Says Rob Worsnop in a posting on the Libertarian Alliance Forum:
I found this typed-up on an old scrap of paper in my parents' house a few years ago. So not exactly topical: it refers to Neil Kinnock, in his role as Shadow Education Minister.
I am the very model of an Education Minister;
My arguments are tortuous, my motivation sinister;
But though my plans are ropy, and my reasons even ropier,
I'm laying the foundations of a socialist utopia.I'm well aware the arguments the Tories use to blame us is
that schools without competition will foster ignoramuses.
But tolerating independent schools will be hypocrisy
since freedom's incompatible with genuine democracy.I want to see that everyone learns socialism properly,
and this is only possible inside a state monopoly;
All schools that I don't recognise will therefore be prohibited
and any private tutors will be flogged or even gibbeted.All middle-class morality I promise to eliminate;
Exams I shall abolish, since they certainly discriminate;
A college with a vacancy selecting its own candidate
will quickly wish it hadn't, when it finds I have disbanded it.I'll throw away all covenants and charters international
with which I disagree, and which must therefore be irrational;
I short, in all of Europe from the Parthenon to Finisterre
I'll be the most intolerant, intolerable Minister.
Phil Teare has added a comment on this, which you would never have known about if I hadn't told you, because Blogs don't work like that. Or maybe they do, or can be made to, and this is another opportunity for a Brian Learning experience.
Anyway, Phil says this:
I actually have little to say right now, as I concur with Brian - It's too damn hot here in London, to even think. But as I just found you I would like to point you all to my blog (click on my name, below). It's all about dyslexia, and written by a dyslexic (me) who makes dyslexia focussed software. So fairly relevant I guess.
Very relevant indeed. Thanks Phil. It helps that he's a Londoner rather than an American, because Americans are already all over the blogosphere (including the education related blogosphere) but Londoners, by and large, and for the time being, aren't.
Phil supplies more dyslexia links here. Click on "Sites to See" at the top, after the swirling brain and computer have done their stuff.
The weather in London today is not calculated to provoke profundity. It is hot. It is humid. Frankly, you're lucky to get any education blogging here at all, and what you will get will be the usual piggy-packing on someone else, rather than anything startling from me.
The man on whose shoulders I ride today is Brian Glanville, writing in the sports pages of timesonline.co.uk (stuff in timesonline.co.uk soon disappears from the one-click-and-you're-there-o-sphere, so no link). Glanville heeps yet more well deserved scorn on that old cliché about how those who can do and those who can't teach and that those who can't, yet who teach nevertheless, ought therefort to be ashamed of themselves. But those who can't are often great teachers, as he proves by talking about some of the best football managers:
“YOU don’t have to have been a horse to be a jockey.” Such were the lapidary words of little Arrigo Sacchi, who never kicked a ball in anger but rose to become manager of Milan’s championship-winning team and of the Italy team that lost the 1994 World Cup final, only on penalties, to Brazil.His words came back to me when it was announced that Carlos Queiroz had been made manager of the illustrious Real Madrid, who were said to have preferred in vain his fellow Portuguese, the 40-year-old Jose Mourinho, manager of the FC Porto team that beat Celtic in the Uefa Cup final in May and took the Portuguese league title into the bargain.
Sir Bobby Robson, once a fine footballer and World Cup player, mused that neither Portuguese manager had played football of any consequence. Both had worked under him. Queiroz came from an academic background and began as a schoolteacher. Mourinho, also a teacher — as, of course, was Liverpool’s Gérard Houllier before he made his managerial name at Noeux-les-Mines — initially became Robson’s interpreter when the Englishman managed Porto, “an academic without a football background” who stayed with Robson for six years, following him to Barcelona.
I love it. Especially the guy who started out as an interpreter, for goodness sake. It just goes to show that if you can get your foot in the door, watch whatever it is being taught, and learn to tell who is doing it right and who is doing it wrong and what needs to be said to get them to do it right, you can basically teach anything, even if you are paralysed from the neck downwards.
This harks back to a posting I did last year about the Charlton brothers, Jacky and Bobby, in which I suggested an inverse relationship between inborn ability and teaching ability, the point being that the former is so very hard to be explicit about. Just kick it, boy! Like this! What's your problem? Dunno, coach, I thought you might be able to tell me.
Good teachers, especially teachers of the sort who don't actually do whatever it is very well (or even at all), do not think like this, and do not teach like this. They may never know how to do it themselves, but they know the right things to say to the people who are doing it.
Bas Braams has started an education blog – Scientifically Correct – which will be about K-12 education.
(What is K-12 education? All I know is that it is American. That's the year, yes? What does the K stand for? It's time I knew about this.)
Anyway, Bas emails of his new enterprise:
There will be co-authors, and I hope that together we'll maintain an active schedule of posting. We will focus on K-12 education in the United States, with occasional postings on international issues and on college education. We especially care about curriculum issues. My own area is math and science education, but I expect that others will write about language and humanities.
Sounds promising.
In his latest posting Bas quotes from a conversation with Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton:
Q. How would you change the way science is taught at universities?A. I think we do not teach the introductory courses appropriately. Right now, we just teach all the basic facts of chemistry, physics, biology or mathematics. Then, we teach a few basic principles. By the third year, we finally tell the students what is interesting about all of this. I think we should break the pyramid. We should begin with the most exciting ideas in chemistry, physics, biology and how you go about studying it. What are the things you need to know? We should only teach what students need to know in order to understand what those are.
Q. Would you teach science by changing science education into a "great ideas of science" course?
A. Absolutely. I'd like to see us teaching more than a canon, a collection of facts, but why this is exciting, why is the exploration of nature one of the most wonderful ways to spend one's life.
Says Bas:
All this without a hint of regret that even Princeton University students should have to be babied into an appreciation of science.
Point taken, but as a description of how it makes sense to teach science to younger people, when the burden of persuasion, so to speak, is more with the teacher, I think Tilghman's attitude makes more sense. It's asking a lot of a secondary school teacher to know such stuff, though. My answer would be: get the Professors to make DVDs about how life is at the scientific frontier, and distribute those to the secondary schools. And to anyone else who is interested.
In general, it makes sense to me that teaching should be done with some idea in the minds of the pupils of what it might be leading to. That doesn't mean that there is no place for teachers who teach the basics and nothing else. Teaching is, after all, usually a team effort. But someone ought to be trying to get across what it's all for.
My thanks to David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky for sending me the link to this LewRockwell.com article by Linda Schrock Taylor. Nothing like a blogger bash to stimulate the exchange of useful information:
When I introduce a new group of students to my reading class, I explain that there are two main ways to teach reading – with sight words or with phonics. I tell them that I will present them with some information, and let them decide which method they wish me to use.I explain that with the sight word approach (Dick & Jane, whole language, balanced instruction, balanced reading, re-packaged whole language, re-named whole language,…) the student only needs to memorize about 250,000 words, for instant sight recognition, in order to be a very good reader.
I explain that it is difficult for the human brain to achieve this feat …
I'll say. What is especially satisfying about this piece is that this is not just a teacher saying that her phonetics based methods work better; it is also a teacher saying how they actually work. I won't copy and past the entire thing, much as I'm tempted. But if such methods are of interest to you, I strongly, on the basis of what I've learned about this stuff so far, recommend the whole thing. I've never got around to reading LewRockwell.com properly. Maybe this needs to change.
Any explanations of why I'm wrong to admire this piece, if I am, would be particularly welcome.
