I've had another busy day today, but I did manage to find this depressing news from Germany:
… A German school official has ordered seven families homeschooling their children in Northwest Germany to enroll their children in public schools immediately, or the children will be forcibly removed by police and taken to school. Any resistance on the part of the parents will result in the children being removed from their homes, according to a Home School Legal Defense Association report.The families argued that, as Christians, they wanted to protect their children from the godless and humanistic values being taught in public schools. They also assured officials that they were providing an adequate education through a German correspondence school.
County education director Heinz Kohler dismissed the families' beliefs, stating, "you and your children are not living in isolation on some island but rather in an environment posing intra- and extracurricular situations where you'll have to accept that your world view will be curtailed."
Kohler further explained that homeschooling could not be allowed as "children should not be encapsulated or kept apart from the outside world. In these cases, the parents' rights to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society…"
You will be socialised!
I found this at an American anti-abortion site. Americans can contemplate this kind of thing with relative detachment, but here in Britain, for anyone who favours the right to homeschool, it is different. Homeschoolers here must have in the back of their minds the thought that the EU might one day decide to "harmonise" the rules about homeschooling, and something tells me they probably wouldn't harmonise them in such a way that Germans would be allowed to homeschool. Although, I suppose that there is always that hope.
Earlier this evening I was socialising at Perry de Havilland's. It was essentially a meeting between these people and some of the starrier of these people, among them the people who actually first wrote the software that this blog uses to run itself. Had I truly understood who they all were exactly (one of them was definitely this lady and I sat next to this gentleman), I would probably have felt even more insignificant than I did.
I was only there at all in order to return a copy of a magazine in which an article about Adriana appeared, which I had been scanning in text and the photo from, and I had to leave early. But before I did, I picked up an interesting little observation from Perry de Havilland.
Perry spends quite a bit of time participating in on-line chat-rooms (please forgive my approximate spelling there) mostly on the subject of computer games, concerning which Perry is an enthusiast rather in the way that I enthuse about classical CDs. And Perry reckoned that he might (he's not sure but … might) have spotted an interesting trend, with clear educational vibes attached to it.
During the last year or so, Perry says, he thinks he has spotted, in the many chat-rooms he frequents, a somewhat new attitude towards English grammar. Whereas in former times, chatterers would chat away using very bad spelling, worse punctuation and with no apparent idea of the meaning of the word 'paragraph', such chatterers are now starting to be criticised by more orthodox and easily understood contributors. Several times lately, for instance, a chatterer has erupted with a list of queries presented as a slab of miss-spelt gobbledegeek, and the very first responder has responded along lines like these: "I probably could answer your questions, but first I would have to understand what the hell you are talking about, which I presently do not. Try spelling words correctly. Try using capitals at the beginnings of sentences. Punctuate. Arrange separate questions in separate paragraphs. In general, make an effort to be understood and to make sense. Until you do, I have nothing more to say to you." Harsh! But: interesting!
Will this kind of pro-grammar heckling have consequences? If it gets louder in volume and vehemence, then it is surely bound to.
Perry and I were interrupted about half way through making the following point, so this next bit may only be my opinion and not Perry's. But as I recall it we were both converging on the notion that what is happening here is that human beings, so to speak, are entering chat-rooms hitherto mostly inhabited by extreme geeks, and these humans are bringing with them their old fashioned ideas about how well-written English is easier to understand than semi-literate techno-babble, or just plain babble.
Personally, I am startled by the illiteracy and bad spelling of some (but not most) blog comments, not all of which is at all explicable as merely caused by haste and/or poor (or no) checking. But that is a value judgement, and is not the central point I am making here, i.e. that Perry was making. The point here is that old fashioned grammatical correctness, quite aside from how much people like me prefer it, may actually, as a matter of fact, be making a come-back, and what is more doing so in an arena hitherto assumed to be a force only for grammatical anarchy.
Personally I have had very little to do with chat-rooms, and a lot of that is because of my prejudice that they abound with – often deliberately – lousy grammar. Blogs, in general, certainly the ones I read regularly, tend to be far better written. They are written by humans, for humans.
Which is all part of why the people I met earlier this evening are all of them so splendid. I wish them all, both my friends in the Big Blog Company and the Six Apart/Movable Type possee, the very best of good fortune. They deserve it.
I checked this posting more carefully than usual for grammatical errors, for obvious reasons. Deep apologies for any grammatical errors that still remain.
I am very busy today, but Alice has a post up about arithmetic, and about maths, one of the points being that the teaching of the forner can often screw up the teaching of the latter. For her, the big breakthrough in her teaching came when she made an abacus with paper clips, thereby answering the question: why?
Proper abacus picture, here, and this:
The abacus was the first known machine developed to help perform mathematical computations. It is thought to have originated between 600 and 500 BC, either in China or Egypt. Round beads, usually made of wood, were slid back and forth on rods or wire to perform addition and subtraction. As an indication of its practicality, the abacus is still used in many eastern cultures today. The abacus, an ancient product of the middle east, is really a full blown hand-held decimal calculator!
Ten out of ten.
Incoming email from Mark Alexander:
Thought you might be interested in this brief essay pointing out that withholding English from immigrants is racist.
I am. It's a good piece, too. The gist of it is that if English is not your first language, it is still your icket to full and free membership of the big wide world out there, and that ethnic leaders, in this case Hispanic leaders in the USA, don't want their flock to learn English, because that way they would cease to be their flock.
I love the cat picture, but do not understand it.
A predictable response to Mr Bell's speech yesterday (see immediately below):
THE HEAD of a Huddersfield Islamic school has called on England's chief education watchdog to resign after 'ignorant' comments about Muslim schools.Samira Elturabi, head of Islamia Girls' High School on Thornton Lodge Road, said the comments of David Bell, the chief inspector of schools for Ofsted, were ignorant about the facts of Islam.
I don't think this is very clever. Indeed, I think that it illustrates some of the exact fears that Mr Bell was expressing. Calling on Mr Bell to resign, just because his grasp of the nuances of Islam is shaky is foolish. The way to respond to speeches like Mr Bell's is to realise that here is an opportunity both to put across some of the facts about Islam that are in the "better than you thought" category, and to demonstrate that Islamic leaders can handle criticism politely.
I would say that she gets, at best, no more than one out of two.
… Mrs Elturabi, who has been head at Islamia for three years, said Islamic education was full education.She added: "We not only do Islamic studies such as Arabic and the Koran but we also do the full national curriculum programme.
"Schools in this country have a lot of behavioural problems, but in Islamic schools the students learn responsibility and to be caring.
"Mr Bell should resign. Before he gives a lecture like that he should understand Islam."
Mrs Eluturabi's school came joint third in the Kirklees education league tables published last week with 71% of students getting five 'good' GCSEs.
Assuming that this is an approximately accurate report of what Mrs Elutrabi said, then I think she has – shall we say? – struck a rather bad note. At best, she seems to have given the Huddersfield Weekly News the chance to make it sound like that.
I realise that Mrs Eluturabi may be a bit frightened. But I think she ought to show a greater understanding of how the world looks to the people she is – or ought to be – trying to influence and whose minds she is – ditto – trying to change. Telling Mr Bell that he should resign is likely to persuade Mr Bell, and many others, only that Mr Bell was right about the potential divisiveness of these schools, and of the people who run them.
My feeling about this speech, which has undoubtedly been the big education news story today, is that I am glad he said it.
Head of Ofsted David Bell sparked anger among Muslims today after warning that Islamic faith schools must not be allowed to threaten the coherence of British society.A traditional Islamic education offered by a growing number of schools "does not entirely fit" children for life in modern Britain, the chief inspector of schools said.
Mr Bell singled out Muslim schools for failing to teach pupils their obligations to British society, and called on them to promote “tolerance and harmony”.
The Muslim Council of Britain described Mr Bell’s remarks as "highly irresponsible" while the Association of Muslim Schools accused him of "Islamophobia".
The head of England’s schools watchdog made his comments in a lecture on citizenship education to the Hansard Society in central London.
"Islamaphobia" – like its verbal parent "homophobia" – is a clever piece of propagandistic invention. The purpose of the word "islamophobia" is to say that anyone who fears Islam is in the grip of a mental disease, rather than saying anything which might be true. I am emphatically not Islamophobic, because I don't have any phobia about Islam. But it does often scare me. And if me and many others saying such things means that Islamic educators become scared themselves about how we might react to their activities in our midst, then good. I want them to think that we are watching them, and worried about them, and I want them to be on their best behaviour.
Mr Bell, judging by this report, was rather circumspect about his exact objections to Islamic education, and if he really was so circumspect, he might have done better to spell it all out a bit more clearly.
Let me do it for him, by saying what I fear about Islamic education.
I fear that Muslims are being taught to be cruel to their own women, or in the case of Muslim women, cruel to themselves. I fear that they are being told that forcing their women into loveless marriages that are not unlike domestic slavery is virtuous rather than vicious. I fear that Muslims are being taught to regard cruelties to non-Muslims are also morally tolerable rather than morally wrong.
Politically, I fear that Muslim schools are teaching Muslims to vote Muslim, in a way that will attempt to be tyrannical, and will actually be deeply divisive. And I fear that a small but significant minority of the pupils of such places might turn into the next generation of terrorists.
And I think that part of the way to prevent such schools cranking out bigots and Stepford wives and political pains-in-the-arse, and the occasional terrorist, is for the people in them, teachers and pupils alike, to know that in these particular respects they are not entirely trusted. On the other hand, if, after fifty more years of Muslim education in our midst, we are not overrun with bigots, and our politics continues to be reasonably smooth, and absolutely no terrorists have been incubated by such places, then fine, people like me (not me because I'll be long gone) will alter their prejudices and fears, and relax. Meanwhile, we're on our guard, and if Muslims don't like that, tough.
None of which is any excuse for any of the rest of us to be personally impolite to any Muslims, still less to commit crimes against them.
I am absolutely not scared that Muslim schools are doing a worse job of producing scientists and technologists and lawyers and doctors than are the regular state schools. If they do this worse, so what? Who cares? This only matters insofar as it gives the Devil and opportunity to find mischief-making work for idle brains. Meanwhile, my prejudice is that such schools probably do at least as well as the other schools.
