There is a fascinating piece in the Telegraph about a course that cures stammering:
In August last year, I attended my first session of the McGuire progamme, an experience I can only describe as liberating. The main focus is on learning a technique called "costal breathing". It involves using a different part of the diaphragm – the muscle below the lungs – to generate a deep, full breath, generating the power to push out the words.What makes the programme distinctive is that it is a speech therapy course run for stammerers by recovering stammerers. This creates a sense of honesty and trust: everybody in the room knows everybody else's biggest secret.
At the end of each course, all the students make a speech in front of hundreds of people. Difficult enough for most non-stammerers, this is a test of nerve, composure and technique. When I stepped down from the platform, the feeling of elation – the freedom of finally being able to express myself fully – was overwhelming.
This is how singers and woodwind players are taught to breath, if I am not mistaken.
Link to the McGuire Programme website here.
The headline makes the point on its own:
School Trains Girls to Be Good Wives
Which makes you wonder if perhaps it might make sense to have another headline about how:
School Trains Boys to Be Good Husbands
No link for that because I made it up. And I suppose the good schools already do teach this. (Get a job.)
Deep thanks to Dave Barry, where MOTW comments as follows, on a related educational theme:
When I was in college (1998), those students in the Business College were required to attend an Etiquette Dinner. It was a five course meal and several faculty attended. This was to teach students how to engage in small talk, to know which fork to use, where the napkin goes, don't talk with your mouth full, etc. It prepared them so that when the student was out at a business lunch or dinner, they would not embarrass themselves and ruin their career with a horrendous lapse of manners.You may laugh and poke fun at this, but manners really are largely lacking in society today.
And there is plenty more about education as it used to be, in the Good Old Days when people held their forks correctly instead of only using them to poke fun. Worth a look.
I am now trying to get my head around the decades long saga of failure that is the attempt by the British Government to devise a workable "skills strategy", by reading Alison Wolf's outstanding book, Does Education Matter?
Meanwhile, Eamonn Butler gives his opinion of the latest effort along these lines, over at the Adam Smith Institute Weblog:
All garbage. It's just an attempt to correct, in the workplace, what our rotten state education system hasn't done at school. If instead of a failing state monopoly, we had diversity and competition in schools, then maybe educators would give kids what they really need to get on in life – and enthuse them in the process.And why do we need new government-run vocational qualifications when independent agencies already provide them? We should let employers decide what they need in the market, not force them into something they might regard as no good.
And joining up the agencies is a laugh. England has 9 Regional Development Agencies, 47 Learning and Skills Councils, government departments for skills, education, work, who knows what, plus a zillion other work and training quangos. You couldn't even get them all in the Albert Hall, never mind getting them to agree anything.
No, in this case, government is the problem, not the answer. …
Which sounds very like the opinion I'm eventually going to arrive at. But check out the comments – two so far, against and for what Butler says.
