As I say, busy, but just a quick pointer to this NRO piece, already linked to by Jackie D. It's by Cathy Seipp, the mum of Cecile Dubois, and I think Cathy's final paragraph is exactly right.
I've become more and more convinced that, because of the internet, and because of all the other kit they have in their bedrooms, "freedom for children" is not so much an aspirational political slogan as an accomplished sociological fact. Which totally changes how teachers have to go about things, and how we ought to judge their effectiveness. Ever since I went for the lady on Samizdata, and again in more measured tones here, I've been wondering what it must be like having to be the teacher of Cecile Dubois.
Or, as Cathy puts it:
So even if she hadn't received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile's regular stops in the blogosphere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she's not and here's why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passé. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.
I and Jackie D, and Michael Jennings all get a mention, along with Samizdata of course.
Confession time. I depend on my computer, but I'm very bad at learning new stuff I can do with it. This is because my basic method of learning is to be told things, and I don't spend enough time working on my computer in the company of others.
This definitely has its advantages. You try listening to Bruckner symphonies in an office with half a dozen other people in it. Try turning up to work in your pyjamas. But from the learning point of view, working home alone has severe disadvantages.
I am reminded of these disadvantages when circumstances temporarily give me a taste of life without them, but only in the form of a small taste rather than a steady diet.
At my last last-Friday-of-the-month meeting at the end of January, one of my guests witnessed me mucking about in Photoshop with some photos I'd taken. I wasn't changing them, just showing them. And my guest noticed that I wasn't using the "thumbnails" option to find the pictures I was looking for. And I wasn't. I'd never noticed its existence. Like everything involving computers, it was easy once I knew how, but hard to find out about until then.
It doesn't matter whether you understand the details of this thumbnails thing, or of how idiotically obvious it is. All that matters is that you get the general principle, which is that with computers there are, at any one time, about four dozen obvious things which you might be doing more cleverly, or doing at all, if only you realised that you could. I sort of knew that there must be a way to browse more quickly, the way I've seen people doing it in Windows. The way I do it in Windows, for goodness sakes. But I had never got round to learning about it.
And then, following an absurdly ill-informed posting on Samizdata, I further learned that you can search google for images. Yes! That's right! I've only been using the internet for about half a decade, so how was I expected to realise this any sooner? It isn't as if I've been staring this procedure in the face for more than about ten per cent of my life. No wonder I didn't realise it any sooner.
I now celebrate my new found knowledge by sticking up a picture of the famous Headmaster of Rugby, Matthew Arnold which I found in seconds, armed with my new superpowers. And of course with the browsing thing, it'll be easier for me to find this picture again if I need it again.
In order to learn things, it helps to have sympathetic souls hovering in the background making helpful suggestions. A common word for such people is: "teachers". These teachers watch what you are doing, and they say things like: "Do you mind if I suggest something? Tell me to stop if I'm interrupting, but maybe this would help? Please permit me to demonstrate. There. Like that. Please forgive the interruption. Ignore that if it is of no use to you."
You can't find the answer if you don't ask the question, and even then you may not be able to answer it.
And the trouble with computers is that you have so many questions and if you live the life I do, you spend it saying "I wish I'd remembered to ask X that thing about Y when I last met him." So do I now ring him up? It's just a tiny bit too much bother, the way it wouldn't be if he was right here all the time. That way, I could ask him as and when the question reasserted itself in my mind. (And that assumes I was aware of the question.)
This is a posting for my education blog, because it is about education, and why education alone isn't all that it is sometimes cracked up to be, not least by techno-enthusiasts like me, when I'm in a different and happier mood. But, because it is about the value of being in company, and therefore of the value of companies, run by people in direct face-to-face contact with each other for quite a lot of the time, it is also a posting which I will now go and refer to on Transport Blog. For this is one of the basic reasons why people travel to work, instead of just doing it at home. If you do it at home, you don't learn so much.
Don't get me wrong. I've learned a lot doing blogging, a lot more than I was learning before I started blogging. (The difference has been me writing things down rather than just reading them and writing the occasional set piece piece.) But I haven't learned as much about basic computing stuff as I would have if others had been hovering and offering suggestions and answering casual questions.
Busy day today and a busy weekend, so it's probably now a case of see you Monday.
The invaluable Dave Barry (whom I missed severely when he took his Christmas break) points the world to a site where you can learn about virtual knee surgery.
By slicing the "knee" bit off that address I found my way here. I don't get how livingchildren.com gets to be so particularly fascinated by knee surgery, but there you go. Americans, eh? What's the betting money was involved?
I haven't run the knee surgery thing. The photos were enough for me.
I recently acquired a copy of A Devil's Chaplain, which is a collection of essays by the geneticist, and scientific polemicist and populariser, Richard Dawkins. I particularly liked the one called The Joy of Living Dangerously, which is about F. W. Sanderson, who was the Headmaster of Oundle at the beginning of the last century.
Two bits I especially liked:
Sanderson’s hatred of any locked door which might stand between a boy and some worthwhile enthusiasm symbolised his whole attitude to education. Another anecdote. A certain boy was so keen on a project he was working on that he used to steal out of the dormitory at 2 am to read in the (unlocked, of course) library. The Headmaster caught him there, and roared his terrible wrath for this breach of discipline (he had a famous temper and one of his maxims was "Never punish except in anger").
Dawkins now quotes from an old boy of the Sanderson vintage:
The thunderstorm passed. "And what are you reading, my boy, at this hour?" I told him of the work that had taken possession of me, work for which the day time was all too full. Yes, yes, he understood that. He looked over the notes I had been taking and they set his mind going. He sat down beside me to read them. They dealt with the development of metallurgical processes, and he began to talk to me of discovery and the values of discovery, the incessant reaching out of men towards knowledge and power, the significance of this desire to know and make and what we in the school were doing in that process. We talked, he talked for nearly an hour in that still nocturnal room. It was one of the greatest, most formative hours in my life ... "Go back to bed, my boy. We must find some time for you in the day for this."
And I also like this, about how a similar spirit prevailed at Oundle even after Sanderson had died:
His spirit lived on at Oundle. His immediate successor, Kenneth Fisher was chairing a staff meeting when there was a timid knock on the door and a small boy came in: "Please, sir, there are Black Terns down by the river." "This can wait," said Fisher decisively to the assembled committee. He rose from the Chair, seized his binoculars from the door and cycled off in the company of the small ornithologist, and – one can’t help imagining – with the benign, ruddy-faced ghost of Sanderson beaming in their wake. Now that's education – and to hell with your league table statistics, your fact-stuffed syllabuses and your childhood-destroying, endless roster of exams.
Which reminds me, I must do a posting here some time about Mr Gradgrind. Dawkins' whole essay is a loud quarrel with Gradgrind's shade.
I ought not to be encouraging this. But he should. It's his job.
I just think it's funny.
I'm guessing, but I should imagine that this will have a huge effect, because the hunger of Chinese people to get educated far outstrips the traditional means available for them to contrive that. (Commenters, you are welcome to tell me I'm wrong.)
BEIJING, Feb. 10 (Xinhuanet) -- China has selected 151 academic courses as high-quality ones and put them online through the official website of the Ministry of Education (MOE), with a view to giving excellent education resources free to the public, a high-ranking official said here Tuesday.Wu Qidi, vice-minister of education, said at a press conference that the 151 courses, selected out of nearly 500 courses, was the first step of a national project on improving higher education quality.
The MOE plans to promote 1,500 academic courses in five years and realize the sharing of education resources with the help of modern technologies.
She said the selected academic courses, all given by Chinese professors, were recommended by schools and local education administrations, and gradually approved online by specific jury committees organized by MOE.
According to Wu, China's national academic courses not only emphasize the subject itself, but also include construction of teaching material and teaching staff.
An MOE investigation showed that since 2001, the degree of Chinese students' satisfaction with teaching material and their teachers has increased by 22 percentage points.
Wow. Twenty two percentage points more satisfaction. Imagine that.
Seriously, do you get the feeling of hundreds of cats, solemnly and with due deliberation, being let out of hundreds of bags? I do. The Internet is, I believe, one of those revolutionary technologies which changes everything it touches, no matter how carefully it is supervised. This news report reminds me of things I've read about committees of Elizabethan bishops equivocating for months, and then finally allowing some book to be published.
I know it's a government initiative, but this has got to be a step in the right direction, for the British economy, and for education:
Thousands of children from the age of 14 are to be offered apprenticeships, allowing them to leave the classroom and learn a trade.Ministers are to announce a new "junior apprenticeship" scheme next month under which 14 to 16-year-olds can spend two days a week at work, one day at college and two days in school. They will learn on the job from skilled workers such as plumbers, joiners, electricians and IT operators.
A briefing note by the Department for Education and Skills says that thousands of 14 and 15-year-olds will be given the opportunity to go out to work as part of the scheme.
The scheme is seen as part of an attempt to plug the skills gap in the United Kingdom that has left industry short of skilled workers. Employers say that one in ten employees are "incompetent". Ministers believe the scheme will also help combat truancy.
For once I agree with those "Ministers". Anything which widens the available options for bored teenagers yearning to be free has to be a good thing.
Which doesn't mean the government won't find a way to balls it up. But despite that obvious prejudice, I'm still glad that our rulers are thinking along these lines. After all, the lives of the kids who give this a try are already totally nationalised, so it's hard to see how this could make things any worse. I know, I know, they'll find a way. But I still say: good luck and I hope it works.
Some teachers, naturally, are worried.
