I just caught a TV advert for something called Connexions Direct. I went to the website the advert was plugging and explored.
Connexions Direct can help you with information and advice on issues relating to health, housing, relationships with family and friends, your career and learning options, money, as well as letting you know about activities you can get involved in.
I dug further.
Finding someone to talk to.Connexions Direct Advisers are here to listen to your relationship problems and can also help you to find support in your area. You can contact us via email, text, phone or webchat or pop into your local office. Look in the Connexions Service section for details of where your local office is.
My immediate reaction is that anything with a website that ends with .gov.uk has no damn business arranging relationship counselling. (I've picked out the creepiest bit for the title of this posting.)
My next reaction is that, what with the .gov.uk thing at the end of it, it will cost a lot and achieve very little.
And my next is that insofar as it is a good idea, the effect of anything ending in .gov.uk, with its potentially vast budget no matter how little return it may be getting, is liable to crowd out any voluntary initiatives offering similar stuff.
And my final reaction is that maybe White Rose, the website that deals with government snooping and suchlike, might also be interested. You can see how the email list of such an operation might be quite appealing to a snoopy sort of government. Maybe the advice will, as promised, be confidential, but the fact that it was solicited might not be quite so, so to speak. And what are we to make of this, from their Privacy Policy?
If you register to receive updates your information will be held on a secure server and the data will not be shared with any organisations outside Government.
Whereas organisations inside Government can fish at will?
It will be used only to provide you with e-mail updates on the topics you have requested or postal information if you request that service. If you respond online to a consultation exercise your data will only be used to facilitate the analysis of responses.
Hm.
Does anyone out there know anything about this operation?
Here's a story about the progress of homeschooling in the USA:
Cassandra Stevenson isn't old enough to drive or vote, but she's already a college graduate. Five years ago Cassandra, now 15, entered her freshman year at Danbury's Western Connecticut State University before most of her contemporaries had hit middle school.She and her older sister, Samantha, who at 19 has a master's degree in astrophysics from Wesleyan University in Middletown, never went to high school -- or elementary school for that matter. Like a small but growing number of Connecticut youngsters, they were homeschooled.
Masters degree in astrophysics. Propaganda that potent just can't be bought. No wonder homeschooling is spreading.
Cassandra attributes her academic achievements to the home instruction her mother, Deborah Stevenson, provided around the family dining room table."Homeschooling is more like college than a public or a private school is," said Cassandra, who lives with her mother in Southbury. "You learn what you want to learn and what you need to learn. The curriculum is fitted to you."
Yes that seems such a simple idea. I'm surprised more people don't learn things that way.
While off-the-charts success stories like Cassandra and Samantha's are relatively rare, a National Home Education Research Institute study showed that the majority of home-educated children score at or above the 80th percentile on statewide standardized tests.Such statistics may account for why the number of home-educated children in Connecticut has increased six-fold since 1990. Despite such gains, only about 2,100 of the state's about 630,000 school-age children are being educated at home, according to data provided by the state Department of Education. About 250 Fairfield County youngsters are homeschooled, the state Department of Education's Student Census Report shows.
I like it when someone else can do educational numbers for me.
The statewide increase is part of a larger national trend, said William Lloyd, a researcher for the home education institute who estimates that last year about 2.1 million children were homeschooled – up from 500,000 in 1990."It used to be homeschoolers were thought to be earth mothers in California or Oregon," Lloyd said. "Now it's seen as a mainstream thing."
That's the key line in this story for me. A "mainstream thing".
What all of the above means is that in the short run, homeschooling is going to grow and grow, to the point where homeschoolers will exist in such numbers that their abolition, or even their excessive harrassment, will become a political impossibility. And if there are comments saying I'm wrong about that, it will be because this point has already been reached.
But then another question will kick in. For as long as homeschooling is done by mums like the mum of Cassandra and Samantha, it's pretty much bound to do really well. That at any rate will the retrospective put-down from the critics. But what if Mrs Typical Homeschooler starts to be Joanne Schmo rather than Alberta Einstein? How well will it work then?
I'll place my bet now. I think homeschooling will continue to outperform the state and even private school alternatives by any measures you care to dream up, provided the comparisons they make are half way fair.
After all, being well educated means learning how to find out about things that your teachers have no idea about. I reckon Joanne Scho might still crank out a few astrophysicists.
Of all the education news stories of the last day or two, this one struck me as the most interesting:
It is a shadow that hangs over the thousands of young men who aspire to earning a living from their favourite pursuit, playing football: What if they fail to make the grade?As the multi-millionaire players of the country's best teams prepare to kick off another lucrative season, the pain of coming to terms with the dashing of dreams can be especially hard for those forced to give up the game through injury or because they have been released by their clubs.
Today, instead of finalising their pre-season training, up to 80 would-be players will be visiting a jobs fair at Keele University, the first of its kind organised by the FA Premier League to prove that there is life after football.
The more I ruminate upon it, the more I believe the growth areas in education to be everywhere except in "schools". The way to sort out a lot of the problems in education is to denationalise, and to allow individual pupil choice. But how do you do that? It has to be done gradually, and it has to be sneaked past the special interests, and if they do see it coming, it has to be too popular and to make too much sense to be opposable. In general, the way that education is going to develop in the future is for adult institutions to diversify down the age range.
In particular, I believe that the big sports clubs are going, logically, to be drawn towards teaching more and more indoor stuff as well. If the big soccer clubs of Britain were to open up schools, not just for the boys they considered possible future stars, but for boys who were merely keen to learn about life with a soccer slant to it, starting with boys of, say, twelve, no one would stop them, provided they did it half reasonably. Their big problem would, on the contrary, be the government being so keen to help.
The basic problem for most teenagers is that they aren't going to be able to do what they would most like to do, and this applies with special ferocity to aspiring soccer stars. Most of them really aren't going to make it. They are liable to be very disappointed.
This story is only about the soccer people taking some of the bump out of the otherwise very hard landing that soccer boys get now if the soccer clubs decide they've no more use for them, which is what it decides for most of them, of course. And what I think it shows is that thought is going into the education of the "others", the ones who don't make it, the ones who if only they can be offered the right alternatives, could do fine, or not, depending.
In short, the world of soccer is thinking hard about education.
Four out of five players who signed on with Premier League clubs in their teens would be released by the time they reached 21, he added. Some of those eligible to attend today's fair will have been with their clubs since the age of eight.
Did I say twelve?
To help them, the league has assembled an all-star line-up of university admissions staff and employers to try to help them develop a new career.Kate Coleman, education and child-protection manager at the FA Premier League, said: "The league takes the education of young people very seriously and we have worked very hard in conjunction with our academies [established at individual clubs] to encourage scholars to realise the importance of gaining academic qualifications. Unfortunately, not every player who joins a Premier League Academy will sign a professional contract with their club and get a career out of the game. The event at Keele will be a useful opportunity for those players who have been released by clubs to assess what options they have for the future."
Universities including Loughborough – famous for its sports science degree – Cardiff and Leeds Metropolitan will be attending the event. A wide range of employers at the fair will include the armed services, the fire brigade and the John Lewis Partnership.
I guess all I'm really saying is: interesting.
I've already mentioned here Alison Wolf's book Does Education Matter?, and have also quoted from it in a Samizdata posting. Here's another chunk, from the concluding chapter. And for this I already have a category classification nice and ready.
The last twenty-five years have been the heyday of education policy directed purposefully towards economic ends. One result has been a fixation on quantitative targets which allow governments to monitor progress and pronounce success. These necessarily emphasize what can be easily counted and easily measured; so we have policies intended, above all, to increase numbers, whether these be of qualifications gained or of students enrolled. The most extreme manifestations of this trend – such as outcome-related funding which paid people for NVQs delivered, or franchising schemes which offered backpackers free scuba-diving courses – have foundered because they so visibly undermined quality and invited abuse. But the basic principle of targets has not vanished. How could it? For this is the quintessential approach of any centrally run and directed system which measures success by quantity. If you believe that more education equals more growth, and that government can and should deliver one through the other, then, like a compass needle to the pole, you will be drawn towards quantitative targets, whether they are the NVQs of the early 1990s or the 50 per cent enrolment in higher education that currently enthuses our political classes.
This approach is precisely analogous to the way in which Soviet planners ran their economy, and it has precisely the same drawbacks. Numerical targets have to be concerned with things that can be counted easily (like tractors or examination grades), not with more complex attributes which require judgement and are open to debate (such as whether those tractors work at all well, or the quality of different curricula). In a centrally funded, target-driven, top-down organization, the main and inevitable concern of lower-level functionaries is the satisfaction of their paymasters. If the things they are being asked to produce are genuinely simple to define and inspect, then the system may indeed produce them – albeit not very efficiently. But if they are complex and difficult to measure, like the quality of a university degree, then the effects of such systems tend to be pernicious.
This is especially true when one marries centralized, target-driven controls with financial pressures. That, of course, is exactly the situation that modern education systems find themselves in. As we saw in Chapters 6 and 7, the huge expansion of university education has been accompanied by a constant downward pressure on costs and on real levels of spending. These pressures are not specific to any particular political party or any particular country: they are inherent in any large-scale expansion of state-funded post-compulsory education. They are most obvious in higher education, because that is where change has been so recent and rapid. But the repercussions are not confined to this level.
I only started watching That'll Teach 'Em (Channel 4 – Aug 12 – 9 pm) because of still needing something to put here after another drainingly hot London day, spent basically doing other things, but oh boy, it's hilarious. The entire show is poised at the edge of a cliff and threatening to plummet towards pure Monty Python insanity.
It's like a brothel, but without the sex. Not very good actors stride about picking arguments with the boys and girls, and the usual procedure would then be for the customers - which is what he would be - to have an orgasm. But this is a serious, or as serious as it is possible to be about such things, to recreate a "nineteen fifties" public school education.
The programme brings out all the snobbery in me, that is to say of a boy who went to a truly posh school, or who thinks he did. Mine was called Marlborough, pronounced Morl-brur. And I remember Marlborough as being a more relaxed, more decadent sort of place. We all assumed that it was only the "minor" public schools (public means the opposite for these purposes – sorry America) who took all this stuff truly seriously.
The teachers at this TV place are, frankly, not as posh as the ones I remember. They have no irony, no humour. Only the tremendously exciting English mistress seems to have the real Posh Stuff. The teachers here do have their virtues, but they remind me of NCOs, rather than officers. They are mostly deadly serious sergeant majors who shout about everything they see that is wrong rather than languid colonels and brigadiers who see much, much more than they can be bothered to complain about.
But we never had anyone like that English mistress.
If you're interested, the best explication on film of sort Iof place I went to is not this programme, but Lindsay Anderson's If, which is outstanding. The weirdest thing of all about these places was the way that they sprayed Christianity all over the Caesarian savagery. They're doing that as well at this TV place. But Lindsay Anderson does that outstandingly. Who could forget the priest who is kept by the Headmaster in his drawer. (You have to see it.)
Still, this is a great show and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
As always when it comes to adapting, the girls are adapting to it all far better than the boys. The girls are enjoying it. They are becoming fifties stereotypes – Stepford schoolgirls. They are knitting scarves for their brothers back home.
The boys - and good for them – are just waiting for it to end. But even they are starting to come round.
Even for them it will have been a learning experience. They will have experienced a very different way of doing things. There's nothing like a shared ordeal lived through. Some of them will be friends for life.
The best thing about this show is that it so very clearly illustrates that such a place would now be unrunnable for real. Interestingly, and extremely importantly, they are not using very much physical violence at this place. But you can't run this kind of old-fashioned totalitarian regime without extremely serious physical violence. Without the ultimate sanction of the cane, or at least some kind of comparably severe torture, these places don't function properly. After all the humour and irony had been exhausted, if I didn't do what those bastards at Marlborough told me to do, then I was physically assaulted. And if that didn't work I would have been expelled, an option which I wish I had explored more thoroughly than I did at the time. (Put it this way. I am often able to startle the ex-victims of Communism with my grasp of the finer points of Communism, what it was and how it worked. How the hell did you know that? – they say, of some weird communist nuance. Easy I say, I went to a British public school.)
In this programme they have contrived a few pretend tortures, basically endurance tortures. But the hardcore stuff? - that they have shrunk from imposing on these children. You simply can't do this kind of thing now.
Which means that the entire pyramid of power crumbles. Everything has to be done differently. The boys on this show are waiting for it all to end. And after all, it's only a TV reality show, not reality. But if there was no end in sight, and if this was for real, they might well have rebelled by now.
And equally important, there simply aren't the teachers any more to run this kind of show. Simply, we don't believe in this kind of regime any more. We look at it, and we can't help bursting into giggles.
Carry on schooling? Like they did in the nineteen fifties? It can't be done.
If we are going to deny ourselves the ultimate sanction, namely torture - and that is precisely what we are now doing – then the entire way that the lives of children are governed is going to have to be painfully re-invented. This is one of the central beliefs of this blog. This process has hardly begun. But at least it has begun.
Category: Boys will be boys • History • The private sector • Violence
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In a rush. Quota posting. Guardian report of Tories proposing new national committee to sort out mess caused by previous national committees. They are dumb.
The Conservative party today set out how they would reform the exam system - including plans to give the exams watchdog full independence from the government - to restore confidence after last year's grading fiasco.
The shadow education secretary, Damian Green, said that the exam system needed simplifying, AS-levels should be scrapped and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) should be given more independence.
And if the QCA did something they didn't like, or created another mess? What then? Another committee?
Damien, go and stand in the corner, and think about what you've said.
When nationalisation is a mess, the answer is less of it, not more.
