Here's an interesting little educational aside on the financial and managerial strength of two of Britain's most distinguished educational establishments, Oxford and Cambridge Universities. It's from a Telegraph article of 1999 in which Giles Worsley looks back over the architecture of the previous decade. He refers to the way their long-term attitude enabled Oxbridge to build when others weren't.
Few professions felt the impact of the early Nineties recession more keenly than architecture. The Lawson boom of the late Eighties had seemed a moment of infinite promise as the property market soared and there was plenty of money for architecture. Bright young architects left the security of the big practices, only to see the market collapse and with it their prospects. Older firms that had expanded exponentially were ruthlessly cut back to size. Even leading architects began to wonder where the next commission would come from.There were beneficiaries, particularly Oxford and Cambridge Universities, whose perspective stretched beyond immediate building cycles and who were able to take advantage of falling building prices and architects' keenness to build. The wave of new building included John Outram's Judge Institute, Jeremy Dixon Edward Jones's Darwin Study Centre, Norman Foster's Law Library and Michael Hopkins's Emmanuel College Common Room in Cambridge; Richard McCormac's St John's College building and Demetri Porphyrios's new quadrangle for Magdalen College in Oxford. The results revealed the diversity and strength of British architecture when working within tight physical constraints but to a relatively generous budget.
Despite all the attacks on them by governments like the one we have now, Britain's two top universities have evidently retained quite a lot of their financial independence, or they wouldn't have been able to buck the trend like this.
Too bad there aren't more British educational establishments able to think in this way.
More from the ew York Times, this time on the subject of cram schools. It reads like the direct response, but four days earlier, to the New York Times article featured in the previous posting here. First few paragraphs:
For children of Asian descent growing up in and around New York City, cram schools are a part of life.Starting in the third grade and continuing through high school, hundreds of students drag themselves to these private tutoring classes, long a tradition in the Far East, day after day, after school, on weekends and over the summer.
The goal? The schools' signs, dotting storefronts in Flushing, Queens, and other communities with large populations of Asian immigrants, clearly state their ambitions: "Ivy Prep," "Harvard Academy," "Best Academy."
Now, growing numbers of non-Asian parents are enrolling their children in the schools, hoping to emulate the educational successes associated with Asian students.
The key thing here is that if one group of children are rescued by their parents by being switched to the private sector, other parents will follow. The usual theory is that the smart/lucky kids can improve the lot of the not dumb/unlucky ones only by sticking around in state schools and thereby raising the average level of education for all. If they leave, they deny the dumb/unlucky ones their education-enhancing presence.
It occurs to me this is a fallacy that I should have identified and flagged up here far sooner, but better late than never.
I'm talking about the Fixed Quantity of Education Fallacy.
This says that if rich and determined parents buy the best education they can for their smart/lucky kids, they will only be doing this by taking education away from the dumb/unlucky ones, in cases like this by denying the unlucky kids the example that the better kids set in school. If the lucky kids get taking elsewhere, the unlucky ones will sink into abject ignorance and rot there for ever.
In reality, slamming the dumb kids and the smart kids together only makes the smart ones unlucky as well. It dumbs things down for everyone, as the article featured in the previous posting illustrated.
But if the rules are changed from everyone being herded into the same schools and kept there regardless, to everyone going to whatever school they want, the dynamics change, and the total amount of education goes up, big time.
If the smart kids are rescued (i.e. if they get lucky), the parents of the dumb/unlucky kids, sensing that their kids are now being left behind will (a) want their kids to catch up, and will now (b) have the kind of places they need to choose between in order for their dumb kids to catch up.
So, instead of the situation described in the previous (i.e. later) article, where the world is divided into smart/unlucky kids and dumb/unlucky kids, it becomes divided into smart/lucky kids and dumb/lucky kids, with the distinct possibility that eventually all will, because all have now got lucky, all become smart.
All that is needed is for the state to get out of the way and just let it happen. At present the "smart/lucky" kids are working twelve hour educational days. If the state stopped compelling attendance at their rubbish schools, all this could really get into its stride.
The egalitarians should be told to choose between a world in which everyone is unequally unlucky, and another far better world in which everyone is unequally lucky.
This story also demonstrates the massive educational benefits that accrue to countries that allow immigration.
Immigrants contribute obvious things, like sweeping floors. But they bring less obvious benefits, in this case in the form of the certain knowledge that education can be done far better than it is here, because they have cousins back in the old country where – damn it – it is done far better. The trouble with the tenth generation locals of the rich and educationally decadent countries is that they don't know any better. If they're the only ones tracking it, an education system can slide from excellence to ghastliness unchecked. Immigrants do know better. They come from places with shit economies (that's why they came) but with better education. Letting them in means the rich countries get to keep their good economies and can dump their shit education.
As often with me, there have been oversimplifications in this posting. But useful ones, I think.
A depressing article in the New York Times about … well, it's impossible to describe it without completely taking sides and making major judgements. I'd say it is about the abject failure of the Prussian model of education if you don't have Prussians in charge of it.
"What goes on in these classrooms, that's the story of urban education," said a teacher from Brooklyn. "You've got kids playing dice in the back of the classroom. You've got kids listening to their Walkman, or writing rap rhymes. And rapping to girls. And also practicing gang signs. Now that's a classroom that's run by a teacher who doesn't care."There were frequent references to "the back of the classroom." When I asked why, one teacher said: "There's a certain protocol to the room. If they sit in the back, the kids have specifically opted out of dealing with the classroom. They feel as though they can do whatever they want back there."
"They just slam their desks to the back of the room," said another teacher. "There might be 15 or 20 kids back there, with a space between their desks and the ones in the front of the room. The teacher just teaches the ones in the front."
"Remember," said a teacher from Manhattan, "these are just children. Teenagers. There is no reason to ever let them get out of control like that. But I would say that many of the teachers I've met don't care about their students."
The usual horror story only a bit more so in other words. This is New York after all – and in New York they don't do things by halves. Basically the out of control kids at the back are making it impossible for anyone at the front, teacher or pupils, to get anything done.
One of two strategies might work. One, the aforementioned Prussian model, the problem there being an insufficiency of Prussians, and more pervasively, the general unwillingness of the system as a whole to be Prussia. Not a wholly bad thing, I think you might agree.
Two, a "consenting" Prussian system. Teach only those who want the sort of schooling of this sort, and chuck out the rest. Have rules, and have near the top of the list of rules: and if you don't like all these rules, leave. That might then evolve into something better than Prussia, because then surely, other schools might spring up which might cater to those who don't care for Prussianism.
But the implications of Two are too scary for most people to want to face. In effect that would mean making the abolition of compulsory schooling official. (I presume that it's already an unofficial reality.) And if kids can choose not to go to school, what else will they choose to do? I'd say, make it legal for them for work for money, and in general confer upon them the legal rights and legal duties of adulthood. But the rich world's not ready to face that.
So, Three, bugger on with the shambolic mess now prevailing, is presumably the policy that will go on happening.
There's a posting and prolonged comment-fest about home schooling going on at Crooked Timber. I'd like to have time to join in, but I alas don't.
The consensus seems to be that although in a perfect world home schooling wouldn't be allowed, the world being the messy place that it is now, it should for the time being be allowed. Very generous.
From the website of Wheeling Jesuit University, via the Libertarian Alliance Forum. First two paragraphs:
A Wheeling Jesuit University business professor is using the book Atlas Shrugged to help MBA and undergraduate business students better understand the philosophical concepts and the moral aspects of today's business world.Edward Younkins, professor of accountancy and business administration and author of the book Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundation of Free Enterprise, incorporates Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged, into his Conceptual Foundations of Business course to give students practical business examples. Younkins explains that students take turns leading discussions on all 30 chapters of Rand's 1,075-page novel. Of course, the professor takes part when necessary to make certain that key ideas are discussed.
But of course.
While rootling about in various classical music websites for my Culture Blog, I came across this interesting little educational nugget, about and then from the now highly successful classical singer Magdalena Kozena:
Though she is now based in Paris, she first learnt her art in Czechoslovakia; first at the Brno Conservatory and later at the Bratislava College Of Performing Arts. She commented on how that grounding has served her over the years."Actually, I'm from a very lucky generation because I did all my studies during the socialist time and the education, I have to say, was really very good. It was very, very strict and difficult. Everything I learned – and it was a lot – I could use abroad because I was sixteen at the time of the Velvet Revolution and could go abroad immediately."
Sometimes everything just works out right.
It's been a irregular but regular theme here that the Eastern Europeans could really hit the big time in the next few years as educators, once the European Union really opens up.
Yesterday's speculations here about higher education maybe being a male preoccupation were doubted by a commenter, and that same commenter would find further confirmation of his doubts in this story, from the Independent:
Women work harder than men at university and get better degrees as a result, according to a study carried out at Brunel University.The research, which tracked 200 students over four-years, found that women consistently outperformed men in further education even though they had started their courses with almost identical A-level results.
The study was launched after academics in Brunel's geography and earth science department became concerned that male students were under-performing.
Its findings could have far-reaching consequences as Brunel's vice-chancellor, Steven Schwartz, heads a government task force into university admissions, which is investigating how more disadvantaged students can be encouraged to go into higher education.
Apparently attitudes more commonly found in ghettos seem to be creeping into universities:
The study, based on 180 questionnaires and interviews with more than 70 students, concluded that males underachieved because they felt working hard was not "macho".
Here's how the story ends:
Professor Schwartz said the research, though inconclusive, raised interesting questions. "The government has a focus on widening participation to reach its target of 50 per cent of school leavers moving into higher education," he said. "However, it may be that the vast majority of graduates will be women, while men risk losing out in the qualifications stakes."This survey shows how vital it is that we engage all young people and teach them the value of higher education."
Clearly my remarks yesterday about differing attitudes of men and women to higher education were at best out of date, as that commenter said. But what if the trend described here reflects something almost the opposite of what I was referring to yesterday, namely that higher education, at any rate at a place like Brunel, is now ceasing to be a way to stand out from the crowd, and more a way of sticking with the crowd? Are the men, now that they feel unable to stick out at the top end of the class, saying to hell with it?
What are now the poshest of the posh "finishing schools"? Might even the poshest universities perhaps now be being replaced as the incubators of society's Crown Princes by such places as the top management consultancies? I'm guessing that men still predominate there, but am, today as yesterday, very ready to be corrected about such things.
I realise that I'm flailing about here, but these are not notions I am ready to abandon, merely because the first few darts I threw at them missed. The idea that education is an arena which displays the contrasts between the male and female psyches, strikes me as worthwhile. Why should twenty first century higher education not reveal these differences, every bit as much as the coming of age rituals of South Sea Islanders or African cattle-herders?
And since higher education in our societies has changed a lot in the last fifty years, most notably in the sheer numbers of people involved in it, but in lots of other ways too, many of them triggered by that numerical change, you would expect male and female concerns to express themselves differently in this radically changed setting.
To put the thing bluntly and gender stereotypically, women do as they are told, while men want to excel, but if they can't … then fuck it. (It was interesting that one of the things that "diverted" men from doing the academic work that they were "supposed" to be doing at Brunel university was sport.) What I'm saying is: university course work of the usual sort nowadays no longer appeals to the male lust for glory. And there may also be an inherently masculine desire to go off and male bond with the other males, and to avoid anything which stinks of "women's work", as I'm guessing university work now seriously does.
A hundred or two hundred years ago, higher education was something you either had bought for you, or you had to fight for. So to be non-rich and at a university at all was an inherently glorious thing. (That's what I think I was trying to say yesterday.) Now university is pretty close to being a universal right.
There's more trashing of the No Child Left Behind Act going on in the USA today, this time in the New York Times. I started having another go at it for here, but then, as so often with my specialist blogs, decided to give it the Samizdata treatment.
A week ago today, Friedrich Blowhard posted a piece about how women's fashion is maybe an exercise in sexual self-presentation. The point being, it's hard, and it's complicated. If you can excel at being fashionable, you are one formidable woman.
The tricky part with signaling is that it is easier, evolutionarily speaking, to cook up a fake signal of reproductive fitness than it is to actually deliver the goods. I think you’ll understand the pressure to “cheat” when you consider that reproductive fitness isn’t an absolute quality, but a relative one. Reproductive fitness is graded on a curve, and only a certain percentage of the population will get an “A” no matter how well everyone does on the final.So the natural tendency among individuals evaluating such signals is to look for ones that are hard to fake. In 1975 Amotz Zahavi realized that traits that actually inflicted a penalty or a handicap to the signaler fit this bill perfectly. He used this handicap theory to explain why peacocks grew such enormous tails, despite the fact that this reduced their odds of survival: the fact that the peacocks are still around and functioning despite their grotesque tails signals to peahens that these guys were extremely reproductively fit. Such a signal can’t be faked; if you’ve got such a tail then it will handicap your individual survival whether or not you’ve got the genetic resources to bear up under this burden, so it's insane to fake it.
And this is how fashion fits into that:
How a woman dresses, for it to work both as a successful signal and a handicap in Mr. Zahavi’s sense, has to go beyond the fairly utilitarian matter of successful self-presentation. That's too easy. As a result, the notion of fashion has evolved, which forces a woman to look good while simultaneously not violating a rapidly changing set of arbitrary rules. With fashion in the game, a woman not only sends out face and figure cues – which are fairly easy to fake – but she also signals her knowledge of the rules of fashion and her strategies for coping with them – which requires a set of inputs that are much harder to fake. With fashion layered into the mix, men can now tell something about a woman's alertness to social conventions and the world around her, about her problem-solving skills and about the financial resources she brings to the game.
I've often thought that the dowdy, school swat girls, with blue but rather laddered stockings, often under-rate the sheer formidableness of the girls who look great but don't make any great thing of being clever. Doing make-up that good, every day, has long seemed to me to suggest managerial skills and qualities of persistence that bode well for the careers of the ladies in question. And I long ago learned to distinguish between the desperate desire to say clever things all the time and actually being clever. (Time and again, in public and in private, the smartest answer is: no comment.) So I agree with Friedrich about fashion. And I think the world does also, given how it gives quite important jobs to ex-glamour-pusses while shunning many of the brainy girls. They don't just get to be posh wives. They get to be posh all sorts of things.
But that isn't the education point I want to make here. The point of Friedrich's piece is that he's trying to explain why fashion is the weird thing it is, and in particular how very distinct it is from mere female beauty. And my central point is that I think this same theory, of self-sacrificial display, applies also to education, which is a similarly weird and arbitrary process, and which constantly enrages us all by being so very different from what would seem sensible and economical. What I'm saying is, to repeat the title I've chosen for this posting: education as peacock feathers. I think this explains a hell of a lot.
It explains, for instance, why education goes on for so insanely long, and for longer and longer as more and more people can afford to do it for longer and longer. People who two hundred years ago would have been half-way through their working careers are now still engaging in economically ruinous – yet also economically rational if you look at the incentives facing the individuals concerned – competitive display behaviours, which are of no direct creative benefit to anyone or anything. What the hell is going on? Peacock feathers. That's what's going on. Is literary post-modernism arbitrary and absurd? Latin verse composition? Total immersion in obsolete computer languages? Archaeology? Keynesian economics? … Peacock feathers.
You are proving with your long history of education and exam-passing, BA-ing and PhD-ing, that you have what it takes to do a real job, of equal laboriousness and of equal meaninglessness. An instantaneous test of mere cleverness wouldn't do it. Mere mental facility is not the point.
Education as peacock feathers also suggests something else about education, especially of the higher sort. It is, if not an inherently masculine preoccupation, at the very least skewed towards the male temperament and masculine preoccupations. Not so long ago it was the exclusive preserve of men, many of them unmarried and childless. Now, it is a way for men to prove their manliness, and to get mates as well as jobs.
You think I'm kidding? Do you think all this is sheer male chauvinist piggery? Well put it this way. Not so long ago I saw a romantic comedy on the TV where the man had done all the usual self-presentational things to the woman, and all was going swimmingly. They liked the look of each other and were doing each other nice little favours. He had collected her dry cleaning. She was smiling at him above and beyond the call of social duty.
But the relationship only got seriously going when the woman's best friend at work had the man's CV faxed over to their office. (I don't know how they were able to do this, but somehow they were.) Only after the women had together scrutinised the man's CV and declared that also to be satisfactory did the relationship get seriously under way. Peacock feathers!
And I think education as peacock feathers may explain something else, which is the deeply held belief, certainly in Europe, which says that a total free market in education is a bad idea.
Free market ideologists like me rage away against nationalised education, and say: surely total educational freedom would make everything educational get done far, far better. But what if education being "done better" would simply mean longer, heavier, more elaborate, more ornate, more expensive, more ridiculous, more time-consuming … peacock feathers?
The point here being that education is felt to be one of those things where the interests of the individual peacock (so to speak) work against the interests of the peacock species as a whole. The individual wants to get ahead in the queue. But the species as a whole does not want all its individuals merely fighting each other inside one huge queue. It wants productive work to get done.
Other examples of individual freedom being regarded as collectively self-defeating are: suburbs, where everyone's attempt to live in the countryside destroys the countryside, and (the closely related matter of) individual car ownership, where everyone's ownership of a car destroys everyone's mobility by getting everyone stuck in traffic jams.
And how about also: medicine? If everyone bought all that they wanted of that, there'd be no end to the damn thing. Old people would consume all the wealth of the world on complicated machines to prolong their pointless old ages. Can't have that.
So, it's better for education to be quick and messy, and not too wealth-consuming and above all not too time-consuming a thing, otherwise it might get completely out of hand and overwhelm our entire society. Keep it nationalised, for all but the very rich, who can be allowed to waste their money on this foolishness without general economic melt-down. For the rest, education must be nasty, brutish and short, and it must remain so if social catastrophe is not to ensue.
Similarly, if the very rich want to waste their money on stately homes in the country, expensive cars and idiotic medical nonsense, that's okay. The countryside survives, and they don't buy enough Rolls Royces to clog up the roads. If they all impoverish themselves, fine, others can have a turn being the rich.
I think all that is wrong, but I surmise that this may be one of the many reasons why nationalised education is so infuriatingly popular.
This has been a long and rambling post. Apologies. Not long ago I wrote a piece, somewhere (here), about how the interestingness of an idea is inversely proportional to the fluency with which it is expressed, and I rather think this law may just have engulfed me. I like to think that I am threatened by it quite often.
The Libertarian Alliance Forum has a piece on it from the Daily Telegraph of October 11th (just over a week ago) which doesn't seem to be at their website in any form, and was presumably therefore only on paper. The spacing and spelling of the text certainly says scanner rather than copy and paste. Here is all of the text we got. Presumably this is all of it, but I can't say for sure:
Pupils using internet material as their ownExam boards have criticised teachers who let pupils present material from the internet as their own.
Examiners at two of the three boards in England say some teachers are providing their students with too much help or failing to spot copying.
Teachers mark GCSE coursework which is then "moderated" by boards which look at sample work from different grades.
They are required to sign that material submitted by pupils is their original work, but a report by Edexcel, one of the boards, found the rules were being breached.
Some teachers failed to sign authentication statements or submitted photocopied signatures. "In some cases, teachers signed [?scanning?] authentication statements for some candidates, when a cursory glance indicated collusion," said a report on the GNVQ in information and communication technology.
Thoughts.
First, this was why exams of the old-fashioned sort – with a kids imprisoned in a big exam hall for three hours with nothing but a desk, an exam paper, blank paper to write on, a pencil or pen, and a suspicious and embittered old-fashioned schoolteacher prowling around looking for rule-infractions – were invented in the first place. Not only can pupils not cheat. Neither can their teachers.
Second, teachers are now cheating, because that's the way more and more of the incentives are fixed. If your school income more and more depends (as it does) on how well your school scores in various "outcomes", then your school is extremely liable to fiddle these outcomes. The key fact is that London-based education bureaucrats are more and more "finding out" how well education is being done by saying to those doing the educating: "How well are you doing it?" Lie and you get your money. Tell the truth, and you don't get so much. This is the day-to-day reality of all those "initiatives". The School Inspectorate can't keep up.
Third, the cheating goes right to the top. There is a steady trickle of headmasters getting done for this kind of thing, and the ultimate cheat, claiming that the system is doing better than it really is, is the Secretary of Education himself, and above and beyond him, the Prime Minister.
After all, why have they switched to "continuous assessment"? More precisely, why might they now be reluctant to switch back to an assessment regime based more than now on old-fashioned exams? Because the news might, for the system as a whole, be unwelcome, is why.
This is why I have a category here called "Sovietisation". In the old USSR you just could not trust the numbers. And that's the way British education is headed.
However, fourth: the Internet now makes the administration of exams, however old-fashioned, harder. Any leaking of the contents of next week's exam by anyone anywhere becomes common knowledge to everyone everywhere. That makes the exam business a lot harder.
However, fifth: it goes deeper even than that. The internet make old-fashioned education itself a lot harder to do, because old-fashioned education is built around the fact of information scarcety. Old-fashioned education is, you might say, a solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Amen. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
