This is worth a look:
A Stepford Wives that worked as social satire today would be different from its predecessor: It would be at least as much about the project of perfecting children as that of perfecting wives. It would be about the collaboration between ambitious fathers and mothers who believe both in the meritocracy and in doing what it takes to rig it in the interest of their own offspring's Ivy League prospects. It would be about shameless string-pulling to get kids into the right nursery school. Status anxiety about three-year-olds. The subtle assessing of other people's children in relation to one's own.
And part of the art of "perfecting children" is not making it feel like that.
Home schooled children are, sometimes, a little like Stepford Children, in that when they are dealing with adults, they often behave a lot more like adults themselves. They are a lot more confident – assertive in a good way, rather than veering wildly between over- and under-assertion. Not necessarily such a bad thing, but food for thought.
Have any movies been made in which children behave in a much more adult way than most children do now? Gregory's little sister in Gregory's Girl spring to mind, as does the younger sister of the Eric Stoltz hero of Some Kind of Wonderful. And of course there's Lisa Simpson, which would suggest that the way to create a super-together child is not necessarily anything much to do with being a perfect father. But how about the boys? Will it really be possible to create Stepford Boys?
John Stuart Mill perhaps?
Thailand may not be a grain of sand exactly, but look at its education controversies, and you do see the entire educational world writ smaller.
From the Straits Times:
BANGKOK – At the heart of the rejection by King Bhumibol Adulyadej is a transition from a very conservative, typically Asian system of education to a globally competitive system.The Bill sent back by the King contained several errors described as technical, with most arising out of confused terminology.
With the career paths of some 500,000 government teachers at stake, those technicalities could have turned out to be critical, which is why the Bill was rejected.
The administration has admitted its error, and the Bill has been killed. Legislators and their committees will go back to the drawing board when Parliament reopens after its three-month recess, which began this week.
While there was unnecessary haste, too little consultation, and overconfidence on the part of the ruling party in pushing through the Bill, there was no sinister intent.
The Bill was supposed to decentralise the system and restructure the work force – teachers – according to skills, competence and seniority. But 500,000 teachers constitute a substantial body of people, and many among them were district education officials worried that the proposed structure in the Bill made their jobs redundant.
Quite naturally, they lobbied the King in a petition against the Bill. Whether this had a bearing on the Palace's decision is something the public may never know.
The rejection of the Bill thus has no bearing on political stability, other than the fact that it is a loss of face for the government which has been shown up in this instance to be, at the least, mildly incompetent and, at the worst, overconfident and therefore sloppy, given its superior position in Parliament.
But the controversy is a reflection on the critical nature of the change being sought.
As in many countries, in Thailand's private schools, quality education is available to those who pay for it.
In the kingdom's public schools, the traditional teacher-disciple relationship is still very entrenched, with the teachers' authority unquestioned even on academic issues. This lack of debate does not breed creative competitiveness.
Also, in today's globalised world, working knowledge of English is an asset.
With the school system largely in Thai, English skills are rudimentary among many who go through the government system.
As noted by the Asian Development Bank in its report this year, the Thai education system lags behind that of others in the region, especially in science and an area crucial for national competitiveness – creative problem-solving.
And in an indication of the nature of the stakes, a mere three weeks ago Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra replaced his education minister with Adisai Bodhiramik, a former commerce minister who is considered more capable of pushing reform.
Same old story in other words, with only the usual Asian tweaks, to the effect that children pay too much attention to their teachers in state schools rather than too little, and that state schools are in trouble because they don't teach enough English. Otherwise: private success public failure, not enough science, concern about global competitiveness, entrenched teacher and bureaucratic interests and consequent political grief, despite a dominant governmental position politically, as this politician turns out to be better than that one at "pushing reform" – it's all familiar stuff.
I tried to pick out the best paragraphs of this story to illustrate the point about how familiar it will all seem to people thousands of miles away from Thailand, but it was all so relevant to this theme that I ended up copying and pasting the entire thing.
Do they use the word "initiative" in Thailand, I wonder?
This is a good article, I think. Like a lot of the stuff I'm reading at the moment, I got to it via Arts & Letters Daily.
Here are two paragraphs from it which I particularly liked:
What do boys and young men want from their fathers? For the most part I think we want precisely what they cannot give us – a painless transfusion of wisdom, a key to life’s mysteries, the secret to happiness, assurance that one’s daily struggles and aggravations amount to something more than some stupid cosmic joke with no punch line. Oh, Dad, you have been here longer than I, you have been in the trenches, up and over the hill, quick, before you exit, fill me in: does it all add up, cohere, make any sense at all, what’s the true story, the real emes, tell me, please, Dad? By the time my father reached sixty, I knew he could not deliver any of this.
But for someone who "could not deliver any of this", this isn't too bad:
In my middle thirties I was offered a job teaching at a nearby university. In balancing the debits and credits of the offer, I suggested to my father that the job would allow me to spend more time with my two sons. "I don’t mean to butt in," he said, before proceeding to deliver the longest speech of his paternal career, "but that sounds to me like a load of crap. If you’re going to take a teaching job, take it because you want to teach, or because you can use the extra time for other work, not because of your kids. Con yourself into thinking you make decisions because of your children and you’ll end up one of those pathetic old guys whining about his children’s ingratitude. Your responsibilities to your sons include feeding them and seeing they have a decent place to live and helping them get the best schooling they're capable of and teaching them right from wrong and making it clear they can come to you if they're in trouble and setting them an example of how a man should live. That's how I looked upon my responsibility to you and your brother. But for a man, work comes first."
"Emes" is obviously some Jewish thing. What is it? I have the feeling that this second paragraph is a real slice of it, in some way or another. As far as I can judge from this (which I got to by typing "What does "emes" mean?" into Google), it means something along the lines of "the complete truth", rather than just a casual approximation. Hitting the nail hard on the head, rather than merely striking it a weak, glancing blow.
This is one of the most famous passages in the whole of My Early Life. Generations of expensively educated British schoolboys, me most definitely included, can remember precisely the feelings described:
When the last sound of my mother's departing wheels had died away, the Headmaster invited me to hand over any money I had in my possession. I produced my three half-crowns,; which were duly entered in a book, and I was told that, from time to time there would be a "shop" at the school with all sorts of things which one would like to have, and that I could choose what I liked up to the limit of the seven and sixpence. Then we quitted the Headmaster's parlour and the comfortable private side of the house/and entered the more bleak apartments reserved for the instruction and accommodation of the pupils. I was taken into a Form Room and told to sit at a desk. All the other boys were out of doors, and I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown covered book filled with words in different types of print."You have never done any Latin before, have you?" he said.
" No, sir."
"This is a Latin grammar." He opened it at a well-thumbed page. " You must learn this," he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. " I will come back in half an hour and see what you know."
Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension.
Mensa - a table
Mensa - O table
Mensam - a table
Mensae - of a table
Mensae - to or for a table
Mensa - by, with or from a tableWhat on earth did it mean? Where was the sense in it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I thereupon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorize the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.
In due course the Master returned.
"Have you learnt it?" he asked.
"I think I can say it, sir," I replied; and I gabbled it off.
He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.
"What does it mean, sir?"
"It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension."
"But," I repeated," what does it mean?"
"Mensa means a table," he answered.
"Then why does mensa also mean O table," I enquired, "and what does O table mean?"
"Mensa, O table, is the vocative case," he replied.
"But why O table?" I persisted in genuine curiosity.
"O table – you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table." And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, "You would use it in speaking to a table."
"But I never do," I blurted out in honest amazement.
"If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely," was his conclusive rejoinder.
Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.
You can see how this would become such a popular piece of writing. It appeals to two distinct constituencies. There are those who endured, but in the end accepted all this rigmarole. "But you know, looking back on it, I'm glad they made me do it ..." The Trad Tendency, in other words.
And then there are those endured but who, then or later, rebelled, and stayed rebelled, so to speak, and became supporters of the Progressive Tendency in education. Children, said the Progs, shouldn't be made to learn things they can't get the meaning of. And the fact that it is Winston Churchill, no less, now installed in national folk memory as the ultimate arch-Traditionalist, who is saying all this, makes it pack an enormous propaganda punch. Ivan Illich or John Holt saying such things doesn't count for a tenth as much.
There'll be more from Winston Churchill in a similar vein in a future posting.
There's a charming article in today's Telegraph about a school that decided it needed a wood next to it:
When the school was built in a residential area of the town in the 1970s, it had a tarmac playground and a games field, which is how they still build schools today. "All the children could do at playtime was racket around, which resulted in bumps and bruises and poor behaviour," says Ruth Lippitt, who has taught here for 25 years. "Some couldn't deal with open spaces without getting into trouble."Concerned about behaviour at playtimes, she contacted Brian Stoker, an education adviser for Cheshire County Council with a daisy-fresh approach to how children relate to space in playgrounds. She took his advice; parts of the grounds were imaginatively re-landscaped and a redundant patch of ground near the carpark was earmarked for a wood. Each of the 200 pupils and staff planted a 1ft whip, or young tree, as well as eight more established "standards" to give them an idea of how it would look in the future.
Read it all. It's fascinating.
But even before that bit, there was potentially grim news:
An Ofsted inspector described the woods at Lunts Heath Primary School in Widnes, Cheshire, as an "area for calm and reflection".
Ofsted likes it. So what's wrong with that?
What's wrong is that, instead of being inspired to take a look at what Ruth Lippitt has achieved in Cheshire, and learn from it if they can, and if they can fit it in around all the other things they're doing, teachers all over Britain will, I fear, in due course be "encouraged" to duplicate this experience. Perhaps partly because of this article, London will mull over what's been going on in this Cheshire school and decide to include it in its ever lengthening list of "best practices", and then try to impose it everywhere. Queue another initiative, and more forms to fill in, and in this particular matter, outbursts of titanic rage from teachers whose problem is that the kids in their charge are perfectly happy and well-behaved, but would benefit (in the teacher's judgement) from learning another language. But no. London ordains that the foreign language money that they've managed to scrape together by shaving bits off other budgets must instead be spent on bloody trees.
I'm not against trees. If you think that you've entirely missed my point. My point is that judgements about policy need to be made by those who are going to make them happen.
Anyone who has ever done anything in life, and that's most of us, knows that good things don't just happen, as the result of a one-off decision that they shall. They have to be backed enthusiastically, by people who are determined to make them happen and happen well. More precisely, they need one person who wants to make it work and is determined to make it work. The difference between doing something because you want to, see the point of it, and are determined to make it do what you want, and just going through the motions because some boring ass in authority over you has told you to do it, is all the difference.
This principle doesn't just apply to weird and wonderful things like planting a wood next to your school. It applies to everything. To understanding this distinction is to understand an awful lot that is wrong (but also a good lot that is right) about education in Britain today.
Winston Churchill wrote copiously all his life, and in 1930 My Early Life was published. Here's how Churchill's "education" got started:
It was at "The Little Lodge" I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as "the Governess" was announced. Her arrival was fixed for a certain day. In order to prepare for this day Mrs. Everest produced a book called Reading Without Tears. It certainly did not justify its title in my case. I was made aware that before the Governess arrived I must be able to read without tears. We toiled each day. My nurse pointed with a pen at the different letters. I thought it all very tiresome. Our preparations were by no means completed when the fateful hour struck and the Governess was due to arrive. I did what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods. I hid in the extensive shrubberies – forests they seemed – which surrounded "The Little Lodge." Hours passed before I was retrieved and handed over to "the Governess." We continued to toil every day, not only at letters but at words, and also at what was much worse, figures. Letters after all had only got to be known, and when they stood together in a certain way one recognised their formation and that it meant a certain sound or word which one uttered when pressed sufficiently. But the figures were tied into all sorts of tangles and did things to one another which it was extremely difficult to forecast with complete accuracy. You had to say what they did each time they were tied up together, and the Governess apparently attached enormous importance to the answer being exact. If it was not right it was wrong. It was not any use being "nearly right." In some cases these figures got into debt with one another: you had to borrow one or carry one, and afterwards you had to pay back the one you had borrowed. These complications cast a steadily gathering shadow over my daily life. They took one away from all the interesting things one wanted to do in the nursery or in the garden. They made increasing inroads upon one's leisure. One could hardly get time to do any of the things one wanted to do. They became a general worry and preoccupation. More especially was this true when we descended into a dismal bog called "sums." There appeared to be no limit to these. When one sum was done, there was always another. Just as soon as I managed to tackle a particular class of these afflictions, some other much more variegated type was thrust upon me.
That last stuff could, on the face of it, come straight out of John Holt's How Children Fail, especially the point about how the reward for doing a sum is … a harder sum.
But what Churchill is really doing here is siding ironically with the adult world, and against his juvenile self. That's how he felt, but he was wrong, he is now saying. He accurately describes how small children such as he was feel about being made to learn things, when they are at the same time eager to be learning other things instead. But he takes it for granted that such children nevertheless must be made to do their sums and their letters and their words. Churchill as a child wanted freedom, but Churchill the adult takes it for granted that Churchill child had to be over-ruled, at whatever cost in bewilderment or hurt feelings.
Churchill understood the urge for freedom. He did a lot to protect it, of course. But he was very firm about what had to be its limits.
To me, depressing.
I hope that Madsen Pirie won't mind me reproducing this entire posting:
Adam Smith famously thought that professors whose pay came from their students performed better. At Oxford, he noted, "the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching." (Could Oxford students tell us if this is still true?)When I was a professor at Hillsdale, part of my pay was determined by students. We were all assessed by our students, who could add up to ten percent onto our salary. There were widespread predictions that students would favour the teachers who gave easy grades, the ones who handed out an A if you just reproduced lectures or the book.
In fact it didn't happen. The students awarded the highest marks to the most rigorous and demanding professors, even though it was harder to get an A from them. Most students were paying for themselves, and it was value they wanted, not an easy ride. They could tell the difference a mile off, and didn't want to be fobbed off with second rate.
Maybe if such a system were more widespread, it would impel university lecturers to attend to the quality of their teaching, instead of affecting to disdain it in their pursuit of the higher goal of 'research.'
I think that's a clutch of observations that deserves to get around, and I hope this helps. Alex Singleton is also impressed.
This evening I am to give a little talk, arising directly out of having been doing this blog, on educational matters. More exactly, I am there to stir up discussion. It's with the members of the London School of Economics Hayek Society. It kicks off at 7 pm, in the George IV pub, which is near to the LSE. These discussions take place every Monday evening, and if you want to get in on them, email Nick Spurrell of the Hayek Society and ask him about that.
I will now use this blog posting to gather my thoughts for this evening. Here are the kinds of things I will dangle in front of these good people:
Free markets are great for other things, why not education?
The equality objection. People ought to get a fair break in life. If their families or genetic endowments vary, all the more reason for egalitarian education policies. Free markets won't give you those, quite the contrary. (That's the argument, not my argument.) But: free markets are, I think, surprisingly egalitarian, as conservatives (real ones, not members of the Conservative Party) have complained throughout the twentieth century. Which, because of mass market capitalism, has been dominated by the debased and lowest-common-denominator tastes of the lower classes, and which has seen the refinements of the upper classes overwhelmed by a tide of vulgarity. So a totally free market in education might actually have given the masses a pretty reasonable (if perhaps not very refined) start in life compared to what state education has given them. That's my opinion anyway.
The peacock feathers argument. In English: the fear that we are moving more and more towards a world in which you will need a super-advanced degree in order to become a Tesco Check-Out Person. I further surmise that this is a reason why lots of people fear a totally free market in education. It would unleash a world in which more and more people spent about two thirds of their lives still at school. Again, I think this fear is mistaken, and that a free market would bring people up against the costs of such absurdities. But it's something to think about and talk about, I hope.
The whole Sovietisation thing. A constant theme here, as the link above will demonstrate if you scroll down, and down, and down. Excessive centralisation, bogus statistics, everybody (including and especially the supreme political heads of education) helping each other to cheat. Think, Soviet steel production or agricultural production statistics. (And think: collapse of Soviet Union.)
And, in response to Sovietisation, the argument for freedom because education (like the "economy") is too complicated and too subtle and too unmeasurable to centralise. I like postings here which undermine the simplicities involved in assuming that educational success can be fully and accurately measured. (Queue argument: what exactly do we mean by "education"?) Ironically, the free marketeers are the ones who now like educational numbers and "objective" educational "research", and their statist opponents pour scorn on the numbers, and on the tests which crank out the numbers. My answer is, let educational practice be negotiated locally between parents, children and autonomous and entrepreneurial teachers. Ditto, with testing. By all means permit testing enterprises, and let people pay attention to them and buy their services is they make sense, but don't impose tests from the centre. Again: as in the free economy. If large scale educational organisations emerge in response to consumer demand and producer inclination, fine. But don't impose them. The economic calculation argument applied to education, in other words.
That ought to keep the pot boiling.
