One of the better tree consuming enterprises in Britain is a thing called The Week, which is a summary of the output of the rest of the print media. This week's The Week came out today. There's some best articles page, which features some of the best chunks of commentary they can find, and this week's number two British chunk is this, from Janey Daley, in the Telegraph:
When I was a student at Berkeley, says Janet Daley, I spent my evenings in a San Francisco cinema ushering people to their seats. I was not alone. Working your way through college is what most American undergraduates do - even the rich ones. It's not just a way to pay for your studies; it's regarded as a social good in itself. To Americans, economic self-sufficiency is a virtue. Imagine my shock then, when I came to Britain for postgraduate work and was told that my college would be most unlikely to permit me to work. In Britain, I soon realised, having to take a job while at college is regarded as an affront: consider how shocked we were all meant to be this week at the news that one in five Oxford students now find it necessary to do so. Underlying this attitude is an ingrained haughtiness: you don't go to university in Britain just to be educated but to become a certain sort of person. And that person does not wait tables. Small wonder relations between the classes are so much more relaxed in America than they are here: in America, the man who brings you-coffee "may be a future professor of history".
Quite so. That point about how you never know who you might be insulting is one of my favourite arguments in favour of rampant capitalism, USA-style.
Certainly some of the best education I've had has been on the job, and the nastier the job was the more educational it tended to be. I once had a month and a half stuffing plastic bottles two at a time under a machine that spewed photographic chemicals. One mistake, and you spend the rest of the day with your genitals soaked in the stuff.
I never got it wrong, so I was spared the worst of it. Good hands, I guess. Not clumsy. All that keeping wicket at school.
But imagine doing something like that for your whole working life. I had plenty of imagining to do when I was doing it, and that was definitely one of the things I imagined. (Not necessarily ghastly, was my conclusion, if you were really good at it and not good for anything more complicated or difficult.) Maybe I was only pretending to be a worker type worker during the vacation, but the experience surely made me a better person, and a better educated person. A different "certain sort of person", you might say.
Category: Economics of education • Learning by doing
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I missed this the first time around but found it today, via Chris Bertram. It's a Guardian report on arguments about the history syllabus in Russia. A fraught matter as you can surely guess. The people who lost the Cold War were never de-commified, so even if they lost the big one, they can still win little – actually not so little of course – battles like this one:
A row has broken out between the Russian government and a group of the country's top writers over removing literary classics about the repression of the Soviet era from the school syllabus.Thirteen distinguished writers have sent an open letter to the Minister for Education protesting at plans for several seminal Russian works, including Boris Pasternak's classic Dr Zhivago, to be dropped from the essential reading lists for 12- to 18-year-olds.
The protesters allege that bureaucrats are trying to keep literature dealing with the purges of the Soviet era away from schoolchildren, presenting an anodyne version of the nation's former imperial glory. The books will instead become "recommended reading", taught at the teacher's discretion, on a new list due to come into effect in 2005.
The row goes right to the quick of Russia's struggle to come to terms with the brutalities of its past. While during the Yeltsin era the Kremlin kept the media brimmed with reminders of the horror and hard graft of life under Communism, the Putin administration's focus on nationalistic pride often results in a warm nostalgia for the glories of the Soviet era.
You probably all know what I think about school syllabuses. Let the schools decide them. But I doubt that's going to happen any time soon in Russia.
It's not going to happen any time soon in Britain, either.
This from Happy Homeschooler Joanne Davidson, is good:
The issue I really want to focus on, though, is the level of acceptance that bullying, teasing and related behaviors that demonstrate poor character are 1) expected 2) normal and 3) demand early and repeated exposure to by our youngest citizens.Public schools are in a unique situation. They provide an ever increasing program of diversity training while at the same time tolerating a high level of teasing and bullying. IMO and IME, institutional learning enviornments breed and foster the kind of climate that diversity training rallies to combat. At the same time, talk to almost any educator or parent who has (or has been) a child of the system, and you will hear version after version of "kids will be kids". The transalation is "You can't stop all teasing, you need to accept that it's going to happen." The fact that teasing and bullying happens at schools is given as an argument that our children *should* attend.
So … to sum up my poorly communicated incredulity: teasing and bullying happens. We have diversity training to protect certain politicalized special interests. But we will honor our children's needs to behave as they do in under-supervised packs. And not only is this a good thing, you need to throw your children into the mix at an early age.
And now beside that, from the USA, put this from the UK:
Children as young as 10 are being robbed of their childhood by pressure to copy scantily clad pop stars such as Kylie Minogue, the leader of a teaching union said yesterday.Jim O'Neill, chairman of the Professional Association of Teachers, argued that primary school pupils were losing their innocence because they were bombarded with lewd images and exposed to inappropriate storylines and bad language on television programmes before the 9pm watershed.
So I guess children oughtn't really to live at home at all. All that mind rotting television. They should all be packed off to boarding schools at seven, there to be protected from the menace of Kylie.
But what if all that pressure to emulate Kylie comes not so much from Kylie herself as from those "under-supervised packs" that Joanne Davidson talks about?
One of the pleasures of doing this blog is that I am starting to meet quite a few homeschooled, home-edded, home-raised children, and to pay attention when I do meet them. And I can tell you that the home-thinged children whom I've been getting to know (a) get "pressure" from their parents that is much less frantic and antagonistic, to the point where it hardly seems like pressure at all, because the matter is settled between the children and the parents, day in day out, without third parties piling in with other agendas for six hours every day, and (b) they don't get pressure from feral-gang peer groups. They do, however, (c) go out and make friends as and when they feel the need. The idea that home-schooled children don't know how to socialise is, in my experience of socialising with them and on the basis of what they say about their lives, tosh.
The difference is that the very lives of these children are not ruled by the aggregate of their friends' opinions.
I don't generally pay the full wack for books. I wait until I see good stuff in the remainder shops. But I've made an exception for this book, reviewed by J. R. Shackleton in Economic Affairs (the Journal of the Institute of Economic Affairs – Vol. 23 No. 2 – June 2003 – paper only so far as I am aware):
This is a good and timely book. The current government's obsession with 'education, education, education' has led it into one problem after another as it seeks to micromanage the huge UK education industry. Last year's botched teacher vetting and the A-level regrading fiasco, two recent examples, have not deterred its ever-growing compulsion to meddle, meddle, meddle. And don't even start me on the recent White Paper on Higher Education.Alison Wolf, Professor of Education at London University's Institute of Education, is not an economist. But she attributes many of the government's failures - and those of previous Conservative governments - to the mistaken belief that education is crucial to the success of the economy. She writes that: 'An unquestioning faith in the economic benefits of education has brought with it huge amounts of wasteful government spending, attached to misguided and even pernicious policies'(p. xi).
Professor Wolf shows that the evidence contradicts the view that government spending on education plays a decisive role in economic growth. There are plenty of examples of rapidly growing economies where educational spending has been low, and of economies where relatively high educational expenditure has had little impact on growth.
Even in cases where high spending is apparently associated with high income per head, the causation is as likely to run in the opposite direction. Families in rich societies want to spend more on education, while complex modern economies also require educated people to perform more complex jobs although Professor Wolf rightly points out there is a continuing demand for employees in low-skilled fields which is often neglected.
Sounds good, doesn't it.
Here's a bit from the Introduction:
… an unquestioning faith in the economic benefits of education has brought with it huge amounts of wasteful government spending, attached to misguided and even pernicious politics. Just because something is valuable, it does not follow that yet more of it is by definition a good idea: that any addition, any increment, must be welcomed. Yet in practice this is what we seem to believe.
Okay, the book is definitely going to play to most of my libertarian prejudices. And that's not very admirable. What is better is that this woman obviously knows a lot about that education policy stuff that I have such a difficulty with. I will learn a lot if I read this book. The economic benefits of this, to me, and to the world in general, are going to be undetectable.
But I come from a family in a rich society, and I want more education.
Does Education Matter? by Alison Wolf is a Penguin paperback, first published in 2002.
And – isn't this nice? – this was where, this afternoon, I bought it.
Well, as promised, something before my bed-time, but strictly a copy-and-paste-and-a-comment-if-you're-lucky job.
From today's Telegraph:
Only a market-based funding system which encourages competition can save our ailing higher education institutions, writes Steven Schwartz.Hurrah, my libertarian prejudices are about to be confirmed.
Just go out and visit our universities. Buildings are shabby, toilets don't work, and roofs leak. Equipment is getting old, staff are underpaid and classes are overcrowded. How did we get to this state and what we can do about it?
Once, universities were private organisations. They made ends meet by a combination of fees, donations, and endowments. After the First World War, they began to ask for and receive public funds. Today, they are financially dependent on the state and display all the characteristics of state-run enterprises, including lack of investment and demoralised staff.
He's right, I think. I visited Commenius University in Bratislava, at just the time when Communism was finally being buried, and the surprise for me was how little it differed in appearance from the average British University.
It reminded me of Royal Holloway College, which is one of the most extraordinary university buildings in Britain, being a brick by brick copy of a French chateau, but in red brick rather than the original white, and completed in the way that original chateau was only intended to be. I know this not because I ever studied at Holloway, but because it was just down the road from where I was raised. I could see its magic pinnacles from my bedroom window. True. Follow the link above, and take the "virtual tour", and see if I'm not right.
And last time I saw the inside of the place, it sported the same faded glorious, barbarians-camped-in-the-ruins style that I had also seen at Commenius, together with the same ugly blockhouses next door, or in the case of Holloway, scattered about in the old grounds. Or in other words, as the RHC website puts it:
Welcome to Royal Holloway - a unique blend of tradition and innovation.
I should imagine that the parallels between the physical appearance of the place and what goes on there intellectually are fairly exact. Although the big change is that Holloway used to be all for ladies, and is now … not bisexual, but you know what I mean. Plus, it's been "merged" with another college. Bedford, I think.
So, denationalise it. Good night everybody.
I have mishandled my time today. Just when I should have been doing a meaningful stint of blogging here, I got caught up in something else, and now I have been summoned away to an Important Meeting which I Don't Want To Miss. I will put something here before I go to bed, but I won't manage anything before midnight. As I say: sorry. Please all read your books and do not misbehave.
Meanwhile, by way of rescuing my reputation somewhat in the eyes of my readers here, I ask you all to take a look at what it says about little old me at the bottom of this posting. Although I notice that, unlike Colby Cosh, I am not awarded my own newspaper column. So, not that brilliant.
Nevertheless: wow.
If you write for a big blog and you also run a small specialist blog like this one, here's one of the things you do. You put a story up on your small blog. You get a comment on it. You then rehash that comment into a posting on the big blog. And then you recycle any comments you get there back to the small blog. And you keep on doing that until you are the Ruler of the Universe.
So, this time around, the starting point was this posting here about the collapsing British exam system, which Emma commented upon, which I then put up at Samizdata, and which Guy Herbert then commented upon there, thus:
I'm surprised you don't recall that once upon a time – as little as 20 years ago – we did have a market-like system for qualifications for GCEs O-levels, and A-levels (and the forgotton "S-levels" for those for whom A-levels were not demanding enough). The various exam boards were independent, and schools would choose between them, depending on the sort of syllabus they wanted to pursue. The government didn't set the syllabus. The exams were kept honest by competition, because the universities and other consumers of the qualified could discount a board's qualifications if it got too lax.My reading of the QCA's railway-style approach is that it's a Parkinsonian scheme to increase its own size and influence, which will be supported and encouraged by the government as a means to tighter central control. Compare the invention of the Strategic Rail Authority. While there are still lots of exam boards--even as currently constituted--it wouldn't be a vast adminstrative task just to abolish the QCA and the national currriculum and let nature set the course.
All of which is far too well informed and intelligent not to pass on to you lot, just in case you don't bother with Samizdata. (I certainly hope that this is true of some of you. I try to put at least some stuff here that is of interest to people with very different political prejudices to mine.)
I did sort of know what Guy says about how exams used to be, but there's sort of knowing and really knowing. I mean, did the Ministry of Education in those days have no influence on the exam choices made by State Schools? I don't know. But Guy seems fairly sure that they didn't.
That's a problem I've always had with learning things. I've never been happy about just taking one person's word for it. I need to get the story from several different and preferably unrelated directions. Which I think is an attitude that has educational implications.
One thing I think it means is that with teaching, as with the political persuading which is what I have spent a lot of my life doing, you have to be content to say your piece to your "pupils", and then let them make of it what they want to. Which might very well include nothing.
And exams, of course, don't fit very well with that attitude.
There's nothing like a link to something else there to get you looking at a good piece near the one linked to, that you would otherwise have missed.
Instapundit links to this posting, which is fun and also education-related too, but just under it I also found this, which is Photon Courier's take on the decline of what they call in America "shop".
Some of you may recall me ruminating on this here, in connection with my friend the "shop" teacher John Washington.
This afterthought strikes me as particularly acute:
UPDATE: I'm sure that another factor playing a role here is the fear of lawsuits. If kids are allowed to smart off in a shop class, it can be very dangerous. It's a lot easier to hurt yourself (or someone else) with a welding torch than with a computer or a piece of paper. And few school administrators seem to have the courage to insist on the right to remove troublemakers from class...so activities that could be hazardous are simply avoided.I suspect that many of the factors discussed here are also relevant to the decline of laboratory science in the schools.
Makes sense. And see also the second half of this recent posting here, which also bears on child safety.
Over at A TCS Blog, Emma (who commented on the post below) has a charming description of attending a Promenade Concert, an event which coincidentally I also gave some attention to.
The killer line in Emma's description for our purposes here was this, concerning a rather officious member of the audience who was telling other people what was what in a very stupid way:
"I'm a school teacher. I don't mean to be patronising; I just like telling people things they might want to know."
Indeed.
