This Telegraph story is good news indeed. Here's how the subheading goes:
The state won't help parents who want to teach their children at home, so parents have pooled resources to help themselves.
The state regarding something as rather bad, but not bad enough to be actually illegal, is the ideal arrangement to ensure that this something flourishes. Government "help" is the kiss of death to any activity. It means that eyes are taken off the ball (in the form of doing it yourself with likeminded collaborators) and fixed instead on politics (in the form of trying to get hold of government money). Just think how much better school schooling would be if the government stopped trying to help with that also.
Home schooling is not easy, but it is expanding all the time, with more and more resources and advice, both legal and educational, being made available to help it along, and I mean really help it along. The article is full of information about that, and it even has a link to Education Otherwise. Although, this bit will not be universally liked in these parts:
"People get a false impression of the type of family that educates at home – they imagine they allow their children to loll around all day, doing nothing apart from the occasional piece of arts or crafts work. In fact, many families work to a rigid timetable, geared to academic success. Some, particularly in London, withdraw their children for extended periods to give a quick spurt to learning because they are progressing so slowly at school."
Personally, I still think that even this sort of home school is an improvement over children being just dumped unthinkingly at school school. This is my favourite bit:
But isn't it a huge risk to meddle with your child's education in this way?
Don't you just love that? Meddle. But I shouldn't mock. The Telegraph is doing its best. I don't know how much encouragement it has given to home schooling over the years, but this piece will definitely help.
Okay it's time I tried one of those link fests.
Here are the rules. No quoting, because then it would take too long. No education blogs – it has to be stuff about education on other blogs. And nothing I've already noticed and linked to from here, which means no Alice Bachini, ASI blog or Stephen Pollard, because I've linked to them several times from here recently.
So, in (reverse) chronological order, because that way I don't have to make it logical:
October 1st – Andrew Medworth is going back to college, and it's no mean college.
September 30th – Natalie Solent reflects on a short story published in 1937 about the mismanagement of Arkansas schools by Evil Capitalists.
September 30th – Colby Cosh reflects on what testing can and cannot do for the teaching of English writing.
September 29th – David Farrer writes about muddles in Scotland to do with scrapping school league tables.
September 29th – While I'm in the linking to other blogs mood, I've been neglecting to mention here that I did a Culture Blog piece based on the Txt-ing habits of The Goddaughter, who can write standard English but enjoys not doing so.
September 27 – Aaron Haspel says cut down on blog reading by ignoring anyone who writes too much about their own children. Lilexia, he calls it, naming and linking to the inventor of the concept (not him). Personally I now like the Gnat stuff, even though I'm childless. Perhaps that's because I know I can switch it off in mid-sentence if it ever gets tedious. He doesn't like it.
September 23rd – Andy Duncan predicts that if posh universities are told to discriminate against the posh, posh people will put their poshspring into scumbag schools for the final year, and get them into a posh university that way. Last Sunday's Sunday Times said that this is now happening.
September 2nd – Excellent Friedrich Blowhard piece called Genetics, Environment and IQ. IQ can be quite profoundly influenced by environment. But how? Very good discussion, and excellent links to key articles. Don't miss the comments. I missed the whole thing first time around.
August 6th – Jackie at au courant has educational things to say about TV, and also says that gays shouldn't be segregated but that the people who bully them should be.
August 1st – The nearest to any educational stuff I could find chez Alan Little (a recent commenter and graphic helper-out at my Culture Blog which got me looking at his) was a reference to Photoshop tutorials. (Warning, AL is another Lilexia sufferer.)
July 2nd – Patrick Crozier quotes A. N. Wilson on the failure of British state education, and on the success of its private sector and voluntary predecessors. 92 percent literacy? Now? No, that was 1870.
That'll have to do for the moment. Now I know why I don't do link fests more often.
I read about it in the paper version of last Sunday's Sunday Times, which I still had lying around:
A study of primary school children found that supplements of fish and plant oils could push them from the bottom of class to the top in just two terms.The study, which covered a dozen primary schools concludes that giving youngsters such "brain food" supplements causes dramatic improvements in reading age and numeracy.
Here's the link to the whole of that story, but Times links are liable to go dead in foreign parts, so I'm told. So then I googled "Fish" "Oils "Reading age" and I got to this, from something called Junior Magazine, last month:
It was a huge surprise to learn that our five-year-old son was not progressing well at school. Both his father and I had done well academically and assumed that our offspring would similarly breeze through their letters and numbers. However, a Year One test had indicated that Benedict's performance was "dipping" and he has been taken under the wings of the special needs teacher. We now have to take him through an eight-week extra tuition programme. But there may be a simpler, much easier solution. Fish.According to a new piece of research which is being proclaimed by its author as a "landmark study", thousands of children up and down the country are failing to do their best at school because they are deficient in essential fatty acids, a nutrient found in the flesh of oil-rich fish such as mackerel, salmon, kippers, herring, trout and sardines. Essential fatty acids are, well, essential for the brain's development and functioning.
This story is at the website of Equazen Neutrachemicals, so they make a feature of this quote from the story:
Parents want the best for their children, and Equazen Nutraceuticals, the company which makes the supplement used in this study, already reports that sales have taken a pleasing upturn.
I'll bet they have.
That wealth causes education (because wealthy people can afford it) rather than education causing wealth is a familiar notion to regular readers of this blog. Now here is some writing (from Alison Wolf's Does Education Matter?) about how job success might also cause job training. The ususal nothing being that job training causes job success (pp. 149-150 of my Penguin edition).
What little we know about training practices suggests another scenario as well. Training is more frequent for those higher up the hierarchy; but perhaps much of it follows from success at work, rather than causing it. It may not be about adding skills with a general economic pay-off but rather something that comes with certain jobs. For example, some research I have been doing recently shows that interviewing skills are a very common topic of in-company training for managers. Companies take these courses very seriously, partly because they want managers to make effective hiring decisions, but mostly because they are terrified of ending up before an employment tribunal. Attending such courses is part and parcel of promotion, and so is very likely to be associated with success and higher pay; but it is training that tags along with a successful career, rather than training that leads to one.If a significant amount of training follows from, rather than causes, people's career success, this would certainly explain some puzzling findings. Remember that a major reason to expect systematic under-spending on training is fear of poaching. Employers supposedly train less for fear that trained employees will be snapped up (for higher wages) by other companies which didn't incur the training costs. Yet in practice individuals who receive training are less likely to move than those who do not, and the pay-off to training appears, on the whole, to be higher when you stay with the employer who provided it.
Which means that just spraying job training all over the people who are not now getting it, or who are thought not now to be getting enough of it, is unlikely to make any difference other than to spread confusion, waste and cynicism.
Note also the point about how some (lots of?) training is about legal requirements rather than about the work itself. Regulation regulation regulation brings forth education education education, in self defence. Which might account for why so many educated people - by which I mean schooled people - are so fond of regulation.
Wolf's book is one of the best I've ever read for getting a broad sense of the various educational policies our government has pursued over the years and decades, and of what expensive and counter-productive flops they've mostly been.
Friedrich Blowhard links to, quotes from and comments on a New York Times story very much like the bits of this story that I linked to last week.
Says Friedrich of another of those exceptional educational leaders who do better than the rest by being nice plus old fashioned:
Corporal punishment, while permitted by the school’s by-laws, has apparently never been necessary, possibly because of Principal Whitfield’s previous line of work as a professional football player. This former New York public school teacher also takes the time to greet every student from pre-school to 8th grade with either a hug or a formal handshake.It kind of makes you wonder if America’s schools aren’t failing for lack of well-socialized children, but for lack of leaders who are willing to be – well, you know, adults.
Individual success stories like this are worth celebrating, but not if the implication is that nationalised education can be rescued simply by everyone just, you know, doing better. And if the government reads these stories, boils down what it reads into a set of national instructions (hire only professional sportsmen, all heads must greet, with hug or handshake, all pupils every morning, and must behave in an adult manner at all times …) then forget about it. It will just be another way to mess up the system.
Jonathan Wilde the difference between a real free market in education, and a business merely managing government schools on behalf of the government.
Conclusion:
Edison Schools has nothing whatsoever to do with the free market.
It's a point I often make, but I think "nothing whatsoever" is putting it a bit too strongly. Only a bit mind.
The basic point is sound, and one I make here regularly. But by running education as a business, even if governments are the only customers of it so far, Edison at least helps to establish the principle that regular education for regular people can indeed be a business. And by supplying an alternative to what I believe they call over there The Blob, Edison may at least help to break the power of that grim entity.
But I guess Jonathan's reply would be that Edison will soon become just another bit of The Blob.
I am now trying to get my head around the decades long saga of failure that is the attempt by the British Government to devise a workable "skills strategy", by reading Alison Wolf's outstanding book, Does Education Matter?
Meanwhile, Eamonn Butler gives his opinion of the latest effort along these lines, over at the Adam Smith Institute Weblog:
All garbage. It's just an attempt to correct, in the workplace, what our rotten state education system hasn't done at school. If instead of a failing state monopoly, we had diversity and competition in schools, then maybe educators would give kids what they really need to get on in life – and enthuse them in the process.And why do we need new government-run vocational qualifications when independent agencies already provide them? We should let employers decide what they need in the market, not force them into something they might regard as no good.
And joining up the agencies is a laugh. England has 9 Regional Development Agencies, 47 Learning and Skills Councils, government departments for skills, education, work, who knows what, plus a zillion other work and training quangos. You couldn't even get them all in the Albert Hall, never mind getting them to agree anything.
No, in this case, government is the problem, not the answer. …
Which sounds very like the opinion I'm eventually going to arrive at. But check out the comments – two so far, against and for what Butler says.
