This is interesting. It's from Terence Kealey's book, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.
Curiously, these inadequacies in the much-vaunted German vocational training colleges or Berufsschulen persist to this day. In 1991, a team of British school inspectors reported that the Berufsschulen were manifestly inferior to their British counterparts, the colleges of further education. Amongst their inadequacies, most Berufsschulen (i) lacked central libraries, (ii) they were overcrowded and lacked study space, (iii) a much lower proportion of German staff had recent industrial experience compared with British staff, (iv) there was little project work, and (v) general courses were not sufficiently challenging. The British school inspectors found that the reason the Berufsschulen have, for over a century, been supposed to be so excellent, is that they award the qualification of Master Craftsman, for which there is no equivalent in Britain. This qualification carries high status in a nation obsessed with qualifications, but the actual products of the Berufsschulen are in practice no better than their British equivalents with their modest diplomas [Aspects of Vocational Education and Training in the Federal Republic of Gemany (London : Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1991)].
And that's just a footnote (on page 116 of my Macmillan paperback, 1996). I will definitely be reading this book properly. It's near the top of my book list.
Kealey's thesis in this part of the book is that explaining Britain's economic decline by talking about the supposed excellence of German education is superfluous, because, Britain having got out ahead economically, and the others having then followed, Britain's relative economic decline was a mathematical inevitability.
The argument of the book as a whole is that economic advance does not depend on government funding for scientific research, any more than does science itself.
A common blogosphere experience for me is to follow a link from Instapundit and then find something else with a link to something else of extreme interest. By which time I usually lose all track of how I got there, and fail to thank those responsible This time I remembered.
Anyway, the something else I finally got to is about something called "Whiteness Studies", which is a kind of reverse Nazism being taught in American universities, and no doubt soon to arrive here if it hasn't already.
Now, we didn’t have “Whiteness Studies” back when I was in college. Then, all the rage was multiculturalism, of which I got more than I could handle when, as a freshman, a scheduling snafu forced me into a section of the mandatory freshman-English program bearing the ominous title of “Differences.” There we studied literature through – to use the most pervasive cliché in academia – the lens of “race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.”What that meant, in application, was that in the first weeks of class, we read books by African-Americans, the theme of which, unfailingly, was hatred for white people. Next we moved on to books by Hispanics, the theme of which was hatred for white people. From there it was books by Asians and Native Americans on—you guessed it—hatred for white people. There were a few variations, including some readings on anti-Semitism and homophobia, but otherwise, the theme was constant. This was a study of oppression, and the oppressors were always white guys.
Of course, all this took place way back in the early 1990s, eons ago for the modern-day Ivory Tower. Multiculturalism, once the primary fetish of academia, is now old hat in a culture that values the avant-garde above all else. Its permutations are spent. There are no more -isms to define; no more ethnic groups to balkanize; no more victims to patronize. That leaves academics looking for the next Big Thing, and they think they’ve found it in WS.
The focus has changed from multiculturalism, but the “hating whitey” theme remains.
“Whiteness,” as its would-be studiers see it, is the underlying cause of most every conceivable social ill. As David Horowitz has observed, “Whiteness Studies” is different in kind from other ethnocentric disciplines: “Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women’s studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil.”
If you are my friend the pessimistic David Carr (a favourite quote went something like: "I fear that things will get a lot worse, before they get even worse than that") you are now plunged into yet more despair at all this. If you're more like optimistic me, you'll be at least hoping that sooner or later this idiocy will cease, and that the academics pushing it will make such public fools of themselves that even the public will eventually notice. And the truth will probably lie somewhere between the two, which is not good.
When the Whiteness Studies crowd speaks of abolishing “whiteness,” what they really mean is abolishing Americanism, most notably the American ideal of a society in which people are judged not by color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Yes, that makes sense, and to some extent that will be the result.
But surely the most obvious consequence will be to keep a lot of stupid, semi-educated black people out of the big tent, by making them believe in being out of it.
Ask yourself this. If you were a hardcore white racist from straight out of the worst nightmares being plugged by these academics as white business-as-usual, what would you say about all this? Would you be scared? I really don't see how. Would be you pleased? Surely: yes:
If the niggers want to wallow in this self-deluding crap, let them. It's all they're good for. And obviously we need some of our people to keep an eye on things, to see that the niggers remember how heavily they are outnumbered, in America and in the world as a whole, and that they don't try to do any of this nonsense, and confine themselves to miseducating themselves. On the other hand, if they do try to start a race war for real, we can be good and ready and wipe them out.
Well, maybe not. But if that was the plan, would things be happening much differently?
There's a fascinating posting at 2Blowhards, about why mental superpowers so often go hand in hand (brain location with brain location) with mental inadequacies of other sorts. Here's the bit that grabbed me:
The argument of Alan Snyder, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sydney, is that (1) the unusual mental abilities of savants (autistics who are capable of amazing mental feats) are actually present in all human beings, (2) that these abilities—such as the ability to do complex mental arithmetic rapidly, to remember with photographic detail and accuracy, to instantly spot proofreading errors, etc. – are actually just basic, lower-level brain processes that occur below the level of ordinary human consciousness, (3) that somehow our ordinary conscious processes mask these abilities or prevent us from accessing them, and (4) that these savant-like skills can be brought out by using TMS to turn down the volume on the "masking" processes.
That makes more sense of the "idiot savant" phenomenon than anything else I've ever read. I've never believed that savants possessed any powers I didn't have, merely that for some reason I couldn't get at my own similar powers, and that for some other reason, connected with their other mental problems, they could.
TMS, by the way, stands for "transcranial magnetic stimulation". Read more by following the link that Friedrich Blowhard supplies to this New York Times article.
They're learning more and more by the month about how the human brain actually works, as opposed to just recommending books to each other full of more or less sensible speculations on the subject, which is how things used to be. This knowledge is bound to have educational consequences sooner or later.
Proof that Brian's Education Blog is changing the world. From today's Guardian:
Labour has dramatically lost its reputation with voters for improving schools and education in the past three months, according to the results of the June Guardian/ICM opinion poll.Back in March, when the Guardian carried out its annual public services survey, education was the only area where the voters said they could see real improvements coming through. But the results of this month's ICM survey show that the impact of the schools funding crisis and the row over tuition fees has led to a sudden loss of confidence in the government's record on education.
The poll records a dramatic swing in its net rating on schools and education from plus two points to minus 17.
Well, to be a bit more serious, this could mean one of two things. It could mean that the public now hates the government because it realises that its entire approach – throw money at everything, and use the threat not to throw money at any particular educator if he disobeys the latest central and centralising edict-of-the-week is doomed to fail. Or it could merely mean that the public believes that chucking money about is the answer, but that the government is horrid because it is a little bit reluctant to do this, on account of money not growing on trees – while the public still thinks money does grow on trees. A lot of the latter I fear.
But what can you do? The public mostly went to these damn government schools in the first place.
Today I finally got around to ringing these people, to offer my services as a reading helper. The application form will be in the post to me tomorrow.
The only thing of note about the conversation, which was otherwise most informative and definitely made we want to press ahead, was that they wanted to know – or warned me that they were going to want to know, I forget which – my ethnic group. Those, I suppose, are the times we live in.
I told them I was "white", the word "Caucasian" not being ready at the top of my brain. Just in case you were wondering.
Does this mean I'll be helping only white children?
Today I had lunch with a friend who has just got herself a law degree. She mentioned in passing that one of the jobs of her dreams would be to do teaching in some exotic location where the air was warm and the pupils were well behaved and eager to learn. But she wasn't going to do this because it wouldn't, she said, lead anywhere. By this she meant that if she came back to England she'd be no nearer to a real career than she is now, and she can't afford such dalliance. We talked of other career options, which sounded much more realistic.
It was only afterwards that I realised. Here was someone who "dreamed" of being a teacher, but to whom it simply did not occur to become, or to even try to become, a teacher in England. And nor did it occur to me for a moment that she was wrong. We didn't discuss it. We simply moved on straight away to the more promising stuff. We dismissed without even seriously considering the possibility, that teaching in England, or the sort that could result in a career, could ever have anything whatsoever to do with dreams.
Rather revealing, I think.
More on the Harry Potter phenomenon, this time in the form of some entertaining rhapsodising about the educational benefits of Pottermania from the always provocative Normal Lebrecht in the Evening Standard last Friday:
Think back to June 1997 when 1,000 Bloomsbury copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone sneaked near-unnoticed into British bookshops, after being rejected by some 20 publishers for being variously too long, archaic and politically incorrect.The pronounced wisdom was that children were uninterested in reading. Teachers and their unions set up a demand for more "visual aids". Pre-teens returned home from seven hours of unstrenuous schooling to slump, semi-vegetative, in front of flickering images of vaguely sexual connotation.
The publishing dictum, impressed on me when I proposed a story about kids with a chronic illness, was that "we no longer take on children's books without a television tie-in". Rowling changed all that, surreptitiously and within months.
Harry Potter spread by word of playground mouth and reprinted time after time.
Children blew their pocket money on the first book and clamoured for more. Infant teachers who read it aloud in class were begged to continue when the bell rang for break. Pupils who had previously resisted literacy mastered their ps and qs on platform nine and three-quarters.
Yes, this is what I've been hearing, and reading elsewhere. And seeing on the TV news of course, in the form of all those super-excited children queueing up at one o'clock in the morning. But is it really like this? Does any teacher or parent have first hand experience of this kind of thing?
Does anyone, in particular, have any tales to tell of Harry Potter resistance from any section of the youth market?
I have no idea how good this is. But this introductory paragraph certainly strikes a chord with me:
The goal of Project LRNJ is to make Japanese accessible to people who enjoy anime or video games, and wouldn't otherwise learn it. To meet this goal, it is necessary that the training program be freely available, efficient, and both attractive and fun for the target audience. There are years of part-time R&D on the project, but the idea of making it into a game only came up in March 2003.
If you're in the market for something like this, let him (and the rest of us here) know what you think. If you know of anyone else who might be interested, pass it on.
My thanks to Darrell Johnson for emailing me the link. I wonder what he things of this.
