The invaluable David Farrer links to these letters in the Scotsman about home schooling.

Home schooling is apparently being talked about up there in the same breath as Fred West, mass murderer.

So, the question is, will the critics of home schooling succeed in persuading Scotland that home schoolers are mad, or will the critics of home schooling persuade Scotland that they, the critics of home schooling, are the mad ones?

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 02:16 PM
Category: Home education
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Jim of Jim's Journal did a piece that I featured here, about the glory of the American Melting Pot. Today, however, he emailed about a less happy American circumstance:

Brian,

Here's a situation you might be interested in mentioning in your Education Blog:

A 15 year-old girl in New York City has successfully completed 71 credits at two public community colleges in New York City. A full-time college student would normally complete between sixty and seventy credits during two years of study. (Community colleges in the U.S. typically offer Associate of Arts or Associate of Science degrees after that amount of study; for some students that is the ompletion of their college career but many then go on to complete a B.A. or B.S. degree at a full college or niversity. I'm not sure if there is a British equivalent or not.) She earned a 3.84 cumulative average while doing this; that is pretty close to being a straight A average.

Recently the girl and her parents sued in an attempt for her to receive a degree. In the U.S. and Canada there is something called a G.E.D. (General Equivalency Diploma). It was intended for people who dropped out of high school but then later in life needed a high school diploma, either because of employment requirements or in order to enroll in higher education. Apparently the community colleges allowed anyone to take courses, but high school graduation (or a GED) was a requirement for official admission to a degree program. New York State said she had to be at least 17 years old to take the tests leading to a GED. Thus, a suit to force New York to let her get a GED so she could get her associate's degree and enroll in a bachelor's degree program.

The judge ruled against them and was harshly critical of her father for allowing her to take college courses instead of attending high school. He also noted that it would have been legal for him to have her be a Home Schooled student, but allowing her to attend college was illegal.

Not only that, but now New York City's child protective services division has launched an investigation and is threatening her father with prosecution for "educational neglect" for allowing her to skip high school. This from a city with a notoriously poor public school system. Pregnant 15-year-old drug addicts are normal but allowing bright children to attend college is a horror that must be stamped out at once. The idiocy of the education bureaucracy and the Big Nanny social enforcement bureaucracy is truly beyond belief.

More in the Daily News and the New York Post.

Regards,

Jim

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 11:19 PM
Category: Examinations and qualifications
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Today I did a posting on Samizdata, quoting from this guy's article in the Guardian. And buried in among his piece is this little educational snippet, which I am starting to hear from lots of sources, New Labour and otherwise.

Although Blair sounds like a Tory more often than not, his government's policies have been more redistributive than they admit to being. Yes, too much of this money is raised through indirect taxation; but still, the general trend is positive. Ditto for the belated increases in public sector spending. In one area I have seen at first hand - primary education - there has been a marked improvement; secondary schools and hospitals are harder to fix, but still, throwing money at them is a good way to start. As for foreign policy... here we come to the nub of the anti-Blair problem. …

And of course foreign policy – the WMDs row – is the point of the piece.

Nevertheless, I'm intrigued by that reference to primary education. "In one area I have seen at first hand …" That definitely counts for something, and it helps that the author comes across in general as an honest person.

David Milliband, the "Schools Standards Minister", has been popping up on the television lately, and he never fails to boast about how much better primary education has been getting lately, and the implication is that soon they'll be moving on to secondary education, and to university education, and then to adult education, until everyone in the entire country has become tremendously clever.

Well, the later stages of all that may come unstuck, because as people get older they have a way of asserting themselves and not doing what you want, but in the meantime, has there actually been an improvement in primary schooling?

Thinking about it, it does make sense to me that of all the kinds of teaching, the teaching of the 3Rs to young and pliable children is likely to respond best to state centralism, and to be least screwed up by it. After all, it's a basically pretty straightforward procedure, and if you're a teacher and you just do what London says, that is quite likely to be an improvement. And this would be true even if the rigmarole being imposed is rather unsatisfactory, provided what it is replacing was shambolic enough, as in many cases it surely has been.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 11:17 PM
Category: Primary schools
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There's excellent linkage and comment at Freedom and Whisky about Scottish education. There's a strong home schooling angle to the education debate up there, because unlike the British politicians, the pols in Scotland are prepared to be vocal in their opposition to home schooling. Naturally, David Farrer disagrees.

Sadly, the days of the Scottish Enlightenment are long gone. What they're now back to arguing about in Scotland is the low level of literacy among the poorest school leavers.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 02:46 AM
Category: Literacy
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More news that the educational private sector is impressing people in some surprising places:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: July 15 (PNS) – Federal Minister for Education Zobaida Jalal Monday said that a facilitation cell will be established to facilitate private sector schools and institutions to help them in getting registered with government to resolve the row between CDA and the private schools management committee.

Presiding over a meeting with Chairman CDA Chaudhry abdul and the representatives of private schools management committee she said that government would take all necessary steps to facilitate and help the private sector in the field of education.

She maintained that private sector should be encouraged so that it can help the government in uplifting the standard of the education in the country.

Not that any of this is particularly good news for private sector education in Pakistan. When politicians talk of how they will "facilitate" and "help", and how this or that will be "encouraged", look out.

First will come money, then the nagging and the threats, then government control. I hope I'm wrong, but I fear that I am right. With luck, there won't be any money. This is the big educational advantage that the Third World now has over the First.

Much better is government indifference, because then they leave you alone to get on with it. Even better is malign indifference, because then they really leave you alone to get on with it, and are positively proud of themselves for knowing nothing about what you do. Perfect.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 01:35 PM
Category: Politics • The private sector
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My current reading enthusiasm is Terence Kealey's The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, and he has interesting things to say about just how educated Britain's steam engine pioneers were.

The first commmercial steam engine, Thomas Newcomen's, was at work in 1712 at Dudley Castle, Worcester. It was huge, expensive, and inefficient, but it clearly met a need because, by 1781, about 360 had been built in Britain, most of them devoted to pumping water out of coal mines. …

… The historian D. S. L. Cardwell has established that Newcomen, who was barely literate, was a humble provincial blacksmith and ironmonger who, stuck out in rural Devon, had never had any contact with science or scientists. Newcomen did, however, have a lot of contact with the tin mines in the neighbouring county of Cornwall, and he knew that they were frequently, and disastrously, flooded. There was, unquestionably, a market for an effective pump.

So, no "education" in the sense most people now understand it, then. Plenty of knowledge, but no book learning.

The first significant improvement was made in 1764 when James Watt invented the separate condenser …

Whatever that may be. I'm not concerned here with what these people did, just with how much schooling they had.

Watt's advances … owed less than nothing to contemporary science; they proceeded on an 'old established fact'. In any case, Watt had not been formally educated in science; he worked at Glasgow University as a technician. …

So some schooling there, but no scientific training.

… Moreover, the next major advance in steam engine technology, the use of high presseure steam to push the piston, was made by a man in Newcomen's mould. Richard Trevithick, whose engine in Coalbrookdale in 1802 achieved the unprecedented pressure of 145 pounds per square inch, was barely literate. Born in Cornwall to a mining family, Trevithick received no education other than that provided at his village primary school, whose master described him as 'disobedient, slow and obstinate'. But Trevithick addressed a problem. The Cornish tin mines were a long way from the nearest coal fields, so their Watt steam engines were expensive to run. Could they be made more efficient? Unlettered and ill-educated though he was, Trevithick thought so, and he introduced steam under high pressure to push, not suck, the piston. …

In 1801, Trevithick built his first steam carriage, which he drove up a hill in Camborne, Cornwall, on Christmas Eve. In 1803, Trevithick built the world's first steam railway locomotive at the Pendaren Ironworks, South Wales. On 21 February 1804, that engine hauled 10 tons of iron and 70 men along 10 miles of trackway. …

Still not much in the way of education, although bags of engineering intuition, acquired by mucking about with existing machinery, and struggling to improve it.

Who's next?

The very next major advance, too, was made by an ill-educated, barely literate, barely numerate, self-taught artisan called George Stephenson. Light though it was, Trevithick's locomotive was still too heavy for the cast-iron rails of the day. … But on 27 September 1825, a steam engine designed by George Stephenson drew 450 people from Darlington to Stockton at the trrifying speed of 15 miles per hour. Stephenson went on to built the Liverpool to Manchester line, for which he then designed the 'Rocket', an engine which could attain 36 miles per hour! Yet Stephenson was unschooled. The son of a mechanic, he followed his father in operating a Newcomen Engine to pump out a coal mine in Newcastle. He only learnt to read (just) at the age of 19 when he attended night school, and he never really acquired mathematics. So unsophisticated was Stephenson, and so dense his Geordie brogue, that he needed an interpreter when talking to educated men from London. Yet it was the educated men – from all over Europe – who consulted him, not the other way round.

In other words, then, very little schooling at all went into the inventing of the steam engine and the steam locomotive? Correct. Ten out of ten. Or to be precise, three and a half out of four, and when it comes to formal scientific education, four out of four.

It will be seen therefore, that the development of the steam engine, the one artefact that more than any other embodies the Industrial Revolution, owed nothing to science; it emerged from pre-existing technology, and it was created by uneducated, often isolated, men who applied practical common sense and intuition to address the mechanical problems that beset them, and whose solution would yield obvious economic reward.

It is of course a matter for debate just how much can be learned from this story that is of relevance to the modern world. Maybe the steam engine was invented and pioneered by barely-educated men, but it is very hard to believe that the Industrial Revolution could have got underway in a nation populated only by such unlettered men as these. Those educated men who consulted with Stephenson may indeed not have invented the steam locomotive, but they surely made better – and better organised – use of it than a nation consisting only of similar illiterates would have done. The educated men did surely contribute a lot.

Furthermore, it is hard to see how "intuition" alone could have enabled anyone to devise and perfect the modern electronic chip, and it would be impossible for an illiterate to programme a computer.

But even so, the story does throw an interesting light on the limits of education as a contributory explanation of one of the great technological events in human history. And all this from the Vice Chancellor of a University.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 08:52 PM
Category: History • Learning by doing
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This sounds ominous:

The school secretary is forlorn. The caretaker is beside himself with fury. Dean Hall, a school for children with special educational needs in the Forest of Dean, is to close in September 2005.

Parents marched in the street to save the school, but the Labour-run council said it was following the Government's policy of including all but the most seriously disabled or disturbed children in mainstream classes.

The local school organisation committee, which oversees admissions and places, referred the controversial closure to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, set up under the 1998 School Standards and Framework Act.

The adjudicator, Hilary Nicolle, the former education director of the London borough of Islington, backed the council and said that it had a legal obligation to close special schools and divert the money to mainstream classes to comply with the Government's inclusion policy.

Her word is final unless the parents can find the funds to apply to the High Court for a judicial review of the decision. If the ruling stands, it could sound the death knell for hundreds of other schools under threat.

The picture is complicated by the Government's interpretation of its own laws. While inclusion remains its stated aim, ministers seem unwilling to accept that it entails the closure of special schools.

Publishing the report of her working party on the future direction of special schools last April, Baroness Ashton, the minister with responsibility for special education, told The Telegraph: "I am very worried that somehow people believe the Government's agenda is to close special schools, when it absolutely isn't."

What's going on here?

I think it is clear. The government has been reading Brian's Education Blog and has realised that state education is a Bad Idea. They want to turn Britain into a nation of home schoolers and private schoolers. They want to destroy state education, as quickly as they can. But how can they make the destruction of state education seem like a Good Idea to their barking mad backbenchers who think that state education is such a Good Thing?

One day a year or two ago, some policy advising genius came up with the answer. Why don't we close down all the specialist schools where they now do whatever they can to help children who need special teaching to make any educational headway, and who often misbehave if they don't get it? Children of this sort are not that numerous, not as a percentage. But if they can be "reintegrated" back into the "school community", and scattered in twos and threes throughout the existing state schools, the havoc they will cause and the teacher attention they will divert from the currently docile majority will be out of all proportion to their numbers.

I am a devout enemy of state education, but even I would shrink from the sheer ruthlessness needed to make a policy like this stick. That's politicians for you, I guess. Nothing if not decisive. Ever willing to break eggs to get their omelettes.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait at 11:32 PM
Category: Politics
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