There's a fascinating and depressing article about education in Russia by Rachel Polonsky, in the latest Spectator.
In 1991, in a hungry Moscow with empty shops and an ugly, uncertain political mood, Shichalin quietly advertised a beginners’ course for adults in Latin and Greek. On the first morning, to his astonishment, a queue of more than 130 people of diverse professions had formed outside his door. Out of this success evolved the idea for a school with a curriculum emphasising ancient languages and mathematics. The Classical Gymnasium was established in 1993. Since then, it has grown from ten to 160 pupils; it gains outstanding results in public examinations, and has alumni in all Moscow’s best higher education institutions, studying everything from physics to history and economics. The Shichalins, who also run a small academic publishing house, have even begun to publish their own textbooks. In a decade, they have created the most inspiring, effective and spirited teaching institution I have encountered in all my educationally pampered life.Many members of staff are university teachers who accept their low pay because they appreciate the atmosphere and ideals of the school, and its respect for their professional freedom. At the same time, the Shichalins profit from the nation’s enduring pedagogical strengths.
However, as we've already been told in the first paragraph:
In Britain, it is easy to forget what an important human freedom non-state education represents. In post-totalitarian Russia, where civil liberties are in first bud in a hostile climate, this recently regained freedom is menaced, not so much by state ideology as by the rampages of power and money unrestrained by an adequate legal system. My children’s school, a modestly resourced 'Classical Gymnasium' founded ten years ago, is threatened with closure at the end of this academic year. Its rented premises have been sold by the City of Moscow to a shadowy company with only a mobile phone number as its address, which plans to build a massage centre on the site of this unique institution.
So what can be done?
The living tradition embodied by the Shichalins represents the best of Russia, but everything they have created since perestroika is now threatened by official corruption and indifference. Faced with the demise of their school, they recently called a crisis meeting to inform parents of its grave position, and to solicit ideas for its salvation. We need a miracle, everyone agreed, or, failing that, an oligarch who will help us to buy a building. Again and again Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s name was raised. Various parents claimed, with differing degrees of plausibility, that they had channels of inside access to Russia’s richest billionaire.Before he was arrested by the FSB at gunpoint in the early hours of 25 October and incarcerated in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison, the oil tycoon had become known not only as a sponsor of the liberal opposition parties like Yavlinsky’s Yabloko, but also, through his Open Russia Foundation, as a Maecenas and a sponsor of independent education. In the past few years, Khodorkovsky has shrewdly spent money on enhancing his international reputation, including the US Library of Congress and Lord Snowdon among the beneficiaries of his charitable grants. At the same time he has, less visibly, given large sums of money to needy individuals and institutions whose activities have the potential to build a civil society for his native Russia. His arrest will hurt many besides the rich and the powerful.
There is scarce hope now of a handout from Khodorkovsky ...
Capitalism with a Stalinist face, they're calling it.
In the middle of all this gloom, there is this interesting titbit:
Traditional Russian mathematics teaching is considered unrivalled in the world. A Russian banker who, like many of his kind, is educating his children at one of London’s most prestigious public schools recently confided in me that, appalled by the low standard of maths teaching in Britain, he and some Russian friends have started a Saturday class for their children, with Russian teachers. 'I just don’t understand the English,' he said. 'Mathematics is everything.'
I've been emphasising here for some time that Eastern Europe is going to go into business educating Western Europe. I wonder if the Russians will go into business to teach maths to the English, in England. It doesn't seem to be getting any easier teaching anything to Russians in Russia, despite those enduring pedagogical strengths.
A (perhaps junk but thanks anyway) email from "Russ" went thuss:
Hi Brian,Thought you might be interested in this fathead (genus Psychrolutes)
trawled during the NORFANZ expedition:
www.amonline.net.au/fishes/about/fieldwork/norfanz/psychrol2.htmOr, for a for a full range of fish info:
www.amonline.net.au/fishes/fishfacts/index.htmThanks
Russ
These links plug into what strike me as being excellent educational resources. Many a child might learn a lot rootling around in these kinds of virtual locations.
You absorb a mass of good stuff by such wandering, such as spelling, the way different species are classified, the use of the letters of the alphabet in a set order (something often forgotten) to organise and present information and to make it easily accessible, and much much more.
Above all, if you like this kind of thing, it's fun. I quickly found my way to extraordinary images like this one.
And remember also to eat fish.
Here's Ted Wragg in today's Guardian, with his plans to make all schools everywhere equally marvellous:
There is a better way. Nothing less than a massive coordinated blitz on conditions across all relevant policy areas - housing, employment, health, education - will do.
"Blitz". That's another of those continental words (to put alongside "Czar") that people resort to when their answer to failing state control is to treble it.
This article is nothing short of hysterical, in a bad way. Wragg flails about in all directions, snarling at the rich, accusing everyone who disagrees with him of "blaming the poor". He is a Professor of Education at Exeter University and a quite big cheese in the nationalised education biz. He reads more like some gibbering lunatic orating to nobody at Speakers Corner.
Here is his conclusion, by which I merely mean concluding squawk:
Giving all, not just a few, the finest and best-equipped buildings would not come amiss either. Who knows? With these assets they might even attract a few more people from the superior caste, and be able to offer children the social mix they need to stand a chance in life.
Or to translate that into another idiom: if the oiks don't mix with people of quality and thus catch a bit of their educational sparkle, they're doomed. And he calls everyone else snobbish. Why doesn't he stick to his job and try to crank out better teachers, instead of blaming everyone else? Presumably because everything he "knows" about how to do that is wrong, and he secretly knows it, this time for real.
How on earth did those Victorian poor people ever manage to learn anything?
Melanie Phillips is not impressed either:
Pinning the blame for educational underachievement on poverty is tantamount to blaming the poor for their own failure. Yet instead, he accuses those who say 'poverty is no excuse' for blaming the poor. This shows he doesn't even understand the argument. 'Poverty is no excuse' is not blaming the poor at all. It blames instead people like Wragg who have promulgated ridiculous theories which have progressively undermined the very concepts of education and of teaching, and abandoned hundreds of thousands of children to ignorance and educational failure. After all, it's not the poor who make this excuse – it's people like Wragg.
I don't really agree that Wragg is blaming the poor, any more than anyone else is. He's blaming the rich. What he is doing is underestimating the poor, which is somewhat different.
But the rest of that quote is spot on. It's partly because, I surmise, Wragg is at least still vaguely sentient enough to know that this is what people think of him, and that they have a point, that he is now such a deranged individual – a Mad Processor of Education, you might say.
There's a really interesting article in the Autumn issue of City Journal about the education battles being fought by New York's Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Together with Klein, a tough New York lawyer and formerly head of the Clinton Justice Department’s antitrust division, Bloomberg created a revamped command-and-control center, placing the several hundred administrators who survived the 110 Livingston Street purge in the Tweed Courthouse, 200 feet from City Hall, where the mayor could keep an eye on them. Bloomberg instructed the troops to focus like a "laser beam" on a single goal—improving teaching and learning in the classroom. To further that goal, Chancellor Klein began a highly publicized search for the "best practices" in classroom teaching and curriculum, an initiative he named "Children First."
The trouble is, says Sol Stern, all this commanding and controlling is being used to command and control some bad things, especially in the matter of basic literacy teaching. On that front, says Stern, what is now going on in New York is exactly what has been going on in Britain.
Which is: that although phonics has done pretty well in public debate, the anti-phonics crowd still occupy so many of the bureaucratic offices that it is often they who are charged with the task of re-introducing phonics to the curriculum, of expunging their own past influence, that is to say. This they are understandably reluctant to do. Instead, they produce curriculum and teacher guidance documents with the word "phonics" on the front, but inside it's the same old look-and-say "whole word" rubbish.
They, in the case of New York, is a lady called Diana Lam.
Notwithstanding Lam’s lackluster record, Klein gave her control over most personnel and pedagogical decisions during the planning stages of Children First, while he himself focused on the structural reforms, and during early planning meetings with superintendents, says former district superintendent Betty Rosa, Klein chaired the sessions about organizational and administrative issues, while Lam presided over those focusing on the coming changes in curricula and teaching. It was clear that Lam took the progressive, constructivist approach to most pedagogical issues. She favored superintendents who were already using "whole language" reading curricula (the anti-phonics approach), as well as outside staff developers like Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins, a leading champion of the doctrine that all children are natural readers and writers, and that therefore it is criminal for them to be drilled in "boring" phonics lessons.When the Department of Education announced its choice of a citywide K-3 reading program called "Month by Month Phonics" in February 2003, it was clear that this was Diana Lam’s baby. It was also a perfect illustration of how truly you can’t tell a book by its cover. Though the word "phonics" appears in the title, the slim workbook contains none of the systematic instruction in how to break words into letter/sound correspondence required by the new federal standards. Instead, it offers some unconnected shreds of phonics activities in an otherwise whole-language reading program – which is why it met with enthusiastic support from New York’s phonics-hating progressive educators. The progressives were even happier that Lam had ditched a true scripted phonics program, "Success for All," that was in use (with promising results) in some of the city’s lowest-performing schools, and that would easily have qualified for federal reading funds.
By giving the appearance of using some traditional phonics instruction, Lam's chosen program disarms parents and elected officials, who increasingly have been pressuring the schools for more traditional and reliable methods of reading instruction. That seems to be the effect it had on Mayor Bloomberg, who said in his stirring Martin Luther King Day speech introducing the new citywide reforms that the K-3 reading curriculum would "include a daily focus on phonics." Since it is hard to imagine that our Republican mayor was looking for a confrontation with the Bush administration, it’s likely that Bloomberg was told by Lam or Klein, or both, that the program contained enough phonics to pass muster with the feds. Either that or no one at the Tweed Courthouse bothered to think that $240 million in federal reading funds was at stake.
Since then, Klein and Bloomberg have doubtless spent many hours, and perhaps some sleepless nights, thinking about the problem they face from Month by Month Phonics and Lam's failure to brief them properly. When the city announced its choice, alarm bells went off among the scientific consultants who had helped frame the new federal reading requirements. The experts realized that if the nation’s largest school district could pick a reading program so far from meeting the standard of "scientifically based research" – while abandoning Success for All, which did meet the standard – then the message about the new reading standards was not getting through.
The other huge problem is that all this is being imposed by a highly centralised and dictatorial new system, which makes it more difficult for dissenters – teachers or parents – to opt into different schools and do things better, and then to spread by their example the "best practice" which Mayor Bloomberg says he's so keen on, but has actually made it harder to spread.
... the authoritarian curriculum stands in contradiction to one of the city’s proudest education reforms. In a gala ceremony in September, Bill Gates announced that he was giving the city another $51 million to create 200 new small high schools and middle schools, whose fundamental premise will be that each will have a unique theme or educational approach, and each will have some degree of autonomy from the central system. Yet even as the mayor was taking Gates’s check, his education department was pressuring dozens of the city’s existing small schools (some of them already Gates-supported) to align their curricula and teaching methods with the new standardized citywide approach.
I already hate the word "initiative". I'm starting also to hate the phrase "best practice".
Here are the opening words at the website of Birkbeck School, North Somercotes, Lincolnshire. I do not doubt their sincerity.
Achievement By CaringIt is my pleasure to introduce you to The Birkbeck School.
We are a successful 11-16 mixed secondary school close to Grimsby and Louth.
We are a friendly, caring school, with dedicated, well qualified staff who share a vision of striving for the highest levels of success and achievement for all students.
We offer students of all abilities the chance to succeed. Our aim is to identify the unique needs of all children in order that we can help them attain the very best results from their time with us.
The school has three core values, Learning, Respect and Responsibility. These values underpin everything we do.
We believe very firmly in a partnership between the school, the children and their parents.
Our mission statement is simple. Achievement By Caring
Being successful at Birkbeck is as simple as ABC.
We think that The Birkbeck School is a great school, but don't just take our word for it. You are most welcome to see us in action. We will arrange for a tour of the school for any prospective parents.
Please call 01507 358 352
G P Loveridge (Headteacher)
Something tells me that the phone will now be off the hook.
A 14-year-old boy died today after being stabbed inside the Lincolnshire school he attended, police said.A 15-year-old student at Birkbeck school, in North Somercotes, near Louth, was arrested and taken to Skegness police station in connection with the death.
Frankly I was amazed that the website was still functioning. It soon may not be.
Do you get the feeling that Britain's teachers are being given lessons by London in the obvious?
Primary school pupils are to be taught how to speak and listen to each other.Young children, more used to watching television than talking, are to be encouraged to improve their communication skills.
From next week, every primary school in England will be sent guidance on how to get children to hold discussions and listen to one another.
The curriculum watchdog, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), says improving oral skills has a "key role" in raising standards.
Supporting the "Speaking, Listening, Learning" initiative will be a pack of teaching materials, including a training video for teachers.
"Initiative". A word that strikes fear into every teacher's heart.
Seriously, although I can, just about, imagine some teachers being helped by all this palaver, I can also imagine not a few of them getting very, very angry. For some it could be the last straw.
Encouraging the children to talk to each other, to improve their communication skills, which have been damaged by them watching too much TV. Why ever didn't we think of that?
Interesting article in today's Telegraph about something I keep meaning to blog about here but have never got around to, which is the presentation of the world of education in the movies. In this piece, Simon Brooke contrasts the portrayal of college life in American and in British movies. American college movies abound. British movies set in universities do not.
The cultural appeal of the US worldwide is not the only reason for the success of American college films, says Alby James, the head of screenwriting at Leeds Metropolitan University's film school. "When you're making a film, you must always think about the audience," he says, "and in Britain relatively few people go to college."In the US, though, many more people do and there is a much greater social mix, so it gives films about students and college a wider appeal."
Richard Teague, one of Alby James's students, was originally planning to set his thriller, The Gospel According to Me, at a university before he realised that a film with this setting would have a limited appeal. "Not many British films manage to recreate student life successfully, so I moved most of the action outside," he says. "Syd Field, the screenwriting guru, warns against only writing about what you know." Teague, 28, points out that including a college strand to the story line, rather than basing the whole story there, can work in television series such as Hollyoaks.
Perhaps the only British film that did try to tackle head on the manic energy and seedy detail of college life was Inbetweeners, released almost unnoticed by critics and audiences alike in 2000.
Unnoticed by me too.
But I wonder. I suspect that the reason why many British movies fail at the box office, and many more attempted British movies don't ever get made, is not that they are about the wrong kind of people, but that the people have the wrong attitude, and that it is this attitude that people can't or don't want to identify with. It's not just a matter of "recreating student life successfully", but of having characters who themselves try to make a success of student life. But if the message is going to be: university is a hell of boredom and mediocrity and there's nothing we can do about it, then that might explain British people not wanting to watch.
After all, American action movies contain all kinds of characters with totally different lives to those lived in Britain, but they're popular enough in Britain. Most people aren't either cops or criminals, yet movies have lots of both.
Simon Brooke mentions Educating Rita as the exception that proves his rule, in that she isn't really proper university material, but an "ordinary" outsider to university life. But Rita also proves my rule. Rita was trying to get ahead and make something of herself. She wasn't living a drab life. She was trying – successfully as it turned out – to escape a drab life. (Interestingly, she finds lots of students to be, after impressive first impressions, somewhat less than truly impressive.) If British movies set in a universities were about ordinary people, but people who were trying to be less ordinary, then I reckon they might do fine at the box office.
Brooke also mentions Chariots of Fire, which features the Jewish and upwardly mobile Harold Abrahams, who is scorned by the disdainful rulers of his swank Oxbridge college, but who battles on anyway to his Olympic triumph, to the delight of his more generous and open-hearted contemporaries.
None of this need do violence to the truth of university life. I mean, isn't making a success of yourself what going to university is supposed to be about?
