I planned to have only one posting today, and I always try to avoid the USA, what with there being so many USA education bloggers covering their stuff themselves, but this BBC story is too good to miss:
Are pupils at the world's first "gay" state school victims of segregation or symbols of progressive thinking?The majority of pupils at Harvey Milk High School in New York are gay and were bullied at their previous school for their sexuality.
Harvey Milk refuses to be classified as a "gay school" even though that is the general perception of it from opponents and supporters alike. But it says its unique brand of segregated education fully deserves its public funding.
It says it provides for a small population of victimised and bullied pupils who are made to feel so freakish in mainstream high schools that they are falling behind in lessons, too scared to go to school and missing out on a proper education.
I am strongly inclined to favour that most extreme form of segregation that consists in children only going to schools they like going to, and teachers only teaching children they liked teaching. If that happened, segregation of all kinds would probably flourish.
So, this strikes me as a quite big step in the right direction. It insinuates a Political Incorrect (i.e. correct) idea into the minds of people who are otherwise only capable of thinking Politically Correctly (i.e. incorrectly). Good.
At its heart is the entirely correct idea that the answer to bullying – the only answer if you rule out punishment of bullies violently enough to make them desist – is to separate bullies from their victims.
Dramatic survey news:
Britain will be left out of a major international survey of education standards because the government did not provide enough information.
Very wise.
Emily Yoffe has a piece up about her learning to shoot, and Instapundit quoted, among other bits, this bit:
So anathema are guns among my friends that when one learned I was doing this piece, he opened his wallet, silently pulled out an NRA membership card, then (after I recovered from the sight) asked me not to spread it around lest his son be kicked out of nursery school.
I spent yesterday afternoon with my two young (male) Paradise Primary customers spelling out words like SHOOT, BANG, ZAP, etc., in big capital letters (and also doing such things as combining the two Os of SHOOT with a front-on picture of a double barrelled gun held by a mad monster), which they thought most satisfactory.
Once again, I have a busy day today, busier than I had anticipated, so again, not much to say. Please blog quietly amongst yourselves, or read your books.
Busy day today, Volunteer Reading Helping at Paradise Primary, and then out again this evening.
This was the most interesting thing I was quickly able to google to. It begins thus:
Research has failed to establish whether increasing education levels drive economic development or whether economic development affords improved education.
Quite so. Rich men's wives have diamond necklaces. So get rich by buying your wife a diamond necklace. Well, I can imagine circumstances in which this just might work.
But goodbye for today. More substantial fare tomorrow, I hope.
Sean Gabb's latest Free Life Commentary, Number 128, is up. It is an uncompromising attack on the entire principle and practice of State Education. Sean describes the present mess, and concludes:
The only answer is to get the state entirely out of education. The education budget should not be expanded, or its administration reformed. It should simply be abolished. That £49 billion - now, I believe, £63 billion - should be handed back to the people in tax cuts; and these should be directed at the poorest taxpayers. The schools should be sold off or given away, and the bureaucrats be made redundant. The people should then be left to arrange by themselves for the education of their children.The argument that parents would not or could not do this falls flat on any inspection of the third world, where parents make often heavy sacrifices and choose often highly effective schemes of education. There is also the experience of our own past. A generation ago, E.G. West showed how growing numbers of working class people in the 19th century paid for and supervised the education of their children. The beginning of state education in 1870 should be seen as ruling class coup against an independent sector that looked set to marginalise its legitimation ideology. And that reaction was promoted on the basis of fraudulent statistics.
Left to themselves, it is inconceivable that parents would not do substantially better than those presently in charge of state education. How they might do this is for them to decide. Some would pay for a conventional independent education. Some would send their children to schools run by their ministers of religion, or by charitable bodies. Some would educate their children at home. Many do this already, by the way; and Paula Rothermel of Durham University caused a stir in 2002, when she looked at a sample of children educated at home and found they performed consistently better in standard tests than schoolchildren - indeed, she found that the children of people like bus drivers and shop assistants were receiving a better education than those committed to the care of state-certified teachers. Parents could hardly do worse than the present arraignments manage. They could easily do better.
This is not a "left" or a "right" wing cause. It is about allowing children to get an education which is not directed to moulding them to believe as suits the convenience of their betters, and which really will enable them to make the best of their own lives.
Such are precisely my opinions. The only reason I do not belabour my readers here every day with such views quite as relentlessly as I might (aside from the fact that this would make this blog even duller), is that opinions is all that they would be, coming from me. I have very little direct experience of what Britain's education system is like in reality (although I am now beginning to acquire it). Sean Gabb, on the other hand, has taught for the last several years in one of the less stellar (i.e. not one of these) of London's universities, and daily confronts both what the products of Britain's state education system are like, and, equally important, how those products compare with the products of the education systems in other countries. When he compares, for example, the English fluency of young English people with that of young African people (as he does earlier in this piece), he has actual direct knowledge on which to base such comparisons.
On the other hand, Sean has been an uncompromising libertarian for just about as long as I have know him, and this is a case of prejudices refined and informed, rather than merely deduced from his relatively recent day-by-day experiences as an educator. Sean, like me, is predisposed to judge state actions to be, on the whole, bad, and the actions of free people to be, on the whole, good. Some would say that such prejudices render our particular views on education nearly worthless. I would say (and I'm sure Sean also) that if you do not have such prejudices, you should.
As for the Department of Education, I'd like to see an experiment: let the position go unfilled for four years and see if it has any impact on the educational abilities of the nation's youth. I'm guessing no one would notice if we didn't have a Secretary of Education. Everyone just keep on doing what you’re doing, and get back to us.
Same here. But teachers and schools here would definitely notice. Suddenly, the only initiatives and shake-ups would be their own.
My good friend Adriana has emailed me about a blog posting entitled BLOGs: are they the new holy grail in education?, which has obvious Brian's Education Blog relevance.
It is the work of an academic at something called the European Center of Knowledge Management. At one point he uses the phrase "sustainable development" without any sneering. Personally, I think that the only sustainable development worth a damn is a series of unsustainable developments laid end to end. Also, his commenters (his students – I'm guessing) get into the usual guilt-ridden flap about whether the Internet increases inequality. Answer: make internet connections even cheaper, and even less dependent than now upon complicated and unguardable fixed infrastructure. In other words, let capitalism carry on moving rapidly in the direction which it is now moving rapidly in anyway.
But, these ideological complaints aside, this is worth a look, if only to learn about how blogging is getting around, and how all manner of people are sensing that they could use it too. The comments are particularly good for sampling that particular atmosphere.
This, for me, was the most interesting paragraph:
Today, more than ever before, I am convinced that virtual learning has a bright future, particularly since it allows each and every learner to develop his own learning path, fully adapted to each individual's context. At least that is what virtual learning is able to do, which does not automatically mean that all what we call today e-learning fits this definition. Well designed virtual learning allows for diversity in learning, eventually allowing almost individualised education. In order to develop more accessible educational facilities in deprived regions or amongst the less fortunate, virtual learning has a huge potential.
I think he is quite right about the way the Internet individualises education.
The comment thingy is, as of now, and as helpful emailers have pointed out to me, refusing to supply a Turing Number, only a red cross.
This is, I am told by my Blog Software Guru, being attended to. He doesn't think it should take him long.
English language triumphalism from Paul Johnson in the latest Spectator.
The new world is going to be a world of three Great Powers, China, India, and The Anglosphere, with Continental Europe (France in particular) going nowhere, and with the English language carrying all before it.
An EU report says that French children are falling behind in their English lessons:
What seems to have impressed the commissioners is that French youth is slipping behind other EU countries in its ability to understand English, actually regressing in the years 1996–2002. By contrast, the Spanish, traditionally monoglot, are moving ahead. Under a 1990 law all Spanish children are now taught English from the age of eight, and in some regions from six. In the Madrid region there are 26 bilingual schools and colleges in which courses – with the exception of Spanish literature and mathematics – are taught in English. By 2007 there will be 110 such establishments.Mr Raffarin, the French Prime Minister, accepts the logic of the Thélot report and will implement it. Mr Chirac, of course, being 'anti-Anglo-Saxon' to the bone, countered with a high-minded plea for cultural diversity. 'Nothing could be worse for humanity than to move to a position where everyone speaks the same language.' Really? Come off it, Jacques! While France hesitates about what to do, the Indians are in no doubt. The wisdom of Macaulay in pushing the spread of English during his spell as a legal adviser in India is now being endorsed by events. As India emerges as a major economic power, several million Indians are now finding English speech essential – indeed, among the vast numbers employed in outsourcing, it is their livelihood.
This is the kind of grandiose world-view prophesy that has a way of being overtaken by events. What if India and China both break apart (China in particular well could) and the relative political stability of Europe suddenly looks a better bet than its senescence and resulting plummeting birthrate (of which Johnson makes much) does now? What if the high hopes now being placed in the Anglosphere come to little? I like the idea of having thoughts like this nailed down in a posting, so that I can look back on them in a few years time and see how true they really were.
On the other hand, I think that this continental news site – which I commented on last night at Samizdata, at which, at some point not so long ago, they decided to do an English offshoot as well, thereby multiplying many times over their potential readership – may be yet another sign of the times we now live in.
For decades, English speakers haven't had access to Europe's leading newsmagazine. DER SPIEGEL and the award-winning Web site SPIEGEL ONLINE, with their second-to-none news coverage, rich story mix and clear, sharp European view, were obscured by an unbreachable language barrier.Until now.
Indeed.
Tangenting somewhat, but on general topic of this blog, the page of Spiegel Online that I linked to from Samizdata also has, if you scroll down, references to headscarf bans in Germany and a Neo-Nazi teacher in Bavaria who has been resigned.
Co-education may be natural but that doesn't make it good, says Cynthia Hall, head of an independent girls' school in Oxfordshire.
From the BBC:
Mrs Hall is headmistress of the School of St Helen and St Katharine in Abingdon and current president of the GSA, which represents 200 independent, single-sex schools in the UK.She told its conference: "It makes me mad when I hear heads of co-ed schools dismiss single-sex education with the comment that the co-ed classroom is natural, as if being natural is all the justification one ever needed for anything.
"I believe that most girls benefit enormously from being in a single-sex environment during their school years."
A survey published by the association found that 90% more of its schools' girls chose physics or chemistry at A-level than in all schools nationally.
Mrs Hall said girls' education could suffer when they were taught alongside boys.
"In the teenage years, when girls are finding out who they are, the ability to camouflage in order to fit into a given environment is a highly perilous quality for girls," she said.
"It particularly makes them vulnerable to verdicts of others about their own incompetence."
"These years for girls coincide with the equally important years for boys in which they are testing out their strength, voicing claims they cannot yet deliver, seeing how much they can dominate the world around them."
From later in the same report:
A 2002 study by the National Foundation for Educational Research suggested girls in single-sex comprehensives achieved better results than girls in mixed schools, especially in GCSE science.It also suggested separate schooling particularly benefited those at the lower end of the ability range.
… which makes sense. If you're at a co-ed school, you can cheer yourself up for being bad at school work by impressing the boys. No boys to impress, and exams, work, etc., are the only game to play.
Alan Little, a Yoga enthusiast (and regular BEdBlog commenter – I particular like his most recent one here), links to some Yoga pictures. Always on the lookout for gratuitous pictures for here, I explored.
I know I shouldn't mock, but some of these pictures cry out to be the basis of a caption competition, my favourite one for these purposes probably being this one, although it's a tough call:
Seriously though, these pics do give you a much better idea of what Yoga at least looks like, when performed by highly qualified Yogans.
The guy in the blue shirt doesn't seem to be doing very much in any of the pictures. I'm guessing he's there in case any of the performers ties him/herself – shoelace style – into such a tight knot that he/she needs emergency help getting untied.
The other thing that struck me about this demo is the splendour of the new building – the Yashasvi Wedding Hall in Mysore – in which it is being given. Anyone who thinks India is still only dust, poverty, and big white cows with huge horns meandering about slowing everything down from very slow to even slower should update his ideas. And since I was "struck", I guess that has to include me.
