Here are two interesting articles from economist.com about university finance, a short one, and a longer one.
Key paragraphs, from the short one (with that link again to the longer one):
There are, broadly, two models for running universities. They can be autonomous institutions, mainly dependent on private income, such as fees, donations and investments, or they can be state-financed and (as a result) state-run. America's flourishing universities exemplify the former, Europe's the latter (see article). Britain's government wants to move towards the American model. The subject of next week's rebellion is a bill that would allow English universities (Scotland and Wales are different) to charge up to £3,000 ($5,460) in tuition fees, instead of the current flat-rate £1,125. Students will borrow the money through a state-run loan scheme and pay it back once they are earning enough.It is a very limited start, laced with sweeteners for students from poor backgrounds. The best universities worry that the maximum fee should be many times higher. But it reflects an important shift in thinking. First, that the new money universities need should come from graduates, rather than the general taxpayer. Second and most crucially, it abandons the egalitarian assumption that all universities are equally deserving.
The government is right to be trying to move towards the American model. The European model is a shambles. Pit they're going so slowly. That's the gist of it all.
I'm finally starting to be comfortable with what I'm supposed to think about all this. I still find it hard to stay awake but I do now know what my opinions are, and why I hold them.
My friend Jackie D has written a short story entitled DIERESIS. I think it's called DIERESIS anyway, although that could just be a subheading. It is about a drunk kindergarten teacher.
If I understand the situation correctly, the story couldn't be called "The Drunk Kindergarten Teacher", because this story is part of a collective blogosphere-based attempt to write lots of Drunk Kindergarden Teacher stories. No, I don't quite understand that either.
Dieresis apparently means this. This is presumably a reference to the name of the story's other central protagonist, who is called Zoe with two dots over the e.
You learn something new every day. Even if you knew this particular thing already, that remains true as a general principle. If you don't, you should.
Comment Number One at Jackie D's posting of this goes thus: "Hey that was kind of twisted! I liked it." So, you have been warned.
Unlike many "short" stories, this one actually is quite short. So if you regret reading it, you won't regret having spent very long reading it.
Moral (for me): teachers can sometimes be extremely nasty and peculiar.
Here's an interesting article, by ex-BBC man Steve McCormack, who switched to teaching for the usual wanting-to-make-a-difference reasons. Now he's giving up. For all the usual reasons again.
A frighteningly large (i.e. not insignificant) minority of children behave atrociously:
After school in the pub one Friday, my concern about the pupils' attitude was confirmed when a gaggle of teachers from abroad began to compare notes. One, an Australian with 10 years' experience, said that until she came to England, she'd never had a pupil refuse to do something outright; in this school, it had happened three times in a week. Colleagues from France and South Africa agreed. The widespread lack of respect for teachers and teaching that they were coming up against in Britain would be unthinkable in most schools back home.Everyone in public life in the UK needs to wake up to this fact. Something fundamental is going wrong. Not with all children, granted, but with a frighteningly large proportion. Year on year, it's getting worse. Pupil behaviour explains why so many teachers leave early, and I can't see any hope on the horizon of things changing.
The bureaucratic burdens are getting too heavy for normal humans to bear:
In every school, pupils have to meet targets – from the grades that they should hit by Year 9, say, to learning five new Spanish words a week. But the teacher who has to dream these targets up has, on average, more than 200 children to think about. All of their targets have to be written down, discussed with the student in question, and the pupil's performance monitored against them. The scale of the operation means that the quality of thought and implementation plummets. It's another factor chipping away at morale.
As pure story-telling, as opposed to public philosophising, you can't beat this next bit. McCormack has finally decided that he's had enough:
Then, of course, fate got out its emotional knife and gave it a good twist. Out of the blue, pupils and teachers paid me kind compliments and said they wished I were staying. On the last day of term, my wonderful Year 10 tutor group unexpectedly floored me by showering me with presents and touching comments.
But what I think is the key paragraph comes just before that one, and it goes like this:
This job is about imposing your authority for benevolent ends. A few teachers can do this naturally. Most have to work at it, and use tricks, techniques and a bit of acting to get their way. I was firmly in the second category, but found the process, day in day out, draining. So I decided to leave school at Christmas and return to journalism.
There, it seems to me, you have the collapse of state education in one paragraph. Our brightest and best simply don't believe in doing the centrally important thing that state education now requires, which is the imposition of their own authority, by which they actually mean power. McCormack is aware that for schools as we know them to work properly, orders must be given, and obeyed. Yet he refuses himself to do it any more.
He presumably believes that someone should do this, but he isn't willing to do this himself, given the circumstances in which he is expected to work.
You can write my concluding paragraph for yourselves.
David Carr comments interestingly at Samizdata on this story, which is about a trend towards offering financial education in schools. The best news is that they are selling it to schools as "extra-curricula", but no doubt if it gets anywhere the clamour will begin for it to become compulsory.
The subject of taxation is included, which naturally fills Carr with forebodings. Will it just be pro-tax propaganda? Maybe, but the effects might nevertheless, he says, be interesting:
… this could be welcome because even if it transpires that this is really all part of a lefty 'get-them-while-their-young' programme, the effect might be to start prodding young brain cells in directions that their teachers never intended them to go.
The Internet pulsates with complaints about propaganda in the classroom, but I hear rather less about the actual effects of such propaganda. After all, Younger Generations do constantly erupt in rebellions which make nonsense of what their teachers were supposedly stuffing into their heads.
Or do they? Do these "rebellions" actually just consist of Younger Generations taking the philosophical axioms they have been taught to their logical conclusions?
The Telegraph had a story last week, which I've only just read, referring to grumbles about Ofsted inspections. My favourite paragraph of the story is the final one:
A third more schools have been failed or put in the "serious weakness" category since September than over the same period last year. They include Grey Court in Richmond upon Thames, Surrey, one of the Government's Beacon Schools. The school was failed and put into special measures by an Ofsted team three months after its Beacon status had been renewed and Her Majesty's Inspectors had judged teaching there to be good enough to permit it to become a specialist computer and science college.
I am always confused about government education policy, but this time I really think I'm entitled to be. Do Her Majesty's Inspectors have nothing to do with Ofsted?
No wonder teachers don't want to be head teachers any more.
In a comment thread provoked by a posting about the French school head-scarf ban (of interest to readers here in its own right of course), the somewhat tangential but interesting matter of whether Christian religious fundamentalism deranges the teaching of biology in the USA was raised. llamas commented thus:
Both claims – that evolution may not be taught, and/or that Creationism is mandated to be taught on an equal footing with evolution – are specifically outlawed by US Supreme Court decision. Epperson v Arkansas, 1968, Freiler vs Tangipahoa Board of Education, 1997, and Epperson v Arkansas, 1987.Every time somebody tries one of these 'creation-science' stunts, it gets lots of media time, and, no doubt, self-satisfied tut-tutting from the more-enlightened French. Noone ever reports what happens the next day, when the lawyers call, and the proposed policy is ditched because it is so self-evidently against the law. This is a popular election-time stunt in some parts of the country, where a candidate seeks to curry favour with a tiny minority of fundamentalist Christians. For example, Kansas Board of Education, about 2 years ago. Everyone reported what the Board said it was going to do. Noone reported the injunctions that prevented them from doing it. And it never happened.
There's more in a similar vein, and that was the point of view which carried the argument.
Last night I was obliged, temporarily, to switch off the comments system here. This blog, and my other blog too, came under severe automated comment attack. There were several hundred comments in the space of a couple of hours. I was out late and only got home an hour into the process. All the comments have been cleared out, and a random number system has now been installed, like the one already in use for the comments at Samizdata. New comments are trickling in as per usual, so there doesn't seem to be any great problem with this.
My deepest thanks to Perry de Havilland of Samizdata, and especially to the Dissident Frogman, for their prompt and excellent assistance. First, the crisis was stemmed. Then the solution was put in place which ensures that this particular crisis can't happen again.
Another learning experience. Brian's Education continues.
Other than this, posting will almost certainly be non-existent for the rest of today.
Further to the Europe/America University thing, see below, there has been another highly pertinent and Brian's Education Blog Relevant comment at Samizdata from "Scott" (who just might, judging by the email he used, be this guy. Anyway, F. Scott Kieff or not F Scott not Kieff, Scott has this to say:
What's too bad, for Europe at least, is that it actually does a good job in the initial training of scientists and engineers. I have a friend whose engineer father (himself a Belgium emigré) who'll only hire Europeans because he finds them more diligent and better trained. I've also been told that less Americans go for the PhD, rather, they get the BS (bachelor of science degree) and then go for paying jobs right away. So, European students take up the slack.When another friend of mine was earning his mech e phd at a Berkely, there were several Euro students, especially German. I got an earful from them about the problems they faced in Germany. They were proudly patriotic (for Germany), but readily admitted that their future was here. Before the same friend gained tenure, there was concern about giving an American tenure instead of trying to lure in another Euro scientists. So, there is high demand.
I say the more the merrier, and merry they do seem to be working here.
Scott's comment was only a comment and evidently typed in hastily, so I've cleaned up some of the spelling and grammar, which I trust he doesn't mind. Not sure about "Berkely".
Otherwise, good point, n'est-ce pas? Or should that be: nicht wahr? (Sp? UPDATE thankyou Tim H) Europe must be doing something right, educationally speaking.
Although, maybe what they are doing right, educationally speaking, is not having such a vibrant economy, tempting those being educated out into it to earn immediate money, instead of pressing on with education. After all, Eastern Europe has long been crammed with highly intelligent, super-educated people. And they got so highly educated precisely because unless they did this, they'd not be able to earn any decent money at all. In America, anyone half decently educated is quids in – dollars in, I should say – by comparison.
Still, the point stands. If Europe wasn't cranking out any educated brains, there couldn't be any brain drain to America in the first place, could there?
A comment from Michael Jennings on this which I reproduce (and see also this posting here where similar points to Michael's are made) here, in full:
I did a (scientific) Ph.D. at Cambridge. I know lots of really bright Germans who have come to Britain to do PhDs (because German graduate education is a shambles and British isn't, at least for the moment), have got British PhDs, and have then gone to American universities for research careers, never to be seen again. It is partly the salaries, but it isn't the salaries as much as that America is where the good people to work with are, and British academics spend a huge portion of the time coping with the bureaucracies imposed upon them either directly or indirectly by the British government, at the same time as they have swallowed lots of appalling management speak in how they administer themselves. Allowing Oxford and Cambridge, whose colleges are traditionally endowment based organisations similar to US private universities, to essentially be nationalised is a great catastrophe. This is a process that has been going on for decades, but the urge of this labour government to control and manage them (by, for instance, reducing their independence to control who they admit) is just appalling.
On the other hand, the academics are generally fairly squishy leftists who have generally accepted and indeed encouraged government controls and voted for Tony Blair. They complain about the bureaucracy and the low pay without yet really putting it together in their heads what caused it.
And the great thing about the US university system is the diversity of the institutions. You have private universities, state universities, federal research institutions, the odd city university, Jesuit universities, and various other things. This constitutes something like competition. And if you are American and poor but bright, the cheapest option to you is probably to go to the best state university in your home state. This probably doesn't have the cachet or going to Harvard but the quality of the education will not be much worse (and if you are good enough, you can then go to Harvard as a grad student anyway). And if you are lucky enough to live in California or Michigan or somewhere else with a really good state university, it really isn't much worse than going to Harvard.
Michael Jennnings
