I am utterly confused about whether standards (whatever exactly they are) in British schools are going down, or whether improved primary school teaching has actually improved matters somewhat in recent years. So I smiled quite a lot at this letter in yesterday's Guardian, from Catherine Wykes:
After years of falling exam standards, shouldn't we be celebrating this year's rise in standards as evidenced by the drop in GCSE passes?
Maybe so.
More examination angst.
Six Brazilians have been turned away by immigration officials at Heathrow Airport after failing a quiz about the Beatles.The group said they were on their way to Liverpool's Mathew Street Festival this weekend, which celebrates the lives of the Fab Four.
Reports say immigration officials refused to let them into the UK when they failed to answer basic questions about the band.
They apparently did not know who Yoko Ono was and thought Ringo Starr was dead.
Organiser of this weekend's festival Bill Heckle, from Cavern City Tours, told the Daily Post: "Portuguese-speaking immigration officials asked them simple questions about the Beatles, such as how many of them are still alive and what songs could they name?"
Well, okay. The Home Office attitude is that these bloody foreigners will try anything to weedle their way in Britain, and its their job to frustrate their dastardly tricks with dastardly tricks of their own.
But a related question is more serious. Would it make sense, as I believe David Blunkett has suggested recently, that would be new British citizens should have to pass exams, in such subjects as English, British politics, British history? And what kinds of entrance exams do they have in other countries?
Success for a home boy:
Arran Fernandez surprised educationalists two years ago by passing a GCSE aged five. Yesterday, he was celebrating again after becoming the youngest person to get an A* grade in the exam.The Surrey schoolboy was seven when he took the higher-tier GCSE maths paper and topped this GCSE roll-call of young achievers after scoring the highest possible grade.
Like 12-year-old Jonathan Prior, who last week became the youngest person to pass an A-level this year, Arran, now eight, does not attend school but is taught at home by his father, Neil Fernandez.
Arran said: "I'm very proud of myself and so are my family and friends."
But he added that he planned to take a break from exams and would not move straight on to A-levels in 2004. "I study English and French and also I'm studying geography and astronomy," he said. "Daddy doesn't think I should go to school. We've done topics that aren't in the syllabus, such as complex numbers and groups."
Sounds like Daddy, who sounds like an interesting guy, has a point. And note the telling little detail "and friends". Home schooled children are often accused of not being able to make those.
Incidentally, school is not the only arena to display ranking slippage. Do you think that, like US generals, A grades at GCSE will eventually come in five different versions above the basic A, in the form of one to five star A grades?
David Carr of Samizdata also comments on this story, but he apparently got in a muddle about the difference between A (which anyone with two brain cells to rub together can get in their sleep) and A* (which requires over a dozen brain cells and full wakefulness). But, as is usual at Samizdata, there are some interesting comments.
Keeping up with Alice, who is now back from her camping trip, took me here, and to this article by Sarah Fitz-Claridge, entitled The Education of Karl Popper.
In about 1917, Popper came to a clear realisation about school: "... we were wasting our time shockingly, even though our teachers were well-educated and tried hard to make the schools the best in the world. That much of their teaching was boring in the extreme – hours and hours of hopeless torture – was not new to me. (They immunised me: never since have I suffered from boredom. In school one was liable to be found out if one thought of something unconnected with the lesson: one was compelled to attend. Later on, when a lecturer was boring, one could entertain oneself with one's own thoughts.)" On returning to school after an illness of over two months Popper was shocked to find that his class had hardly made any progress, so, at the age of sixteen, he decided to leave school. He enrolled at the University of Vienna, where the cost of enrolling was nominal and every student could attend any lecture course. "Few of us thought seriously of careers – there were none ... We studied not for a career but for the sake of studying. We studied; and we discussed politics."At university Popper initially attended lectures in many different subjects, but he soon dropped all subjects other than maths and theoretical physics. He thought that in mathematics he would learn something about standards of truth. He had no ambition to become a mathematician, and says: "If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations."
I think that one of the best ways to write about education is to write about the educational experiences and opinions of people who are deservedly famous, or for that matter deservedly infamous.
I've had a pre-occupying day, so I've let Sarah Fitz-Claridge do most of my thinking and writing along these lines today. It's a formula I expect to use again many times in the future, and not necessarily with writings already available on the internet in their entirety. Linking to aready internetted stuff is useful, but it is also faintly parasitical. All I've really said here is: have a read of this. But that is something.
Category: Education theory • Higher education • Maths
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More Australian sadness:
Children in Melbourne have been banned from dressing up as Batman, Superman and the Incredible Hulk because schools say the action hero costumes encourage aggressive behaviour.
This means that in twenty years time, our cricketers have a chance. David Carr of Samizdata spotted this story, and has a laugh about it.
This is rather sad:
SCHOOL students are being deprived of the chance to perform popular musicals and plays because of sky-rocketing performance copyright fees being commanded by licensing corporations.Performance copyright laws in Australia make few allowances for schools, forcing them to pay up to $10,000 in fees for performances they seldom profit from.
As a result, many schools are being forced to cancel plans to stage popular musical productions.
Critics claim the exorbitant copyright fees are placing the creative development of students who are striving for careers in the performing arts at risk.Roseville College music director John Barnes said the school no longer staged big musicals. A performance to farewell a principal was nearly ruined because the school couldn't afford to pay thousands to stage a section of My Fair Lady.
Yes, well, I don't know what that signifies exactly or what if anything ought to be done about it all, but it makes a change from the usual fare here, of homeschooling and school schooling of the more usual sort. Maybe there's some kind of gay angle? Anyway, if you want to read all of it, all of it is here.
I put a piece about "Connections Direct" here, and I put a piece about it at White Rose. And at White Rose, Stephen Hodgson commented thus:
Brian, I am unfortunate to have had first hand experience dealing with "Connexions" because my school (a combined secondary school and sixth form college of around 1,400 students aged between 11 and 18) handed over my personal details to this organisation without my consent: They passed on my name, date of birth, home address, telephone number and goodness knows what other information they held on me to Connexions in exchange for £1. (Connexions have subsequently sent me a vast amount of junk mail including a small booklet which explained that, "Connexions are here to offer you advice on important life-changing decisions - like starting an apprenticeship, getting a job or having a makeover" and I also received a phonecall from an idiotic bureaucrat who insisted that I hand over my personal information for the sake of allowing them to "monitor the quality of service" or some such rubbish.)
At White Rose I described this most peculiar enterprise as "creepy", and it was certainly a creepy for Stephen. But I think that in order to set up something like this, the people who set it in motion had to be the sort who wouldn't understand such language to describe all the help they are providing.and all those "connexions" they are making.
I remember watching the New Labour project assemble itself in the late eighties and the early nineties, and these people were immensely impressed by capitalism, by all the fun you could have shopping, and by such things as credit cards and those supermarket cards, then in their early stages. My guess is that the sort of people who are involved with an outfit called Demos, or at any rate people in the general Demos milieu, had a hand in this "Connexions" nonsense, and that they imagined that what they were doing was not pestering people and making creeps and jackasses of themselves, but rather "reinventing government" and "learning from the retail revolution" blah blah blah.
But somehow, I didn't expect to be writing about nonsense like this here. Nonsense yes, in abundance. But not this particular nonsense.
Follow the rumour from her, to him, to this:
I'm sick of all this whining following good A-level results about what second-rate subjects students choose. What did the older generation learn with their supposedly breathtaking mastery of long division etc? They learnt to attack and exploit the poor all over the world, abandon the vulnerable of their own society, and generally not give a damn about anything apart from the statistics of "progress".
Maybe with our more humanities-based curriculum, with its emphasis on finding something for everyone, we might learn that numbers are to serve people, and not the other way around.
Says Peter Briffa:
There's one for the root causes brigade: long division turns you into a rampaging capitalist.
If only it were that easy.
Thank you to the Chris Tame and the Libertarian Alliance Forum for the link to this HLSDA article about homeschooling in Taiwan:
Homeschool Freedom Grows in TaiwanDr. Shou-kong Fan, President of Mu-Jen Chinese Christian Home Educators Association (skfan@seed.net.tw), recently reported to HSLDA that homeschoolers in Taiwan continue to enjoy freedom in educating their children. He feels that the Taiwanese government has been favorable toward homeschooling families because of the commitment of the homeschool movement to work with the government in a peaceable and respectful fashion. He also reports that the media has given homeschooling positive coverage, both because of the academic and social success of the children, as well as the additional time homeschooling parents are able to spend with their children.
A father was recently denied his right to homeschool because of his lack of higher education. Fortunately, this denial was reversed after the Chinese Christian Home Educators Association sent a prayer alert throughout the island. Taiwanese homeschoolers have expressed thanks to the pioneer homeschooling families in the United States who have successfully homeschooled their children. Statistics from the U.S. have enabled the Taiwan homeschoolers to deal with the government and convince officials of the value of homeschooling.
One of the greatest needs facing homeschoolers in Taiwan is the need for higher education opportunities. Because the homeschool movement in Taiwan is relatively young, few homeschool graduates have sought admission to Taiwan's colleges. As a result, most higher education institutions have not developed policies that are favorable to homeschoolers. Most homeschool graduates are then forced to seek admission to a college in the U.S. or some other country that is more favorable to homeschoolers.
Please pray for Taiwan homeschoolers as they continue to expand public and legal recognition of homeschooling.
Amen.
I don't know if it's education, but it's fun. The site calls it snowflakes, but I think they mostly look more like paper table mats. This is a kind of internetted version of what people complain about children doing in primary schools instead of having the three Rs pounded into them.
Where would the world be without Professor Dave Barry?
Category: Learning by doing • Primary schools • The Internet
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On the ITV news this evening there was an item about an Indian family in Britain who, disgusted by the educational options offered to them in London, were sending their child to a school back in India.
I believe that in the years to come, many more British children will be educated overseas, especially in Eastern Europe.
A friend of mine, born and educated in Eastern Europe and now living in France, even toyed with the idea of starting just such a school, in her native Romania. She herself was actually in no position to run such a school, and in any case probably lacked the temperament for such a job, but there was nothing wrong with the basic idea. Life in Romania is cheap, compared to life in Britain, as are teachers, but the teachers are very good. Schooling in Romania is only now beginning its descent into the age of television, computer games and violence against teachers. It could have worked. In other hands, I think it will.
The catalyst for all this will be the arrival in Britain of large numbers of legal, well educated immigrants from Eastern Europe, courtesy of the EU. Many of these will be recruited to work in Britain as teachers. But they will have a nasty shock at how difficult teaching in Britain has now become. However, the idea that they might be able to contribute to the education of British children will now be firmly in their minds, as will the low level of education here. Eastern Europeans are frequently shocked at the low quality of individual people in the west, in such sharp contrast to the high quality of so much of the mere stuff that is made here. So they mostly don't now see this opportunity. But once they get here, they will. So, some of them will go back home again and get it organised, while others remain here to do the selling job.
Well, we'll see. I'm not the entrepeneurial type myself, so this could be nonsense. But as of now, I can't imagine why.
No links because I thought of this myself. But if anyone can suggest any ...
I recommend that you read The Ratchet by Natalie Solent. All of it. It's about the many subtle ways in which anti-discrimination laws harm those they are intended to help.
There is a lot about education in the piece, and it once again illustrates that how well people do in their education, and how the world of education in general conducts itself, is profoundly influenced by forces at work in the wider society, in this case legal forces, which in their turn give rise to subtler social forces.
Let's start off with the observation that black school leavers are less qualified than their white counterparts. (It does not affect my argument whether this is through the racism of their teachers or their own bad behaviour.) By insisting that they will not be openly penalised for this in the job market, the anti-discrimination laws ensure there is less of an incentive to study. The problem never gets solved. It just gets papered over. Although the rising generation may never explicitly make the calculation "I don't have to work so hard because I'm black," that is the message that will filter down through the millions of little allusions, jokes, observations and examples that make up each individual life experience.And of course, many of them do explicitly make that calculation. They don't work and mock their classmates who do. It has its inevitable result: blacks really are, on average, less well educated than whites. Prejudices come true.
As I say, you really should read the whole thing.
I have friends who fear that the blogosphere is inevitably the triviasphere. This kind of piece is proof that it need not be so.
