This is an interesting book, by the look of things, that link being to a review of it. Opening paragraphs of the review:
What impact has computer technology had on public education in the US? That's the question journalist Todd Oppenheimer sets out to answer in "The Flickering Mind."Mr. Oppenheimer's conclusion: Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless.
"At this early stage of the personal computer's history, the technology is far too complex and error prone to be smoothly integrated into most classrooms," Oppenheimer writes. "While the technology business is creatively frantic, financially strapped public schools cannot afford to keep up with the innovations."
I presume that much the same applies in Britain. Still, at least British schools aren't using "BBC" computers any more. Remember them? That was when British schools – or rather the gink who decided these things for them at the moment when he did – thought it made sense for British schools to have their own special and different computer standard from the regular standard, thereby destroying any chance that much of use would be learned, like: how to use the standard computers.
Although this books seems to be written as an attack on current computers and all the parasites who specialise in flogging them to the public sector, I read it (via this review of it) more as an attack on "public" schools and the way these schools are run. After all, computers are doing all sorts of wonderful things, for kids and for everyone else, outside of schools, and I remain utterly convinced that computers do now make a massive contribution to education, and that they will do so even more massively in the future – just not in "schools". They do it at home, in the workplace, etc.. So what's wrong with schools, that their best response to computers is to ignore them and use nothing but chalk and pencils, etc.? Because I am forced to agree that for the average school to ignore computers completely may well be its best response.
I suspect that one big reason why schools fail with their computers is that no one really owns these computers. They arrive, and are then engulfed in the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons is pretty tragic for desks, blackboards, curtains, etc. For computers it is very tragic indeed.
And I further suspect that many schools, instead of getting some computers when they really, definitely need them, to solve some particular, definite problem that they do definitely have, just get them with the vague idea that, you know, the kids will somehow learn how to use them, for … things. (The functional equivalent of that would be if The Government tells all its schools to Get Computers, regardless of the immediate consequences.)
That never works. You should never, ever buy anything computer related (for more than the pettiest of petty cash) which is not the exact answer to an already existing problem that you definitely do have, and which will rapidly solve that problem, and do this so rapidly that you will not regret the price drop that will hit you in three months' time, and which will make an ass of you if you haven't had three solid months of brilliant problem solving out of your new kit.
So, if your school is thinking of "getting some computers", ask in a loud voice (a) what the problem is, exactly, that these computers are definitely going to solve, and (b) why these particular computers are the answer, rather than some other far cheaper ones, or no computers at all. And while you are about it (and going back to that point about ownership), if the school is going to "get some computers", ask (c) exactly who – which pre-named individual who is hungry to perform this task – is going to make sure that all this problem solving actually happens, and that the damned stuff doesn't just rot in cupboards or sit about until someone with a better idea about what to do with it steals it, or until someone just plain wrecks it. In the absence of solid answers to all of this, forget it.
Every now and again, when I sit down to do a posting for Brian's Education Blog, I end up with a posting for Samizdata.
I've just finished How the Hitlerisation of British history teaching may be saving British Independence and stuck in up there. It's far too early to say, but I think it may be a rather good piece.
I've written about this Hitlerisation thing here, at some length, but hadn't grasped the (anti) EU dimension of it all until today. It's obvious, when you think about it.
Incoming email:
Hi Brian, I've been enjoying your blog and thought you might be interested in this article.My own comments here.
Jeremy Hiebert
Indeed. Me and quite a few readers of this, I believe. The links are both worth following. At the end of the second, we find Jeremy saying, of a computerised home schooling set-up of some kind that the regular teachers somewhere or other in America are getting angry about:
This new model may be bad for teachers, but what about kids? I didn't really understand a couple of weeks ago when he said that homeschooling was a bad idea because many parents are not qualified to teach. The idea that none should be allowed to because some can't do it well seems a bit absurd, and the public system is in the midst of trying to figure out what it means to get "qualified teachers" when funding keeps getting cut and districts face teacher shortages. We all know smart people who would make better teachers than many of the ones that the government says are qualified. And what if they had good curriculum to use with their kids, online collaboration tools and all kinds of extra-curricular social activities available - sports, clubs, friends, travel, etc - wouldn't that have the potential to be an excellent learning experience?
As they say in America: you'd think.
By the way, in case you'd not noticed, I regard all incoming emails from strangers to Brian's Education Blog as publishable unless it explicitly says otherwise.
Alice Bachini sums up (title: "Whew") a recent burst of educational theorising thus:
I just finished a series of rants on an autonomous-learning kind of theme, over on my blog.Education invites commenters to write about memorable learning incidents in their lives. Education addendum expresses some of the frustrations we unschoolers have to put up with when dealing with the ignorant and uninitiated. Avril Lavigne makes some points about growing good musical ideas. Then (ie above) there is some other stuff. And then there is a review of Avril Lavigne, who I think sums up a lot of what TCS parenting, life and learning are about, and why it matters.
And now I am having a bath.
Which the general opinion of her friends and associates is: she earned. Also at the other TCS blog or whatever it's called this week, Emma joins in the argument.
Julius Blumfeld comments on two recent and depressing news stories:
The first is a report on Conservative plans for education vouchers:
This week, the Conservative Party promised a voucher scheme for education whereby funding would follow a child. This, it said, would enable parents to spend the amount of money the government spends on each state school pupil at a school of their choice.
The party says this money could not be used towards a place at a private school, but could, for example go into a school being set up by parents or a charitable foundation.
I had to re-read that last sentence quite a few times to be sure my eyes weren't deceiving me. Yes, the Tories are proposing a vouchers scheme in which the vouchers cannot "be used towards a place at a private school". This does rather beg the question of what the point of such a scheme would be. At it happens, the exclusion of private schools is largely meaningless because most British private schools are charitable foundations, which apparently will be included in the scheme. Nevertheless, the Tories' apparent fear of mixing the words "education" and "private" in the same policy, suggests a political timidity on their part which, if they ever get power again, does not bode well for future educational reforms.
The other gruesome story is in the Independent, and is about a report from Ofsted, one of the various Quango's that controls education in Britain:
The Government policy allowing parents to choose their child's school is polarising the education system and trapping poor children in the worst schools, an official report has warned.Weak schools often served the poorest, most vulnerable and disaffected pupils, the joint report by Ofsted and the Audit Commission concluded. The Government and local authorities should not allow unpopular schools to "sink further" by expanding popular schools to allow more children into their first-choice institution.
Note, again, the last sentence: "The Government and local authorities should not allow unpopular schools to 'sink further' by expanding popular schools to allow more children into their first-choice institution."
In other words, parents are to be given choice about where to send their children, as long as they don't have the temerity to choose a popular school, because then the rubbish schools won't have enough children attending and might then be forced to close. Well at least we now know what the Government means by "choice" in education.
The din of distant battle. There's an interesting posting, and a most interesting discussion in the comments, about home schooling, menace of, etc., at Joanne Jacobs, with lots of links. CBS TV has been laying into home schooling. Once it gets more popular here, we'll have all the same arguments, sparked off by the same media scare attacks. They'll trawl the country for a murdered home-schooled kid, and there's your episode of Panorama. Then the battle won't be so distant after all. And it's already, as reported here, been hotting up in Scotland, because statists there are more confident and meddlesome than in England.
Joanne herself comments:
Not one state requires criminal background checks of parents before they're allowed to take their newborn home from the hospital. Not one state checks parents' qualifications to raise a child. Every day, defenseless babies are sent home with parents who are addicts, alcoholics, violent, crazy and/or just plain stupid.
And then adds in a later comment:
Actually, I was being sarcastic. The implication that parents should undergo a check if they want to educate their kids at home strikes me as looney. If the parents are rotten for whatever reason, the kids already are in big trouble. And wanting to homeschool tends to be a positive sign, not an indicator of bad parenting.
But as I always say, the Be Consistent! argument can be dangerous. They're liable to respond by saying: Good Point. We should indeed have exams for all parents, with all failures surrendering their kids into the care of the state. Here, the rule must be: tell them to do the right thing, as often as they can manage, and more often than they do now.
I wrote a piece commenting on this article by John Clare in today's Telegraph. But Samizdata has been short of a posting or two today, and there's been more than enough here by my far more casual standards, so instead of putting it here I put it there.
Samizdata pieces on education tend to get more comments than education pieces here, so if the subject interests you (education "cuts", education directives, etc.), then keep an eye on any comments on that piece.
Often when there are reports about a kid being expelled from school for a year for saying boo!! to a teacher, or some such non-mega crime, I hesitate to join the chorus of derision, because this could be and probably was merely the final straw in a vast hay-rick of indiscipline, and because in any case I favour the right of institutions to expel people irrationally on the same basis that I favour the right of people to leave an institution irrationally. It's called Freedom of Association, and I think that the principle of Freedom of Association should apply just as definitely to education and schooling and so on as it does to sports events or art exhibitions or the comments sections of bossy blogs such as this one reserves the right to be (in case you were wondering). If you don't want to be involved, you shouldn't have to be, and if the owners of the thing don't want you in or on their property, they should be able to expel you. If you think that makes them bastards, well then, why are you so keen to go on associating with them?
All of which is an unwieldy preamble to what really does look like a piece of official idiocy, which really should be jeered at by the entire interested blogosphere, unless compelling evidence later emerges to the contrary. Here's the story from Yahoo:
A teenager was disciplined for sharing medication used to treat asthma, but he said it saved his girlfriend's life, News2Houston reported Wednesday.
Andra Ferguson and her boyfriend, Brandon Kivi, both 15, use the same type of asthma medicine, Albuterol Inhalation Aerosol.
Ferguson said she forgot to bring her medication to their school, Caney Creek High School, on Sept. 24. When she had trouble breathing, she went to the nurse's office.Out of concern, Kivi let her use his inhaler.
"I was trying to save her life. I didn't want her to die on me right there because the nurse's office (doesn't) have breathing machines," Kivi said.
"It made a big difference. It did save my life. It was a Good Samaritan act," Ferguson said.But the school nurse said it was a violation of the district's no-tolerance drug policy, and reported Kivi to the campus police.
The next day, he was arrested and accused of delivering a dangerous drug. Kivi was also suspended from school for three days. He could face expulsion and sent to juvenile detention on juvenile drug charges.
My thanks to Dale Amon for alerting by email me to this seemingly quite mad story. He came across it in James Taranto last week. (While your at Taranto's, take a look at his next story also.) Even from across the Atlantic, this really does look like, in Dale's words, "one for the home schoolers". I'm sure I'm not the only one saying this.
The Philosophical Cowboy reproduces in full this letter to The Times, concerning former Balliol classicist Anthony Leggett who has just been awarded a Nobel Prize. They don't give you one of those just for doing Latin or Greek.
The key line from the letter is the Oxford dictum that: "the Greats man can turn his mind to anything". In Leggett's case this proved to be so, with stunning success.
Says the PhC:
I find this a wonderful parable about the benefits of a broad education, particularly of the type furnished by Oxford, and by subjects (such as Classics) that serve as mental training.
But was it Classics that made Leggett clever, or Leggett's cleverness that made him good, first at Classics, and then at science? Certainly the Classics doesn't seem to have done any permanent harm in his case, but in general, Classics is an unnecessary and insufficient educational basis for winning a Nobel Prize. Science, on the other hand, is necessary but insufficient.
You can tell I did Latin and Greek at school can't you? How else could I possibly have learned to think?
Warmest thanks to Tim Haas for telling me about this Scotsman.com article about Scottish teaching union hatred of home education. First few paragraphs:
PARENTS who take their children out of school have been accused of "kidding themselves" they can educate their children from the kitchen table.In a hard-hitting statement a teaching union leader claimed home educators are jeopardising their children’s future.
And, in a separate attack, the Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) has accused ministers of putting children at risk of abuse and poor teaching by agreeing to cut down checks on those who are not enrolled at school.
Revised draft guidelines from the Executive propose dropping a number of controls for children outside the education service.
The Executive is expected to announce definitive guidelines in the next few weeks.
The original proposals, which were sent out for consultation last year, caused protest among parents who choose to teach their own children. They said the new checks represented unwarranted interference.
Yesterday, Pat O’ Donnell, a Scottish official of the NASUWT teaching union, insisted that the Executive should adopt a strong line on home education.
He said: "Gone are the days when well-educated parents could do at home what teachers do at school. They’re kidding themselves they can educate their children from the kitchen table.
"This is a movement driven by romantic anti-establishment views of the world."
I had to go on until I got to that bit.
I can't tell whether this is good news or bad, the yowling of a defeated interest group watching the world slip from its grasp, or the howl of the beast as it strengthens its grip. The former I hope, the latter I fear. But it is certainly – Brian's Education Blog wise (and it is) – news.
The story continues:
Highlighting the potential for abuse to go undetected, the SPTC calls for a register of home-educated children. Estimates of numbers vary between 350 and 5,000. Edinburgh officially records only 18 children.Ronnie Smith, the general secretary of the EIS, Scotland’s main teaching union, said school allows children to interact with peers and teachers, which plays a major part in pupils’ social development.
But Alison Sauer, of the home schooling group Education Otherwise, rejected the criticism. She said: "If you are a professional teacher you don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to home education. We don’t do any teaching. Our philosophy is self-directed learning.
"They can say what they like until they are blue in the face but the evidence shows that home education is the most brilliant thing."
No need to go anywhere else and "read the whole thing", because you just did. That's all of it.
I reckon it's good news, and that the home edders are winning up there. They are certainly the ones getting the favourable press, if this piece is anything to go by.
I blog a lot here about the impact of politics on education. Here's James Taranto writing about the impact of education on politics, in the forrm of an analysis of how education correlated with voting Democrat or Republican in the Arnie Californian Recal election.
The Democratic "base," it seems, can be found at the extreme edges of the bell curve, consisting of a small number of uneducated voters and a large number of overeducated ones.
By "overeducated" I take it he means "educated a lot", rather than "educated too much". Or then again …
Many months ago, on November 6th of last year, in among a long, disorganised, multi-subject posting of the sort I have long ago learned to do as five separate postings, I asked the following, of President Bush's still then much trumpetted No Child Left Behind Act:
Question. What if a good teacher stops being a teacher at all, because of not having completed and not wanting to complete an "academic major"?
Later in the same posting (if you had really dug) you would have found this, to the effect that this same Act:
… is a disaster in the making, but we are witnessing the very beginning of it, the bright shining dawn. No child left behind! Six years from now, expect the news to be about all the children being left behind, and all the further behind because of what the government is now doing.
The point being that not only did the Act say that No Children are going to be Left Behind so there. It also said that all teachers had to be Really Good, so there. The teachers who were bad at passing complicated academic type exams were themselves going to have to shape up or move out.
So today I come across this story, and I feel vindicated:
FAIRLEA, W.Va. – President Bush's No Child Left Behind education program, acclaimed as a policy and political breakthrough by the Republicans in January 2002, is threatening to backfire on Bush and his party in the 2004 elections.The plan is aimed at improving the performance of students, teachers, and schools with yearly tests and serious penalties for failure. Although many Republicans and Democrats are confident the system will work in the long run, Bush is being criticized in swing states such as West Virginia for not adequately funding programs to help administrators and teachers meet the new and, critics say, unreasonable standards.
Bush hoped to enhance his image as a compassionate conservative by making the education program one of the first and highest priorities of his administration. But he could find the law complicating his reelection effort, political strategists from both parties say, as some states report that as many as half or more schools are failing to make the new grade and lack the money to turn things around promptly.
Phase one, in other words, has been completed. The Bright Shining Dawn bit is now over. X zillion dollars further on, in about, you know, another five years or so, it will be understood that all this Federal Lawmaking and Federal Money has actually made things worse.
I told you so, in other words, even if not so you'd notice.
I think I may be getting the hang of this education blogging thing.
A somewhat unusual scene is set out at the Gloucester nursery in Southwark, south London. Ten teenagers aged 15-17 are playing quietly and patiently with 40 or so toddlers who surround them. An atmosphere of relative calmness pervades the room. This is Teens and Toddlers, an innovative and successful teenage pregnancy prevention project based on providing the actual experiences of parenting.Terry Borondi, now 19, an assistant on the project, was on the pilot scheme in nearby Greenwich two years ago. It changed the direction of his life. "I wasn't that interested at first, but I thought I'd give it a try," he says. "My future plan is to assist, and hopefully become a social worker, which is funny as I used to hate children." At the start of the course, Borondi believed he would be ready to be a father at 18 or 19. But now, like almost all the students who have attended the courses, he says he would not even consider it until he was 25.
Schemes such as this are badly needed. Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in western Europe, which in turn is second only to the US. Latest official statistics for England and Wales show that the number of conceptions for girls aged 14-17 in the year 2000 were 40,944, about half of which ended with abortion.
Teens and Toddlers is the vision of Laura Huxley, widow of Aldous Huxley. In 1977, she founded its parent organisation, Children Our Ultimate Investment, in the US. The idea came to her because she wanted to teach teenagers a reverence for life and to show them how difficult it was to be with young children. Early childhood and adolescence are the most egocentric periods in life, so she decided to put them together.
I got to this by listening to BBC Radio 4's weekly education show The Learning Curve, which is presented by Libby Purves. They reported on this scheme in their programme last Tuesday, which was repeated this evening. And I googled my way to this piece. I love the Internet.
I only caught the second half of this half hour radio show. I must remember to listen to it regularly, now that I'm listening to the radio in general more regularly having just gone digital. It's on at 4.30pm on Tuesdays and then repeated on Sunday evening at 11pm.
