There's a useful article in the Telegraph today about Montessori schools, the problem being that there is no central, franchised control of such schools, and anyone can claim to have started one.
I wrote about Montessori, with some links, here.
From Instapundit to something somewhere, to something else at that same somewhere … it's a common path. So I've just now gone from this to this (on account of having developed an interest in Intellectual Property issues – never mind why), and the I scrolled up to this.
It's is about SAT tests. I sense, on the basis of little evidence that I can point or link to, but just a general feeling, that in Britain, SAT tests are becoming more important.
Partly it's because SATs are such a big deal in America, and news from America now gets here faster and more voluminously than ever. Partly, it's because of the increasing muddle that is the British exam system. And partly, as Britain becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, tests which hack their way past all that stuff and dig out inborn intelligence become more significant. And no doubt several other reasons I can't think of now.
Basically what she's saying is: SATs aren't perfect, but they work pretty well, despite energetic efforts to prove otherwise.
I missed this nearly two weeks ago. But Alex Singleton of the ASI Blog didn't.
Here is an article bemoaning how little teachers are paid in the USA, compared to orthodontists.
And here are the gratuitous pictures used in the article to help explain what else teachers do to make ends meet.
Answer (reprise): a free market in education.
Actually, that would probably result in quite a few fabulously well paid teachers, a lot of adequately paid teachers, and even more very, very badly paid teachers, desperate to get plum jobs but mostly never getting them. Like acting in other words.
The reason that teachers are "underpaid" and orthodontists better paid is that poking about in people's brains is a lot more appealing than poking about in their mouths.
Also, most of teaching is basically child-minding rather than actual teaching, and any old twat can learn to do that, whereas not any old twat can orthodont. Orthodonting even adequately is hard. If done incompetently, huge damage would routinely result after only a few hours of idiotic orthodonting. How often do idiot teachers do the kind of serious and irreparable damage to a pupil that an idiot orthodontist would do almost every time if he was an idiot? Therefore people are rationally willing to pay extra for properly qualified orthodonting.
Plus, nobody can agree what good teaching is, whereas there is widespread agreement about what good orthodonting is. Therefore, people are rationally willing to pay a lot for an actual agreed product, but they skimp on that which cannot be rationally decided on. Instead they (rationally) pick with a cheap pin. The more of a free market in teaching there is, the less this is true, but it would still remain somewhat true, I think, no matter how free the teaching market.
There is more widespread agreement about what a good school is (as opposed to "good teaching"), so people pay fortunes to buy, in fees or in mortgage payments to be in the right area. But this money doesn't find its way through to the mere teachers, on the whole, for the reasons stated above.
Nevertheless, a few free market teachers do already get paid a lot. I have already written here about Tony Buzan and Michel Thomas. They both get paid a lot. As do British TV's star history (two links here) teachers.
Cecile Dubois' classmates, and her English teacher, have found out about her blog:
There has been an incident in one of my classes today. I have shot myself in the foot, but I will get back up and still carry the torch of writing. I forgot to log out of my Microsoft account at school, and my weblog somehow was on the screen. And people noticed my blog and started reading everything. They googled me, I suppose, and read 'My Conservative Outburst'. A 'source' (I'm thinking 'Harriet the Spy' now) has called me and informed me of the chaos in her classroom. Some students whom I mentioned in Feburary are pissed off, possess a short temper, and are plotting amusing pranks to pull on me. The bright side is this produces weblog material, but the megative side is that I'm transforming from Cecile Dubois, sweet innocent nice girl into Cecile Dubois, professional back-stabbing bitch. I guess you need both qualities to live in the real world. The thing is some kid who I most likely showed my weblog to, ratted it out to the English teacher, who now is reading every single entry.My source suggested I not post for a while, but as a loyal blogger, I will post and bite the possible emotion 'humiliation' in the head this time. My source told me that it is hard for her to defend me now. As a journaist wannabe fellow human being, I shall not mention her name. The difference between us is that she cares what other people think about her, or me.
'Don't you want to have everyone like you?' she asked. 'You shouldn't make enemies!'
I smiled and thought of the good ol' days in grade school when I had no friends. Everyone would pinch me, chase me, shouting 'Spider, Spider, Worm, Worm'. Ah, I miss those days. I didn't purposefully make enemies, they just aggravated me so, I put them on my frown list. Now, I have a decent number of good friends, who don't associate themselves in any way with any of my English classmates. I'm not saying that my classmates in English are bad people--they're differennt from those I'd regularly hang out with. Its a good thing to take different classes and work with different kinds of people--it not only builds your patience, but prepares you for life. So, I take the bull by the horns and begin to actually enjoy, somewhat their company--which means talking in class. I do all my assignments which I enjoy, and chat with them casually.
My spellchecker puts red squiggly lines under: weblog, blog, googled, Feburary, weblog, megative, Dubois, Dubois, weblog, blogger, journaist, and differennt.
But I absolutely do not want to be megative about Cecile. This is one of the funniest postings of hers I've yet read, especially the bit at the end about Michael Moore. Placing a bet on Cecile Dubois (I mis-spelt Dubois as "du Bois" in that posting – apologies all round – spellcheckers eh?) when they had only just been issued and she'd just detonated her first big blog story (the Conservative Outburst thing), was one of the smartest things I've done lately, because from then on my name has been up in lights at her blog saying she is a potential genius. Now she is starting to shed the potential bit, and I too am starting to look like a genius, for spotting her so early and so quotably. I feel like a theatre critic when he sees his first "Brilliant – will run and run" bit stuck up outside an actual theatre, and what is more outside a show that actually is brilliant and actually is running and running.
More seriously, how many more pupils will follow Cecile's example and start their own blogs? And then get read by all their classmates and teachers, along with the rest of the universe? We're talking major shift in the Correlation of Forces between teachers in old-fashioned command-and-control regimes and pupils. And between pupils who really know how to write and the rest of them. (Before you know it, literacy might end up being cool. There's a thought.)
So here's another bet: within the next six months, a command-and-control school will forbid pupils to blog as a condition of continuing attendance. Each way bet: they won't make the ban stick, because the Blogosphere will do its thing, just like it did over Cecile's original Conservative Outburst.
Here now is a gratuitous picture of Cecile's mother, because (a) I have it (having taken it in London just before Christmas), and (b) I like it:
This lady is a major part of why Cecile Dubois is probably going to be such a big writing name. Nepotism. Don't knock it. You can learn a lot about your chosen trade from a parent if the trade you have chosen is the one they already ply. They can open a lot of doors for you. And then tell you how to conduct yourself once you're in, this being one of the big reasons they let you in in the first place.
We all sort of knew this, didn't we?
Almost a third of young teenagers have so little passion for reading that they cannot name a favourite story book, according to a poll that suggests most youngsters' reading tastes are prompted by the big screen.A survey of 300 seven- to 14-year-olds, heralding the launch in September of a national storytelling festival for children, indicates that a love of books withers as children get older. Across the age range, one in five has no best-loved read.
The poll, published by the Prince of Wales Arts and Kids Foundation on the eve of the national release of the latest Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, reveals that the schoolboy wizard is the most popular read of those children naming a favourite book, with just over half placing it in their top three.
JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, also acquiring new life and new audiences in cinemas, is popular with 25%, followed by Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The findings were yesterday described by the children's laureate, Michael Morpurgo, a patron of the foundation, as confirmation that "a great welter of children simply don't read".
If you define education as reading, then clearly movies, TV, etc., are undermining education. But what if understanding pictures – how to make them, how to use them, how they work – is now more of what education does consist of, and should consist of, than in the pre-TV age, and in particular the pre-digital age? That makes sense to me.
Ask me which are the stories I now have a passion for, and most of the answers are movies, not books. So I am a traitor in the camp of the readers, like one of those teachers pointed to in the report above who lacks a passion for books, by which they mean story books.
I still read books, for history, technical understanding and social theorising. But less and less do I read them for diverting stories. When I do read a good old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg story, I am as likely as not reading it because of the social theories and history embodied in it, rather than for fun. (Example: I'm now scrutinising Dickens' Hard Times, which is a fascinating source of educational rumination, in this spirit of non-entertainment. If I want to be entertained by Hard Times, I get a video adaptation of it.) There are a few middlebrow contemporary exceptions, like Susan Isaacs and Nick Hornby, whose contemporary stories I read as and when I encounter them (preferably at knock-down prices a year after they've come out), but I almost never now read "literature" for fun. Would this make me a force for evil as an educator?
I still think the 3Rs are crucial, if only to read and type the captions on the pictures and to keep count of all the pixels and megabytes etc.
Devoted readers of everything that I write - and I know that such people exist because I met one in 1995 (although I pity the poor bastard now) – will be aware that this posting could just as easily have gone on my Culture Blog. I put it here because writing good stuff for here is harder. This is because by simply not being asleep I am immersed in my Culture, but the world of Education does not now (yet – keep reading) force itself upon my attention quite so completely or so often, and in order to write about it even half-adequately, I have either to think a little, or to steal – or as we bloggers call it: link.
As regulars here will know, the policy here, now, for reasons which this posting has been all about, is to have gratuitous pictures, often only marginally relevant to the matter in hand, to arouse the interest of readers and keep their attention, stop them staring out of the window or sending text messages to each other instead of paying attention to me, etc. So here is a gratuitous Harry Potter picture:
There is an obvious danger to putting up pictures here, which is that my readers won't bother to actually read what I've put, but will merely guess its meaning by looking at the pictures, and thereby acquire extremely bad "reading" (not proper reading at all of course) habits which will stand them in very bad stead in their future lives. But this is a risk I believe I must take. After all, if I can't persuade you to want to read this stuff, you'll never learn to read properly. The point to grasp is that (a) all these squiggles do actually mean something, and that (b) you must decypher all of them.
I found this picture here. You want to read? Read all that.
I have no *!*!*!*!* idea what this is about, but it sounds as if it might be interesting:
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and SHANGHAI, China, June 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- On the heels of its first-ever Lifelong Learning Forum held in Madrid, Spain in March, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW – News) today announced the Java(SM) Education and Learning Community (JELC). Spearheaded by Sun, the JELC's mission is to gather a global community of key educators, administrators and technologists to share best practices and strategies for creating, managing and implementing next-generation education infrastructures. Sun announced the availability of the JELC portal at the eLearning Center of Excellence Forum hosted in Shanghai, PRC in conjunction with Sun's first Asia Pacific SunNetwork Conference.Founded on the principle of open collaboration, the JELC plans to address a variety of issues of great importance to the education community, including teaching and learning new technologies, vocational retraining, bridging the digital divide, and achieving full global access to top education materials and courses. To make this happen, Sun is convening education stakeholders and decision-makers, including ministers of education, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ministers, K-12 and higher education institutions, as well as partners such as independent software vendors, standards boards and humanitarian organizations.
Is this just a fancy way of selling boxes of kit and complicated phone conversations, or is something more honourable and interesting than that involved here? I'd love any comments from the informed, i.e. from those whose knowledge of such matters is more than my *!*!*!*!*.
I asked a few days ago: When should school start? – in connection with the often repeated claim that children in the UK start school too soon.
Sally had just commented thus, and since the original posting was several days ago, you may miss it:
I used to think UK school started too early, when I lived in Europe and saw how good the early years education of friends' kids was. I've had three children go through UK reception and primary now, and no longer think it's the timing, but WHAT they do in school, that is the problem. The kids are stressed out by inadequate teaching I'm afraid - somtimes not the teachers' fault as, eg the National Literacy strategy is, well, a bit rubbish. When my children have had good teachers it has been like watching a huge weight lift off them, it isn't the reading or writing instruction itself that is the problem, but the way it is done (and some of the teaching is so muddled that older children will be just as stressed). Though the school day IS very long for the youngest children.
One day, I, or somebody, is going to give here a blow by blow (metaphorically speaking) account of exactly what good teaching of the 3Rs actually consists of.
Anyone know of such a piece of writing I could link to?
I see that the Independent has done a piece about that Bill Cosby speech:
Scholars of race issues in the United States have a new text to ponder, from Bill Cosby, arguably the country's most beloved black entertainer and an icon of the African-American community. Its message was harsh: Poor black people – or some of them – are "knuckleheads" who mangle the English language.Two weeks ago, Mr Cosby criticised the black community in a speech in Washington DC to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v The Board of Education, the court ruling that led to the desegregation of schools.
He said that after all the sacrifices earlier generations made to win racial equality in America, there were blacks today, in the poorer class, who let those pioneers down. "The lower economic people are not holding up their end of the deal," he said. "These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around."
I wonder how much the Internet contributed to this story getting an airing in the British press.
This will be very stale news to Americans, no doubt, but it contained a lot of up to the minute news to me. It's a piece by Ross Neverway, who has just got a place at Harvard, in today's Telegraph:
So what about the cost? The headline figure of £25,000 a year - tuition fees plus living expenses - is far beyond my family's means. However, I was advised by a Harvard graduate who teaches at my school not to let this bother me, and it was the best piece of advice I received.Harvard admits students on merit and without any reference to their ability to pay, which is known as a "needs blind" admissions process. Details of an applicant's financial situation remain sealed until a place has been offered. The help the student's family will need is then assessed and scholarships awarded accordingly, to American and international students alike.
I was fortunate enough to receive a scholarship of £20,000 a year. That Harvard, thanks to its huge endowment, can be so generous is one of its greatest strengths. Typically, about 10 per cent of each year's intake is made up of international students drawn from 60 or more countries. In my year group – the class of 2008 – there will be 30 students from the UK, chosen from the 217 who applied.
What particularly impressed me was that Harvard seemed intent on wooing me to accept its offer, though I did not need much convincing. Last month, I attended the "visiting program" weekend to sample Harvard life and get a better idea of the nature of my next four years.
I was given every opportunity to meet faculty members, fellow applicants and current undergraduates, and inspect the campus and its facilities. Founded in 1636, Harvard was America's first university and is now probably the world's foremost educational institution.
Okay, those last two paragraphs are comment rather than news, but I agree with Ross. It's very impressive, and he's a lucky guy.
I've been waiting decades for this headline:
Cut-price private schools set for launch
Here's the story, which is from today's Independent, in its entirety. I don't want anyone not being able to read this in a year's time, and I particularly want to be able to read all of it myself.
A right-wing think-tank will this week launch a national chain of cut-price primary schools in a drive to open up private education to middle-income families.The first New Model School will start work in September, charging less than half the average fees of many independent primary or "pre-prep" schools.
Teachers have already been appointed, and tomorrow the school starts advertising for pupils to join the inaugural class of five-year-olds.
The programme has been devised by Civitas, a conservative-leaning policy group, which says that both the state and private sectors are letting parents down.
Surveys consistently show that more than 50 per cent of families would like to educate their children privately. In practice, fewer than 7 per cent can afford the fees.
Dissatisfaction with the state system reaches a peak at this time of year, particularly in urban areas, when thousands of parents find their children do not have a place at the most popular schools.
While the average private primary school charges £7,000-£8,000 a year in the South-east, – beyond the means of most parents – the New Model School is asking £3,000.
The school's founders say they have created a blue-print that can easily be replicated, and could help families to opt out of the state system.
"Our intention is revolutionary. It's a challenge to both the public and private sectors," said Robert Whelan, deputy director of Civitas. "Much of the state sector is failing. The independent sector is also failing a lot of parents by not providing a sufficiently wide range of products."
The school, based in an old Victorian building in the Queen's Park area of London, is promising to have its pupils reading and adding up after just one year. French will be taught from the start, and Latin from the age of seven. Its behaviour policy is described as "firm".
The New Model School is still considering whether or not to adopt a Latin motto, but Civitas insists it will not be a "crammer" and will instead emphasise music, art and PE, subjects that Ofsted inspectors have said are often squeezed out of the national curriculum.
Civitas is not the first organisation to question the high fees charged by private schools. The independent sector is already under investigation by the Office of Fair Trading over allegations that schools have colluded to keep fees high - something that the schools deny.
An international firm called Gems – Global Education Management Systems – is in the process of opening its own chain of private schools in Britain at significantly reduced prices.
The former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead is also said to be planning a similar scheme.
But Dick Davison from the Independent Schools Council said that the criticism is unfair, as most of the fees charged by his members are taken up in staffing costs. Lower charges, he said, would lead to fewer teachers, or a lower standard of teachers in many private schools.
I know Robert Whelan of Civitas. He's a good guy (although that doesn't mean I endorse everything else Civitas is saying and doing) and I wish him and all the others involved in this every success. Here's a link to the enterprise.
