This is worth a look:
A Stepford Wives that worked as social satire today would be different from its predecessor: It would be at least as much about the project of perfecting children as that of perfecting wives. It would be about the collaboration between ambitious fathers and mothers who believe both in the meritocracy and in doing what it takes to rig it in the interest of their own offspring's Ivy League prospects. It would be about shameless string-pulling to get kids into the right nursery school. Status anxiety about three-year-olds. The subtle assessing of other people's children in relation to one's own.
And part of the art of "perfecting children" is not making it feel like that.
Home schooled children are, sometimes, a little like Stepford Children, in that when they are dealing with adults, they often behave a lot more like adults themselves. They are a lot more confident – assertive in a good way, rather than veering wildly between over- and under-assertion. Not necessarily such a bad thing, but food for thought.
Have any movies been made in which children behave in a much more adult way than most children do now? Gregory's little sister in Gregory's Girl spring to mind, as does the younger sister of the Eric Stoltz hero of Some Kind of Wonderful. And of course there's Lisa Simpson, which would suggest that the way to create a super-together child is not necessarily anything much to do with being a perfect father. But how about the boys? Will it really be possible to create Stepford Boys?
John Stuart Mill perhaps?
Thailand may not be a grain of sand exactly, but look at its education controversies, and you do see the entire educational world writ smaller.
From the Straits Times:
BANGKOK – At the heart of the rejection by King Bhumibol Adulyadej is a transition from a very conservative, typically Asian system of education to a globally competitive system.The Bill sent back by the King contained several errors described as technical, with most arising out of confused terminology.
With the career paths of some 500,000 government teachers at stake, those technicalities could have turned out to be critical, which is why the Bill was rejected.
The administration has admitted its error, and the Bill has been killed. Legislators and their committees will go back to the drawing board when Parliament reopens after its three-month recess, which began this week.
While there was unnecessary haste, too little consultation, and overconfidence on the part of the ruling party in pushing through the Bill, there was no sinister intent.
The Bill was supposed to decentralise the system and restructure the work force – teachers – according to skills, competence and seniority. But 500,000 teachers constitute a substantial body of people, and many among them were district education officials worried that the proposed structure in the Bill made their jobs redundant.
Quite naturally, they lobbied the King in a petition against the Bill. Whether this had a bearing on the Palace's decision is something the public may never know.
The rejection of the Bill thus has no bearing on political stability, other than the fact that it is a loss of face for the government which has been shown up in this instance to be, at the least, mildly incompetent and, at the worst, overconfident and therefore sloppy, given its superior position in Parliament.
But the controversy is a reflection on the critical nature of the change being sought.
As in many countries, in Thailand's private schools, quality education is available to those who pay for it.
In the kingdom's public schools, the traditional teacher-disciple relationship is still very entrenched, with the teachers' authority unquestioned even on academic issues. This lack of debate does not breed creative competitiveness.
Also, in today's globalised world, working knowledge of English is an asset.
With the school system largely in Thai, English skills are rudimentary among many who go through the government system.
As noted by the Asian Development Bank in its report this year, the Thai education system lags behind that of others in the region, especially in science and an area crucial for national competitiveness – creative problem-solving.
And in an indication of the nature of the stakes, a mere three weeks ago Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra replaced his education minister with Adisai Bodhiramik, a former commerce minister who is considered more capable of pushing reform.
Same old story in other words, with only the usual Asian tweaks, to the effect that children pay too much attention to their teachers in state schools rather than too little, and that state schools are in trouble because they don't teach enough English. Otherwise: private success public failure, not enough science, concern about global competitiveness, entrenched teacher and bureaucratic interests and consequent political grief, despite a dominant governmental position politically, as this politician turns out to be better than that one at "pushing reform" – it's all familiar stuff.
I tried to pick out the best paragraphs of this story to illustrate the point about how familiar it will all seem to people thousands of miles away from Thailand, but it was all so relevant to this theme that I ended up copying and pasting the entire thing.
Do they use the word "initiative" in Thailand, I wonder?
This is a good article, I think. Like a lot of the stuff I'm reading at the moment, I got to it via Arts & Letters Daily.
Here are two paragraphs from it which I particularly liked:
What do boys and young men want from their fathers? For the most part I think we want precisely what they cannot give us – a painless transfusion of wisdom, a key to life’s mysteries, the secret to happiness, assurance that one’s daily struggles and aggravations amount to something more than some stupid cosmic joke with no punch line. Oh, Dad, you have been here longer than I, you have been in the trenches, up and over the hill, quick, before you exit, fill me in: does it all add up, cohere, make any sense at all, what’s the true story, the real emes, tell me, please, Dad? By the time my father reached sixty, I knew he could not deliver any of this.
But for someone who "could not deliver any of this", this isn't too bad:
In my middle thirties I was offered a job teaching at a nearby university. In balancing the debits and credits of the offer, I suggested to my father that the job would allow me to spend more time with my two sons. "I don’t mean to butt in," he said, before proceeding to deliver the longest speech of his paternal career, "but that sounds to me like a load of crap. If you’re going to take a teaching job, take it because you want to teach, or because you can use the extra time for other work, not because of your kids. Con yourself into thinking you make decisions because of your children and you’ll end up one of those pathetic old guys whining about his children’s ingratitude. Your responsibilities to your sons include feeding them and seeing they have a decent place to live and helping them get the best schooling they're capable of and teaching them right from wrong and making it clear they can come to you if they're in trouble and setting them an example of how a man should live. That's how I looked upon my responsibility to you and your brother. But for a man, work comes first."
"Emes" is obviously some Jewish thing. What is it? I have the feeling that this second paragraph is a real slice of it, in some way or another. As far as I can judge from this (which I got to by typing "What does "emes" mean?" into Google), it means something along the lines of "the complete truth", rather than just a casual approximation. Hitting the nail hard on the head, rather than merely striking it a weak, glancing blow.
This is one of the most famous passages in the whole of My Early Life. Generations of expensively educated British schoolboys, me most definitely included, can remember precisely the feelings described:
When the last sound of my mother's departing wheels had died away, the Headmaster invited me to hand over any money I had in my possession. I produced my three half-crowns,; which were duly entered in a book, and I was told that, from time to time there would be a "shop" at the school with all sorts of things which one would like to have, and that I could choose what I liked up to the limit of the seven and sixpence. Then we quitted the Headmaster's parlour and the comfortable private side of the house/and entered the more bleak apartments reserved for the instruction and accommodation of the pupils. I was taken into a Form Room and told to sit at a desk. All the other boys were out of doors, and I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown covered book filled with words in different types of print."You have never done any Latin before, have you?" he said.
" No, sir."
"This is a Latin grammar." He opened it at a well-thumbed page. " You must learn this," he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. " I will come back in half an hour and see what you know."
Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension.
Mensa - a table
Mensa - O table
Mensam - a table
Mensae - of a table
Mensae - to or for a table
Mensa - by, with or from a tableWhat on earth did it mean? Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I thereupon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorize the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.
In due course the Master returned.
"Have you learnt it?" he asked.
"I think I can say it, sir," I replied; and I gabbled it off.
He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.
"What does it mean, sir?"
"It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension."
"But," I repeated," what does it mean?"
"Mensa means a table," he answered.
"Then why does mensa also mean O table," I enquired, "and what does O table mean?"
"Mensa, O table, is the vocative case," he replied.
"But why O table?" I persisted in genuine curiosity.
"O table – you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table." And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, "You would use it in speaking to a table."
"But I never do," I blurted out in honest amazement.
"If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely," was his conclusive rejoinder.
Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.
You can see how this would become such a popular piece of writing. It appeals to two distinct constituencies. There are those who endured, but in the end accepted all this rigmarole. "But you know, looking back on it, I'm glad they made me do it ..." The Trad Tendency, in other words.
And then there are those endured but who, then or later, rebelled, and stayed rebelled, so to speak, and became supporters of the Progressive Tendency in education. Children, said the Progs, shouldn't be made to learn things they can't get the meaning of. And the fact that it is Winston Churchill, no less, now installed in national folk memory as the ultimate arch-Traditionalist, who is saying all this, makes it pack an enormous propaganda punch. Ivan Illich or John Holt saying such things doesn't count for a tenth as much.
There'll be more from Winston Churchill in a similar vein in a future posting.
There's a charming article in today's Telegraph about a school that decided it needed a wood next to it:
When the school was built in a residential area of the town in the 1970s, it had a tarmac playground and a games field, which is how they still build schools today. "All the children could do at playtime was racket around, which resulted in bumps and bruises and poor behaviour," says Ruth Lippitt, who has taught here for 25 years. "Some couldn't deal with open spaces without getting into trouble."Concerned about behaviour at playtimes, she contacted Brian Stoker, an education adviser for Cheshire County Council with a daisy-fresh approach to how children relate to space in playgrounds. She took his advice; parts of the grounds were imaginatively re-landscaped and a redundant patch of ground near the carpark was earmarked for a wood. Each of the 200 pupils and staff planted a 1ft whip, or young tree, as well as eight more established "standards" to give them an idea of how it would look in the future.
Read it all. It's fascinating.
But even before that bit, there was potentially grim news:
An Ofsted inspector described the woods at Lunts Heath Primary School in Widnes, Cheshire, as an "area for calm and reflection".
Ofsted likes it. So what's wrong with that?
What's wrong is that, instead of being inspired to take a look at what Ruth Lippitt has achieved in Cheshire, and learn from it if they can, and if they can fit it in around all the other things they're doing, teachers all over Britain will, I fear, in due course be "encouraged" to duplicate this experience. Perhaps partly because of this article, London will mull over what's been going on in this Cheshire school and decide to include it in its ever lengthening list of "best practices", and then try to impose it everywhere. Queue another initiative, and more forms to fill in, and in this particular matter, outbursts of titanic rage from teachers whose problem is that the kids in their charge are perfectly happy and well-behaved, but would benefit (in the teacher's judgement) from learning another language. But no. London ordains that the foreign language money that they've managed to scrape together by shaving bits off other budgets must instead be spent on bloody trees.
I'm not against trees. If you think that you've entirely missed my point. My point is that judgements about policy need to be made by those who are going to make them happen.
Anyone who has ever done anything in life, and that's most of us, knows that good things don't just happen, as the result of a one-off decision that they shall. They have to be backed enthusiastically, by people who are determined to make them happen and happen well. More precisely, they need one person who wants to make it work and is determined to make it work. The difference between doing something because you want to, see the point of it, and are determined to make it do what you want, and just going through the motions because some boring ass in authority over you has told you to do it, is all the difference.
This principle doesn't just apply to weird and wonderful things like planting a wood next to your school. It applies to everything. To understanding this distinction is to understand an awful lot that is wrong (but also a good lot that is right) about education in Britain today.
Winston Churchill wrote copiously all his life, and in 1930 My Early Life was published. Here's how Churchill's "education" got started:
It was at "The Little Lodge" I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as "the Governess" was announced. Her arrival was fixed for a certain day. In order to prepare for this day Mrs. Everest produced a book called Reading Without Tears. It certainly did not justify its title in my case. I was made aware that before the Governess arrived I must be able to read without tears. We toiled each day. My nurse pointed with a pen at the different letters. I thought it all very tiresome. Our preparations were by no means completed when the fateful hour struck and the Governess was due to arrive. I did what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods. I hid in the extensive shrubberies – forests they seemed – which surrounded "The Little Lodge." Hours passed before I was retrieved and handed over to "the Governess." We continued to toil every day, not only at letters but at words, and also at what was much worse, figures. Letters after all had only got to be known, and when they stood together in a certain way one recognised their formation and that it meant a certain sound or word which one uttered when pressed sufficiently. But the figures were tied into all sorts of tangles and did things to one another which it was extremely difficult to forecast with complete accuracy. You had to say what they did each time they were tied up together, and the Governess apparently attached enormous importance to the answer being exact. If it was not right it was wrong. It was not any use being "nearly right." In some cases these figures got into debt with one another: you had to borrow one or carry one, and afterwards you had to pay back the one you had borrowed. These complications cast a steadily gathering shadow over my daily life. They took one away from all the interesting things one wanted to do in the nursery or in the garden. They made increasing inroads upon one's leisure. One could hardly get time to do any of the things one wanted to do. They became a general worry and preoccupation. More especially was this true when we descended into a dismal bog called "sums." There appeared to be no limit to these. When one sum was done, there was always another. Just as soon as I managed to tackle a particular class of these afflictions, some other much more variegated type was thrust upon me.
That last stuff could, on the face of it, come straight out of John Holt's How Children Fail, especially the point about how the reward for doing a sum is … a harder sum.
But what Churchill is really doing here is siding ironically with the adult world, and against his juvenile self. That's how he felt, but he was wrong, he is now saying. He accurately describes how small children such as he was feel about being made to learn things, when they are at the same time eager to be learning other things instead. But he takes it for granted that such children nevertheless must be made to do their sums and their letters and their words. Churchill as a child wanted freedom, but Churchill the adult takes it for granted that Churchill child had to be over-ruled, at whatever cost in bewilderment or hurt feelings.
Churchill understood the urge for freedom. He did a lot to protect it, of course. But he was very firm about what had to be its limits.
To me, depressing.
I hope that Madsen Pirie won't mind me reproducing this entire posting:
Adam Smith famously thought that professors whose pay came from their students performed better. At Oxford, he noted, "the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching." (Could Oxford students tell us if this is still true?)When I was a professor at Hillsdale, part of my pay was determined by students. We were all assessed by our students, who could add up to ten percent onto our salary. There were widespread predictions that students would favour the teachers who gave easy grades, the ones who handed out an A if you just reproduced lectures or the book.
In fact it didn't happen. The students awarded the highest marks to the most rigorous and demanding professors, even though it was harder to get an A from them. Most students were paying for themselves, and it was value they wanted, not an easy ride. They could tell the difference a mile off, and didn't want to be fobbed off with second rate.
Maybe if such a system were more widespread, it would impel university lecturers to attend to the quality of their teaching, instead of affecting to disdain it in their pursuit of the higher goal of 'research.'
I think that's a clutch of observations that deserves to get around, and I hope this helps. Alex Singleton is also impressed.
This evening I am to give a little talk, arising directly out of having been doing this blog, on educational matters. More exactly, I am there to stir up discussion. It's with the members of the London School of Economics Hayek Society. It kicks off at 7 pm, in the George IV pub, which is near to the LSE. These discussions take place every Monday evening, and if you want to get in on them, email Nick Spurrell of the Hayek Society and ask him about that.
I will now use this blog posting to gather my thoughts for this evening. Here are the kinds of things I will dangle in front of these good people:
Free markets are great for other things, why not education?
The equality objection. People ought to get a fair break in life. If their families or genetic endowments vary, all the more reason for egalitarian education policies. Free markets won't give you those, quite the contrary. (That's the argument, not my argument.) But: free markets are, I think, surprisingly egalitarian, as conservatives (real ones, not members of the Conservative Party) have complained throughout the twentieth century. Which, because of mass market capitalism, has been dominated by the debased and lowest-common-denominator tastes of the lower classes, and which has seen the refinements of the upper classes overwhelmed by a tide of vulgarity. So a totally free market in education might actually have given the masses a pretty reasonable (if perhaps not very refined) start in life compared to what state education has given them. That's my opinion anyway.
The peacock feathers argument. In English: the fear that we are moving more and more towards a world in which you will need a super-advanced degree in order to become a Tesco Check-Out Person. I further surmise that this is a reason why lots of people fear a totally free market in education. It would unleash a world in which more and more people spent about two thirds of their lives still at school. Again, I think this fear is mistaken, and that a free market would bring people up against the costs of such absurdities. But it's something to think about and talk about, I hope.
The whole Sovietisation thing. A constant theme here, as the link above will demonstrate if you scroll down, and down, and down. Excessive centralisation, bogus statistics, everybody (including and especially the supreme political heads of education) helping each other to cheat. Think, Soviet steel production or agricultural production statistics. (And think: collapse of Soviet Union.)
And, in response to Sovietisation, the argument for freedom because education (like the "economy") is too complicated and too subtle and too unmeasurable to centralise. I like postings here which undermine the simplicities involved in assuming that educational success can be fully and accurately measured. (Queue argument: what exactly do we mean by "education"?) Ironically, the free marketeers are the ones who now like educational numbers and "objective" educational "research", and their statist opponents pour scorn on the numbers, and on the tests which crank out the numbers. My answer is, let educational practice be negotiated locally between parents, children and autonomous and entrepreneurial teachers. Ditto, with testing. By all means permit testing enterprises, and let people pay attention to them and buy their services is they make sense, but don't impose tests from the centre. Again: as in the free economy. If large scale educational organisations emerge in response to consumer demand and producer inclination, fine. But don't impose them. The economic calculation argument applied to education, in other words.
That ought to keep the pot boiling.
I grew up a bus-ride away from Eton, the ultra-posh school in Windsor – Windsor being where my primary school was. But I never wanted to go to Eton. One of the reasons for that was the Eton Wall Game. So far as I understand it, you have to shove a big ball along a big wall and past a line. Or something. It's played between two brands of Etonian called Oppidans and Collegers, whatever they are.
How come, the non-aficionado will ask, that such a slow and at times painful sport survives?
Non-aficionado. That would be me.
One answer is simply that it has done so since at least the 1760s and probably longer: the wall was built in 1717. Another is that it gives the 70 collegers, who like to think of themselves as the brains of Eton, the chance to show that they are anyone's equal at games too. The wall game is essentially a collegers' sport: even now, they have a ceremony in piam memoriam JKS – J.K. Stephen, a great colleger player (and in later years a very minor poet) of the 1870s. Collegers have more chance to play than most oppidans do, and greater skills can make up for the greater brawn available among their more numerous rivals.A third reason may seem unbelievable to those who have never played this game: it's fun. Buried in that sweating, unmoving bully are skills and achievement that few watchers – not even the boys looking down from atop the wall – will see, let alone understand. Boys like rough games. They like to have skills, even arcane ones. They like to compete, however eccentric the game. Ask the synchronised swimmers, the shot-putters, the hop-skip-and-jumpers before you rush to mock the world's dullest game.
Not all boys feel this way. Trust me. I don't mind watching rough games but I don't care to play them thank you, and I never did. I've never forgotten or forgiven being made to box, against my clearly stated will, at the age of eight. Presumably nobody is made to play this Eton game, and assuming that's so, fine, play up, play up etc.
I got to this via her and she got to it through these guys . That's the blogosphere for you. That's a game I like a lot.
I've just done a Samizdata posting linking to this, which is a story about Chinese people coming to British universities, in large numbers.
As usual, watch out for the comments. I've already learned things I didn't know.
The government is going to put a stop to bullying in schools:
The suggestions are part of an anti-bullying charter, which all schools in England will be expected to sign.
And what will happen to any schools which refuse to sign this anti-bullying charter? Will they perchance be ... bullied?
The lefty schoolchildren of Britain are playing truant to demonstrate against George W. Bush, and the government is on the case. (I wonder. Would they be so severe on demonstrations that the Prime Minister was in favour of? No need to answer that.) If that's what it takes for teenagers to grasp how silly compulsory education is, then I'm for it.
The government today launched the latest wave of anti-truancy sweeps of town centres and shopping arcades - as speculation mounted that some children will bunk off school to protest against the visit of US president George Bush.Teams of police and education welfare officers will patrol known truancy hot spots in England over the next three weeks in the fourth such nationwide operation, said young people's minister Ivan Lewis.
Figures from the last national sweep in May showed police caught 5,182 truants, 2,194 of whom were in the company of an adult.
In the previous operation last December, 7,341 children who should have been in school were stopped, 3,645 of whom were with a parent.
Mr Lewis said: "The message could not be clearer - school attendance matters. Truancy is a passport to a life blighted by wasted opportunities, unemployment and even crime.
Well if you make truancy into a crime, it isn't that surprising that it leads to … crime. But if "truancy" was legalised, it would surely do far less damage, and stop being a gateway crime to real crimes. By making truancy illegal, you put those who do it beyond the protection of the law, and thus make the process far worse.
Legalise all truancy. Not just soft truancy like taking a day off for a demo that your mother will be at as well. No, legalise the lot. I know it sounds terrible, but really, it would be better.
Get a load, as they say in the USA, of this guy, a teacher with a difference.
Fritz Kraemer, a refugee from Nazi Germany who tutored generations of America's leading generals in historical and geopolitical thinking, died in Washington on Sept. 8. He was 95.From 1951 until his retirement in 1978, he worked in the Pentagon as a senior civilian counselor to defense secretaries and top military commanders. His son, Sven, a Pentagon official, said that Mr. Kraemer's title often changed but that he occupied the same map-covered office from which he would be called on to prepare briefings, often on short notice, on such diverse subjects as political developments in Southeast Asia, economic prospects in China and French views on nuclear weapons.
But his influence on national policy was felt most visibly, perhaps, in a friendship he struck in 1944 when he was a private at a Louisiana Army camp during World War II. There, he met Henry A. Kissinger, also a private and another refugee from Germany, whom he helped guide toward a career that reached the highest echelons of government.
In cold-war years, long before Mr. Kissinger moved from Harvard to the office of secretary of state, Mr. Kraemer pursued his antitotalitarian views, participating in formal and informal seminars at staff colleges and within the Pentagon, where Donald H. Rumsfeld referred to him as "a true keeper of the flame."
He also developed close and mentoring relationships with many officers who either occupied or would rise to powerful positions, among them, Gen. Creighton Abrams; Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr.; Gen. Vernon A. Walters, who later served as ambassador to the United Nations; and Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, the theoretician of counterinsurgency.
If you want to read all of it, hurry, because this is the New York Times, and that has a habit of disappearing behind all the usual barriers that all we bloggers hate.
Oh goodee, David Miliband has had another idea about how to harass teachers and complicate everyone's lives:
Every child could be offered a place at US-style summer camps, it emerged today.Ministers believe the move could fire enthusiasm for school and build youngsters confidence.
Three pilot projects which ran this summer were deemed successes, the Department for Education and Skills said.
Now Schools minister David Miliband is poised to launch the scheme nationwide following further analysis next month.
Natalie Solent is not impressed:
… A pilot scheme was successful and so they are all convinced that a burst of wholesome exercise and outdoor living will send the young lads and lasses home flushed and happy for some reason other than the usual Ecstasy tablet / successful shoplifting expedition / fornication.So we're back to ten mile runs and outdoor living, eh? What's the betting that next year's miracle cure is the long-neglected educational virtue of cold showers.
These poor deluded innocents never seem to figure out that experimental pilot schemes frequently succeed because they are pilot schemes; i.e. new and not offered to everybody. Remember Home-School Contracts? When some head teacher first thought up that wheeze it probably did work well. Gosh, thought the kids and the parents, a contract, we better take this seriously. But once every child in the country gets one in his school bag at the end of the first day back it becomes just another bit of paper to sign.
Wise words. Some good may come of this idea. More harm. Huge expense. Oh, and crooks organising camps that turn out not to be, while the kids stay at home and the parents get their cut of the swag. Just you wait. If I am wrong, I like to think I'll have the decency to link back to this and admit it. If I'm right, you can count on me linking back.
The sad thing is that instead of spending his life making the lives of headmasters hell, David Miliband might have made quite a good headmaster himself.
Proof that education can be a dangerous thing:
A textbook on Islam that preaches the value of "holy war" and "martyrdom" for all Muslims is being reprinted by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority for use in schools in the occupied West Bank.Entitled Islamic Culture, it was originally published in 1994, but has been reproduced this year, despite undertakings from Palestinian leaders – following international pressure – that new books would be introduced.
The book, intended for 17-year-olds, explains: "Jihad is an Islamic term that equates to the term war in other nations. The difference is that jihad has noble goals and lofty aims, and is carried out only for the sake of Allah and for His glory." It also refers to shahada, or martyrdom. A suicide bomber sent to kill civilians in Israel is celebrated as a shaheed in the Israeli-occupied territories.
One passage in the book states that if a Muslim is "blessed with shahada and honour, his soul returns to its Creator to live a different life, content with the rewards and honour bestowed upon it, a life of grace thanks to Allah."
The general assumption at this blog is that education prepares you for life, and I join in as many arguments as I can find about how best you contrive that. This, on the other hand, is preparation for death. At best, for life after death. And not just your own death.
Meanwhile, the Merde in France (NOT The Dissident Frogman as originally stated, see comments) reports that in Gagny, in France, a Jewish school has been burned down.
Nothing substantial here today, I'm afraid. But I have just posted a rather long piece for Ubersportingpundit about the preparations made by the England rugby team for their attempt to win the Rugby World Cup. They have reached the final of this tournament, and there's a decent chance they'll win it.
In this piece I concentrate on the matter of how you prepare people for extreme high pressure situations. This has also, I assert, been what the England coach, Clive Woodward, has also been concentrating on.
The central claim I make is: that you can perfect anything you can practise. Discuss. Here or there, I guess.
I almost completely agree with Alice Bachini, about this:
The father of a persistent truant has said he would rather go to prison than force his bullied child to attend school.Gary Standford is facing prosecution by his local education authority over 15-year-old Darren's failure to attend Tunbridge Wells High School in Kent. But he claims that forcing his son to go to the school would be the equivalent of child abuse, as he is being hounded by a gang of bullies.
"Putting him into a new school or college would solve everything but putting me in to prison – well all that would mean is there will be no one to look after my child," he said. Mr Standford, who lives in Tunbridge Wells, is due in court soon unless the matter can be resolved.
Alice says that, on the face of it, this is unbelievable, which is the only bit in her posting about this that I don't fully agree with.
But:
A spokesman for Kent County Council said taking parents to court was always a last resort. "The education welfare officers have been in contact with the family over a number of months and bullying has not been mentioned as a factor before. No-one wants this to happen but it seems to have been the only way."
In other words, if Kent County Council are to be believed, Dad could have just made it up to excuse his dereliction of duty.
Personally, I don't think that a child not attending a school should require an explanation, any more than me walking out of HMV Oxford Street the other day without having bought any classical CDs – which, this time really unbelievably, did actually happen – requires me to explain myself to HMV. (Or to put it another way: in education as with most other things - such as transport - number 37.)
Nevertheless, the rules being the rules they now are, Dad has accused Kent Council of wanting to abuse children, and Kent Council are calling him a liar.
Or, the Telegraph has made it up, which should not be discounted, as anyone who has ever had direct dealings with a newspaper-reported event will almost certainly know.
Sounds like there'll be more to hear of this story. The Council certainly seem to have raised the stakes.
One of the great education miracles in the world is happening in India. From the New York Times:
MANUA, India – In this democracy of more than one billion people, an educational revolution is under way, its telltale signs the small children everywhere in uniforms and ties. From slums to villages, the march to private education, once reserved for the elite, is on.On the four-mile stretch of road between this village in Bihar State, in the north, and the district capital, Hajipur, there are 17 private schools (called here "public" schools).
They range from the Moonlight Public School where, for 40 rupees a month, less than a dollar, 200 children learn in one long room that looks like an educational sweatshop, to the DAV School, which sits backed up to a banana grove and charges up to 150 rupees a month, or more than $3. Eleven months after opening, it already has 600 students from 27 villages.
There are at least 100 more private schools in Hajipur, a city of 300,000; hundreds more in Patna, the state capital; and tens of thousands more across India.
The schools, founded by former teachers, landowners, entrepreneurs and others, and often of uneven quality, have capitalized on parental dismay over the even poorer quality of government schools. Parents say private education, particularly when English is the language of instruction, is their children's only hope for upward mobility.
Such hopes reflect a larger social change in India: a new certainty among many poor parents that if they provide the right education, neither caste nor class will be a barrier to their children's rise.
The writer of the story, Amy Waldman, seems torn between various different axioms, two in particular: whatever poor people in India do must be okay; and: private education bad. How to square that circle?
What's driving this private sector surge is in general, the ghastliness of Indian government schools, and in particular the refusal of government schools to teach in English, which is giving the private schools their sales hook. We teach in English!
Two further paragraphs caught my eye:
If anything should be free, it is primary education," said Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. No developed country, whether France or Japan, had educated itself using private schools, he noted.
Apart from the small matter of Britain, the first developed country of them all, which was deep into its development by the time state education got seriously dug in. The implication, that development somehow depends on state provided primary education is just plain wrong.
And second, immediately after that, comes this:
A recent census in the slums of Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh, found that of 1,000 schools identified, two-thirds were private, according to James Tooley, a professor at the University of Newcastle in England who oversaw the research.
Ah yes, that man Tooley again.
Finally, I note that in India they are calling private schools "public" schools. Ha!
I've been reading the autobiography of Yehudi Menuhin, and I promised yesterday that I'd be reporting on how violinist Louis Persinger taught Menuhin. But this came first. Hephzibah and Yaltah are Menuhin's sisters.
I went to school for precisely one day, at the age of five, by which time I could read quite well and write and calculate a little. Tremendous discussions preceded the experiment, whose brevity suggests that my parents thankfully accepted the first token of its unwisdom to return to their basic convictions. My one morning was not unhappy but bewildered. Very quietly I sat in the class, the teacher stood at the front and said incomprehensible things for. a long time, and my attention eventually wandered to the window, through which I could see a tree. The tree was the only detail I remembered clearly enough to report at home that afternoon, and that was the end of my schooling. Some time afterwards Hephzibah attended this same school for a whole five days, at the end of which the superintendent asked for a private interview with my parents to tell them their daughter was backward; whereupon Hephzibah too was whisked home and within the year fluently read and wrote. After two failures, a third experiment for Yaltah was never even thought of.So we were educated at home. What did we lose thereby? Most obviously we lost acquaintance with other children. By the time I was ten I was used to adults taking me seriously but was only on tentative speaking terms with boys and girls of my own age. The academic gains and losses of the system are harder to weigh. If we didn't take mathematics beyond the beginnings of algebra and geometry, nor even study physics or chemistry, nor learn Latin and Greek, I believe that the languages and literature we did concentrate on were taken beyond the levels offered by most schools. I was thirteen and my sisters nine and seven when a holiday at Ospedaletti was celebrated by daily readings from The Divine Comedy in the original.
They all turned out okay. Mind you, their parents were remarkable people.
I've been reading the autobiography of the late Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Journey. He was not only was he a great musician and a most intriguing human being, but he also wrote beautifully, it would seem.
The education of someone like the young Menuhin was bound to be interesting, and so it proved.
The first thing to be said is that almost from the word go, Menuhin himself was determined to become a violinist. He wasn't pushed into it, still less forced into it, by ambitious parents, although once he had embarked on his course his father and mother ("Aba" and "Imma") backed him to the hilt. No, what happened was that Menuhin saw and heard a violinist in a circus, by the name of Carichiarto. And he saw and heard the "concert master" (that's what they call the leader over there) of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a man named Louis Persinger.
The finger I pointed at Louis Persinger could base its choice on four years that had given me what as many years of college rarely give the graduate: a sense of vocation. …
And like the teacher he himself was later to become, Menuhin immediately starts to speculate and generalise:
… Is this particular sense native to childhood itself? I wonder. Have the fortunate simply rescued from an otherwise lost age of innocence the conviction of unlimited possibility, the instinct for real worth, which make it easier for children to identify with great soloists or simple souls with able middlemen? Certainly, looking at children from an adult perspective, I have long believe that the grown-up world consistently underrates the young, finding marvels in ambition and achievement where none exists. …
Older children have no "vocation" not because they never had one, but because they lose touch with it, is what I suppose that to mean.
… At the age of four I was far too young to know that the violin would exact a price commensurate with the grace conferred – the grace of flying, of occupying an absolute vantage point, of enjoying such dominion over nerve, bone and muscle as could render the body an ecstatic absentee. But I did know, instinctively, that to play was to be.Quite simply I wanted to be Persinger, …
Whatever the vocations of others, Menuhin himself was firmly set on his course. Louis Persinger was asked if he would take the young Menuhin as a pupil, but he declined, so instead Menuhin was entrusted to the instructive attentions of …
… the local Svengali, Sigmund Anker, who, with the techniques of a drill-seargeant, transformed boys and girls into virtuosi by the batch.
There then follows a fascinating description of what Menuhin learned, not from Anker exactly, but as a result of the way Anker taught, combined as it was with Menuhin's determination to make sense of it all.
Anker's business in life was to groom the young to brilliant performance of Sarasate and Tchaikovsky, and as far as I can gather from dim memories of those distant days, he had neither capacity nor ambition for anything more subtle. He knew nothing of style, the classics, chamber music; more fundamentally, he knew nothing of the process of violin playing, or if he did, lacked the skill to pass his knowledge on. Not that he was alone in his darkness, for violin teaching was altogether a hit-and-miss activity then, as indeed it still too largely is. Anker's method was to set up a target – correct intonation, full round tone, or whatever – and whip his pupils towards it by unexplained command. The result was that one taught or failed to teach oneself, as one had earlier learned to walk and talk mainly by self-instruction; but violin playing being more complex than such inbuilt human skills, an illumination beyond what one's own nerves and muscles could supply would have been gratefully received.At the outset merely holding the violin, at arm's length, very tightly, lest it fall (or recoil), seemed problem enough; where did one find a second pair of arms to play it? I was invited to fly; I answered by hanging on for dear life. Where the left hand, in the 'golden mean' position, should form spirals round the neck of the instrument (as the right hand does around the bow), mine pinioned it between thumb and the base of my first finger. Where the digits should arch softly over the fingerboard, each muscularly independent of the others, mine – all but the smallest, which drooped behind – cleaved to one another like three parade ponies, moving en masse from one positional rung to another up the chromatic ladder as if they found safety in numbers. Where the violin should lie on the collarbone, secured there by the head's natural but delicate weight, I clamped it tight. Where the right hand (and by extension the wrist, elbow, arm, scapula) and the bow function rather as the wheel and axis of a gyroscope, the former rotating in order to keep the latter on a true course, I sawed a straight line and, on every downstroke, swerved or 'turned the corner' (to make matters worse, the bow was too long for me). At crucial points where sound should have vibrated freely, it was hopelessly grounded. These abominations were so many symptoms of my ignorance of the violin's nature, an ignorance which clearly was not going to be corrected by the explanations of a third party, but only by personal exploration. The gyres, the pendular swings, the waves required by an instrument that itself forms one continuous curve, I had to teach myself, and could do so the more easily perhaps for inhabiting my own absolute space, for lacking the linear perspective that relates people to one another, for feeling in circles.
After six months I had made remarkably little progress. Mr Anker would bode the worst, having expected the best, Imma would report his diminishing hopes, Aba would fall silent, and I felt like a terminal case bandied by future pallbearers. …
But then, the miracle …
… Then, for no reason I could explain, the violin began to lose its foreignness, my grip relaxed, my body discovered the freedom to forget itself, and I could enjoy what I was doing. I was at last launched. At this distance what I recall most clearly is my conquest of vibrato. To teach vibrato, Anker would shout, 'Vibrate! Vibrate!' with never a clue given as to how to do it. Indeed I would have obeyed him if I could. I longed to achieve vibrato, for what use was a violin to a little boy of Russian-Jewish background who could not bring a note to throbbing life? As with my struggle to roll an r, the problem was not to imagine the sound so much as to produce it; but vibrato proved a more elusive skill. I had already left Anker's tutelage and was perhaps six or seven years old when, lo and behold, one bright day my muscles had solved the puzzle. By such strokes of illumination, the solution proving so mysterious as the problem and leaving one almost as blind as before, most violinists learned their craft.
For Anker's combination of extreme dirigisme and extreme laissez-faire, Menuhin, perhaps without intending to, communicates gratitude. Was it so terrible to be told, as a budding violinist, that what mattered was "intonation!", or "tone!", or "vibrate!", or whatever was the word of the day, in unadorned commands? Would it have really improved matters if Anker had supervised the details of Menuhin's learning process, instead of merely announcing the required destination with one mysterious bellowed order? Would it really have made Menuhin a better musician if a man like Anker had been poking about in Menuhin's young mind when that mind was at its most responsive but yet also most vulnerable? Surely the best person to contrive the demanded outcomes was Menuhin himself. At any rate, that is what seems to have happened, although Menuhin adds parenthetically:
(The quest to perfect vibrato was to last for many years yet. Even when I was regularly performing in public as a boy, my vibrato was never very fast, and it wasn't until, as an adult, I undertook to unpick the mechanics of the operation and put them together again that I really began to satisfy myself.)
Once he had mastered the technical foundations of his chosen instrument – of his vocation, that is to say – Menuhin was again presented to Louis Persinger, and this time Louis Persinger said yes.
It's a fascinating story, which traditionalists and progressives would no doubt both regard as proof positive of their own wisdom and of the folly of their adversaries, that is, if such people as "traditionalists" and "progressives" actually exist, which I choose to doubt. To read descriptions of the Progressive/Traditional divide in educational theory is, I am increasingly coming to believe, to learn about two straw men locked in mythical battle, but in a battle that has decidedly little to do with real teaching. The reality of teaching, and of learning, is that traditional methods and discovery methods interact with extraordinary subtlety.
Anker told Menuhin what he wanted, but he left Menuhin himself to work out how to contrive it. To switch metaphors, Anker constructed a wooden frame, but left the plant Menuhin to grow upon it, telling him nothing. That Menuhin had to do for himself.
Meanwhile, I, the market choice in education freak, also regard it as a story about how right I am. For I regard the market choice mechanism – with parents deciding whatever they must and children deciding (as Menuhin decided in the first place to be a violinist) whatever they can, and, crucially, teachers only joining in if they agree to do so – as the framework within which Menuhin, Anker, Aba, Imma and Persinger, could all make their distinctive educational contributions to the glorious educational outcome (Menuhin himself).
Consider. Menuhin goes to a circus (prog choice) and to a classical concert (trad choice) and decides for himself (prog choice) to be a violinist. His parents ask Persinger (choice), but Persinger says no (choice again). The parents make do with Anker instead, who agrees (choice). Anker yells commands like a Prussian drill-seargeant (the distilled essence of "straw man" trad), yet Menuhin must himself discover (prog) how to get the results demanded, and does so discover. Anker having served his purpose, he is dismissed (choice again). Persinger notes the improvement and now says yes (more choice). It all worked out splendidly, I say.
That's more than enough for now. In due course, I hope to be telling you about Persinger's teaching methods. And when I get to the end of the book, I will also be learning about Menuhin's own teaching methods.
I don't know how much attention this story will get in the USA, but it certainly got mine:
Fourteen-year-old Lauren Lee recently got some great news in a progress report sent home from Sherwood High School in Montgomery County. The freshman got an "A" in a tough honors-level geometry course.Not bad, thought Lauren's mother, Lauren Asbury, especially considering that her daughter never attended the school.
"She doesn't go to Sherwood," explained Mrs. Asbury. "She goes to Good Counsel High School."
Lauren, who lives in Olney, has never attended Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring, but that hasn't stopped teachers she's never met from giving her high marks.
Two of the four teachers at Sherwood whose classes Lauren never attended gave her A's anyway, according to the Sept. 26 progress report school officials recently mailed home.
The mother is worried that truant officers will come calling. But what this story is really about is how increasingly, the people judging how well teachers are doing these days are themselves. School "reform" often now means London, or in this case maybe Washington, or perhaps the state capital, sending you a form which can be summarised as asking: How well are you doing? Answer: I'm doing great! Smiles all round. But what if, as here, and as in a lot of other places, the answer is a lie?
This is why I have a category called "Sovietisation", because this was how the economy of the old USSR also used to do so well. That too was an "I'm doing great!" set-up, until suddenly it very obviously wasn't.
I've always thought that that One Child policy in China was a bomb waiting to explode. All this only child objects of parental worship, and at the end of it, a fight to the death to get a girl friend. (Their potential girl friends tended to die in infancy.) How's that going to play out?
John Clare has an article in today's Telegraph about education in China which fills in some of the details. He's been there and seen a little of it, and is achingly envious of the eerily good behaviour of the Chinese children.
Deep calls to deep. The ancient Chinese authoritarian foundations upon which communism was first built, and back to which it is crumbling, reach out across teh continents to the Telegraph educational agony uncle.
Two things struck me. One was that state education, though compulsory from six to 15, is only partially subsidised: parents and sponsors commonly meet about 35 per cent of the cost. In the case of WenHui Middle School, the government provided the land and the buildings, but the school pays for everything else.Second, I was in Beijing when Tony Blair's monthly press conference was broadcast live on CNN. His first words were: "The main issues for our society are disrespect and anti-social behaviour. The community has to be re-built around deeply rooted values."
Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from the People's Republic of China?
One thing the Chinese are apparently all learning about us, though, is: our language. That also will surely have interesting consequences.
This from today's Guardian:
Master spy Sir Richard Dearlove will become the master of Cambridge University's Pembroke College following his retirement next summer as chief of MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service.
No no no. They never retire. He's just shifted to the recruiting department.
The college said that Sir Richard will take up his new role in October next year. Pembroke is the third oldest college in Cambridge, founded in 1347 by the Countess of Pembroke, Marie de St Pol, who gave the nucleus of its present site and an endowment.
Countess of Pembroke, eh? Before she married the Count, she was Miss Moneypenny.
Incoming.
Hi Brian,I thought I'd email to say thank you for the good write up that you gave to the Australian Museum fish site in your "Educate yourself about fish" entry.
I regularly put up images and factsheets on all sorts of strange fishes that your users might be interested in. Today for example I've added a factsheet on another deepsea fish, the bizarre Fangtooth. As it's name implies it has an impressive set of teeth!
www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/acornuta.htm
Cheers,
Mark
Cheers.
I can't claim to have had a very busy day, but I have had what was by my standards a slightly nerve-racking day. This was because I have just been on the radio, talking about something I am not confident about because it is such a complicated subject, namely the government's plans to introduce, slowly but surely, a national compulsory Identity Card scheme. I didn't know how long this little performance would take, or how well, badly or dreadfully I would do, so I spent the day fretting. Now it's done. It lasted only a tiny few minutes, so I had no time to dig myself into a very deep hole or be humiliated by some pro ID card fanatic. Nevertheless, the end result of my worryings and wafflings is that is now nearly eleven in the evening and I still owe the universe a posting on my Education Blog.
Allow me then to inflict a ramble upon you, in the form of a further reflection on just what a superb method of self-education blogging is. Anything more profound would almost certainly take me past midnight, and there have been too many take-a-look-at-this just-goes-to-show-don't-it postings of late. They don't take long, but nor do they add much. A day that includes one or two of these is fine. A day with just one of these and nothing else is not one I'm very proud of.
So, off we go.
During the year or two before I got started as a blogger, I felt that I was ceasing to make much in the way of intellectual progress. To be blunt about it, I had stopped learning. I'll spare you the details, but I've written about this experience here.
Blogging has changed all that. The comments on this blog are not numerous, but they make an impact on me, especially if they are critical, and whether I reply or not. Only today, I received a quite long email complaining about something I had put here a month or so ago, and I emailed back with an acknowledgement of error, together with a partial defence of other things I'd said. As most of us know, error and learning are things which are intimately related to each other. Through the simple discipline of having to bend my mind to matters educational at least once every day, I have learned an enormous amount about matters educational, and am confident that I will learn lots more as the years roll by.
I am not vain enough to imagine that more than a tiny handful of decidedly eccentric people ever trawl their way through the archives here, but it will not surprise you to learn that one of these eccentric people is me. Mostly I am relieved by the experience, for I usually agree with myself. But more to the point, I learn things. To be exact, I have things reinforced for me. Just reading something is one thing. Having to stir it up inside one's head and organise one's thoughts and write them down is an order of magnitude more educational. Reading it back a month later piles on yet more education.
Learning doesn't just mean piling up facts. It means organising them into coherent patterns, spotting their interconnections, and also spotting contradictions and confusions, and reformulating the original truths in such a way that they remain true, but do less to contradict other truths which are also true.
Of all the blogs I write for, the one which has done most to bring all this home to me in recent weeks has been this one, for which I have been writing about the Rugby World Cup. This experience has given me an entirely new respect for what real sports correspondents must endure and for what they achieve. Simply, I have learned far, far more about the game of rugby by writing about it than I would ever have learned about rugby merely by watching it. Writing about it meant making judgements, and then not being able to deny to myself (never mind to anyone else) that this was what I had put. One week Ireland, or whoever, looked great. The next week they were being mangled. One day England's backs looked all-powerful. Days later they were leaden footed cloggers. What was happening? Blogged questions are far harder to forget about than unblogged questions. I arrived at answers, and blogged them too. Commenters commented. (See especially this posting, and the comments on it.)
I think the rugby thing has been particularly striking because I've never really tried to think systematically about rugby before, to the point of actually writing stuff down, ever before in my life. Over the years I've written about politics, about education, about culture, about transport, about civil liberties (including ID cards) before, so the extra push given to my thinking on these matters by blogging about them has been less dramatic. But I'd never before written about rugby.
Well, I'll spare you the details, because if you are not a rugby fan, you won't care. My point here is, if you want to really learn about something, blog about it.
I know what you're thinking. Why do you need a blog to write about something? Well, of course you don't. But if you are as disorganised as me, and as big a show-off as me, blogging will basically make sure that you do it systematically and regularly and that you will later read what you have earlier written. It will organise your notes for you and supply you with a search engine to find what you put about some particular thing after a gap of three months, or a year.
It may not look very systematic to you, but blogging is the most systematic and sustained studying I've ever done in my entire life.
And although it definitely wouldn't suit everybody, I can't help thinking that there are lots of other failing or failed students who could turn their entire studying life around by following the same path. Like I say: if you want to learn about it, blog about it.
Email from Tim Haas:
If you didn't catch it, you might find this past week's "Moral Maze" on Radio 4 of interest: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/moralmaze/moralmaze.shtmlThe putative topic was whether Diane Abbott was a hypocrite, but it really turned out to be a fairly good examination of the agenda of the egalitarian education movement and whether public school parents (the term "independent schools" is making some inroads over there, I see) are buying better education or just privilege. It seems like the British left really can't let go of class rhetoric.
Thanks. I'm not very clever at making these sound file thingies work, and wasn't able to get this one going. Plus, it rather looks as if this particular link won't last, for educational purposes, as you can only access the latest programme. Still, useful to a few, I hope.
More news of the spread of home schooling in New York. I quote at length because New York Times stuff soon hides behind a payment wall. If you want to read the whole thing, as we bloggers say, read it now.
Newcomers to home schooling resist easy classification as part of the religious right or freewheeling left, who dominated the movement for decades, according to those who study the practice.They come to home schooling fed up with the shortcomings of public education and the cost of private schools. Add to that the new nationwide standards – uniform curriculum and more testing – which some educators say penalize children with special needs, whether they are gifted, learning disabled or merely eccentric.
"It's a profound irony that the standards movement wound up alienating more parents and fueling the growth of home schooling," said Mitchell L. Stevens, an educational psychologist at New York University and author of "Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement" (Princeton University Press, 2001).
"The presumption of home schooling is that children's distinctive needs come before the managerial needs of the schools," he said. "And, it's easier to do than it was 10 years ago, because the ideologues were so successful in making it legal and creating curriculum tools and organizational support."
In addition to dissatisfaction with schools, Mr. Stevens and others say, social trends have fed interest in home schooling. More women are abandoning careers to stay home with their children. And many families yearn for a less frantic schedule and more time together.
"This may be a rebellion of middle-class parents in this culture," Mr. Stevens said. "We have never figured out how to solve the contradiction between work and parenting for contemporary mothers. And a highly scheduled life puts a squeeze on childhood."
The link was added by me, and I do recommend that if you want to know more about home schooling in the USA and haven't already read this book, you follow that link. Sample quote from the Introduction:
… Theirs is a post-1960s America, a nation now sensitized profoundly to the fact that state officials and school bureaucrats can abuse their powers, a nation that has grown rather more accustomed than it used to be to groups that do things unconventionally, to people who live their ideals. Many of today's homeschool sages became adults in the 1960s and 1970s. Many participated in the cultural innovation and experimentation of those decades. Even years later, they think of themselves as their own people, a bit outside the mainstream. Notably, I found this sentiment to be as pervasive among conservative Protestants as among other home schoolers. These are people who have self-consciously done their own thing, or the right thing, regardless of what the neighbors or the in-laws might think.
The everlasting search for a meaningful life turns another corner in the road.
From John Clare's most recent Telegraph readers' questions answered column:
Why can't schools be left to choose their own pupils? What need is there for busy-body local education authorities, admissions forums and appeals panels to intervene?According to Philip Hunter, who glories in the title of "chief schools adjudicator", the answer is as follows: "Where a school can choose children, it will, left to its own devices, inexorably drift towards choosing posh children. Teachers would rather deal with nice children who have done their homework, and parents would prefer to send their children to schools that cater for children with similar backgrounds. The result is high-performing schools in posh areas and less well-performing schools in deprived areas." If nothing else, you have to admire the brutal clarity of the argument. The notion that schools can be improved so that all are equally attractive is "pie in the sky for the present", Mr Hunter adds.
I reckon he's right about the "pie in the sky" bit, and not just "for the present" either.
His solution? Parents must learn to accept that the bureaucrat who dispatches their child to a poor-performing, unpopular school knows best.
Mr Hunter is the Fixed Quantity of Education Fallacy personified. Yes, posh schools would get posher, if all were allowed to choose. But can he not see that the unposh schools would face pressures on them to get posher too? Especially if people were allowed to take a crack at setting up posh schools for the unposh, so to speak. Mr Hunter seems to think that posh kids have a fixed quantity of educational virtue attached to them, which shines out on its surroundings, uplifting all in their vicinity, and the only question is: who gets to bask in the light? And the unposh kids will automatically be illuminated, no matter what the other influences of their immediate surroundings. But what if the unposh kids extinguish the lights in their midst rather than passively allowing themselves to be illuminated?
What, in other words, if his rearrangements reduce the total amount of illumination? What if the arrangements he forbids would greatly increase it?
There's a fascinating and depressing article about education in Russia by Rachel Polonsky, in the latest Spectator.
In 1991, in a hungry Moscow with empty shops and an ugly, uncertain political mood, Shichalin quietly advertised a beginners’ course for adults in Latin and Greek. On the first morning, to his astonishment, a queue of more than 130 people of diverse professions had formed outside his door. Out of this success evolved the idea for a school with a curriculum emphasising ancient languages and mathematics. The Classical Gymnasium was established in 1993. Since then, it has grown from ten to 160 pupils; it gains outstanding results in public examinations, and has alumni in all Moscow’s best higher education institutions, studying everything from physics to history and economics. The Shichalins, who also run a small academic publishing house, have even begun to publish their own textbooks. In a decade, they have created the most inspiring, effective and spirited teaching institution I have encountered in all my educationally pampered life.Many members of staff are university teachers who accept their low pay because they appreciate the atmosphere and ideals of the school, and its respect for their professional freedom. At the same time, the Shichalins profit from the nation’s enduring pedagogical strengths.
However, as we've already been told in the first paragraph:
In Britain, it is easy to forget what an important human freedom non-state education represents. In post-totalitarian Russia, where civil liberties are in first bud in a hostile climate, this recently regained freedom is menaced, not so much by state ideology as by the rampages of power and money unrestrained by an adequate legal system. My children’s school, a modestly resourced 'Classical Gymnasium' founded ten years ago, is threatened with closure at the end of this academic year. Its rented premises have been sold by the City of Moscow to a shadowy company with only a mobile phone number as its address, which plans to build a massage centre on the site of this unique institution.
So what can be done?
The living tradition embodied by the Shichalins represents the best of Russia, but everything they have created since perestroika is now threatened by official corruption and indifference. Faced with the demise of their school, they recently called a crisis meeting to inform parents of its grave position, and to solicit ideas for its salvation. We need a miracle, everyone agreed, or, failing that, an oligarch who will help us to buy a building. Again and again Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s name was raised. Various parents claimed, with differing degrees of plausibility, that they had channels of inside access to Russia’s richest billionaire.Before he was arrested by the FSB at gunpoint in the early hours of 25 October and incarcerated in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison, the oil tycoon had become known not only as a sponsor of the liberal opposition parties like Yavlinsky’s Yabloko, but also, through his Open Russia Foundation, as a Maecenas and a sponsor of independent education. In the past few years, Khodorkovsky has shrewdly spent money on enhancing his international reputation, including the US Library of Congress and Lord Snowdon among the beneficiaries of his charitable grants. At the same time he has, less visibly, given large sums of money to needy individuals and institutions whose activities have the potential to build a civil society for his native Russia. His arrest will hurt many besides the rich and the powerful.
There is scarce hope now of a handout from Khodorkovsky ...
Capitalism with a Stalinist face, they're calling it.
In the middle of all this gloom, there is this interesting titbit:
Traditional Russian mathematics teaching is considered unrivalled in the world. A Russian banker who, like many of his kind, is educating his children at one of London’s most prestigious public schools recently confided in me that, appalled by the low standard of maths teaching in Britain, he and some Russian friends have started a Saturday class for their children, with Russian teachers. 'I just don’t understand the English,' he said. 'Mathematics is everything.'
I've been emphasising here for some time that Eastern Europe is going to go into business educating Western Europe. I wonder if the Russians will go into business to teach maths to the English, in England. It doesn't seem to be getting any easier teaching anything to Russians in Russia, despite those enduring pedagogical strengths.
A (perhaps junk but thanks anyway) email from "Russ" went thuss:
Hi Brian,Thought you might be interested in this fathead (genus Psychrolutes)
trawled during the NORFANZ expedition:
www.amonline.net.au/fishes/about/fieldwork/norfanz/psychrol2.htmOr, for a for a full range of fish info:
www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/index.htmThanks
Russ
These links plug into what strike me as being excellent educational resources. Many a child might learn a lot rootling around in these kinds of virtual locations.
You absorb a mass of good stuff by such wandering, such as spelling, the way different species are classified, the use of the letters of the alphabet in a set order (something often forgotten) to organise and present information and to make it easily accessible, and much much more.
Above all, if you like this kind of thing, it's fun. I quickly found my way to extraordinary images like this one.
And remember also to eat fish.
Here's Ted Wragg in today's Guardian, with his plans to make all schools everywhere equally marvellous:
There is a better way. Nothing less than a massive coordinated blitz on conditions across all relevant policy areas - housing, employment, health, education - will do.
"Blitz". That's another of those continental words (to put alongside "Czar") that people resort to when their answer to failing state control is to treble it.
This article is nothing short of hysterical, in a bad way. Wragg flails about in all directions, snarling at the rich, accusing everyone who disagrees with him of "blaming the poor". He is a Professor of Education at Exeter University and a quite big cheese in the nationalised education biz. He reads more like some gibbering lunatic orating to nobody at Speakers Corner.
Here is his conclusion, by which I merely mean concluding squawk:
Giving all, not just a few, the finest and best-equipped buildings would not come amiss either. Who knows? With these assets they might even attract a few more people from the superior caste, and be able to offer children the social mix they need to stand a chance in life.
Or to translate that into another idiom: if the oiks don't mix with people of quality and thus catch a bit of their educational sparkle, they're doomed. And he calls everyone else snobbish. Why doesn't he stick to his job and try to crank out better teachers, instead of blaming everyone else? Presumably because everything he "knows" about how to do that is wrong, and he secretly knows it, this time for real.
How on earth did those Victorian poor people ever manage to learn anything?
Melanie Phillips is not impressed either:
Pinning the blame for educational underachievement on poverty is tantamount to blaming the poor for their own failure. Yet instead, he accuses those who say 'poverty is no excuse' for blaming the poor. This shows he doesn't even understand the argument. 'Poverty is no excuse' is not blaming the poor at all. It blames instead people like Wragg who have promulgated ridiculous theories which have progressively undermined the very concepts of education and of teaching, and abandoned hundreds of thousands of children to ignorance and educational failure. After all, it's not the poor who make this excuse – it's people like Wragg.
I don't really agree that Wragg is blaming the poor, any more than anyone else is. He's blaming the rich. What he is doing is underestimating the poor, which is somewhat different.
But the rest of that quote is spot on. It's partly because, I surmise, Wragg is at least still vaguely sentient enough to know that this is what people think of him, and that they have a point, that he is now such a deranged individual – a Mad Processor of Education, you might say.
There's a really interesting article in the Autumn issue of City Journal about the education battles being fought by New York's Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Together with Klein, a tough New York lawyer and formerly head of the Clinton Justice Department’s antitrust division, Bloomberg created a revamped command-and-control center, placing the several hundred administrators who survived the 110 Livingston Street purge in the Tweed Courthouse, 200 feet from City Hall, where the mayor could keep an eye on them. Bloomberg instructed the troops to focus like a "laser beam" on a single goal—improving teaching and learning in the classroom. To further that goal, Chancellor Klein began a highly publicized search for the "best practices" in classroom teaching and curriculum, an initiative he named "Children First."
The trouble is, says Sol Stern, all this commanding and controlling is being used to command and control some bad things, especially in the matter of basic literacy teaching. On that front, says Stern, what is now going on in New York is exactly what has been going on in Britain.
Which is: that although phonics has done pretty well in public debate, the anti-phonics crowd still occupy so many of the bureaucratic offices that it is often they who are charged with the task of re-introducing phonics to the curriculum, of expunging their own past influence, that is to say. This they are understandably reluctant to do. Instead, they produce curriculum and teacher guidance documents with the word "phonics" on the front, but inside it's the same old look-and-say "whole word" rubbish.
They, in the case of New York, is a lady called Diana Lam.
Notwithstanding Lam’s lackluster record, Klein gave her control over most personnel and pedagogical decisions during the planning stages of Children First, while he himself focused on the structural reforms, and during early planning meetings with superintendents, says former district superintendent Betty Rosa, Klein chaired the sessions about organizational and administrative issues, while Lam presided over those focusing on the coming changes in curricula and teaching. It was clear that Lam took the progressive, constructivist approach to most pedagogical issues. She favored superintendents who were already using "whole language" reading curricula (the anti-phonics approach), as well as outside staff developers like Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins, a leading champion of the doctrine that all children are natural readers and writers, and that therefore it is criminal for them to be drilled in "boring" phonics lessons.When the Department of Education announced its choice of a citywide K-3 reading program called "Month by Month Phonics" in February 2003, it was clear that this was Diana Lam’s baby. It was also a perfect illustration of how truly you can’t tell a book by its cover. Though the word "phonics" appears in the title, the slim workbook contains none of the systematic instruction in how to break words into letter/sound correspondence required by the new federal standards. Instead, it offers some unconnected shreds of phonics activities in an otherwise whole-language reading program – which is why it met with enthusiastic support from New York’s phonics-hating progressive educators. The progressives were even happier that Lam had ditched a true scripted phonics program, "Success for All," that was in use (with promising results) in some of the city’s lowest-performing schools, and that would easily have qualified for federal reading funds.
By giving the appearance of using some traditional phonics instruction, Lam's chosen program disarms parents and elected officials, who increasingly have been pressuring the schools for more traditional and reliable methods of reading instruction. That seems to be the effect it had on Mayor Bloomberg, who said in his stirring Martin Luther King Day speech introducing the new citywide reforms that the K-3 reading curriculum would "include a daily focus on phonics." Since it is hard to imagine that our Republican mayor was looking for a confrontation with the Bush administration, it’s likely that Bloomberg was told by Lam or Klein, or both, that the program contained enough phonics to pass muster with the feds. Either that or no one at the Tweed Courthouse bothered to think that $240 million in federal reading funds was at stake.
Since then, Klein and Bloomberg have doubtless spent many hours, and perhaps some sleepless nights, thinking about the problem they face from Month by Month Phonics and Lam's failure to brief them properly. When the city announced its choice, alarm bells went off among the scientific consultants who had helped frame the new federal reading requirements. The experts realized that if the nation’s largest school district could pick a reading program so far from meeting the standard of "scientifically based research" – while abandoning Success for All, which did meet the standard – then the message about the new reading standards was not getting through.
The other huge problem is that all this is being imposed by a highly centralised and dictatorial new system, which makes it more difficult for dissenters – teachers or parents – to opt into different schools and do things better, and then to spread by their example the "best practice" which Mayor Bloomberg says he's so keen on, but has actually made it harder to spread.
... the authoritarian curriculum stands in contradiction to one of the city’s proudest education reforms. In a gala ceremony in September, Bill Gates announced that he was giving the city another $51 million to create 200 new small high schools and middle schools, whose fundamental premise will be that each will have a unique theme or educational approach, and each will have some degree of autonomy from the central system. Yet even as the mayor was taking Gates’s check, his education department was pressuring dozens of the city’s existing small schools (some of them already Gates-supported) to align their curricula and teaching methods with the new standardized citywide approach.
I already hate the word "initiative". I'm starting also to hate the phrase "best practice".
Here are the opening words at the website of Birkbeck School, North Somercotes, Lincolnshire. I do not doubt their sincerity.
Achievement By CaringIt is my pleasure to introduce you to The Birkbeck School.
We are a successful 11-16 mixed secondary school close to Grimsby and Louth.
We are a friendly, caring school, with dedicated, well qualified staff who share a vision of striving for the highest levels of success and achievement for all students.
We offer students of all abilities the chance to succeed. Our aim is to identify the unique needs of all children in order that we can help them attain the very best results from their time with us.
The school has three core values, Learning, Respect and Responsibility. These values underpin everything we do.
We believe very firmly in a partnership between the school, the children and their parents.
Our mission statement is simple. Achievement By Caring
Being successful at Birkbeck is as simple as ABC.
We think that The Birkbeck School is a great school, but don't just take our word for it. You are most welcome to see us in action. We will arrange for a tour of the school for any prospective parents.
Please call 01507 358 352
G P Loveridge (Headteacher)
Something tells me that the phone will now be off the hook.
A 14-year-old boy died today after being stabbed inside the Lincolnshire school he attended, police said.A 15-year-old student at Birkbeck school, in North Somercotes, near Louth, was arrested and taken to Skegness police station in connection with the death.
Frankly I was amazed that the website was still functioning. It soon may not be.
Do you get the feeling that Britain's teachers are being given lessons by London in the obvious?
Primary school pupils are to be taught how to speak and listen to each other.Young children, more used to watching television than talking, are to be encouraged to improve their communication skills.
From next week, every primary school in England will be sent guidance on how to get children to hold discussions and listen to one another.
The curriculum watchdog, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), says improving oral skills has a "key role" in raising standards.
Supporting the "Speaking, Listening, Learning" initiative will be a pack of teaching materials, including a training video for teachers.
"Initiative". A word that strikes fear into every teacher's heart.
Seriously, although I can, just about, imagine some teachers being helped by all this palaver, I can also imagine not a few of them getting very, very angry. For some it could be the last straw.
Encouraging the children to talk to each other, to improve their communication skills, which have been damaged by them watching too much TV. Why ever didn't we think of that?
Interesting article in today's Telegraph about something I keep meaning to blog about here but have never got around to, which is the presentation of the world of education in the movies. In this piece, Simon Brooke contrasts the portrayal of college life in American and in British movies. American college movies abound. British movies set in universities do not.
The cultural appeal of the US worldwide is not the only reason for the success of American college films, says Alby James, the head of screenwriting at Leeds Metropolitan University's film school. "When you're making a film, you must always think about the audience," he says, "and in Britain relatively few people go to college."In the US, though, many more people do and there is a much greater social mix, so it gives films about students and college a wider appeal."
Richard Teague, one of Alby James's students, was originally planning to set his thriller, The Gospel According to Me, at a university before he realised that a film with this setting would have a limited appeal. "Not many British films manage to recreate student life successfully, so I moved most of the action outside," he says. "Syd Field, the screenwriting guru, warns against only writing about what you know." Teague, 28, points out that including a college strand to the story line, rather than basing the whole story there, can work in television series such as Hollyoaks.
Perhaps the only British film that did try to tackle head on the manic energy and seedy detail of college life was Inbetweeners, released almost unnoticed by critics and audiences alike in 2000.
Unnoticed by me too.
But I wonder. I suspect that the reason why many British movies fail at the box office, and many more attempted British movies don't ever get made, is not that they are about the wrong kind of people, but that the people have the wrong attitude, and that it is this attitude that people can't or don't want to identify with. It's not just a matter of "recreating student life successfully", but of having characters who themselves try to make a success of student life. But if the message is going to be: university is a hell of boredom and mediocrity and there's nothing we can do about it, then that might explain British people not wanting to watch.
After all, American action movies contain all kinds of characters with totally different lives to those lived in Britain, but they're popular enough in Britain. Most people aren't either cops or criminals, yet movies have lots of both.
Simon Brooke mentions Educating Rita as the exception that proves his rule, in that she isn't really proper university material, but an "ordinary" outsider to university life. But Rita also proves my rule. Rita was trying to get ahead and make something of herself. She wasn't living a drab life. She was trying – successfully as it turned out – to escape a drab life. (Interestingly, she finds lots of students to be, after impressive first impressions, somewhat less than truly impressive.) If British movies set in a universities were about ordinary people, but people who were trying to be less ordinary, then I reckon they might do fine at the box office.
Brooke also mentions Chariots of Fire, which features the Jewish and upwardly mobile Harold Abrahams, who is scorned by the disdainful rulers of his swank Oxbridge college, but who battles on anyway to his Olympic triumph, to the delight of his more generous and open-hearted contemporaries.
None of this need do violence to the truth of university life. I mean, isn't making a success of yourself what going to university is supposed to be about?
