I came across this little comment in an email debate on the Libertarian Alliance Forum, from Rob Worsnop, which seems to me to be fraught with educational implications, and to be worthy of wider circulation:
I have a simple, time-saving rule for usenet and mailing lists: Ignore all correspondents who refuse to use upper-case and vaguely correct grammar. Most of the time, someone who isn't capable of organising a simple sentence is equally incapable of organising his thoughts.I see this principle at work many times in my professional life. People who write garbled e-mails are rarely good programmers.
I agree, especially about the neglect of capital letters.
One of the most deeply embedded memes in Western culture just now is that being verbal fluency (UPDATE: see comments!) is evidence of dishonesty, that it serves as a mask behind which evil thoughts and plans may be hidden, while mumbling and hesitating when trying to express oneself is evidence of openness, guilelessness and all-round moral excellence, and that complete silence is even better. Think of all those fluent, posh, English actors, who make a handsome living playing Hollywood villains. And think of their antagonists who let their guns and fists do the talking.
Perhaps this is what causes people deliberately to set aside whatever grasp of grammar that they possess when battling it out on the Internet. They adopt a false pose of mental confusion, in order to seem honest! Complete silence doesn't work in email ratfights, but incoherence is the next best thing if you want to be thought honest and authentic.
Worsnip's point is somewhat different. He is talking about people who can't rather than who won't express themselves grammatically. But the two ideas are pretty closely linked. Anyone who thinks that grammar is wicked is liable to think that computer programming is wicked also and not to want to do that well either.
Education "experts", i.e. people with strong opinions about education for people other than themselves and their own children, can be divided roughly into "progressives" and "traditionalists", Progs and Trads. Progs rule the roost. Trads probably speak for the average punter far more accurately, yet the Trads seem to get nowhere. Why is this?
Speculation: Progs were people who were bored at school. Trads were more likely to have been confused, or else to have been teatering on the edge of confusion and grateful for whatever shafts of clarity they were offered. Progs knew what was going on at school; they just had trouble paying attention to it. Progs would have preferred to decide their own syllabus, and would have had no difficulty doing that. After all, they basically understood most of the stuff that was being chucked at them by their teachers, and would have been able to embroider, subtract and add to that syllabus with ease and confidence.
Progs dominate education "theory", ever since education theory set itself in motion in the form of teacher training colleges and university education departments and in the form of books about education. And why do they do that? Because they basically did well at school, in among being bored by it. Come the exams, they knew what to do.
Meanwhile, Trads dominate the general public. The public mostly wants teachers to teach, and to teach the 3Rs, to obedient lines of well-behaved kids in desks. The public was mostly confused at school, and they know that if they had managed to be less confused either by better teachers or by them paying more attention or both, their lives would have gone better. Insofar as they too were bored, their cure for school boredom is for kids to shape up the way they should have, and to be made to shape up, and for teachers to teach better, and above all to teach more clearly and accurately.
But of course, they were confused when exam time came around, and so they never got to be education experts.
The above speculation was provoked by reading Chris Woodhead's book Class War. Woodhead was a classic bored at school, but nevertheless successful at school Prog. But as he immersed himself in the problems of the Confused Classes, he moved over to being a Trad.
While I've been away in France, the Conservative Party has been busy opposing university tuition fees. Natalie Solent is scornful, as is Terence Kealey in today's paper Times, at somewhat greater length.
At the heart of Kealey's argument is that if universities can charge their students then they can achieve financial self-sufficiency, and that with that will come intellectual independence from the government that would otherwise control the purse strings.
Kealey is an important man, whom all those who favour free market solutions to … you know … everything, should be aware of and on the side of and making much of. This is because he has put more eloquently than anyone else I know of the case against government funding for science. My brother recently got hold of for me, and I intend to write more on this subject.
Oddly enough though, although Kealey is surely right about the importance of universities being allowed to charge for their services, his own arguments about science funding somewhat undermine the significance – although not the truth – of what he says about university funding.
What Kealey says about science is that universities are not as crucial to the wider economy and society as a lot of the people in them now believe. The conventional model of scientific funding, the one that justifies government spending on science, goes: government funding pays for science, science results in technology, and technology makes lots of money. The Kealey model goes: technology makes more technology which makes money, and science, although it does lead to technology, is also caused by technology. So those temples of intellectual purity, the universities, are not the fountainheads of science, and of technology, and of money for everybody, but more like a sideshow.
But of course you could also argue, as I now will and as Kealey also touches on in his Times piece, that if it is true that universities aren't those great Public Goods that make us all rich, but merely finishing schools for the bright and posh which benefit them but not the rest, that reinforces the case for making students pay their own costs.
I've read about it and heard about it. Tonight I witnessed it. My eleven year old god-daughter is deep into one of the Harry Potter books. I asked if I could sit with her, and read a book, and I expected the reading to be replaced soon by conversation. But no. She concentrated completely on her book, and it took a monumental row about cello practice to wrench her away from it. Now that cello duties have been done, she is, I should imagine, back with Harry Potter.
Nor is this infection confined to Britain or to English readers like my god-daughter. French bookshops are full of Harry Potter, and I recall the same thing happening in Slovakia when I took a trip there.
I read the first one with mild interest, but felt no particular urge to read any more, but I put this down to the fact that I am not a member of the target demographic. I am not a child. But apparently many adults have also been engulfed in HP frenzy.
Whence the mania? A good yarn? A good yarn about children who have escaped the attentions of their parents? A good yarn that is sufficiently un-respectable (these books are surrounded by denunciations of their literary third-rateness from literary authorities) not to have been made into compulsory reading, and which therefore makes a change from being nagged by one's parents to practice the cello? All of that, I dare say. Whatever the reason, it certainly shows that there will always be things that children really, really want to read, and which they will accordingly read avidly, if they can read at all, and which will consequently make them better at reading.
With me it was the Doctor Doolittle books and the Swallows and Amazons books. Each generation to its own.
I've been chatting with my hosts, as you would expect of me, about the relative merits of the British and French education systems. They are English , but with experience of both systems, so their opinions are worth attending to.
In some ways the French system of education appears to be in worse shape than the British one. The state bit of it probably works rather better, although it's hard to tell with things like that. But the real problem is that there is no "unofficial" system of education that remotely resembles the unofficial sector in Britain. There's no "education otherwise" here.
The French system of education seems to suffer from all the same difficulties as the British one of falling academic standards and declining standards of behaviour, and from all the same worries caused by wanting to combine social inclusiveness with keeping order in the only way that order can actually be kept, which is by excluding some children. Teachers are civil servants with jobs for life, which probably makes bad ones even harder to avoid than in Britain.
But those are mere differences of nuance and degree. The fundamental difference is that the French system lacks the self-corrective balance supplied by educational mavericks simply being allowed to do their own thing. The private sector is more heavily regulated than in Britain. This private sector seems to be quite good, but of course it is expensive, and that vital power to simply remove your kid altogether from any school is unavailable.
At present, with "education otherwise" being the practice of only a tiny minority, this difference between continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxons may not matter much. But as the practice of home education and home schools spreads in Anglo-Saxonia, as it is spreading and surely will spread more, it is likely to result in huge educational improvements, which could in the longer run leave continental Europe as far behind educationally as it already is in things like computer making and computer programming.
Which is why preserving the legal status quo in this matter in Britain is so important.
On that front I'm starting to become more optimistic as I meet more home schoolers. Remember those home schoolers I told you about last week. (I'll add links to all my France postings when I get home - for now, good luck or good memories to all.) I remember discussing with them how any government which took on the home-schoolers of Britain would have got itself the Political Enemies from Hell. Think of all those terrifyingly bright children who'd overrun morning television. Consider the fact that many home-schoolers have considerable demonstrating experience. I may not hold with their political views about war, peace, etc., but these people do know how to lay on a good demo and to mobilise the media. And they must be, almost by definition, among the most intellectually self-confident people around. So, no, I rather suspect that education otherwise will remain a legal fixture in Britain for some time to come, and that this difference between Anglo-Saxonia and the continent will continue to be a fact, and a fact of great significance.
And I suppose it is just possible that instead of continental Europe infecting Britain in this matter, the infection might be made to spread in the opposite direction. We can hope.
