Here's an interesting exchange of views, about parenting. Here's an email (which turned into an open letter) from Alice Bachini to James Lileks. (The email turned into an open letter because Alice couldn't work the Lileks email system. If you can help her with that, please go and do so.)
This is the particular Bleat that Alice is referring to.
When discipline is required, Daddy is enlisted. Why? I have the deep voice, and I have the will. I am careful to explain why she is being naughty; I always express my understanding of her position, but I am firm: this will not stand. Comply, or at the count of three you’re locked in your room.
Is it proper etiquette to write open letters to parents about how they raise their children? Well, as Alice says:
You will probably not be interested in this point I'm going to make, but I had to make it. Some people might consider it too personal and therefore rude, but as you write about this subject where people can read it, I hope you don't mind.
I have wondered for some time what Gnat will make in the years to come of the fact that her life has been a Public Issue from the day of her birth. I don't suppose she'll mind. Nevertheless, it must be a bit like being a member of the Royal Family, what with all these total strangers discussing your every little bit of alleged progress or alleged lack of it.
I may do a bit on White Rose some time soon about the notion that discussing individual children's lives must seem to some like a violation of privacy. Personally I just think it's life.
Lileks and Alice agree about the war on terror, which means that Alice's opposition to violence against or forceful restraint of children is not based on pacifism or anything like that.
For me there's no question that the best current article about the realities of education, self-advancement etc., is this one in the latest Spectator. I've not read all the other recent education articles doing the rounds, but if any of them are nearly as good as this one I'd be amazed. And I only got to this piece because Jonathan Pearce linked to another piece in the same issue about the BBC.
Rather than doing the lazy thing and just copying, pasting, commenting, and leaving it at that, let me try to show a bit of initiative.
What the piece says is that now that exam results have becomes so uniformly good, and hence meaningless, the new bit of the juvenile CV which can maybe make a real difference is now "work experience". But not just any old work experience. It has to be posh work experience, with some grand city business or publishing firm that future employers may actually have heard of. Merely working, at Sainsbury's won't get you ahead of the pack when that first real job interview comes along.
Time for just a little copying and pasting:
'In the past six months I’ve had a letter a week requesting work experience, and I usually try to interview about a third of them,' sighed Miss Dawnay. 'So I’ll call them up and ask them to come in on, say, Thursday at 11 a.m. And then they will drawl, 'Fine ... what’s your address?' I always want to scream, 'Do you have any idea how much it will cost me in lost time to read it out?'
Maybe that's what Miss Dawnay should have done. If she had, that would really have been work experience. It would have taken just as long, but she might have enjoyed it more, and the snot might actually have learned something. Well, probably better to break these things to them gently.
I was one of these under-experienced O- and A-level laden little annoyances once. And the one time when I got a realistic sense of exactly how much use I was in that office I infested as a teenager was when one of those work-at-sixteen evening-classes didn't-have-your-advantages blokes in a suit with a mortgage actually lost his temper and told me. No bloody use at all. I'm only putting up with you because my bloody boss, whom your bloody parents nobbled, told me to.
I don't really know what is the answer to all this, although I'm doing lots of good reading about such matters and may be able to tell you all in a year or two.
Meanwhile … you're never going to stop parents trying to wangle unfair advantages for their children, and why would you really want to?
If you keep teenagers away from Real Life, on the grounds that Real Life finds them too annoying, then the teenagers remain ignorant of it until they emerge from University, and the facts of Real Life hit them all in a rush. They have to learn sooner or later, and someone has to put up with them while they do.
My preferred answer is the whole radical TCS-type agenda, which lets children take charge of their own lives just as soon as they are inclined, choose their own work, school (if they want a school), and in general their lives, from the available alternatives. That way, they get their first non-parental bollocking for being too annoying and self-centred (if they have been) at about the age of five from some guy selling hot-dogs, and they learn continuously about Real Life (which really just means other people) by not ever being seriously separated from it (them). The teenagers I've know who have best combined having plenty of self-confidence with hardly being annoying and self-centred in a bad way at all, giving off a sense that your time and efforts might be as valuable to you as their time and efforts are valuable to them, are those who've been raised this way.
As it is, you either get teenagers who still have a bit of spirit, but no Real World knowledge, or teenagers with bags of Real World knowledge, but who only have it because that's all they have. They've had all the spirit kicked out of them by people only losing their tempers with them and telling them they're useless, and nothing else.
As for the fact that people now spend longer and longer accumulating CV stuff instead of actually doing real Real Life things, well, stay tuned about that also.
(If and when TCS-like ideas become the orthodoxy, will they then, in a bungled form, merely become a new arena of parental concern? "Live your own life! Be free! Do interesting things that employers will be impressed by! Don't just sit at home studying! Don't wait for us to tell you what to do!" Oh well. No doubt the TCS people have thought that syndrome through.)
Category: Examinations and qualifications • Parents and children • Relevance
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Physical events provoke virtual connections, there's no doubt about it. As a result of attending this physical event, I went here, and then found my way to this article about science teaching. Here, it seems to me, is the key idea of the piece:
This preference for the concrete reality of everyday life over theory and abstraction dominates educational practice. Yet science is based on a set of abstract ideas. It has to be, in order to deal with the counterintuitive behaviour of the natural world. You cannot explain electricity without introducing the idea of charge and charge carriers – but try explaining what charge is. Electric charge is an abstract model used to explain electricity. In order to understand electricity a pupil needs to know, not only that charge exists, but also that it is a model.Once a pupil makes that leap of imagination, a whole new world of ideas opens up. When we move from understanding everyday life to grappling with an abstract system of ideas, we can really appreciate the power of science. If we avoid dealing with the problem of moving pupils towards a more powerful way of thinking about the world, we avoid teaching them science. Many teachers try to use analogies that relate the flow of electricity to water in a pipe, or a model train on a track – but the more you try to make an abstract idea concrete, the more you stop children appreciating the difference. In the end, you have little choice but to demonstrate to them how powerful the ideas are.
Teaching should not only be incremental additions to the mental territory that the pupil is already familiar with. It should also be news of faraway places, of wonders and magical beasts and faraway lands, of the earth, of the stars, and of the mind. It should include parachute drops into enemy territory (the land of the unknown), not just safe little pushes launched from existing fronts. And among those faraway places should be those occupied by the theoretical sciences, theoretical because our mere senses give us no intuitive understanding of what scientists have nevertheless learned to be true.
Here's an article about how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping schools in the USA to get smaller:
National data on small schools shows that they tend to be quieter and safer, with fewer dropouts and higher graduation rates. This trend held true last year in poor areas of the Bronx, where ordinary high schools, some with enrollments of 3,000 or more, had lower success rates on state exams – and drastically higher dropout rates – than the New Visions schools, which have enrollments ranging from roughly 75 to 150 students.
In Britain smaller schools might be better, if only to stop this, also mentioned yesterday.
Alice Bachini has some educational commentary today, about the latest teacher recruitment adverts. She also points to this story as further proof that you shouldn't send your kids to school at all.
I've little time now, and may not have any more time for education blogging today. So you may have to make do with this link, which is to all the education stuff at the new Adam Smith Institute blog.
There are three pieces so far, about the private educational habits of US politicians, the idea of "a tax on education" (which is not about what you'd think – it's actually about the idea of the government fining Britain's universities for price collusion), and (the first posting of all) about ... education vouchers.
There's an excellent posting by Natalie Solent about the nuances of just how direct is the relationship between time spent at school, education, individual economic success, and collective economic success. And never let it be forgotten that economic success is supposed to be about people being happy, which is why this concluding paragraph is so especially good:
Joanne Jacobs posts a link to a study that describes another reason why increased staying-on rates do not always add to the sum of human happiness. Her story refers to the US, but does anyone doubt the same could be said here? One of the nicer things about being a grown up is that for most of us the chances of being pushed around and insulted on a daily basis go down drastically once you leave school. I noticed an improvement in my quality of life once I hit the Lower Sixth and one or two of the more disaffected pupils had left - and I went to a fairly orderly girls' grammar. The improvement was nothing to do with academic selection (I really missed some friends who left to work in shops or have babies) and everything to do with all those who remained being volunteers. There's a spectrum between a student who is fully committed to education and an utterly rebellious prisoner. Government targets to "improve" staying-on rates do not increase the number of prisoners (we are talking about 16+ year olds, after all, who could leave if they chose) but they do shift the spectrum in the prisoner direction. More young people are in school who would rather be elsewhere, and they tend to horse around.
Lower the school leaving age to zero, I say.
Madonna has written a children's book, called The English Roses. Yesterday's Times T2 Magazine had some quite complimentary reactions from various celebrity mums. (There is now a link for this, but links to timesonline are often a problem after a few days for non-UK people, so just take my word for this.) Their children liked the book very much, even though (because?) a lot of them have now never heard of Madonna.
From the sound of the various reactions, the story is a re-hash of the poor little rich girl story, only this time it's a poor little beautiful girl. Beauty is now wealth, I guess. And the moral is, don't be nasty to poor little beautiful girls.
Written from the heart, I think we can say. (Don't write mean reviews saying that some poor little beautiful girl is utter garbage in her latest movie, just because she is utter garbage …?)
But isn't that what good art does, whether "popular" or high. It takes real experience and rejigs it and universalises it. The idea that you can just slosh out "popular" art with one hand, emotionally speaking tied behind your back, is very, very wrong. You have to mean it.
This could obviously be a culture posting, but I have the feeling that all culture vultures who care already know about this Madonna book, while there may be educationalistical readers (all complaints about academic standards but no interest in the Zeitgeist) who missed this event completely. And a children's book that children like a lot is an educational as well as a cultural event.
The Sovietisation meme is getting around:
Sports centres don't matter. Teachers do. A school is made or unmade by its teachers, and good teachers value the spirit in which they can teach more than sumptuous facilities. Part of the point of being an independent-minded teacher is that you can follow your own genius, if you have any, instead of being treated, as seems the fate of many teachers in state schools, like a Soviet coal miner whose only goal is to fulfil the latest five-year plan.
That's from a telegraph piece by Andrew Gimson on the independent sector price fixing row. There's more to education, he says, than getting and spending lots of money. Earlier paragraph:
… great schools do not depend only upon money. Many were the creation of one outstanding head teacher, who either set up a new school or else revived an old foundation. These teachers did not succeed because they had pots of money, or because they could accommodate their pupils in buildings that are scarcely distinguishable from a five-star hotel and country club. They usually succeeded in straitened circumstances, in makeshift premises, because parents and pupils realised that they understood something about education. We need many more such men and women today.
James Tooley would agree with that.
Jnanoe Jobcas lnkis to tihs, but I want the link to the "elgnsih unviesitry sutdy", or at least to know more about its oingirs.
Something tells me that this might not work with "Micklethwait".
A posh cartel?
Independent schools today strongly denied that they had engaged in price-fixing to increase fees at the country's most prestigious institutions.
Stephen Pollard says it's just envious statists trying to hobble the private sector, and Natalie Solent, as a nod to the new Pollard website, picks out this quote:
You read that right: Sweden. The most egalitarian people on Earth understand what British opponents of school choice do not: choice benefits, above all, the poor. Swedish councils are obliged to give a voucher representing 75 per cent of the average cost per student in municipal schools to any parent who wants one.
I've long suspected that Sweden is a more capitalist place than it likes to let on. There's a lot more to that place than Volvo, SAAB and Social Services.
As for the price fixing accusation, I guess Pollard is right: whether the independents collude or not, the market is still in charge. There are alternatives to these independent schools. But if the independents are putting their prices up, what does that say about the quality of their state rivals?
The independents don't have an educational monopoly. The statist critics of the independents, on the other hand, do want a monopoly. For the state.
More bad press for GCSEs:
Pupils scoring the same marks in the GCSE maths exam have been awarded different grades under a new marking method, teachers have found.Sue Fishburn, headteacher of the independent Leeds Girls' High School, where the anomaly was discovered, said that it was "patently ridiculous".
Perhaps the examiners ought to take an exam in exam-setting.
I've just done what I hope was a big plug over at Samizdata for the new Stephen Pollard blog, and while digging around there, I realised that it is now as easy to read Stephen Pollard back catalogue, and link to selected items, as it used to be difficult.
For the purpose of this blog, then, you go here, and start at the top. Go down a bit and you find that on August 11th, Pollard had a education piece in the Evening Standard:
… Money may be going into the "education budget", but most of it is not – and rarely ever has been – going to schools themselves. It goes instead to Local Education Authorities, who then pass it on – in theory – to schools. And that is the nub of the problem.When you go to a supermarket, you go directly to the checkout. You don't wander outside, find a middle man, give him your money and wait while he buys on your behalf. But that is precisely what happens to the education budget. When LEAs get hold of the money they then, to use the supermarket analogy, say not only that they have discovered a far better product than the one you asked for, but that they need to take a proportion of it themselves to pay for the administration of this essential service.
There is only one sensible way of spending the money: abolishing the wasted bureaucracy and political point scoring of LEAs, and instead handing it over to the people who are in the best position to decide what they need and how they should allocate their money – schools themselves.
Forceful, opinionated, and better informed than most of the stuff you'll read here by me, but no agonisings about whether compulsoriness is, or is any longer, a good thing to unleash upon generation after generation of children. For Pollard, the only question is how to improve the unleashing of it. Nevertheless, well worth a trawl back.
Why am I not surprised?
GCSE results were "fixed" to mask the poorest performance by mathematics students in almost a decade, a senior examiner revealed last night.David Kent, a chairman of the Edexcel exam board for nine years, claimed that he was forced to lower the pass mark by about eight percentage points to ensure that thousands of students managed to pass the exam.
His allegations, reported in today's Sunday Times, will add considerable fuel to the long-running controversy about whether exam pass rates have been artificially manipulated. Those who maintain that easier exams and more generous marking have concealed falling standards are likely to seize on Mr Kent's statements.
Yes they are. I link to the Indy version of this because Times links don't last.
Email:
Brian,
Your kind of thing, I think – LINK.
Regards,The Philosophical Cowboy (nom de blog)
Yes it is. Many thanks.
The Cowboy's starting point is this Guardian story about bullying from last week. His summary:
Essentially, staying over at a friend, Emma's, the protagonist, Vicky, had been the subject of an attempted sexual assault by the friend's father. The police seemed convinced by her story, but the school did little to protect her from the consequences of her reporting the incident …
And she then got all hell broken loose all over her, by Emma's older sister and all her friends at the school they all shared. Eventually Vicky was rescued by her parents going private with her.
The Cowboy says that this is the kind of story that makes people say that all parents should have the chance to make a choice like that, not just the ones who can afford it. Amen.
In one of my favourite movies, Some Kind of Wonderful, there are some memorable scenes between the central protagonist, played by a young Eric Stolz, and his dad. The Stolz character wants to be an artist, and go on to some kind of art school. The dad's attitude, as he tells the (I think) school principal is: "I don't think that's going to happen."
Dad: "You have the chance to be the first member of our family who doesn't have to wash his hands when he gets home from work." But the son blues the savings he got from car mending, which his dad thinks he should spend on a "good" college doing a sensible course, on expensive ear-rings for his girl-friend. His big problem is not deciding on a college; it's deciding which girl is his girl-friend.
Meanwhile the younger daughter, all unnoticed by dad, is an obvious future academic star, and an obvious shoe-in to a good college.
Here's a Washington Post book review that talks of families split by the art-versus-good-education thing, only this time for the realest of real, and about families who are absolutely not ignoring the higher education potention of their daughters:
… Whitney is the top-rated public high school in California, arguably in the nation.Its students are formidable. Take Cecilia, who regards herself as "really pretty stupid." At Whitney this doesn't mean a C- grade point average. As a guidance counselor reminds the senior, "You're a commended National Merit Scholar. A California Governor's Scholar. An AP Scholar. Your SAT scores are a combined 1450. You took three AP tests and got a perfect five on each. Your GPA is 3.8. You volunteer at a nursing home, you're in a Model United Nations, you were part of the design team that won the NASA Space Set award last year for Whitney. You write fantasy and science fiction. And you are in advanced art this year. Where do you get this drive?"
Cecilia answers by insisting she's nothing special. "I'm really pretty average. I actually have to study for my grades, unlike some of my friends, who seem to do all this effortlessly. I have to pull all nighters." Cecilia admits that she's "okay" at art. In reality, the young woman draws "incredible anime and pointillist pictures."
You would think parents would be proud of such a child. Yes and no. In fact, Cecilia's mother and father want her to go to Harvard, Stanford or U.C. Berkeley. When she spoke to them about becoming an artist, they threw her portfolio into the street, then made her wait half an hour while cars ran over an entire year's work before they allowed her to retrieve the drawings and paintings. Similarly, when one of her classmates, Angela, asked for a sewing machine to work on an art project, her parents subjected the sensitive girl to ridicule, then reminded her that they hadn't sacrificed so that she could become a "seamstress."
There are several dozen "morals" to stories like that. One is that people are now competing not just with all the people in their town or all the people in their class, but with all the people in the world. This is an effect of our old friend/enemy "modern communications", which shove the brilliance of all of mankind on your bedroom desk every night while you are doing your homework.
As for Cecilia being "okay", I remember a sociology lecture at Essex U a thousand years ago, in which it was revealed that everyone thought they were middle class, from middle-ranking dukes (which was what all dukes thought they were) to middle-ranking dustmen (ditto).
You get the feeling that Cecilia thinks that "art" is a refuge from this world of endless struggle, which for many it is. But not if you try to do it for a living, Cecilia. On the other hand, Cecilia's parents could be quite wrong about how much money Cecilia might earn as an artist. But, they are right in that the key word there is "might". It's too chancy. They can't entrust their DNA to a mere artist. Get yourself a trade girl. Be a doctor or lawyer or accountant or, at worst, a "manager" of some kind. Hey ho.
I got the link to this by going to Crooked Timber, and then to .
