Yes, it's Guerrilla Parenting.
Do your children RESPECT the hours of hard work that you invest in them? No! Children EXPLOIT THEIR PARENTS in much the same way that MCDONALDS CORPORATION exploits the poor and weak people of Canada's rainforests. It's time to TAKE MATTERS INTO YOUR OWN HANDS and force the LITTLE BASTARDS to behave properly. The time for calm exhortations and promises of extra cartoon time is over. Use our stencils to decorate your neighborhood with messages that will MAKE your kids BEHAVE and STOP treating the place like a GODDAMNED AMUSEMENT PARK.IT'S FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.
This was bound to happen, now that absolutely everyone who remembers the sixties is old.
Sorry, make that "More stuff WITH WHICH to annoy Rational Parenting".
There's a sad essay about the decline of Britain's art colleges in the latest electric Spectator, which contains, in among the obvious regrets about conceptual art (i.e. crappy videos), some facts about these places in their better days which I sort of knew but didn't fully appreciate.
The artist Ian Welsh (born 1944) is ideally situated to comment on the situation. Besides making his own work (Welsh is a distinguished painter specialising in the depiction of water and reflections), he taught for 25 years in the public and private sectors because he believes that art schools can offer a unique education. He himself studied painting at Chelsea School of Art (1963-66), when it was in its heyday under the enlightened direction of the painter and art historian Lawrence Gowing. He then studied sculpture as a postgrad with George Fullard (1966-67), after which he began to teach himself. He returned to Chelsea to do an MA in printmaking in 1976-67, and was finally appointed head of printmaking there in 1992. He gave up teaching in 1993, utterly disillusioned with the way art schools were now administered and structured.Welsh recalls a very different situation 35 years ago. ‘When I first started teaching there were about 20 kids on the Foundation course at Harlowe, and there was a very good chance that three of those would be fine artists and the rest designers of one sort or another. At that time there were something like 28 disciplines in design you could do a degree in — there was Foundation Design, for instance, which was for undergarments, corsetry and so on. Later, when I was at Norwich Art School running the Foundation course, the then shadow minister for the arts came to talk to the senior staff of the Art School and the University Art History Department. He looked around at us and said, “The trouble with you lot is that you all live in ivory towers.” Where do you go after that?
‘The sad thing is that he missed the point. In the mid-Seventies, when the British car industry was disappearing fast down the plughole, there were something like 200 senior design posts in the car industry throughout Europe. Of those 200 key people, 180 had been through the Royal College of Art — which has a very fine course in automotive design — but they were working in Europe and not the UK. The government was looking at art schools and thinking they were full of painters — people who sit around smoking dope waiting for inspiration — whereas 75 per cent were design students, like the graduates in furniture who went to Milan. The quality of British art schools has been completely missed by those in positions of real authority.
This all sounds very similar to what my friend John Washington told me, about the decline of crafts teaching in schools. The difference being that whereas it is now reasonable for most people to leave school knowing more about assembling kit furniture than they do about actually making furniture for themselves from nothing but timber, glue and nails, someone still has to design all that kit furniture.
But all may not be lost. I keep reading that about half of the British rock and roll aristocracy attended British art schools. Those guys didn't learn how to design cars or corsetry, or it they did it didn't do them much good, nor did they get any lessons in guitar playing or rock electronics. What they surely got was (a) intelligent on-the-make mates to do things with, and (b) bags of attitude. All these highly trained conceptual artists can't all just become conceptual artists, and the smarter ones must know it.
As art, I believe "conceptual art" to be pointless and meaningless junk, but this does not mean that those who make a successful living out of such "art" lack skills of any kind. On the contrary, as self-publicists, as zeitgeist surfers, as deluders of those with more money than sense, as manipulators of the media including and especially (in a sort of public relations version of kung fu) the media that most hate them, Britain's conceptual artists display great virtuosity. And if it is true that "training" for conceptual artists is not now costing the nation very much, then who is to say that what little money is still being spent on "art education" will not turn out to be money well spent?
Professor Instapundit links to this piece about the teaching of grammar. (If that link doesn't work, try this and then scroll down.)
It's not about how to teach grammar, merely about whether to teach it. Dennis Baron apparently believes we shouldn't bother, because other things about writing are, he says, more important. Ralph A. Raimi of the University of Rochester, NY, vehemently dissents. Raimi's concluding paragraphs:
Yet Baron's argument is more pernicious than the mere observation that good grammar does not guarantee good writing. This unarguable beginning progresses, and becomes an attack on learning grammar at all. This he is not entitled to do. It is as if a music student were advised against learning anything about scales, arpeggios and modulations, on the grounds that expression and nuance, really, are at the heart of music. And more recently, in the schools, the doctrine that arithmetic is no longer important (now that we have calculators) since mathematics is a science of patterns, big ideas, higher order thinking skills.Then, having demonstrated that learning grammar is a no-no, Baron ends with an attack on testing grammatical competence, with an argument implying that those who would test this competence believe "grammar tests [alone] measure writing ability."
In this last quotation it was I, not Baron, who inserted the "[alone]." I plead guilty, and merely exhibit my take on the general tenor of his article. Read it for yourself, and consider how many such you have read in your time. Arithmetic skill [alone] doesn't lead to better mathematics; music theory [alone] doesn't lead to artistry in composition; Teaching Grammar [alone?] Doesn't Lead to Better Writing. You can cover your flanks by omitting the "alone", sure, but the message is clear: Clean up the curriculum; stick to what's important. No more arithmetic; no more arpeggios; no more grammar. Bah!
So there.
Jackie D (in her first posting on May 21) at au currant, as well as in general being very lively and worth regularly looking at, in particular has a couple of choice pictures via the telegraph and the timesonline of our beloved Education Secretary being upstaged by one of the extras. I mentioned this announcement, but missed what was clearly the big story here.
The habit now regularly perpetrated by politicians of having themselves photographed with children when announcing political schemes is not pleasant (although of course it's not new either) so it's always good to see it going wrong. Kids and animals, eh? They won't be told.
And speaking of animals, I seem to recall a Newsnight reporter that evening talking about how Clarke was too clever to get caught in an "elephant trap". So funny ears are clearly going to be a regular feature of all Clarke coverage.
(By the way, is it just me, or are individual postings at au currant hard to link to? If I'm wrong, deepest apologies, but if that's right, it ought to get sorted because this is otherwise a very promising blog. Jackie D is doing everything else right, like not being dull, like putting comments on samizdata to get noticed here in London, etc.)
Today's big British National Education Story is about a school in Croydon which sent its pupils home early because it couldn't afford to teach them, this being because it couldn't afford substitute teachers.
My problem is that when I see a nationalised industry resisting "cuts" by this time honoured technique, which is basically to treat the exact people for whom it all is supposedly being done with maximum and very public neglect, I smell technique rather than reality. If your job is seeing to widows and orphans and you want more money, the standard procedure is to round up a few of your saddest looking widows and most appealingly photogenic orphans, and some newspaper photographers, and chuck the widows and orphans in the gutter in front of the newspaper photographers, and stand next to it all wailing "Look what you made me do!"
Lacking detailed inside knowledge of this particular school, I have no idea whether this is grandstanding or a genuine cry for help.
Over at Rational Parenting, Alice dispenses wholesome advice to wholesome people, and links to things like Attachment Parenting: A loving and compassionate approach to raising children, which is only right and proper. Here at Brian's Education Blog I am probably a tad more pessimistic about the long term educational and child rearing trends in our society. Home education is all very well and good, if your home is nice. But what about the education being supplied in this home?
POLK COUNTY, Fla. -- A 35-year-old Polk County woman admits she chained her sons to their beds at night to keep them out of trouble, according to a Local 6 News report.Karen Abe, 35, said her sons would break into and steal cars while she was at work so she tethered her 13- and 15-year-old sons to their beds with heavy chains and padlocks.
Even though her ex-husband was reportedly inside the home at night, the boys were chained from 9:30 p.m. until 6 a.m.
"When I left, I just put them on the chain," Karen Abe said. "They just laid down and said 'mom we understand.'" "I told them before I put them on the chain, 'get what you need.'"
Yes, yes, all very terrible and all that, but I think this woman could have done a lot worse. If she was telling the truth about the reactions of her two darling boys ("we understand"), then, well, … Put it this way, what does Rational Parenting or other such websites and authorities on niceness recommend that would actually have worked any better?
Advisers. Try not to say only: "I wouldn't start from here." Suppose you are starting from there. You've done your best, you're doing your best, but your devil brood are out nicking cars every night as soon as your eyes are shut. What do you do?
I'm watching Newsnight report on today's big education story, which is the government's relaxing of the ferocity of testing for primary school children. We are now, the government is saying, going to let teachers themselves make more of the assessments themselves. Schools will set more of the targets themselves.
Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, says that the big reason why things have got better in recent years, where they have, is because "we" have had objective information about which schools are doing well and which are doing badly. The new system will blur that information, and make improvement harder. The government, he says, is caving in to the teachers, or to what in the USA they call (and Woodhead likes this phrase also) "The Blob", although he didn't use that phrase on TV this evening.
Now Jeremy Paxman is grilling Stephen Twigg, Education Secretary Charles Clarke's number two, about just how definite the government's educational targets are. Will anyone resign if they aren't met? asks Paxman. Blab blah blah blah no blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blahblahblahblab – says Twigg.
Politics as usual, in other words. Will the nationalised education industry be run badly in an atmosphere of neurotic norm-fulfilment, or in an atmosphere of old fashioned, who-the-hell-knows-what-the-hell chaos.
If you're literate enough and interested enough in education to be reading this, teach your kids yourself at home, I say.
Remember that boy called Ali whom I once taught maths to? Well, of course you don't, but I do. The gist of what I said about Ali was that I thought he had been misinformed by inconsistent correcting of his work. After all if you tell a kid that 2+2=4 and not 5, but leave 2+2=5 unmolested elsewhere in the same piece of homework, what is he supposed to think? Confusion is bound to follow.
This was why I had a special place in my affections for children who always got the same sum wrong, but with the same wrong answer. They may not have got the right answer, but at least they had grasped that there was a right answer. They were merely wrong about what it was.
Anyway, I've been reading more Theodore Dalrymple on education (see below). And guess what? – have a read of this:
I was told of one school where the teachers were allowed by the headmaster to make corrections, but only five per piece of work, irrespective of the number actually present. This, of course, was to preserve the amour propre of the children, but it seemed not to have occurred to this pedagogue that his five-correction rule was likely to unfortunate consequences. The teacher might choose to correct an error in the spelling of a word, for example, and overlook precisely the same error in the next piece of work. How is a child to interpret correction based on this headmaster's principle? the less intelligent, perhaps, will regard it as a species of natural hazard, like the weather, about which he can do very little; while the more intelligent are likely to draw the conclusion that the principle of correction as such is inherently arbitrary and unjust.
Which is taking it a stage further than I did, but the procedure I was complaining about is what Dalrymple also attacks. Either way, inconsistent correction is a recipe for confusion and ignorance.
In my opinion one of the most basic educational principles is to understand that correcting error is not the same as launching a wounding personal attack on the corrected person. On the contrary, every time a child is told to stop doing something wrong and to do it right is a step in the right direction for that child and a potential cause for celebration and congratulation, rather than for woe. It all depends how you do the correcting.
Sometimes, I suppose, a little aversion therapy is in order. This was how I was taught to drive, by a man sitting next to me who shouted and hit me with his pencil every time I made a mistake. I stopped making mistakes. Given what can happen to you when you make a mistake when driving a car, this is not an unreasonable way to teach driving skills, I'd say. It certainly worked for me, and it did so after I'd been unsuccessfully prepared for the test by a kinder but less relentless and unkind instructor whom I eventually stopped using.
But correcting doesn't have to be hurtful in this way. No, not like that. Like this. Well done! Very good!
There you are, teachers. That's not hard, now is it? Cretins!!!
When I returned from my trip to France on Wednesday of last week, I brought with me a copy of Theodore Dalrymple's book Life at the Bottom, kindly lent to me by my hosts out there. It paints a picture of a class who, with their mere physical survival needs taken care of, and with their brains rotted by second-hand versions of bad liberal intelligensia ideas (don't be "judgemental" - sexually anything goes (or should go) - criminals are not to blame for their crimes, and so on), have descended into a hell on earth.
The moral for those of us concerned about education and its alleged failures in recent decades is that if isn't fair only to blame teachers for the failure of education to get very much better. If the underclass is both sinking into hell and expanding in numbers, it is hardly reasonable merely to blame teachers for people not knowing to the nearest two centuries when the Second World War occurred, or who fought the Battle of Hastings and why, or what six times seven is.
If you talk to an average teacher, this is pretty much what he will tell you. The world is going to hell, so don't blame us for everything.
But Dalrymple doesn't exclude educators from his criticisms, or to be more exact he does not exclude liberal intelligensia thinking about education. He notes that his father, who was born in a slum, singled out for his particular gratitude certain teachers for having shown him that there was a better world beyond the one he was born into. Chapter Seven of Dalrymple's book is entitled "We Don't Want No Education". It's final paragraph reads thus:
In one sense (and in one sense alone), however, the underclass has been victimized, or perhaps betrayed is a better word. The educational absurdities foisted on the lower orders were the idea not of the lower orders themselves but of those who were in a position to avoid their baleful effects: that is to say, middle-class intellectuals. If I were inclined to paranoia (which fortunately I am not), I should say that the efforts of educationists were part of a giant plot by the middle classes to keep power for themselves and to restrict competition, in the process creating sinecures for some of their less able and dynamic members – namely the educationists. But if these middle classes have maintained their power, it is in an increasingly enfeebled and impoverished country.
So you can see how educationists wouldn't want use Dalrymple to excuse their failures, even though to some extent he does, for to him they are part of a larger picture of intelligensia and administrative class failure.
Dalrymple in particular denounces the idea of "relevance". The more I read of the thoughts about education of others, the more I keep coming across this idea that education is about more than just getting a good job, but furthermore that this "more than" is also a matter of huge economic significance. Education does not necessarily abolish your poverty, but it may make it far easier to bear. It means, in other words, that happiness will cost you less.
A man with an interest or pursue, or at least with the mental equipment to pursue an interest, is not in such dire straits as a man obliged by the tabula rasa of his mind to stare vacantly at the four walls for weeks, months, or years on end.
I know the feeling. Doing this blog can sometimes be a bit of a slog, but it certainly beats staring at the wall.
But Dalrymple immediately adds that a man with plenty of irrelevant education is also likely to get a better job. Irrelevant education, in other words, is actually very relevant indeed.
He is far more likely to come up with an idea for self-employment, or at the very least to seek work in places and in fields that are new to him. He is not condemned to stagnation.
… which is also part of the idea of this, for me.
