This is a depressing article, about cyberbullying. It's timesonline, which means non-Brits may soon lose it, so I'll quote at length:
INCREASING numbers of children are falling victim to cyber bullies, who have adopted the internet as their preferred weapon of humiliation and abuse.Police experts and children's charities are concerned at the increase of cyber-bullying, which is estimated to have risen by at least 30 per cent over the past two years.
E-mail, text messages and website chat rooms are the new forums for threatening children by stealth, out of sight of parents and teachers, around the clock.
Bullying claims the lives of around 20 teenagers a year and thousands more suffer physical and psychological torment. Charities are voicing concern that this new phenomenon is "growing like wildfire".
In 2001, mobile telephones were among the most popular Christmas presents for children. Since then, cyber-bullying has risen by at least 30 per cent, Kidscape, a leading children's charity, says.
Yet as teachers crack down on abuse in the classroom, police admit that cyber bullies can be harder to identify and quash than their traditional counterparts.
In May Mouth2Mouth.tk turned from an innocent internet forum for local children in Hemel Hempstead to chat into a vicious gallery of hatred and abuse. Within months, one humiliated teenager had tried to kill herself and another had lost all his friends after abusive messages were given out in his name.
Parents and anxious teenagers contacted Liz Carnell, who runs Bullying Online at www.bullying.co.uk, a charity set up to counter cyber abuse.
"It was appalling. There were death threats, racist messages and threats of violence. So I spent an entire weekend answering all the messages and telling the abusers the damage they were doing," she said.
Cyber bullying began, Ms Carnell believes, after children were given mobile phones for Christmas in 2001. Initially, they made silent phone calls, but since then the abuse has transferred increasingly to public humiliation on the internet.
And so on.
If this is true, then it is of course depressing. If it is being exaggerated, and if actually bullying on the Internet is intrinsically easier to avoid than bullying face-to-face in a school (my suspicion), then that too is depressing. Expect (as David Carr would say) lots of internet regulation "for the sake of the children".
My strong belief is that bullying happens when there is no escape from it. It happens, that is to say, when it can. In a well ordered and intelligent world, bullies cannot bully, because their victims just go away. If the bullies as a result take over a space which is not theirs, the owner of it then chucks them out, if he has not done so already, and if he has any concern for his own interests.
And my internet-ignorant guess is that cyber-bullying is at least greatly intensified by the existence of social systems where escape is not possible, i.e. schools where attendance is, if not legally compulsory, at the very least extremely difficult to get out of.
After all, if you cyber-bully someone, but never actually meet them to deliver, and to share with your sniggering cohorts, those all-important lines that go: "What are you talking about? – Miss, I don't know what he's talking about – What have I done? – He's shouting at me for no reason", why bother? Cyber-bullying, in other words, only really works if combined with the old-fashioned, pre-Internet kind.
But I'd love to hear from people who know more about the nuances of the Internet than I.
I've just done a posting about a Kim Howells outburst on Samizdata. (The posting was on Samizdata, not the Kim Howells outburst.) It was one of those pieces where I only realised at the last second that it would do for Samizdata, instead of merely for here.
I was going to include this rather striking photo of the man here, along with the rest of the original posting, but for Samizdata it was beside the point. But here it is here anyway.
I find writing for Samizdata hard, and for here relatively easy, or that's how it is at the moment. Here I have the mind fix that I have no "readership" to alienate with bad writing, just the occasional passing freak in pyjamas. This may not be true, but I find it more relaxing to assume.
At Samizdata, there are many, many, fully-dressed readers to worry about. Samizdata postings have to be of a certain standard, and that can be worrying.
So now you know. I think that all six of you are trash.
Christie Davies has some intriguingly provocative views about science teaching. Basically, he's against it.
A knowledge of science we are assured is essential for a proper understanding of the modern world. It is not. Very few English people whether adults or teenagers have any serious knowledge of the sciences but this does not hinder them in any way when it comes to earning, buying and selling, taking care of their children, playing elaborate games on their computers, tinkering with their car engines, giving up smoking or choosing between one fool and another at election time. It would not assist them in any way to understand the properties of silicon or carbon monoxide or lead tetra-ethyl or serotonin or the nature of thermodynamics or electro-magnetic fields, even though these underlie their activities. Implicit local skills and understandings are enough. The English are competent in their ignorance. Those who have studied national curriculum science are if anything more ignorant but also more competent than their elders. They have a purely nominal knowledge of science like that conveyed by a glossy encyclopaedia or human interest science documentary film from which all difficult thinking have been carefully excluded. It is lowest common denominator science learned by rote, Gradgrind's dream. It is a worthless piece of paper on a par with a Weimar thousand mark note. For those who can not even manage 'nat cur sci' there is tendentious environmental science and for the great uncertificated majority complete incomprehension – National curriculum one, enlightenment nil, sullen resentment considerable.
Personally, I think children should be allowed to learn what they want, how they want. Anything gets tedious if other people are telling you what to study and how to study it.
If teenagers were rewarded for being useful, and if science really is as useful as is so widely assumed, then plenty of children would learn science, and learn it well, of their own free will. And many more would learn it for the sheer fun of it. And Christie Davies is right that much science teaching all too often drains the fun out of it, and that more recent science teaching also empties the exercise of any great value.
But what if Britain needs lots of scientists, and we don't have them? The answer, says Davies, is immigration. Foreigners have always done the boring and unwelcome British jobs. Hah!
The other night I had a virtual conversation (the mechanics of which I hope to blog more about Real Soon Now – but which for the moment I will ignore) with the Dissident Frogman, who is the man who designed - and more to the point engineered (so to speak) - this blog. I finally told him about the Comment Problem, and, fingers crossed, he has now fixed it.
The Comment Problem has been about number four or five on my list of Important Things To Do for as long as it has existed, and I apologise profusely to all those who have been hit by it, and in general for taking so long to deal with it. If deal with it I have. What happens is, you post a comment, with all the numbers, like you are supposed to, and instead of sticking it up, it comes back at you with some snarky irrelevance about how you have done it all wrong, and you say: well to hell with that no more comments from me at this damn place.
But, the other night, I told me he had found something wrong with the set-up of the Comment System. He didn't know how it had happened, but he had, he said, fixed it. Which sounds promising, I think you will agree.
Here's what I suggest. I will append a string of comments to this posting, with a view to seeing if anything goes wrong, and if you want to check out if things have been fixed, try posting comments here too. The more there are, from more people, the more grateful I will be. Then, if (IF) nothing untoward happens, I will declare the system working (touch wood and hope to die blah blah blah) and invite the resumption of comments of substance, on other postings.
Once again, my apologies for this craziness. I don't know who's or what's fault it was originally, but the delay in sorting it was definitely down to me. However, as I say, with luck, touch wood, it may now have been solved. As I also say, thanks in advance to any who join me in checking this out.
Outstanding letter in today's Times:
Studying at homeFrom Danielle Shanks
Sir, I'm a 15-year-old, home-educated student and for me, leaving school was one of the best things I've done. I left about a year ago, thoroughly miserable after being bullied for three years and after various meetings with teachers about it, which achieved nothing.
I am now doing a correspondence course.
Contrary to the popular belief, it is actually quite easy to make new friends outside of school. I've kept in touch with one friend from school and I play the violin, so I go to an orchestra every Saturday, where I've met new friends. I'm also a member of " Education otherwise", which is a home-ed organisation, where I write to various pen-pals.
How sociable is school anyway? You have all your cliques, but if you don't fit in you can be ostracised.
Yours faithfully,
DANIELLE SHANKS,
56 Vaux Crescent,
Walton on Thames,
Surrey KT12 4HD.
September 20.
Here is the link to Education otherwise. Otherwise, I think it says it all.
Category: Bullying • Home education • Socialisation
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Here's a headline to savour:
House parties planned to educate voters on educationThe nation's largest union is teaming up with teachers and liberal political groups to sponsor simultaneous, education-themed "house parties" in Palm Beach and Broward counties and across the country Wednesday night.
The social calendar will never be the same.
Bring your concerns about public schools, not booze or funny hats.
Yes. What do you think this is, a party? This is education we're talking about. You're not here to enjoy yourselves.
Organizers hope the first-ever National Mobilization for Great Public Schools gets more people focused on education issues before the general election and beyond.
So, that would be "educate" as in propagandise, and "education" as in spending lots more money on schools.
While the event is billed as nonpartisan, the main sponsor is the National Education Association, the 2.7 million member union and teacher professional group that has endorsed Democrat John Kerry. Co-sponsors include MoveOn.org, the Web-based liberal organization that regularly bashes President Bush.
And they'll be doing some non-partisan Bush-bashing.
The federal No Child Left Behind law, the cornerstone of Bush's education-reform program, is billed as a key discussion topic. A Web site previewing the festivities claims "the White House and Congress are failing to provide the basics. Worse, the White House now plans to cut education programs in the first budget after the election."
Which makes me think that "No Child Left Behind" may not be as bad as I had been
assuming.
This guy certainly thinks that it is doing some good.
The president began putting the first part of his education reform package into place literally hours after he took the oath of office. The morning after the inauguration, he and Mrs. Bush listened carefully as Reid Lyon and other top education researchers presented their findings at a White House forum on reading pedagogy. The president made it clear that he wanted federal reading policy to go "wherever the evidence leads."From his gubernatorial days, Bush already had a good idea that the evidence was leading straight to phonics. Following Lyon’s advice, he had pushed local districts in Texas to adopt phonics-based curricula and saw reading scores in the state shoot up, particularly for minority kids. The number of third-graders – 52,000 – who failed the reading test at the start of the Bush governorship declined to 36,000 when he left for the White House and has since dropped to 28,000, now that all his reforms are up and running. Since then, the evidence has become irrefutable. After reviewing dozens of studies – some using magnetic resonance imaging to measure differences in brain function between strong and weak readers and among children taught to read by various methods – the National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress, concluded in 2000 that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, required phonics-based instruction.
Within a week of taking office, the Bush administration devised a strategy for getting a $6 billion "Reading First" phonics initiative past the relevant House and Senate education committees. The administration was offering school systems a deal that went like this: "The federal government will give you lots more money than ever before for early reading programs. Nothing obligates you to take the money. But if you do take it, the programs you choose must teach children using phonics." Hardly a single legislator raised doubts about tying federal reading dollars to instructional approaches backed by a consensus of the nation’s scientific experts.
This "scientific experts" stuff strikes me as somewhat questionable, but I'll leave those questions for another time.
Just to say ...
Education seen as cost, not investment
... that I think those doing the seeing (here - free registration required) have a point.
Australia has neglected its financial responsibility on education by not matching the funding increases to schools and universities made by other countries, according to a report released yesterday.
Education people think education should get more money. Stop the Internet, I can't handle the excitement.
"There is only one explanation for this: education has become a lower public priority," the deans say in the report, New Teaching: New Learning. "Despite rhetoric to the contrary, education is presently viewed as a cost rather than an investment by Australian politicians."
"New" teaching and "new" learning sounds like it's all going to cost a lot more, very soon. Just how much of an "investment" it will be, on the other hand …
I recall noting this plan when it was just a plan. My heading, I see, was India launches an edusat, but actually, the plan was to launch it in June. So. Mid-September. Not bad.
BANGALORE (Reuters) - India's space agency said it successfully launched the nation's first satellite for educational services on Monday, which is expected to boost distance learning in a country with a huge rural population.The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said in a brief statement on its Web site (www.isro.org) that the satellite was placed in its intended orbit 17 minutes after take-off at 4 p.m. from its spaceport at Sriharikota, 50 miles north of the southern city of Madras.
That's www.isro.org and here is the press release.
Excerpt:
EDUSAT carries five Ku-band transponders providing spot beams, one Ku-band transponder providing a national beam and six External C-band transponders with national coverage beams. It will join the INSAT system that has already got more than 130 transponders in C-band, Extended C-band and Ku-band providing a variety of telecommunication and television broadcasting services.
Educated India is starting flex its technological muscles.
There's trouble a't' uni':
The row over performance related pay between Nottingham University and its lecturers reached a new deadlock today as the Association of University Teachers fulfilled its promise to stage an academic boycott of the university.
Later they quote AUT assistant general secretary, Matt Waddup, and my guess would be that the key paragraph in this story is this one:
"We believe that the university is placing its international reputation in serious danger," he added.
Universities in Britain are morphing from (exaggerating only somewhat) places where locals tread water to places where foreigners race through the water and do not want to be interrupted. They are going global, and doing global business. Thus, I classify this story under "globalisation" as well as just "higher education".
Result: a world in which universities demand actual performance, as opposed to mere charming eccentricity, but also one in which unions have a whole new kind of economic success to threaten and to want in on. Guess: there'll be more of this kind of thing.
