thereby raising the average level of education for all. If they leave, they deny the dumb/unlucky ones their education-enhancing presence.
It occurs to me this is a fallacy that I should have identified and flagged up here far sooner, but better late than never.
I'm talking about the Fixed Quantity of Education Fallacy.
This says that if rich and determined parents buy the best education they can for their smart/lucky kids, they will only be doing this by taking education away from the dumb/unlucky ones, in cases like this by denying the unlucky kids the example that the better kids set in school. If the lucky kids get taking elsewhere, the unlucky ones will sink into abject ignorance and rot there for ever.
In reality, slamming the dumb kids and the smart kids together only makes the smart ones unlucky as well. It dumbs things down for everyone, as the article featured in the previous posting illustrated.
But if the rules are changed from everyone being herded into the same schools and kept there regardless, to everyone going to whatever school they want, the dynamics change, and the total amount of education goes up, big time.
If the smart kids are rescued (i.e. if they get lucky), the parents of the dumb/unlucky kids, sensing that their kids are now being left behind will (a) want their kids to catch up, and will now (b) have the kind of places they need to choose between in order for their dumb kids to catch up.
So, instead of the situation described in the previous (i.e. later) article, where the world is divided into smart/unlucky kids and dumb/unlucky kids, it becomes divided into smart/lucky kids and dumb/lucky kids, with the distinct possibility that eventually all will, because all have now got lucky, all become smart.
All that is needed is for the state to get out of the way and just let it happen. At present the "smart/lucky" kids are working twelve hour educational days. If the state stopped compelling attendance at their rubbish schools, all this could really get into its stride.
The egalitarians should be told to choose between a world in which everyone is unequally unlucky, and another far better world in which everyone is unequally lucky.
This story also demonstrates the massive educational benefits that accrue to countries that allow immigration.
Immigrants contribute obvious things, like sweeping floors. But they bring less obvious benefits, in this case in the form of the certain knowledge that education can be done far better than it is here, because they have cousins back in the old country where – damn it – it is done far better. The trouble with the tenth generation locals of the rich and educationally decadent countries is that they don't know any better. If they're the only ones tracking it, an education system can slide from excellence to ghastliness unchecked. Immigrants do know better. They come from places with shit economies (that's why they came) but with better education. Letting them in means the rich countries get to keep their good economies and can dump their shit education.
As often with me, there have been oversimplifications in this posting. But useful ones, I think.
A depressing article in the New York Times about … well, it's impossible to describe it without completely taking sides and making major judgements. I'd say it is about the abject failure of the Prussian model of education if you don't have Prussians in charge of it.
"What goes on in these classrooms, that's the story of urban education," said a teacher from Brooklyn. "You've got kids playing dice in the back of the classroom. You've got kids listening to their Walkman, or writing rap rhymes. And rapping to girls. And also practicing gang signs. Now that's a classroom that's run by a teacher who doesn't care."There were frequent references to "the back of the classroom." When I asked why, one teacher said: "There's a certain protocol to the room. If they sit in the back, the kids have specifically opted out of dealing with the classroom. They feel as though they can do whatever they want back there."
"They just slam their desks to the back of the room," said another teacher. "There might be 15 or 20 kids back there, with a space between their desks and the ones in the front of the room. The teacher just teaches the ones in the front."
"Remember," said a teacher from Manhattan, "these are just children. Teenagers. There is no reason to ever let them get out of control like that. But I would say that many of the teachers I've met don't care about their students."
The usual horror story only a bit more so in other words. This is New York after all – and in New York they don't do things by halves. Basically the out of control kids at the back are making it impossible for anyone at the front, teacher or pupils, to get anything done.
One of two strategies might work. One, the aforementioned Prussian model, the problem there being an insufficiency of Prussians, and more pervasively, the general unwillingness of the system as a whole to be Prussia. Not a wholly bad thing, I think you might agree.
Two, a "consenting" Prussian system. Teach only those who want the sort of schooling of this sort, and chuck out the rest. Have rules, and have near the top of the list of rules: and if you don't like all these rules, leave. That might then evolve into something better than Prussia, because then surely, other schools might spring up which might cater to those who don't care for Prussianism.
But the implications of Two are too scary for most people to want to face. In effect that would mean making the abolition of compulsory schooling official. (I presume that it's already an unofficial reality.) And if kids can choose not to go to school, what else will they choose to do? I'd say, make it legal for them for work for money, and in general confer upon them the legal rights and legal duties of adulthood. But the rich world's not ready to face that.
So, Three, bugger on with the shambolic mess now prevailing, is presumably the policy that will go on happening.
There's a posting and prolonged comment-fest about home schooling going on at Crooked Timber. I'd like to have time to join in, but I alas don't.
The consensus seems to be that although in a perfect world home schooling wouldn't be allowed, the world being the messy place that it is now, it should for the time being be allowed. Very generous.
From the website of Wheeling Jesuit University, via the Libertarian Alliance Forum. First two paragraphs:
A Wheeling Jesuit University business professor is using the book Atlas Shrugged to help MBA and undergraduate business students better understand the philosophical concepts and the moral aspects of today's business world.Edward Younkins, professor of accountancy and business administration and author of the book Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundation of Free Enterprise, incorporates Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged, into his Conceptual Foundations of Business course to give students practical business examples. Younkins explains that students take turns leading discussions on all 30 chapters of Rand's 1,075-page novel. Of course, the professor takes part when necessary to make certain that key ideas are discussed.
But of course.
While rootling about in various classical music websites for my Culture Blog, I came across this interesting little educational nugget, about and then from the now highly successful classical singer Magdalena Kozena:
Though she is now based in Paris, she first learnt her art in Czechoslovakia; first at the Brno Conservatory and later at the Bratislava College Of Performing Arts. She commented on how that grounding has served her over the years."Actually, I'm from a very lucky generation because I did all my studies during the socialist time and the education, I have to say, was really very good. It was very, very strict and difficult. Everything I learned – and it was a lot – I could use abroad because I was sixteen at the time of the Velvet Revolution and could go abroad immediately."
Sometimes everything just works out right.
It's been a irregular but regular theme here that the Eastern Europeans could really hit the big time in the next few years as educators, once the European Union really opens up.
Yesterday's speculations here about higher education maybe being a male preoccupation were doubted by a commenter, and that same commenter would find further confirmation of his doubts in this story, from the Independent:
Women work harder than men at university and get better degrees as a result, according to a study carried out at Brunel University.The research, which tracked 200 students over four-years, found that women consistently outperformed men in further education even though they had started their courses with almost identical A-level results.
The study was launched after academics in Brunel's geography and earth science department became concerned that male students were under-performing.
Its findings could have far-reaching consequences as Brunel's vice-chancellor, Steven Schwartz, heads a government task force into university admissions, which is investigating how more disadvantaged students can be encouraged to go into higher education.
Apparently attitudes more commonly found in ghettos seem to be creeping into universities:
The study, based on 180 questionnaires and interviews with more than 70 students, concluded that males underachieved because they felt working hard was not "macho".
Here's how the story ends:
Professor Schwartz said the research, though inconclusive, raised interesting questions. "The government has a focus on widening participation to reach its target of 50 per cent of school leavers moving into higher education," he said. "However, it may be that the vast majority of graduates will be women, while men risk losing out in the qualifications stakes."This survey shows how vital it is that we engage all young people and teach them the value of higher education."
Clearly my remarks yesterday about differing attitudes of men and women to higher education were at best out of date, as that commenter said. But what if the trend described here reflects something almost the opposite of what I was referring to yesterday, namely that higher education, at any rate at a place like Brunel, is now ceasing to be a way to stand out from the crowd, and more a way of sticking with the crowd? Are the men, now that they feel unable to stick out at the top end of the class, saying to hell with it?
What are now the poshest of the posh "finishing schools"? Might even the poshest universities perhaps now be being replaced as the incubators of society's Crown Princes by such places as the top management consultancies? I'm guessing that men still predominate there, but am, today as yesterday, very ready to be corrected about such things.
I realise that I'm flailing about here, but these are not notions I am ready to abandon, merely because the first few darts I threw at them missed. The idea that education is an arena which displays the contrasts between the male and female psyches, strikes me as worthwhile. Why should twenty first century higher education not reveal these differences, every bit as much as the coming of age rituals of South Sea Islanders or African cattle-herders?
And since higher education in our societies has changed a lot in the last fifty years, most notably in the sheer numbers of people involved in it, but in lots of other ways too, many of them triggered by that numerical change, you would expect male and female concerns to express themselves differently in this radically changed setting.
To put the thing bluntly and gender stereotypically, women do as they are told, while men want to excel, but if they can't … then fuck it. (It was interesting that one of the things that "diverted" men from doing the academic work that they were "supposed" to be doing at Brunel university was sport.) What I'm saying is: university course work of the usual sort nowadays no longer appeals to the male lust for glory. And there may also be an inherently masculine desire to go off and male bond with the other males, and to avoid anything which stinks of "women's work", as I'm guessing university work now seriously does.
A hundred or two hundred years ago, higher education was something you either had bought for you, or you had to fight for. So to be non-rich and at a university at all was an inherently glorious thing. (That's what I think I was trying to say yesterday.) Now university is pretty close to being a universal right.
There's more trashing of the No Child Left Behind Act going on in the USA today, this time in the New York Times. I started having another go at it for here, but then, as so often with my specialist blogs, decided to give it the Samizdata treatment.
A week ago today, Friedrich Blowhard posted a piece about how women's fashion is maybe an exercise in sexual self-presentation. The point being, it's hard, and it's complicated. If you can excel at being fashionable, you are one formidable woman.
The tricky part with signaling is that it is easier, evolutionarily speaking, to cook up a fake signal of reproductive fitness than it is to actually deliver the goods. I think you’ll understand the pressure to “cheat” when you consider that reproductive fitness isn’t an absolute quality, but a relative one. Reproductive fitness is graded on a curve, and only a certain percentage of the population will get an “A” no matter how well everyone does on the final.So the natural tendency among individuals evaluating such signals is to look for ones that are hard to fake. In 1975 Amotz Zahavi realized that traits that actually inflicted a penalty or a handicap to the signaler fit this bill perfectly. He used this handicap theory to explain why peacocks grew such enormous tails, despite the fact that this reduced their odds of survival: the fact that the peacocks are still around and functioning despite their grotesque tails signals to peahens that these guys were extremely reproductively fit. Such a signal can’t be faked; if you’ve got such a tail then it will handicap your individual survival whether or not you’ve got the genetic resources to bear up under this burden, so it's insane to fake it.
And this is how fashion fits into that:
How a woman dresses, for it to work both as a successful signal and a handicap in Mr. Zahavi’s sense, has to go beyond the fairly utilitarian matter of successful self-presentation. That's too easy. As a result, the notion of fashion has evolved, which forces a woman to look good while simultaneously not violating a rapidly changing set of arbitrary rules. With fashion in the game, a woman not only sends out face and figure cues – which are fairly easy to fake – but she also signals her knowledge of the rules of fashion and her strategies for coping with them – which requires a set of inputs that are much harder to fake. With fashion layered into the mix, men can now tell something about a woman's alertness to social conventions and the world around her, about her problem-solving skills and about the financial resources she brings to the game.
I've often thought that the dowdy, school swat girls, with blue but rather laddered stockings, often under-rate the sheer formidableness of the girls who look great but don't make any great thing of being clever. Doing make-up that good, every day, has long seemed to me to suggest managerial skills and qualities of persistence that bode well for the careers of the ladies in question. And I long ago learned to distinguish between the desperate desire to say clever things all the time and actually being clever. (Time and again, in public and in private, the smartest answer is: no comment.) So I agree with Friedrich about fashion. And I think the world does also, given how it gives quite important jobs to ex-glamour-pusses while shunning many of the brainy girls. They don't just get to be posh wives. They get to be posh all sorts of things.
But that isn't the education point I want to make here. The point of Friedrich's piece is that he's trying to explain why fashion is the weird thing it is, and in particular how very distinct it is from mere female beauty. And my central point is that I think this same theory, of self-sacrificial display, applies also to education, which is a similarly weird and arbitrary process, and which constantly enrages us all by being so very different from what would seem sensible and economical. What I'm saying is, to repeat the title I've chosen for this posting: education as peacock feathers. I think this explains a hell of a lot.
It explains, for instance, why education goes on for so insanely long, and for longer and longer as more and more people can afford to do it for longer and longer. People who two hundred years ago would have been half-way through their working careers are now still engaging in economically ruinous – yet also economically rational if you look at the incentives facing the individuals concerned – competitive display behaviours, which are of no direct creative benefit to anyone or anything. What the hell is going on? Peacock feathers. That's what's going on. Is literary post-modernism arbitrary and absurd? Latin verse composition? Total immersion in obsolete computer languages? Archaeology? Keynesian economics? … Peacock feathers.
You are proving with your long history of education and exam-passing, BA-ing and PhD-ing, that you have what it takes to do a real job, of equal laboriousness and of equal meaninglessness. An instantaneous test of mere cleverness wouldn't do it. Mere mental facility is not the point.
Education as peacock feathers also suggests something else about education, especially of the higher sort. It is, if not an inherently masculine preoccupation, at the very least skewed towards the male temperament and masculine preoccupations. Not so long ago it was the exclusive preserve of men, many of them unmarried and childless. Now, it is a way for men to prove their manliness, and to get mates as well as jobs.
You think I'm kidding? Do you think all this is sheer male chauvinist piggery? Well put it this way. Not so long ago I saw a romantic comedy on the TV where the man had done all the usual self-presentational things to the woman, and all was going swimmingly. They liked the look of each other and were doing each other nice little favours. He had collected her dry cleaning. She was smiling at him above and beyond the call of social duty.
But the relationship only got seriously going when the woman's best friend at work had the man's CV faxed over to their office. (I don't know how they were able to do this, but somehow they were.) Only after the women had together scrutinised the man's CV and declared that also to be satisfactory did the relationship get seriously under way. Peacock feathers!
And I think education as peacock feathers may explain something else, which is the deeply held belief, certainly in Europe, which says that a total free market in education is a bad idea.
Free market ideologists like me rage away against nationalised education, and say: surely total educational freedom would make everything educational get done far, far better. But what if education being "done better" would simply mean longer, heavier, more elaborate, more ornate, more expensive, more ridiculous, more time-consuming … peacock feathers?
The point here being that education is felt to be one of those things where the interests of the individual peacock (so to speak) work against the interests of the peacock species as a whole. The individual wants to get ahead in the queue. But the species as a whole does not want all its individuals merely fighting each other inside one huge queue. It wants productive work to get done.
Other examples of individual freedom being regarded as collectively self-defeating are: suburbs, where everyone's attempt to live in the countryside destroys the countryside, and (the closely related matter of) individual car ownership, where everyone's ownership of a car destroys everyone's mobility by getting everyone stuck in traffic jams.
And how about also: medicine? If everyone bought all that they wanted of that, there'd be no end to the damn thing. Old people would consume all the wealth of the world on complicated machines to prolong their pointless old ages. Can't have that.
So, it's better for education to be quick and messy, and not too wealth-consuming and above all not too time-consuming a thing, otherwise it might get completely out of hand and overwhelm our entire society. Keep it nationalised, for all but the very rich, who can be allowed to waste their money on this foolishness without general economic melt-down. For the rest, education must be nasty, brutish and short, and it must remain so if social catastrophe is not to ensue.
Similarly, if the very rich want to waste their money on stately homes in the country, expensive cars and idiotic medical nonsense, that's okay. The countryside survives, and they don't buy enough Rolls Royces to clog up the roads. If they all impoverish themselves, fine, others can have a turn being the rich.
I think all that is wrong, but I surmise that this may be one of the many reasons why nationalised education is so infuriatingly popular.
This has been a long and rambling post. Apologies. Not long ago I wrote a piece, somewhere (here), about how the interestingness of an idea is inversely proportional to the fluency with which it is expressed, and I rather think this law may just have engulfed me. I like to think that I am threatened by it quite often.
The Libertarian Alliance Forum has a piece on it from the Daily Telegraph of October 11th (just over a week ago) which doesn't seem to be at their website in any form, and was presumably therefore only on paper. The spacing and spelling of the text certainly says scanner rather than copy and paste. Here is all of the text we got. Presumably this is all of it, but I can't say for sure:
Pupils using internet material as their ownExam boards have criticised teachers who let pupils present material from the internet as their own.
Examiners at two of the three boards in England say some teachers are providing their students with too much help or failing to spot copying.
Teachers mark GCSE coursework which is then "moderated" by boards which look at sample work from different grades.
They are required to sign that material submitted by pupils is their original work, but a report by Edexcel, one of the boards, found the rules were being breached.
Some teachers failed to sign authentication statements or submitted photocopied signatures. "In some cases, teachers signed [?scanning?] authentication statements for some candidates, when a cursory glance indicated collusion," said a report on the GNVQ in information and communication technology.
Thoughts.
First, this was why exams of the old-fashioned sort – with a kids imprisoned in a big exam hall for three hours with nothing but a desk, an exam paper, blank paper to write on, a pencil or pen, and a suspicious and embittered old-fashioned schoolteacher prowling around looking for rule-infractions – were invented in the first place. Not only can pupils not cheat. Neither can their teachers.
Second, teachers are now cheating, because that's the way more and more of the incentives are fixed. If your school income more and more depends (as it does) on how well your school scores in various "outcomes", then your school is extremely liable to fiddle these outcomes. The key fact is that London-based education bureaucrats are more and more "finding out" how well education is being done by saying to those doing the educating: "How well are you doing it?" Lie and you get your money. Tell the truth, and you don't get so much. This is the day-to-day reality of all those "initiatives". The School Inspectorate can't keep up.
Third, the cheating goes right to the top. There is a steady trickle of headmasters getting done for this kind of thing, and the ultimate cheat, claiming that the system is doing better than it really is, is the Secretary of Education himself, and above and beyond him, the Prime Minister.
After all, why have they switched to "continuous assessment"? More precisely, why might they now be reluctant to switch back to an assessment regime based more than now on old-fashioned exams? Because the news might, for the system as a whole, be unwelcome, is why.
This is why I have a category here called "Sovietisation". In the old USSR you just could not trust the numbers. And that's the way British education is headed.
However, fourth: the Internet now makes the administration of exams, however old-fashioned, harder. Any leaking of the contents of next week's exam by anyone anywhere becomes common knowledge to everyone everywhere. That makes the exam business a lot harder.
However, fifth: it goes deeper even than that. The internet make old-fashioned education itself a lot harder to do, because old-fashioned education is built around the fact of information scarcety. Old-fashioned education is, you might say, a solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Amen. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
This is an interesting book, by the look of things, that link being to a review of it. Opening paragraphs of the review:
What impact has computer technology had on public education in the US? That's the question journalist Todd Oppenheimer sets out to answer in "The Flickering Mind."Mr. Oppenheimer's conclusion: Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless.
"At this early stage of the personal computer's history, the technology is far too complex and error prone to be smoothly integrated into most classrooms," Oppenheimer writes. "While the technology business is creatively frantic, financially strapped public schools cannot afford to keep up with the innovations."
I presume that much the same applies in Britain. Still, at least British schools aren't using "BBC" computers any more. Remember them? That was when British schools – or rather the gink who decided these things for them at the moment when he did – thought it made sense for British schools to have their own special and different computer standard from the regular standard, thereby destroying any chance that much of use would be learned, like: how to use the standard computers.
Although this books seems to be written as an attack on current computers and all the parasites who specialise in flogging them to the public sector, I read it (via this review of it) more as an attack on "public" schools and the way these schools are run. After all, computers are doing all sorts of wonderful things, for kids and for everyone else, outside of schools, and I remain utterly convinced that computers do now make a massive contribution to education, and that they will do so even more massively in the future – just not in "schools". They do it at home, in the workplace, etc.. So what's wrong with schools, that their best response to computers is to ignore them and use nothing but chalk and pencils, etc.? Because I am forced to agree that for the average school to ignore computers completely may well be its best response.
I suspect that one big reason why schools fail with their computers is that no one really owns these computers. They arrive, and are then engulfed in the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is pretty tragic for desks, blackboards, curtains, etc. For computers it is very tragic indeed.
And I further suspect that many schools, instead of getting some computers when they really, definitely need them, to solve some particular, definite problem that they do definitely have, just get them with the vague idea that, you know, the kids will somehow learn how to use them, for … things. (The functional equivalent of that would be if The Government tells all its schools to Get Computers, regardless of the immediate consequences.)
That never works. You should never, ever buy anything computer related (for more than the pettiest of petty cash) which is not the exact answer to an already existing problem that you definitely do have, and which will rapidly solve that problem, and do this so rapidly that you will not regret the price drop that will hit you in three months' time, and which will make an ass of you if you haven't had three solid months of brilliant problem solving out of your new kit.
So, if your school is thinking of "getting some computers", ask in a loud voice (a) what the problem is, exactly, that these computers are definitely going to solve, and (b) why these particular computers are the answer, rather than some other far cheaper ones, or no computers at all. And while you are about it (and going back to that point about ownership), if the school is going to "get some computers", ask (c) exactly who – which pre-named individual who is hungry to perform this task – is going to make sure that all this problem solving actually happens, and that the damned stuff doesn't just rot in cupboards or sit about until someone with a better idea about what to do with it steals it, or until someone just plain wrecks it. In the absence of solid answers to all of this, forget it.
Every now and again, when I sit down to do a posting for Brian's Education Blog, I end up with a posting for Samizdata.
I've just finished How the Hitlerisation of British history teaching may be saving British Independence and stuck in up there. It's far too early to say, but I think it may be a rather good piece.
I've written about this Hitlerisation thing here, at some length, but hadn't grasped the (anti) EU dimension of it all until today. It's obvious, when you think about it.
Incoming email:
Hi Brian, I've been enjoying your blog and thought you might be interested in this article.My own comments here.
Jeremy Hiebert
Indeed. Me and quite a few readers of this, I believe. The links are both worth following. At the end of the second, we find Jeremy saying, of a computerised home schooling set-up of some kind that the regular teachers somewhere or other in America are getting angry about:
This new model may be bad for teachers, but what about kids? I didn't really understand a couple of weeks ago when he said that homeschooling was a bad idea because many parents are not qualified to teach. The idea that none should be allowed to because some can't do it well seems a bit absurd, and the public system is in the midst of trying to figure out what it means to get "qualified teachers" when funding keeps getting cut and districts face teacher shortages. We all know smart people who would make better teachers than many of the ones that the government says are qualified. And what if they had good curriculum to use with their kids, online collaboration tools and all kinds of extra-curricular social activities available - sports, clubs, friends, travel, etc - wouldn't that have the potential to be an excellent learning experience?
As they say in America: you'd think.
By the way, in case you'd not noticed, I regard all incoming emails from strangers to Brian's Education Blog as publishable unless it explicitly says otherwise.
Alice Bachini sums up (title: "Whew") a recent burst of educational theorising thus:
I just finished a series of rants on an autonomous-learning kind of theme, over on my blog.Education invites commenters to write about memorable learning incidents in their lives. Education addendum expresses some of the frustrations we unschoolers have to put up with when dealing with the ignorant and uninitiated. Avril Lavigne makes some points about growing good musical ideas. Then (ie above) there is some other stuff. And then there is a review of Avril Lavigne, who I think sums up a lot of what TCS parenting, life and learning are about, and why it matters.
And now I am having a bath.
Which the general opinion of her friends and associates is: she earned. Also at the other TCS blog or whatever it's called this week, Emma joins in the argument.
Julius Blumfeld comments on two recent and depressing news stories:
The first is a report on Conservative plans for education vouchers:
This week, the Conservative Party promised a voucher scheme for education whereby funding would follow a child. This, it said, would enable parents to spend the amount of money the government spends on each state school pupil at a school of their choice.
The party says this money could not be used towards a place at a private school, but could, for example go into a school being set up by parents or a charitable foundation.
I had to re-read that last sentence quite a few times to be sure my eyes weren't deceiving me. Yes, the Tories are proposing a vouchers scheme in which the vouchers cannot "be used towards a place at a private school". This does rather beg the question of what the point of such a scheme would be. At it happens, the exclusion of private schools is largely meaningless because most British private schools are charitable foundations, which apparently will be included in the scheme. Nevertheless, the Tories' apparent fear of mixing the words "education" and "private" in the same policy, suggests a political timidity on their part which, if they ever get power again, does not bode well for future educational reforms.
The other gruesome story is in the Independent, and is about a report from Ofsted, one of the various Quango's that controls education in Britain:
The Government policy allowing parents to choose their child's school is polarising the education system and trapping poor children in the worst schools, an official report has warned.Weak schools often served the poorest, most vulnerable and disaffected pupils, the joint report by Ofsted and the Audit Commission concluded. The Government and local authorities should not allow unpopular schools to "sink further" by expanding popular schools to allow more children into their first-choice institution.
Note, again, the last sentence: "The Government and local authorities should not allow unpopular schools to 'sink further' by expanding popular schools to allow more children into their first-choice institution."
In other words, parents are to be given choice about where to send their children, as long as they don't have the temerity to choose a popular school, because then the rubbish schools won't have enough children attending and might then be forced to close. Well at least we now know what the Government means by "choice" in education.
The din of distant battle. There's an interesting posting, and a most interesting discussion in the comments, about home schooling, menace of, etc., at Joanne Jacobs, with lots of links. CBS TV has been laying into home schooling. Once it gets more popular here, we'll have all the same arguments, sparked off by the same media scare attacks. They'll trawl the country for a murdered home-schooled kid, and there's your episode of Panorama. Then the battle won't be so distant after all. And it's already, as reported here, been hotting up in Scotland, because statists there are more confident and meddlesome than in England.
Joanne herself comments:
Not one state requires criminal background checks of parents before they're allowed to take their newborn home from the hospital. Not one state checks parents' qualifications to raise a child. Every day, defenseless babies are sent home with parents who are addicts, alcoholics, violent, crazy and/or just plain stupid.
And then adds in a later comment:
Actually, I was being sarcastic. The implication that parents should undergo a check if they want to educate their kids at home strikes me as looney. If the parents are rotten for whatever reason, the kids already are in big trouble. And wanting to homeschool tends to be a positive sign, not an indicator of bad parenting.
But as I always say, the Be Consistent! argument can be dangerous. They're liable to respond by saying: Good Point. We should indeed have exams for all parents, with all failures surrendering their kids into the care of the state. Here, the rule must be: tell them to do the right thing, as often as they can manage, and more often than they do now.
I wrote a piece commenting on this article by John Clare in today's Telegraph. But Samizdata has been short of a posting or two today, and there's been more than enough here by my far more casual standards, so instead of putting it here I put it there.
Samizdata pieces on education tend to get more comments than education pieces here, so if the subject interests you (education "cuts", education directives, etc.), then keep an eye on any comments on that piece.
Often when there are reports about a kid being expelled from school for a year for saying boo!! to a teacher, or some such non-mega crime, I hesitate to join the chorus of derision, because this could be and probably was merely the final straw in a vast hay-rick of indiscipline, and because in any case I favour the right of institutions to expel people irrationally on the same basis that I favour the right of people to leave an institution irrationally. It's called Freedom of Association, and I think that the principle of Freedom of Association should apply just as definitely to education and schooling and so on as it does to sports events or art exhibitions or the comments sections of bossy blogs such as this one reserves the right to be (in case you were wondering). If you don't want to be involved, you shouldn't have to be, and if the owners of the thing don't want you in or on their property, they should be able to expel you. If you think that makes them bastards, well then, why are you so keen to go on associating with them?
All of which is an unwieldy preamble to what really does look like a piece of official idiocy, which really should be jeered at by the entire interested blogosphere, unless compelling evidence later emerges to the contrary. Here's the story from Yahoo:
A teenager was disciplined for sharing medication used to treat asthma, but he said it saved his girlfriend's life, News2Houston reported Wednesday.
Andra Ferguson and her boyfriend, Brandon Kivi, both 15, use the same type of asthma medicine, Albuterol Inhalation Aerosol.
Ferguson said she forgot to bring her medication to their school, Caney Creek High School, on Sept. 24. When she had trouble breathing, she went to the nurse's office.Out of concern, Kivi let her use his inhaler.
"I was trying to save her life. I didn't want her to die on me right there because the nurse's office (doesn't) have breathing machines," Kivi said.
"It made a big difference. It did save my life. It was a Good Samaritan act," Ferguson said.But the school nurse said it was a violation of the district's no-tolerance drug policy, and reported Kivi to the campus police.
The next day, he was arrested and accused of delivering a dangerous drug. Kivi was also suspended from school for three days. He could face expulsion and sent to juvenile detention on juvenile drug charges.
My thanks to Dale Amon for alerting by email me to this seemingly quite mad story. He came across it in James Taranto last week. (While your at Taranto's, take a look at his next story also.) Even from across the Atlantic, this really does look like, in Dale's words, "one for the home schoolers". I'm sure I'm not the only one saying this.
The Philosophical Cowboy reproduces in full this letter to The Times, concerning former Balliol classicist Anthony Leggett who has just been awarded a Nobel Prize. They don't give you one of those just for doing Latin or Greek.
The key line from the letter is the Oxford dictum that: "the Greats man can turn his mind to anything". In Leggett's case this proved to be so, with stunning success.
Says the PhC:
I find this a wonderful parable about the benefits of a broad education, particularly of the type furnished by Oxford, and by subjects (such as Classics) that serve as mental training.
But was it Classics that made Leggett clever, or Leggett's cleverness that made him good, first at Classics, and then at science? Certainly the Classics doesn't seem to have done any permanent harm in his case, but in general, Classics is an unnecessary and insufficient educational basis for winning a Nobel Prize. Science, on the other hand, is necessary but insufficient.
You can tell I did Latin and Greek at school can't you? How else could I possibly have learned to think?
Warmest thanks to Tim Haas for telling me about this Scotsman.com article about Scottish teaching union hatred of home education. First few paragraphs:
PARENTS who take their children out of school have been accused of "kidding themselves" they can educate their children from the kitchen table.In a hard-hitting statement a teaching union leader claimed home educators are jeopardising their children’s future.
And, in a separate attack, the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) has accused ministers of putting children at risk of abuse and poor teaching by agreeing to cut down checks on those who are not enrolled at school.
Revised draft guidelines from the Executive propose dropping a number of controls for children outside the education service.
The Executive is expected to announce definitive guidelines in the next few weeks.
The original proposals, which were sent out for consultation last year, caused protest among parents who choose to teach their own children. They said the new checks represented unwarranted interference.
Yesterday, Pat O’ Donnell, a Scottish official of the NASUWT teaching union, insisted that the Executive should adopt a strong line on home education.
He said: "Gone are the days when well-educated parents could do at home what teachers do at school. They’re kidding themselves they can educate their children from the kitchen table.
"This is a movement driven by romantic anti-establishment views of the world."
I had to go on until I got to that bit.
I can't tell whether this is good news or bad, the yowling of a defeated interest group watching the world slip from its grasp, or the howl of the beast as it strengthens its grip. The former I hope, the latter I fear. But it is certainly – Brian's Education Blog wise (and it is) – news.
The story continues:
Highlighting the potential for abuse to go undetected, the SPTC calls for a register of home-educated children. Estimates of numbers vary between 350 and 5,000. Edinburgh officially records only 18 children.Ronnie Smith, the general secretary of the EIS, Scotland’s main teaching union, said school allows children to interact with peers and teachers, which plays a major part in pupils’ social development.
But Alison Sauer, of the home schooling group Education Otherwise, rejected the criticism. She said: "If you are a professional teacher you don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to home education. We don’t do any teaching. Our philosophy is self-directed learning.
"They can say what they like until they are blue in the face but the evidence shows that home education is the most brilliant thing."
No need to go anywhere else and "read the whole thing", because you just did. That's all of it.
I reckon it's good news, and that the home edders are winning up there. They are certainly the ones getting the favourable press, if this piece is anything to go by.
I blog a lot here about the impact of politics on education. Here's James Taranto writing about the impact of education on politics, in the forrm of an analysis of how education correlated with voting Democrat or Republican in the Arnie Californian Recal election.
The Democratic "base," it seems, can be found at the extreme edges of the bell curve, consisting of a small number of uneducated voters and a large number of overeducated ones.
By "overeducated" I take it he means "educated a lot", rather than "educated too much". Or then again …
Many months ago, on November 6th of last year, in among a long, disorganised, multi-subject posting of the sort I have long ago learned to do as five separate postings, I asked the following, of President Bush's still then much trumpetted No Child Left Behind Act:
Question. What if a good teacher stops being a teacher at all, because of not having completed and not wanting to complete an "academic major"?
Later in the same posting (if you had really dug) you would have found this, to the effect that this same Act:
… is a disaster in the making, but we are witnessing the very beginning of it, the bright shining dawn. No child left behind! Six years from now, expect the news to be about all the children being left behind, and all the further behind because of what the government is now doing.
The point being that not only did the Act say that No Children are going to be Left Behind so there. It also said that all teachers had to be Really Good, so there. The teachers who were bad at passing complicated academic type exams were themselves going to have to shape up or move out.
So today I come across this story, and I feel vindicated:
FAIRLEA, W.Va. – President Bush's No Child Left Behind education program, acclaimed as a policy and political breakthrough by the Republicans in January 2002, is threatening to backfire on Bush and his party in the 2004 elections.The plan is aimed at improving the performance of students, teachers, and schools with yearly tests and serious penalties for failure. Although many Republicans and Democrats are confident the system will work in the long run, Bush is being criticized in swing states such as West Virginia for not adequately funding programs to help administrators and teachers meet the new and, critics say, unreasonable standards.
Bush hoped to enhance his image as a compassionate conservative by making the education program one of the first and highest priorities of his administration. But he could find the law complicating his reelection effort, political strategists from both parties say, as some states report that as many as half or more schools are failing to make the new grade and lack the money to turn things around promptly.
Phase one, in other words, has been completed. The Bright Shining Dawn bit is now over. X zillion dollars further on, in about, you know, another five years or so, it will be understood that all this Federal Lawmaking and Federal Money has actually made things worse.
I told you so, in other words, even if not so you'd notice.
I think I may be getting the hang of this education blogging thing.
A somewhat unusual scene is set out at the Gloucester nursery in Southwark, south London. Ten teenagers aged 15-17 are playing quietly and patiently with 40 or so toddlers who surround them. An atmosphere of relative calmness pervades the room. This is Teens and Toddlers, an innovative and successful teenage pregnancy prevention project based on providing the actual experiences of parenting.Terry Borondi, now 19, an assistant on the project, was on the pilot scheme in nearby Greenwich two years ago. It changed the direction of his life. "I wasn't that interested at first, but I thought I'd give it a try," he says. "My future plan is to assist, and hopefully become a social worker, which is funny as I used to hate children." At the start of the course, Borondi believed he would be ready to be a father at 18 or 19. But now, like almost all the students who have attended the courses, he says he would not even consider it until he was 25.
Schemes such as this are badly needed. Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in western Europe, which in turn is second only to the US. Latest official statistics for England and Wales show that the number of conceptions for girls aged 14-17 in the year 2000 were 40,944, about half of which ended with abortion.
Teens and Toddlers is the vision of Laura Huxley, widow of Aldous Huxley. In 1977, she founded its parent organisation, Children Our Ultimate Investment, in the US. The idea came to her because she wanted to teach teenagers a reverence for life and to show them how difficult it was to be with young children. Early childhood and adolescence are the most egocentric periods in life, so she decided to put them together.
I got to this by listening to BBC Radio 4's weekly education show The Learning Curve, which is presented by Libby Purves. They reported on this scheme in their programme last Tuesday, which was repeated this evening. And I googled my way to this piece. I love the Internet.
I only caught the second half of this half hour radio show. I must remember to listen to it regularly, now that I'm listening to the radio in general more regularly having just gone digital. It's on at 4.30pm on Tuesdays and then repeated on Sunday evening at 11pm.
This is not your average education story:
A schoolmaster hailed as a selfless role model for French teachers after starring in a documentary about a year in his classroom is suing the film-makers, demanding £180,000 for his appearance.The suit has given a sour taste to what had been one of French cinema's sweetest tales in years.
For 20 years, Georges Lopez taught in a one-room school deep in the Auvergne mountains. His only audience was his annual class of a dozen or so children, aged from three to 11, whom he taught English, maths, drawing and cooking.
But this year, the documentary Etre et Avoir (To Be and To Have), named after the two basic verbs in French, attracted two million people to cinemas in France and turned M Lopez into the nation's Mr Chips, the decent, under-appreciated backbone of the education system. The film was also shown by the BBC.
When there's money being made these Selfless Role Models want their share.
There is throwing out and there is throwing out, and this is throwing out:
RABAT, Morocco (Reuters) -- Two Moroccan schoolboys were injured Monday when their teacher threw them out of a first floor classroom window for being too noisy, an Education Ministry official said.One of the pupils, aged nine, ended up in hospital with a fractured shoulder and serious injuries to his face and head while the other, age 10, suffered only slight injuries, the official from the ministry's delegation in Casablanca said.
He said the teacher had warned the pair she would throw them out if they were not quiet.
"They did not listen. They should have listened," he told Reuters by telephone. "She (the teacher) suffers depression."
Quite so. If your teacher suffers from depression, then you, the pupil, need to take this into account when you decide on your preferred classroom misbehaviour strategy. If you make her too depressed and she chucks you out of the window, you have only yourself to blame.
Has Dave Barry been told about this?
"It's become a crisis," says Tom Carroll, executive director of the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future (NCTAF). "We have a bucket with huge holes in it. They're leaving as fast as we pour them in."Last week, NCTAF hosted a conference on new teachers' experiences in Milwaukee. Participants discussed the ways a minority of school districts – such as Rochester, N.Y. and Columbus, Ohio – have dramatically improved teacher retention, saving money on hiring and retraining new teachers in the process.
But in much of the country, teacher attrition statistics remain downright shocking: Almost a third of teachers leave the field within their first three years and half before their fifth year, according to a NCTAF report.
In the 1990s, for the first time, the number of teachers leaving the profession exceeded the number entering.
It would be easy to sneer, and I do more than my share here, but one of the big stories here is that whereas teaching used to be one of the main avenues for social advancement for the lower middle class and upwardly mobile working class, now there are a zillion better paid jobs for pen pushers and number crunchers. The very economic forces that have made education ever more important in the job market have made the actual manning of educational institutions ever harder. As education gets more "relevant", it gets harder to organise, because those who can educate can now do so many other things. Those who once couldn't and could once only teach, now can do. Yes, the battlefield atmosphere of many classrooms is part of the problem, and the usual ways in which the educational whip is cracked only makes that worse, but don't forget the other half of the equation, which is how much more enticing the rest of the world has now become for the average potential teacher.
Daily contemplation of the world of education is no mere preparation for history, still less immune from history. On the contrary, history is yanking education around as never before. So when some particular thing goes wrong – like classroom discipline, or academic standards, or bullying, or literacy teaching, or kids being hypnotised for hours each day by their own individually owned TV sets, or, as in this case, teacher recruitment – it isn't good enough merely to snarl at the people whose misfortune it is to be standing right next to one of the millions of resulting accidents or misfortunes. Okay, many of these people may not be helping much, and Could Do Better, as teachers like to say. But we live in times when even exemplary conduct by a much increased number of the mere individuals involved wouldn't necessarily solve the problems.
Do I sound like a socialist? Yes. Part one of all socialist arguments says: Society Is To Blame, and that, tarted up, is what I just said. But that doesn't mean that the way to make Society shape up is to nationalise the means of production, distribution, exchange and education. Quite the opposite, I would say. Society, like motor manufacturing, is improved when disowned by governments.
If you hear no more from me before it gets underway, have a nice weekend.
Natalie Solent was kind enough to link to this piece here. I return the complement, as I fear that links from Blogger do not flag themselves up here automatically. Sample paragraph from Natalie's piece, about education in Poland. It used to be different under Communism, but …:
Nowadays it's different, but education bureaucrats design their systems as if they still have savage force to back them up. Poland's education system, like our own, is one of ineffective compulsion. It was said (I think by Macchiavelli but I can't find the quote) that there is nothing so dangerous as to harm a man enough to make him hate you, yet leave him the strength to get his revenge. That is exactly what imprisoning young men in school does.
Indeed.
There are other things at Natalie's which I also like. I've stolen one posting in its entirety and put it up at my other place.
… subtitled: "Brian copies his homework off the internet".
This is useful: "Decades of trying to get the balance right". It will be convenient for me – and for some of you? – to be able to link to from here. For a while anyway.
I was tempted to copy the whole thing, and duly surrendered to temptation:
1944: Butler's Education Act creates Ministry of Education, organises public education into primary, secondary and further stages, ends fee-paying in maintained schools and creates county colleges to provide education to age 18.1947: School leaving age raised to 15.
1951: O-levels replace School Certificate and A-levels replace Higher School Certificate.
1959: Central Advisory Council report proposes 20-year programme to ensure half of pupils in full-time education until 18 by 1980.
1964: Department of Education and Science replaces Ministry of Education.
1965: Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) introduced for students at secondary modern schools.
1972: School leaving age raised to 16.
1976: Education Act compels local education authorities to introduce comprehensive education.
1979: Education Act repeals 1976 act on comprehensive schools.
1980: Education Act introduces assisted places at independent schools.
1983: Technical and Vocational Education Initiative for 14-18s.
1986: O-levels and CSEs abolished, replaced by General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). National Council for Vocational Qualifications established.
1988: National Curriculum and grant-maintained schools introduced under the Education Reform Act.
1989: Advanced Supplementary (AS) introduced, separate exam the equivalent of half an A-level.
1992: General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs) introduced.
1992: Further and Higher Education Act removes sixth-form colleges from LEA control. Polytechnics granted full university status.
1995: Standard Attainment Tests (SATS) introduced for children at key stages 1, 2 and 3.
1997: Education Act scraps assisted places at independent schools.
1997: National Literacy Strategy introduced in primary schools.
2000: Curriculum 2000 changes AS qualification to Advanced Subsidiary, an exam taken after the first year of an A-level course.
And don't let's forget 2003: This, which John Clare really does think is quite important.
Last Friday I bought, because I feel that I should from time to time, a copy of the Times Educational Supplement (October 3 2003). It's a sort of giant Brian's Education Blog for centre-left to stupid-left teachers, done on paper. The economic basis of it is teaching job adverts.
The latest issue has (on page 5) what I've come to notice as a staple story for the TES, the one about the very smart person who becomes a starting out teacher, and who finds that it Isn't As Easy As She'd Thought It Would Be, and that she had to Work Very Hard.
This is the subheading of the story:
High-flyers are discovering that the teacher's daily grind is no cakewalk.
This story is about Laura Johnson, a 24-year-old Oxford graduate, who is doing a spell of teaching as part of the Teach First initiative. And she found it was very difficult, had to work from 7 am to midnight, blah blah blah.
The moral being: They Earn Their Money. Or to be more exact: We Earn Our Money And We Deserve A Stonking Pay Rise.
The more I think about these stories, and I've read plenty of them over the last few months, the more I find myself dissenting with extreme and indeed contemptuous vehemence from the usual version of what they are said to mean. They do not mean that Oxford graduates are less than very clever. Oxford graduates are, on the whole and give or take a few pomposities caused by ignorance of the world outside of Oxford which acquaintance with the world outside of Oxford will soon cure, pretty much as clever as they think they are. (It didn't take Laura Johnson long to realise how little she knew about what teachers did and how unrealistic were her first hopes of what she might immediately achieve as a teacher.) The thing that is stupid stupid stupid is the routine of flinging totally, and I do mean totally, inexperienced "teachers", on their own, into "classrooms" crammed with several dozen "pupils", and expecting non-insanity to be the result. The inverted commas in the previous sentence are there because "screws", "prisoners" and "jails" would make at least as much sense of what is going on here as does any talk of teachers and pupils. That kids get stuck in thumbscrews (see the previous story but one here), or otherwise get screamed at or assaulted, or that the kids retaliate in kind and assault their "teachers", is just the kind of Dickensian awfulness that one should expect from such a practice. The miracle is not that this happens. The miracle is that anything nicer ever does.
What would we say about the RAF if kids were plucked off the dole-queues and stuck in jet airplanes and expected to drive them straight away without crashing and burning? Of if they were "trained" for this absurd and destructive ordeal by doing nothing more than sitting about discussing and writing essays about the theory and the philosophy of flying for a few months or years?
The reason why teachers so often compare their lives to that of front line soldiers in wars is because that is indeed what their lives are like. And during the Second World War, the RAF did grab ignorant young men and stick them in complicated airplanes with woefully insufficient training, and hope for the best. That's the kind of cruel madness that happens in wars. But that's no excuse to do such things when there's no war being fought.
Brian School, will, to start with, have about one or two pupils, who can leave at any moment without explanation or justification if they don't like it, and there'll be me, and maybe one or two friends helping out, plus any concerned adults connected with the pupils who aren't sure what will happen with this arrangement and want to keep an earlly eye on it. At first there will be confusions and unpleasantnesses. Some kids won't like me or my friends and vice versa. Some adults won't approve of what is happening. But by and by, a small gang of consenting children and adults will coagulate, and slowly expand, learning all the time.
At which point, I fear, the government will shut the thing down on account of the adults not having had enough "training" (i.e. not having spent sufficient time writing essays about the philosophy of education), because we aren't helping enough with the government's latest truancy initiative and languages initiative, and because there's only one toilet. I'll say to The Government: but you aren't giving us any money, what business is it of yours? And The Government will reply: the fact that you refuse to accept any government money (fair comment – that will be the reality of the situation) means that you are a Private School and that only makes everything far, far worse.
If Brian School can ever get past those problems and get as huge as the average tiny "school" is now, new adult members will be inducted much as new younger members are. They won't be hurled into insane asylum/prisons and made to stay up half the night preparing make-work for their prisoners and then lie awake for the rest of the night worrying about how to subjugate their prisoners. They'll be welcomed, told a little of how the place is organised and how it works, and then asked to make themselves useful, doing something easy which they can easily do. Some will have been enticed there with a particular activity in mind for them to start in on.
Some will be confused and angry, and leave, which is fine – if they don't like it, they shouldn't hang about. Others will love it but be, in our opinion, unsuitable, and will be eased/intimidated out and if that fails, told to go. But some will be great and will see the point quickly, and will love it, and will stick around. It'll be the same as any other sane adult operation, in other words.
Many of these adults will (I fantasise) be ex-"teachers", who, for the privilege of actually doing some real teaching to consenting pupils, will be happy to do it for nothing.
Dream on Brian. That's what blogs are for. More realistically, if anyone is already running something like Brian School within easy-ish travelling distance of Brian (i.e. near-ish to London SW1) do please get in touch. I'd far rather not have to do all the organising myself. I'm better at just helping out.
There were a couple of interesting education-relevant comments over at Samizdata.net concerning the Arnold Schwarzenneger victory in the California governorship recall election.
Cydonia said, of the hope that Arnie might make substantial public spending cuts:
Sadly I doubt that anything will change.According to the BBC, almost half of California's budget is spent on State "education". Any politician with the slightest libertarian leanings would hack away at that, but Arnie has (again according to the BBC) pledged not to touch the "education" budget.
And fnyser replied:
Cydonia; you're right but there is a ray of hope. One can provide vouchers and charter schools without decreasing "school funding." I don't think it's impossible.CA passed total immersion English and threw out bilingual education. All the guilty white liberals were surprised when the biggest support for that measure came from Spanish speakers: they realized speaking Spanglish was a great way to get a career as a dishwasher. There's more and more support for alternatives to public school esp. in the "minority" community so … maybe a step in the right direction.
Hasta la vista. By the way, what does "hasta la vista" mean? I realise that I have no idea.
Here's a startling little story from the Guardian. A Victorian punishment device (wooden blocks for immobilising your fingers) found its way to a school, as a demonstration of how things used to be, and it apparently got used for real. The eight-year-old miscreant had destroyed a pencil. So how things used to be and how things are aren't so different after all.
This is a news item that could have been crafted by a front line novelist, and who knows? – maybe that's what the Mark Oliver of the Guardian will end up as. The final paragraph is particularly silence-inducing:
But the boy's stepfather told BBC Radio Newcastle: "I'm horrified that this could happen ... I'm a great believer in punishment, but not that kind of punishment."
Ouch. What fun it must be to have a stepfather who is a great believer in punishment.
Timesonline becomes Timesoffline for those outside the UK after a while, so it would be useful for non-UKers to get the full Q&A excellence of what Chris Woodhead said (thankyou Unexpected Liberation for the link) in the Sunday Times (and Timesonline) the 21st of last month. Better very late than never, I hope you agree. Woodhead is a big name, a former Chief Inspector of Schools, and a familiar media face and voice here in Britain. When he speaks or writes, many get angry, but many also listen.
Olivia Daly of Leeds said:
After two failed appeals two years ago, we were forced to send our daughter to a school we did not want. Despite support from us, our bright daughter is bored at school, and we can do nothing about falling standards and discipline issues. We now have a second child at the same school, and she is disliking it intensely. We cannot afford private school fees. All the better state schools are full. We feel we have nowhere to turn. We are aware we may be curtailing our children’s future if we leave them where they are. What can we do?
Woodhead's reply:
Sadly, you find yourselves in the position of many parents. You have no alternative – other than to educate your children at home. If you do not feel able to take this radical step there is nonetheless a great deal you can do to support your children.Encourage them to read as much as possible, offer them varied educational experiences after school and in the holidays, and, if you can afford it, employ a private tutor. I appreciate this is a far from ideal solution but until standards in state schools are lifted nothing else is possible.
And M. W. Smith of Gwent said:
Can I teach my child at home if I am dissatisfied with state provision? I am a qualified teacher.
Woodhead's reply:
You do not have to be a qualified teacher to educate your child at home. Any parent dissatisfied with formal schooling can take responsibility for their child’s education, and growing numbers are. Education Otherwise, a parents’ group (education-otherwise.org, helpline 0870 730 0074), can offer advice on home schooling.Mistakes in the marking of scripts are inevitable, but undergrading on this scale is unacceptable. Write to the exam board, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, your local MP, the education secretary Charles Clarke and Tony Blair. And, since he has given this year’s examinations a clean bill of health, Mike Tomlinson, the state’s unofficial exam watchdog. Let me know what they say.It is, however, only fair to add that in reply to another question about a strange and seemingly unfair result, Woodhead replied like this:
We all know what they'll say: nothing, at great length. In other words, Woodhead is saying, as gently as he can: "You're f***ed."
Still, straws in the wind. This home ed meme is certainly getting around, exactly as I've been saying it would.
In an answer to another question, Woodhead also mentioned a group called Personal Tutors, mentioning also their website.
Once again the pattern is repeated. Politics is the land of bad news. If you want good news, make it yourself or buy it from a tradesman.
Last Wednesday, I think it was, maybe Thursday, the government announced the biggest shake-up in secondary education since the last biggest shake-up:
The biggest shake-up in secondary education for 60 years was announced yesterday by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
Yes, what I said, sixty years. Apparently there are going to be some different exams.
So how did I miss this? Well, I didn't. I read about it at CrozierVision, where I also read this:
No, it isn't; no, it hasn't. I haven't even read the story. Why not? Because I know it's garbage. How many times have we heard the words "shake-up" and "biggest" in the same sentence over the past 6 years? Zillions, I should think. It never is. It's just another PR puff to cover up the fact that the government hasn't the slightest idea what it is doing. And in the Telegraph of all things. Wake up guys!
Which sounded more like the real story to me. So I thought, this probably isn't that important, so that's why it's taken me so long to pass it on.
Lord preserve us, it seems that we now have a languages czar. Every primary school is to have a language specialist in it by the year 2010, and when that doesn't happen, the language czar can take all the blame, instead of him sharing it with the idiots who appointed himn and lumbered him with this impossible task.
As with most of the other bits of educational centralisation going on nowadays, this one is provoked by a good idea, in this case that learning foreign languages makes you, other things being equal, a better educated person.
But there is no good idea too good to turn bad if it is foisted on everybody, without anyone being allowed to say thanks but no thanks. I mean, presumably this czar is going to go around telling primary schools that they must pay for language specialists, right? Or maybe he'll give them money for their language specialists? But that will mean they have to fill in a ton of forms before they get that money, and if they don't they'll end up getting a de facto cut in their budgets. That, after all, is the pattern with all the other damn central initiatives that have flooded across the land out of London during the last decade or more. It's got so a school has to do lots of initiatives to just get its hands on a so-so budget, and about a quarter of its staff have to spend their entire days filling in all the forms.
This Telegraph story is good news indeed. Here's how the subheading goes:
The state won't help parents who want to teach their children at home, so parents have pooled resources to help themselves.
The state regarding something as rather bad, but not bad enough to be actually illegal, is the ideal arrangement to ensure that this something flourishes. Government "help" is the kiss of death to any activity. It means that eyes are taken off the ball (in the form of doing it yourself with likeminded collaborators) and fixed instead on politics (in the form of trying to get hold of government money). Just think how much better school schooling would be if the government stopped trying to help with that also.
Home schooling is not easy, but it is expanding all the time, with more and more resources and advice, both legal and educational, being made available to help it along, and I mean really help it along. The article is full of information about that, and it even has a link to Education Otherwise. Although, this bit will not be universally liked in these parts:
"People get a false impression of the type of family that educates at home – they imagine they allow their children to loll around all day, doing nothing apart from the occasional piece of arts or crafts work. In fact, many families work to a rigid timetable, geared to academic success. Some, particularly in London, withdraw their children for extended periods to give a quick spurt to learning because they are progressing so slowly at school."
Personally, I still think that even this sort of home school is an improvement over children being just dumped unthinkingly at school school. This is my favourite bit:
But isn't it a huge risk to meddle with your child's education in this way?
Don't you just love that? Meddle. But I shouldn't mock. The Telegraph is doing its best. I don't know how much encouragement it has given to home schooling over the years, but this piece will definitely help.
Okay it's time I tried one of those link fests.
Here are the rules. No quoting, because then it would take too long. No education blogs – it has to be stuff about education on other blogs. And nothing I've already noticed and linked to from here, which means no Alice Bachini, ASI blog or Stephen Pollard, because I've linked to them several times from here recently.
So, in (reverse) chronological order, because that way I don't have to make it logical:
October 1st – Andrew Medworth is going back to college, and it's no mean college.
September 30th – Natalie Solent reflects on a short story published in 1937 about the mismanagement of Arkansas schools by Evil Capitalists.
September 30th – Colby Cosh reflects on what testing can and cannot do for the teaching of English writing.
September 29th – David Farrer writes about muddles in Scotland to do with scrapping school league tables.
September 29th – While I'm in the linking to other blogs mood, I've been neglecting to mention here that I did a Culture Blog piece based on the Txt-ing habits of The Goddaughter, who can write standard English but enjoys not doing so.
September 27 – Aaron Haspel says cut down on blog reading by ignoring anyone who writes too much about their own children. Lilexia, he calls it, naming and linking to the inventor of the concept (not him). Personally I now like the Gnat stuff, even though I'm childless. Perhaps that's because I know I can switch it off in mid-sentence if it ever gets tedious. He doesn't like it.
September 23rd – Andy Duncan predicts that if posh universities are told to discriminate against the posh, posh people will put their poshspring into scumbag schools for the final year, and get them into a posh university that way. Last Sunday's Sunday Times said that this is now happening.
September 2nd – Excellent Friedrich Blowhard piece called Genetics, Environment and IQ. IQ can be quite profoundly influenced by environment. But how? Very good discussion, and excellent links to key articles. Don't miss the comments. I missed the whole thing first time around.
August 6th – Jackie at au courant has educational things to say about TV, and also says that gays shouldn't be segregated but that the people who bully them should be.
August 1st – The nearest to any educational stuff I could find chez Alan Little (a recent commenter and graphic helper-out at my Culture Blog which got me looking at his) was a reference to Photoshop tutorials. (Warning, AL is another Lilexia sufferer.)
July 2nd – Patrick Crozier quotes A. N. Wilson on the failure of British state education, and on the success of its private sector and voluntary predecessors. 92 percent literacy? Now? No, that was 1870.
That'll have to do for the moment. Now I know why I don't do link fests more often.
I read about it in the paper version of last Sunday's Sunday Times, which I still had lying around:
A study of primary school children found that supplements of fish and plant oils could push them from the bottom of class to the top in just two terms.The study, which covered a dozen primary schools concludes that giving youngsters such "brain food" supplements causes dramatic improvements in reading age and numeracy.
Here's the link to the whole of that story, but Times links are liable to go dead in foreign parts, so I'm told. So then I googled "Fish" "Oils "Reading age" and I got to this, from something called Junior Magazine, last month:
It was a huge surprise to learn that our five-year-old son was not progressing well at school. Both his father and I had done well academically and assumed that our offspring would similarly breeze through their letters and numbers. However, a Year One test had indicated that Benedict's performance was "dipping" and he has been taken under the wings of the special needs teacher. We now have to take him through an eight-week extra tuition programme. But there may be a simpler, much easier solution. Fish.According to a new piece of research which is being proclaimed by its author as a "landmark study", thousands of children up and down the country are failing to do their best at school because they are deficient in essential fatty acids, a nutrient found in the flesh of oil-rich fish such as mackerel, salmon, kippers, herring, trout and sardines. Essential fatty acids are, well, essential for the brain's development and functioning.
This story is at the website of Equazen Neutrachemicals, so they make a feature of this quote from the story:
Parents want the best for their children, and Equazen Nutraceuticals, the company which makes the supplement used in this study, already reports that sales have taken a pleasing upturn.
I'll bet they have.
