No surprise here:
Broadband is having a marked impact on children's education in the UK by helping them make the most of the internet as a research tool.According to a detailed survey of 50 UK families by the Future Foundation, two-thirds of children with broadband access are spending more time using the internet for academic purposes, including research and revision.
Yes. The very same electric boxes, which, in their first form, television, wrought such educational havoc, are now, in their later and more civilised and wordy form, helping to sort out the mess.
Broadband has certainly been a huge education for me.
Just done a big Samizdata piece of the sort which a couple of months ago I thought I might be incapable of ever again, and am busy for the rest of the day, so that may be all here. So maybe no more here today, and of course nothing promised over the weekend, but have a nice one.
... although I'm only guessing it's Dad.
I took this photo through my grubby front window, looking down into the park at the foot of the tower opposite. Faces are not clear, with "Dad" even being hidden by the leaves of a tree, and the swingee moving too fast. Even onlooker sister is obscure, what with the dirt on my window and the tackiness of my camera. All of which is good. The individual faces are not the point.
What are they all learning? Trust. All sorts of physical stuff. Courage in the face of danger. (It could, after all, go horribly wrong.)
It was really fast, by the way.
Michael Jennings PhD (who has just got himself a fine new job and is therefore an example of a successful education) emails with a link to this article by Gregg Easterbrook about the relative merits of the Big Name US colleges compared to the less well known ones which are damn near – and sometimes absolutely - as good. But, he says, as the gap narrows, the obsession among parents with getting their children in to the Big Names only gets more obsessional:
As colleges below the top were improving, the old WASP insider system was losing its grip on business and other institutions. There was a time when an Ivy League diploma was vital to career advancement in many places, because an Ivy grad could be assumed to be from the correct upper-middle-class Protestant background. Today an Ivy diploma reveals nothing about a person's background, and favoritism in hiring and promotion is on the decline; most businesses would rather have a Lehigh graduate who performs at a high level than a Brown graduate who doesn't. Law firms do remain exceptionally status-conscious—some college counselors believe that law firms still hire associates based partly on where they were undergraduates. But the majority of employers aren't looking for status degrees, and some may even avoid candidates from the top schools, on the theory that such aspirants have unrealistic expectations of quick promotion.Relationships labeled ironic are often merely coincidental. But it is genuinely ironic that as non-elite colleges have improved in educational quality and financial resources, and favoritism toward top-school degrees has faded, getting into an elite school has nonetheless become more of a national obsession.
So what is my comment supposed to be about that? No problem. Michael Jennings PhD supplied comment as weell as the link:
My personal experience is that the quality of the education varies a bit between famous and less famous but solid universities, but not really all that much. (Less elite universities will also often make special arrangements and give special attention for talented and successful students when they get them, too). What does vary a lot is the talent, ambition, and general interestingness of the students. I studied at a solid but obscure Australian university, a well known Australian university, and an internationaly famous university, and the number of interesting people I found to talk to increased steadily with the reputation of the institution.
I went to Cambridge (England) and screwed it up, being slung out after two years. (I should have left after one.) Then I went to a lesser university, and made it work much better.
Gratuitous picture:
Ivy. You knew that.
Deepest thanks to Antoine Clarke for emailing me the link to this. This being Professor Instapundit himself, holding forth for Tech Central Station about the educational benefits of computer games, one in particular:
A while back, I speculated that videogames were good for children. My focus there was primarily violent computer/videogames (and porn!), but on further reflection I think that even non-violent videogames just might be helping America's kids.I came to this realization when I heard my daughter and one of her friends having an earnest discussion:
"You have to have a job to buy food and things, and if you don't go to work, you get fired. And if you spend all your money buying stuff, you have to make more."
All true enough, and worthy of Clark Howard or Dave Ramsey. And it's certainly something my daughter has heard from me over the years. But they were talking about The Sims, which has swept through my neck of little-girl-land faster than a mutant strain of flu through Shanghai. Thanks to The Sims, they know how to make a budget, and how to read an income statement -- and to be worried when cash flow goes negative. They understand comparison shopping. They're also picking up some pointers on human interaction, though The Sims characters seem a bit dense in that department at times. (Then again, so do real people, now and then).
And, shortly, The Sims 2 will up the stakes. Among other things, it will allow you to "Mix Genes: Your Sims have DNA and inherit physical and personality traits. Take your Sims through an infinite number of generations as you evolve their family tree." What more could a father want, than a game that will teach his daughter that if you marry a loser, he'll likely stay a loser, and your kids have a good chance of being losers, too?
All joking aside, though, I'm impressed with the things that these games teach. …
Indeed.
Thanks again Antoine. I would probably have got to it on my own eventually. After all, Instapundit himself linked to this piece. But my surfing is erratic and certainly doesn't, as they say in America, cover all the bases. So emails to interesting pieces are always extremely welcome.
However, I still haven't got around to sorting out brian@brianmicklethwait.com, so try brian@libertarian.co.uk instead. Sorting out brian@brianmicklethwait.com is no doubt extremely easy. As are the 7,354 other things I also need to do urgently, a lot of them before I can do any of the others.
Maybe there's a computer game I need to play, where you are rewarded for doing lots of little things right. Maybe all computer games are like this. So, thing 7,355: get into computer games (apart from Solitaire I mean). I will not be doing that actually.
Not much time tonight, so your basic link, quote and: "interesting".
I didn't just forget about blogging during August; I also didn't read most blogs any more. I got right out of the blogosphere and into the normalsphere. So now I've been catching up with my favourites, and one of them now is the Social Affairs Unit blog. And there I found this rather good piece by Digby Anderson, saying that there's too much schooling these days. How true.
Quote:
The precise numbers need to be spelt out. This institution, schooling, is now allowed and funded to monopolize young people's time for more than 4,000 days or 25,000 hours. Yet it takes a commercial organization only a dozen or so hours to teach someone to drive a car and a commercial language school will get you proficient in a foreign language in several weeks. The state's Little Pied Piper children leave after tens of thousands of hours in state schooling institutions inarticulate in their own language.Set aside for the moment the arguments about just how little they learn in all those hours, weeks and years. What is never challenged is the assumption that school, or schools called universities, are the right places for children and youth. The assumption is that they should be there and nowhere else. The assumption is revealed in all its thoughtlessness in the literature of the anti-child labour lobby. Where should children not be? At work, of course. And why not? 'Why not, do you really want to push toddlers up chimneys again or have them rooting on rubbish tips or selling their bodies as they do in South America?' No, but then I don't want adults forced up chimneys either. Nor do I want them on rubbish tips or selling their bodies. That is nothing to do with children. It is about work no-one should have to do.
Once this nonsense is put aside, why should children not be at work? Because they will be exploited? Surely their parents would not let them be and nor would a regulatory government. So why not? It comes down to this. Children should not be at work because - wait for it - their proper place is at school. Where school is concerned all the worries of the anti-child labour lobby are thrown aside. They who are so worried about employers coercing and exploiting children don't care that schools have much more power to coerce and exploit children. They don't care that the schooling institutions can keep their charges working for no wage, in many cases, without any demonstrable educational benefit for years on end.
It doesn't require much imagination to think of jobs in comfy air conditioned offices - not rubbish tips - or in the fresh air and under adult supervision that teenagers could be allowed to do. But the politicians have no imagination. The schooling wheeze has been allowed to grow and grow with no evidence of success. It is time to cut it back. It is not justifying its awful custodial powers educationally and it should not be there merely to do state childminding. I am not sure at what age what is more or less compulsory schooling should cease, perhaps 11. However what there can be no doubt about is that the uncritical attitude to schooling institutions which regards them as the natural place for young people to be for 19 years should cease immediately.
Interesting.
I would start with lowering the school leaving age to thirteen, the beginning of teenagerness. But my longer term aim would be zero. (And by the way, I don't think votes at zero would be nearly such a bad idea as you probably do.) It was going to be only "interesting", but I just couldn't help myself, could I?
Just got an email, from someone who heard it, saying that when David Carr was on Radio 5 this evening – for the Libertarian Alliance - re the latest flap about obesity, smoking, and how the public is begging for more state controls and restrictions and illegalisation – and apparently DC said compulsory education should be done away with. Hurrah.
Yesterday I, Patrick Crozier and Michael Jennings met up, for Michael to help me with my computer (thank you Michael) and then for the three of us then to go for coffee in Café Nero. There I did something I only do occasionally, which was glance through a Sunday paper, as in paper paper.
I was struck by the number of education or education-related stories there were, in the Sunday Times news section alone. And they weren't all clumped together in an education section; they were scattered about in the general news. I bought a copy, and the various supplements and appendages came in very handy for covering up the windows of my bathroom and toilet while workers on scaffolding are busy tarting up the outside of my flat and those of my neighbours.
The first story I noticed was about Jasper Conran giving loadsamoney to a fashion academy. Something tells me that this will work. I mean, will this place be cool or what? I think: cool. Sub-zero, in fact. Yes, I can really see these specialist academies working well. And if not, it won't because the idea is an intrinsically bad one.
Story two is classic Sovietisation, about pupils being expelled from a school to makes its pass rate higher. The measurement, the pass rate, is supposed to measure educational effectiveness. But it also builds in malign incentives. Next step, more orders, ordering people not to succumb to the malign incentives.
Story three is Atticus commenting on Education Minister Clarke's contribution to the healthy eating initiative or whatever the hell it is, pointing out that Clarke himself is not a model of slenderness. New blogger Guido Fawkes echoes the sentiment, and has a picture to prove it.
Story four is a letter from David Milliband saying that Chris Woodhead is wrong about A-levels and they are actually a fine fine thing. But then he would say that. What's the betting that when Milliband finally gives up on politics and tries to get a more sensible job and a more sensible life for himself, he stops pretending, and admits that what Woodhead et al say is right? Just like Woodhead himself did when he gave up?
Story five is only tangentially educational, but importantly so, I think. It is about giving children a vote, in "youth mayor" elections, on the off chance that this might make them less apathetic. I'm for it. In fact I think "youth" should get real votes. I think that adulthood – rights and responsibilities, voting, driving, criminal responsibility, leaving home if you want to, the lot – should cut in at the beginning of teenagerdom. If you don't want adulthood at that age, fine, don't bother with it. But if you do want to get stroppy and claim the privileges of adulthood, the system would stand ready to deal with you sensibly, instead of being utterly bewildered like it is now. I can see no problem with thirteen year olds voting in all elections.
Story six concerns middle class kids shunning university and going straight to work instead. (Sounds like they've been reading my previous posting here, although of course they haven't.) This is excellent. Student loans are working. Universities are being recognised by smart go-getting youth as posh dole queues, and not places the ambitious really need to stagnate in. If you do go to such places, have a plan about what you are there to do, and get stuck into it. Splendid, splendid. What's the betting that in fifty years time only the thickos go to uni and the smart ones all get great jobs at thirrteen (see story five above).
Story seven is about Americans sending their ill-mannered brats to good manners camps, and story eight is (another tangential one this) about a kid who wants to be the youngest person ever to climb Everest. Good on him. A young man with a plan. He's bound to learn a lot, even if it's only that getting permission to climb Everest (quickly enough to be the youngest) is harder than he thought. I wish him luck.
Oh yes, and did I mention the stuff on page one, two, three, six, seven, eight, ten, eleven, etc. etc.? The small matter of what happened to that school in Russia. I wonder what lessons will end up being learned from that horror.
It's amazing the newspaper had room for anything going on in the world that is not education related.
By the way, these are all timesonline links, and for foreigners especially these tend to go dead pretty quickly. Or maybe it's merely expensive – which for the blogosphere is the same thing. So if you are curious about any of them, follow them soon, or you may not be able to follow them at all.
My friend David emailed with a link to a piece by Gary North, holding forth on why the job market loves college graduates. Sample quote:
… A college graduate has shown that he has been willing to suffer enormous boredom, broken only by weekend parties, for five or six years. (Very few students get through in four years, as their savings-depleted parents will tell you in private.)Here is someone who has survived years of a system designed by bureaucrats to produce bureaucrats. He has either been subsidized by his parents (50% of college students) or else has paid his own way (that’s the one I want to hire). He has put up with years of academic nonsense spouted by left-wing bureaucrats who could not hold a regular job in industry, let alone run a business.
Here, in short, is a certified drudge. Better yet, he has been certified at someone else’s primary expense: parents, taxpayers, and collegiate donors with more money than sense.
At this point in concocting this posting I got stuck, because I really don't know whether North is right or not, or what. But an interesting link should not depend on me having something smart to add to it, so here it is anyway.
Gary North includes another interesting link later in his piece, to something called Cooperative Education. Worth checking out. The idea is to improve on the cost and inefficiency of years of higher education, followed by potential job market disappointment.
