I've been busy today doing other things, and have little time for this blog now. So just a short posting on the word itself: "education".
If you google "education", you get a lot of the things you'd expect like the US Department of Education, and the Hawaii Department of Education, and no doubt somewhere in among it all I might have found the Campaign for Real Education, although I didn't. There's a link to that on the right.
But in among all this you get things like Pesticide Education Resources. Education to mean propaganda, education to mean utterly inappropriate additions to the school curriculum.
But mostly, when you google "education", you get: education.
Then I tried googling "The public needs to be educated". How many hits for that?
One thousand four hundred and seventy.
Try it. Then look down all the hits. In every case the word "educated" is mis-used to mean "persuaded", or just plain "told".
Google tells that the public needs to be educated about:
Potatoes. Grizzly bears. White cane laws. The dangers of driving while using the phone. Gang tendencies. The alternatives available for pain management. Basic human rights. Water. Chiropracty. The importance of spaying. Alcoholism. The general, substantive issues that make up the national question. Wrought iron gates. The potential of cloning. The true costs and benefits associated with the use of pharmacologic agents. The potential dangers involved with riding MPWCs and of the necessity for a boating licence. The benefit of street trees. The moth. Ways to be active and healthy and forget about body image. What piracy is and how it affects the artist and the industry. The negative effects of corruption and what they can do against it. Linux. Not to buy stolen goods. Good land use practices. How the presidential fund checkoff works. Calcium's importance in health and how best to improve calcium nutriture by making appropriate food choices. Genetic screening. The threat created by Apple Snails. The Sign Code. So that their expectations of police response time is more realistic. What 'intrusion' is. Inguinal hernias. The importance of harm reduction strategies in relation to all drug use. That during the F&I period, the RedCoats were the good guys. The high quality of re-refined oils. What greenspace is. That a bicycle is a legal vehicle on public roads. To view forest fires as a threat to the national economy. Both what deposit insurance can and cannot accomplish. The difference between decay and cavity. The value of tourism to the local economy. The widespread condition of women who suffer from domestic violence.
Well I'm on about page forty of the hits, copying and pasting away, and I have yet to encounter any claim to the effect that the public ought to be educated, as in: the public ought to be educated. Full stop. In every use of this phrase without exception, educated really means sold, told, persuaded, bullied, but not educated.
I can think of all kinds of further comments I might make about this. But deadline looms. Have a nice weekend.
(The public needs to be educated about the importance of nice weekends.)
Apparently it's Back To School day in the USA, around now.
School's been out for the summer but now it's:
Woe is me, all summer long I was happy and free.
Save my soul, the board of education took away my parole.
I gotta go back, back, back to school again.
That second line (of verse two) scans particularly sweetly ("the BOARD of ED-u-CA-tion TOOK a-WAY my pa-ROLE").
Every problem in education is an excuse for a new central initiative. And this one is really going to spread happiness everywhere.
Headteachers are being urged to stagger the start and end of lessons to reduce traffic congestion created by the school run.The move will be part of a government offensive against parents who cause jams during the rush hour when they ferry their children to and from school.
The proposal could have pupils starting and finishing school up to an hour earlier or later than they do now.
But, the plan is likely to be unpopular with parents who have arranged their work schedules around their childen's existing timetables. Some could be forced to make several journeys every day if they have children at different schools.
Other measures will aim at persuading parents to abandon the school run by improving pedestrian crossings, cycle lanes and bus services.
I believe that the central folly here is one that was perpetrated a long, long time ago and which is going to be the devil of a job to unscramble. Basically, there are far too few schools. They are far too big. And the typical home is far too far away from the nearest one. (See also: cottage hospitals. Now also mostly closed down.)
Number two hundred and sixty three of the seven hundred and forty eight and climbing fast reasons why I believe in a totally free market in education is that I believe that a free market in education would have supplied schools for small children – especially small children – which are but an easy walk away from home, for just about everyone. I think there would have been a smooth path trodden historically, from the old Victorian Dame Schools, which were primary schools for one classroom of kids taught by one Old Biddy, to Tescho Primary, Safeteach, or whatever they would be called, which would be competing nationally franchised chains of educational excellence, for quite small sums of money, with very flexible hours, masses of terrific centrally supplied technology for teachers and children to choose from, and just would generally be fabulous compared to anything dreamed of now.
I was on the radio yesterday trashing the public sector, and it got me thinking, again, that one of the very worst things about a seriously nationalised industry, such as education now is, is that people stop even imagining how much better things might be if competing tradesman and charity workers and parents were running the show instead of state teachers harrassed into daily near insanity experiences by maniacally fusspot London bureaucrats, such as the geniuses who are presiding over this staggered school hours initiative.
From today's Guardian:
Local education authorities are to have their own anti-bullying "tsars" under government plans announced today.
I feel another Micklethwait's Law coming on: Whenever they appoint a "tsar" for anything, it means they don't know what the $%$@!!! to do. And a "tsar" to stop bullying? Listen to yourselves.
Specialist behaviour consultants are to be installed in all 150 LEAs in England and Wales at the cost of £75m.
Consultants. First, it will end up costing far more than that. Second, there'll still be bullying going on after the money has all been spent.
A new national anti-bullying charter will also be sent to all schools in an effort to highlight the problem.
To replace the previous anti-bullying charter?
Schools are already required to have anti-bullying policies, but the deaths over the summer of three children who had all been badly bullied prompted calls for fresh action.
Whatever you did last time that achieved nothing, do more of it.
Police are still investigating the deaths of 16-year-old Karl Peart and 15-year-old Gemma Dimmick, both pupils at Hirst high school in Ashington, Northumberland, who died in June.
Enough. I'm too depressed.
Answer to bullying. First, make it so schools get paid according to how many children go there. Second: let anyone who wants to leave a school leave it. That would make bullying bad for business. Meanwhile: don't know.
If you personally are being bullied at some horrible dump of a school, and they (your parents, teachers, etc.) won't let you even talk about going somewhere else instead, make them an offer. They let you go somewhere else, and in exchange you don't torch the damn place. There was a boy at my posh school who, rumour had it, got to go sports car racing every Wednesday afternoon by this method. In general, the secret is to combine extreme reasonableness with the threat of extreme violence if reason gets no response. Neither sweet reason not violence on their own are sufficient to solve such problems.
When children do this kind of thing to adults, they are called troublemakers. When adults do it to each other they are called diplomats.
The article by Jennifer Chew about phonics which I scanned in here last Wednesday is now up at the Telegraph website.
A homeschooling commenter denounced it thus:
More dogma and propaganda from those who have been indoctrinated to think they know who to raise my child better than I do.I have a recent post on a topic related to this on my blog.
"Infant-school"?
I'm not quite sure which particular "this" the posting on her blog refers to. Is it the phonics, the presumption of teaching superiority, or the "infant school" thing? Not sure.
I don't know if what follows works as any sort of answer to Joanne Davidson's objections, but maybe it does.
It seems to me that two things constantly get lumped together, both by those who favour both, and by those who oppose both, namely very structured and disciplined teaching, and the claim that children should be forced to submit to such teaching against their will.
I'm pretty sure that Jennifer Chew is a more or less unquestioning believer in the necessity of compulsory education, particularly for small children. In this I disagree with her, as does commenter Joanne. But when it comes to the teaching of literacy, I believe that I have a lot to learn from such persons as Jennifer Chew.
Put it this way. Supposing someone asked me which was better for a child: Being "taught" to read and write by those disastrously confusing "look and say" (i.e. look and guess) methods, in purely consenting circumstances, year after year? Or: Being forced to pay attention to someone like Jennifer Chew for a few early months of life? Well, I just hope no one asks. All I can say is I'd try like hell to persuade the "voluntary" teacher to change his or her ways, and if I failed … I'd not be a happy person. At present, most of the damage done by "look and say" is compulsorily inflicted by idiot state teachers, so that question, put to me, has never arisen.
Most of us have good memories of teachers who were (a) tyrants and (b) great teachers. Conflating their justified confidence that they knew how to teach something with a belief that this entitled them to force it down their pupils' throats (the key Bad Idea here) they duly did so. But, we have happy memories of this because to us what counted most was the good teaching, rather than the tyranny, which was irksome but (given the alternatives which probably involved just as much tyranny but less in the way of good teaching) bearable.
Yet good teaching and learning on the one hand, and compulsory teaching and learning on the other hand, are two absolutely different and distinct things. Good teaching may involve orders and obedience and abuse and prodding and poking and generally bossing the pupil around, but it absolutely doesn't have to involve the pupil having no right to switch this process off.
Some of the best teaching I've ever done has started with me saying: "Look, you can stop this at any moment, without explanation. Literally, whenever you want out, you can get out. No problem. But while you stay, you have to at least try to do what I say, or I'll get frustrated and I'll want to stop. Okay? Deal? Yes? Off we go then." And then followed a burst of high pressure teaching that to the naked eye would have been indistinguishable from tyranny. But it was not tyranny. Consent ruled throughout. The right to leave makes all the difference to the pupil's experience, to the pupil's attitude, to pupil morale. It means that despite all appearances to the contrary, the pupil stays in control. (A similar principle is embodied in the idea of an assembly line worker having next to him at all times a button which he can personally push to stop dead the entire assembly line.)
Boys in particular often love this sort of bare knuckle learning ordeal, which at the time is scary, but which afterwards they can feel genuinely proud of having lived through and learned from.
And one of the absolute worst ways to separate teaching from tyranny is to remove all orders, criticism, holding to a standard, attention demanding, prodding or poking, mental or physical, EXCEPT the tyranny of forbidding the victims of this vacuous anarchy from getting the hell out of there. Boys, in particular, will despise such "teaching", and if you attempt it on a gang of them, they will give you the exact punishment you deserve. They will make your life a living hell. That is a one-paragraph summary of all that is wrong with state education in Britain today, and I'll bet also in a hell of a lot of other countries.
I know what you're thinking. How do you persuade children to learn something like reading and writing if they don't want to. The answer is right there in the question. You persuade them. (I call it "selling the culture".) You tell them why you really, really think they ought to learn to read and write, why you are so, so pleased you learned to read and write as early as you did, and then hope that they agree with you. And then you, or someone, teaches them. If they don't agree with you, increase your advertising budget. Spend more time on the persuading. (And before anyone says the opposite, advertising and compulsion are also absolutely different things.)
If you can't think of any good reason why kids should bother with reading and writing and are just taking it on trust from your social superiors, and "selling" reading and writing to your kids on a because-I-say-so basis, then there's your problem right there. You don't actually see the point of it yourself. So why be surprised if your kids don't either? That's the message you've sold them, very persuasively.
So anyway, my question to Joanne is: were you objecting to the compulsion? – in which case I'm with you. Or to the phonics? – in which case I think you are turning your back on some very good stuff, the best stuff on the teaching of literacy that I personally know about.
Category: Boys will be boys • Brian's brilliant teaching career • How to teach • Literacy
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There have been a big debates for years about the rights and wrongs of education for black people, especially black boys, and not just (e.g.) here (to name the nearest spot of the blogosphere to me thus exercised lately). Is it racist? Do teachers expect too little? In general: who's damn fault is it?
But if you are a black parent, what do you do? Not surprisingly, a lot of black parents are now moving to home schooling. Although the "home" bit is not quite the central point. The central point is, they're doing it themselves..) And because home schooling is a much bigger thing in the USA than it is here, yet, black home schooling is becoming very big there.
Venus and Serena Williams are perhaps the most famous among those who call home their alma mater. The tennis stars were educated at home after their father withdrew the pair from middle school to teach them himself.The Williams family has become a visible part of a phenomenon that can be seen across the nation – an increase in the number of black families who are choosing to homeschool.
Homeschooling has come a long way since it first came on the scene more than 30 years ago. In fact, homeschooling has become a viable education option for families across the country and has seen a 4,000 percent increase in 20 years.
The fastest growing demographic of homeschoolers is the number of families, where black children are five times more likely to be homeschooled than they were five years ago.
“There’s really a shift in the African-American community,” said Jennifer James, a homeschooling mother in Chapel Hill, N.C., who founded the National African American Homeschoolers Alliance in January. "Parents are taking hold of their child’s education. They’re saying 'I’ve got to do it because nobody else is going to do it.'"
Link added. Thanks to the Libertarian Alliance Forum for the news.
As I say, the real story here is surely black do-it-yourself education rather than merely black home education. Black-managed independent schools are surely part of the same trend, as is the increasingly vocal preference among US blacks for education vouchers, in defiance of Democratic Party orthodoxy. One way or another, the parents are taking back control of their children's education from the wider culture, which has been failing them both so badly, for so long.
Let's home that in a couple of decades time the question will be at least, and at last, moving towards: Who should get the credit for black education in the USA? - and that similar trends will make themselves felt more strongly in the UK.
Category: Free market reforms • Home education • Parents and children
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This piece by Arnold Kling, which basically says that the longer you spend in the real world the less of a socialist you get to be, while if you spend your whole time mired in the unreal world of education you are liable to remain a socialist all your life, reminded me of an earlier essay by Robert Nozick, which I believe deserves to be remembered for a very long time. I'm referring to his Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?
Kling's piece is about what changes. Nozick's is about what doesn't change.
Says Nozick:
The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement
But I found the next bit, under the heading "Central Planning in the Classroom", especially interesting.
There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.
However, for evidence that things can sometimes fail to conform to theory, however enticing, you need only look to this Aug 18th posting by Andrew Ian Dodge, and to the comments that are attached to it. Here the intellectual is a libertarian, and he hates the non-intellectuals – specifically the sports jocks – for being bullies. Here the vital factor is not central planning; it is force. The geek hates the schoolyard, because the schoolyard is the arena of unapologetic force. (In the classroom, the force is apologetic.) And the geek is a libertarian for the same reason. The market may be anarchic, but at least it never beats you up.
As far as sports building character in young adults, all I have to say is: bollocks. It turns young adults into obnoxious bullies who think they are better than everyone else. It also helps to fuel the "it's not cool to show you are smart" attitude that pervades much of secondary education.
I'm now lurching way away from my original point, which was about whether schooling encourages socialism. Nevertheless, this is an interesting comment, about the differences between the USA and the UK, and I include it here anyway:
The British have a much healthier system for all of this. You are much less likely to be messed about with by jocks at British universities or schools than you are in the US. Of course, in the UK, they value intellectual capacity far more than in the US. It is not "uncool" to be intelligent. Jocks are a major blight on the education system in the US, and something needs to be done about it.
I fear this may be somewhat romantic. Besides which, the fact that sport counts for less and less in Britain's schools these days doesn't mean that the people who would have been doing sport necessarily behave any less nastily towards the geek tendency.
But my original point is that although in general the observations of Kling and Nozick may be right, there will always be people who won't fit into the boxes. Andrew Ian Dodge was a geek, but is no socialist. I was a geek, and I'm no socialist either. But what Dodge and I both have in common is that we both indulge in intellectual complaint about that "real world". It isn't socialist complaint, but it is still complaint. And although I can't speak for him on that, although I personally believe in capitalism, I'm pretty damn bad at actually doing it.
(And to complicate things still further, unlike Dodge, I like love to watch sport, even though, like him, I'm no good at it.)
From here, I went to here, and then to here.
Very interesting. The UK only just misses out on a medal. But I think the interesting thing is what an incredibly close race it is. This suggests to me that something else is involved here besides government policy, which, if it mattered a lot, you would expect to cause things to vary much more according to mad political whims, or maybe differing national psychology or political development. (See for instance the top end of the murder rate page.)
Could it be that people stay at school as long as they can afford to, and as long as they want to, and that the government merely hovers around the outside of it all, fussing? Surely not.
And a great site in general.
Commenting on this, Charles Copeland links to this webpage (with no apparent connection to anything else I could find anywhere) about Media Studies, which offers an alternative view of the benefits of higher education.
For some reason the original posting saying the above is misbehaving, so I've done it again and will delete the first one, if I can.
The comments at the Samizdata posting are piling up.
Yes, the old posting is now gone. I wanted to add the bit about comments piling up, and couldn't get into it, but I seem to be able to revise this posting. I don't know what caused this, but it seems now to have stopped.
This, the top story (about anything) at the Telegraph site today, is interesting:
Children are starting school less well prepared than ever because parents are failing to raise their youngsters properly, according to the Government's Chief Inspector of Schools.In an interview with The Telegraph, David Bell, the head of Ofsted, said that too many children were receiving a "disrupted and dishevelled" upbringing. As a result the verbal and behavioural skills of the nation's five-year-olds were at an all-time low, causing severe difficulties for schools.
Mr Bell said that one of the key causes was the failure of parents to impose proper discipline at home, which led to poor behaviour in class.
Another serious concern was the tendency to sit children in front of the television, rather than talking and playing with them. This meant that many were unable to speak properly when they started school.
"It is difficult to get hard statistical evidence on what is happening across the country," said Mr Bell, "but if you talk to a lot of primary head teachers, as I do, they will say that youngsters appear less well prepared for school than they have ever been before."For many young people school is the most stable part of what can be quite disrupted and dishevelled lives. This should worry us because if children don't all start at broadly the same point, we should not be surprised if the gap widens as they go through the education system."
I have the feeling that the word "dishevelled" is going to get quoted a lot.
One of the things I'm learning about blogging is: if all you have to say about an article is that it is interesting, then leave it at that. Don't comment just for the sake of it, or you're liable to end up with a rather unwieldy posting consisting of something else stitched onto the original quote, which not many will want to plough through.
So: that (the quote above, before the irrelevant essay bit) is interesting.
