I'm assembling education blogs to make that long-neglected link list, and found myself going from this, to this, the first this (try that and go to April 28) being archive-bloggered, and the second this being a piece by John Derbyshire describing the way that Kids These Days are prone to going Off The Rails and to prefer The Life! instead.
Like Derbyshire, I can see the point of both sides of this one. I see why people build The Rails. And I see why other people want to jump or slide off them. I mean, what sort of a life is it if all you ever do is live out almost but not quite the life your parents set up for you? And what sort of reward is it if you end up with a house almost but not quite as nice as the one you grew up in? Bad Behaviour – sex, drugs, rock, roll – are just the ways that some people have to use to get their parents off their backs. I'm old enough to realise how stupid and childish this sounds, but it is nevertheless a fact that one of the many things I like about blogging is that my mother, a most capable woman in lots of ways, has no idea what it is or how it works.
His teachers say he has great ability, but just won’t work. Visiting with the family, we did not see him, only heard the thudding of rock music from the basement room where he lives. Amy: “We’ve totally given up. Just can’t wait for him to leave home.”
Mission accomplished. Lucky is the child whose parents have given up.
I admire the "bourgeois way of life", but to really enjoy it some of us have to redesign it and muck about with it and make it truly our own. For that, The Rails may not be enough. You want to make your own rails.
I'm not sure about any of this. Derbyshire's is a good piece though, and none the worse for having been written a month ago. Some things don't change.
And by the way, for all those parents who reckon they aren't making any Rails for their children to jump off, here's the caption of one of my favourite cartoons – the sort of cartoon that doesn't really need the actual cartoon, just the caption: "We wanted him to be an anarchist but he wouldn't be told." (I suspect that if there is an answer to this, it is to be found in the phrase "giving up". But then they turn round and say you shouldn't have.)
Home schooler Julius Blumfeld writes:
I had a row with Mrs B a few days ago. The cause was the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History. Usborne are highly reputable educational publishers who produce nicely laid out and easy to use books for children.
The Encyclopedia has a section on the Industrial Revolution. There is the usual recital of the horrors of the new towns with an illustration of a slum with a smart horse and carriage driving past and a caption with the words "The factory owner drives past quickly".
The text then continues:
Making changes Members of the trade unions and some wealthy people put pressure on the government to make life better for the poor. In the second half of the 19th century, factories became safer, and better houses were built. New drains and sewers made the streets cleaner, which helped to prevent diseases from spreading.Going to school
In 1800, parents usually had to pay to send their children to school, so many children from poor families never learned to read or write. Over the next hundred years, laws were passed which allowed children to have a free education.
So life became better for people because the Government made it better and poor children learned to read and write because the Government passed laws to give them a free education.
To be fair to the authors, this sort of stuff is entirely conventional. Usborne are merely reflecting received wisdom. Nevertheless, I find it worrying. The book is designed for children and we all know that young children are incredibly receptive to the first ideas that get into their heads. Home educated children like ours are no different that way.
Yet when I ranted to Mrs B about the insidious dangers of this sort of statist propaganda, she looked at me as though as I was a paranoid nut and told me to stop exaggerating. So I told her she was an ideological dupe and stomped off.
I wonder who is right.
Julius
As I have already made clear in my last two postings, the kind of education I am preoccupied with at the moment is my own, in the arcane art of blog "management". I have just spent the afternoon copying everything associated with this blog into my not-for-public-consumption fake blog where I can try out all the little tweaks and polishings that will eventually occur here. Later I can make this fake blog the basis of my Culture Blog. I of course live in terror of having done damage to this real blog, and if I have, grovelling apologies. In theory I was only copying from this. But in such an exercise one is only one click from catastrophe, or so it seems.
The good news is that I can feel my knowledge of this stuff starting seriously to grow.
When it comes to matters computerised, I don't have the willpower to learn things by sitting down and learning them, as if for an exam. Not unless I actually am taking an exam, and so far I have managed to avoid any computer skills exams. From time to time I do sit down and try to "learn" a programme, in an abstract, useless sort of way, with a view later to being able to do things with it, but this never works. The only way I actually learn is by doing a real job with the programme, but very slowly and with lots of mistakes and backtrackings.
I think I know why, and it has to do with the absurdly huge number of things that computers are able to do. Because of this, you want to be sure that the tiny trickle of things you do learn are things that you are actually going to be able to use. If you merely try to "learn a programme", you risk wasting huge amounts of time learning how to do several dozen completely useless things. But if you are hacking your way through a computer task which you actually want done, there is a definite chance that what you end up learning will also end up being stuff you actually wanted to learn.
One other point. When you learn in this learning-by-doing way, you seldom do things from scratch. Usually what you are doing is modifying something, rather than creating it from nothing. That way, by contemplating what you are mucking about with and by watching what it does, and then what it does when you change it, you learn how you might one day create one of these things all by yourself, from nothing.
At the risk of changing the subject too radically for comfort, I recall reading an article – in the BBC Music Magazine I think it was – about the contrast between two kinds of musician, the classicals and the popsters. The classicals learned their art by mastering abstract but at first musically empty skills, and then gradually assembling what they had learned into real music-making. The popsters, on the other hand, started out by simply copying their heroes, and just as soon as they could thrash their way through a real piece of music, even if they were only faking it, then by golly they did. The gist of the piece was that the classicals were mostly a joyless bunch of time-servers, while the popsters actually got to enjoy their lives. The classicals ended up "knowing more", but the popsters hung on to their love of music. (Although I'm sure the money difference made a difference too.)
There are many morals in among the above, but I'll leave you people to tease them out for yourselves. I'm back to my blog-managing.
Which I am enjoying very much.
… namely Patrick Crozier.
Patrick Crozier is a distinguished blogger in his own right, being the boss and principle author of Transport Blog (to which I occasionally contribute) and the boss and writer also of CrozierVision (which is more definitely his own thing). He writes very well, I think.
But more to point here and now, Patrick has recently been acquainting himself with the mysteries of how to set up, clean up and generally sort out blogs. I had the luck to catch him at that special moment when he was determined to understand all this stuff, but not sufficiently confident of his skills to demand lashings of money. He made several visits to my kitchen and together we sat at my screen, trying this, trying that, seeing if this was how to do this, and that how to do that, both of us learning as we went along. I learned how to get this looking nicer, and he learned how to get things looking the way the punter wanted.
Since I didn't have a very firm idea of how I wanted things here to look, but instead wanted the chance to make up my mind in the light of actually visible alternatives, this was, for me, the ideal arrangement. And Patrick also seems satisfied to have had an early client who didn't expect him to know everything about everything either. On the contrary, the fact that he was also struggling gave me more time to think about aesthetics.
For further evidence of Patrick's growing expertise in this field, see his recent posting on CrozierVision, which reports on the developing duel between Movable Type (my and his preferred blogging software) and Blogger.
It was Patrick's willingness to make personal use of that transport that he writes about actually to sit next to me in my kitchen that made the biggest difference. We are now at the stage where things can be done by phone, but to start with that wasn't so. (The educational relevance of face-to-face contact scarcely needs emphasising, but I'll emphasise it anyway. For some purposes, including for many kinds of teaching, there is as yet still no substitute for face-to-face communication. Imagine trying to teach the violin entirely by phone.)
Patrick speculated to me during our most recent session that, since Movable Type is now becoming "easier", serious demand for his type of services might soon diminish. But with computers there's "easier", and there's actually easier, and this change is strictly in the "easier" category. Most bloggers are far cleverer at blogging (i.e. writing) than they are at setting up their blogs, and I don't believe that the sort of thing that Patrick offers will be superfluous any time soon. Everything involving computers is easy, provided you know about it. The trick is knowing.
So, if you live in or near London and you want to get blogging, Patrick could be the perfect man to get you going. Be warned, however, that the queue is already starting to lengthen.
And credit and debit, for the new look of things here, where both are due. The visual merits of this blog are the joint work of Patrick and of me. The visual demerits are my fault, and mine alone.
As I write this posting, this blog is about to do a visual switch, and by the time you read this, the switch may well have occurred. On the content front, nothing has changed. The same postings as always, the same inadequate and still unupdated links (these I will fix Real Eventually Now), the same comments.
But, there's now colour. I have in mind those blackboards they use nowadays, which aren't black any more as blackboards once were, but green – although if I really followed through with that idea I suppose I'd have white text on a much darker green background. The comments section now looks more consistent with the front page, and the archives have likewise been greened. As before, I've gone for serviceable and legible and easily loaded, rather than for outstanding beauty that you have to sit and wait for.
My more serious purpose is to have a blog look that will serve as the basis, with colour changes, for my other blog also, thereby proclaiming the two of them to the world as the brother-blogs that they are, this one being the sensible older brother and the other being the dodgy artistic one. My Culture Blog is now, somewhat embarrassingly, a visual mess, co-ordination between front page, comments and archives being non-existent. So my next blog task, once I am reasonably satisfied with the look of things here, will be to get that blog sorted. Then, I have in mind to be sorting the permanent content of both blogs, the links in other words, and also to find time to sort out the categorising of postings properly, which are now a shambles on both blogs. Then I'll be free to concentrate on the daily content. But I still only promise a post (and maybe more) every weekday about educational matters. All else is merely me guessing how things will unfold.
By all means comment on the new look of things if you wish to, but my understanding of graphic design is that it should satisfy not consumers but producers. If I like the way things now look, and I do, then I'll be happy topost lots of good stuff, and that way you'll like this blog because you like what it says. That being so, you'll learn to like how it looks, no matter what you now think of it. Far better a good read in visually undistinguished circumstances than stuff which looks as pretty as a picture but which is a poor read. Many are the magazines and journals whose days of glory coincided with a decidedly quirky visual appearance, and who went down the drain as soon as they started looking prettier.
Nevertheless, I hope that you also like it.
How long before the whole "Spelling Bee" thing catches on here in Blighty? Read Friedrich Blowhard on a documentary about this fascinating and also rather scary phenomenon.
It will catch on. Someone will want to make it happen, and although many others will be tremendously bothered, none of them will be sufficiently bothered to stop it. It's only a matter of time. This movie sounds like it could light the blue touch paper.
At which point British geek children will be allowed to compete ferociously with one another on national TV, but British sportsjock children will only be allowed to participate in ridiculous everybody-wins events. (And the day they legalise marijuana will also be the day that tobacco is finally totally illegalised.)
