Continuing with the first comment on this that I quoted the beginning of below, and continuing with the theme of higher education as a British export industry, the final paragraphs of what “illuminatus” says go like this:

The wider cult of the metric is of great concern to me and is also starting to creep into HE too. Stories published this week about degree inflation and pressure on academics to wave through international students whose grasp of English is so tenuous as to be pretty much non-existent are just small indicators that the era of the comprehensive university is upon us (trust me, I work in one). Ed Balls is not unique, just the latest in a long line of education ministers who has covered their ears and whistled so they can’t hear the concerns of those of us in the education system telling them some rather uncomfortable truths about education policy and its implementation.

In the words of Albert Einstein: not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

He’s talking about these stories.  Further evidence, I suggest, that Terence Kealey is wrong about the alleged continuing excellence of universities, but right that universities should retain their independence, and preferably have it strengthened.  Instead, that is to say, of becoming “comprehensives” living in a state of perpetual political derangement and deterioration.

If it is true that higher education is now and remains potentially a big export earner for Britain, and it is true, then stories like this won’t help one little bit:

Two French students have been found dead with multiple stab wounds in an East London flat, it was confirmed last night.

A double murder inquiry has been launched after the bodies of the two men, believed to be in their twenties, were discovered on Sunday, when firefighters were called to deal with a fire at the address in Sterling Gardens, New Cross.

A police source said the pair had been “horrifically murdered” adding that it was believed they may have been tortured before being killed and their flat set alight.

This was all over the early evening news today, complete with pictures.  It seems to have been a robbery that went wrong, by which I mean even more wrong.

It’s somewhat off topic for this blog, but I say: allow non-crims to be armed!

It may yet happen.  London, full of disarmed non-crims and armed crims, is rapidly becoming like New York used to be but is now so conspicuously not, a “crime capital”.  Any decade now, something might just give.  Or, to use the language of this blog, the lesson might be learned.

A current blog favourite of mine is the Spectator Coffee House blog, and they laugh at Ed Balls’s latest pronouncements, but actually most of what he says sounds not that ridiculous to me, although his notion of kids being tested without them even realising it does seem somewhat fanciful.  But I think he mostly emerges quite well from this interview, in contrast to how he lets himself look in this story.  Kindness and gentleness are all very well for schools, but when Ed Balls is in a hurry, forget about that.

As I often feel with incompetent socialist politicians, I think to myself, this man might have made a quite capable headmaster, and might actually have done some good, instead of either raging impotently at the ills of the institutions that he supposedly controls, or actually barging in to improve them, and thereby making them worse.

Anyway, the political cycle is such that it is rapidly ceasing to matter what Ed Balls thinks.  And you sense that even the New Statesman now realises this.

For an anti-Balls view that is serious rather than mocking, read the first comment at the NS:

My God, Ed Balls is employing some appalling sophistry with regard to SATs. Over the past 15 years or so, the push to ever more prescriptive curricula and more measurement has created huge amounts of performance anxiety in the education system. And, worst of all, is removing professional autonomy from educators. Children are not being taught how to think or question anything, merely pushed through a mechanistic process to turn out the service fodder for the 21st century that employers demand. Judging by recent comments from employers and the levels of literacy of school leavers, even this goal is not being met.

But according to Ed, it’s all the fault of the schools. This is such a transparent attempt to pass the buck that it would be plainly laughable, were it not for the fact that I am afraid he might actually be sincere. ...

But another commenter reacted much as I did:

Balls strikes absolutely the right tone here. He dismisses the media hysteria that seems to attach itself to stories involving children and yet acknowledges the kernel of truth upon which the stories are based. He sounds humane and measured - and, when attacked, manages to avoid sounding defensive.

It would be a good thing if Ball’s tone was replicated throughout the media.

Trouble is, it doesn’t matter how nice Mr Balls is when being interviewed.  He still presides over a nationalised industry in an advanced state of decay, and for that mere niceness is completely beside the point.  No wonder, when not performing to nice lady journalists, he opens car doors in people’s faces (see link above).

Here.

Children of all ages should study philosophy in school to develop their critical thinking skills, education experts said today.

Academics suggest that, rather than start off with Socrates, teachers use common classroom disputes to help children learn about abstract philosophical principles such as fairness, morality and punishment. They give the example of apportioning blame for spilling paint.

The book Philosophy in Schools, edited by Dr Michael Hand of the Institute of Education and Dr Carrie Winstanley of Roehampton University, puts forward several arguments for including philosophy in the school curriculum.

“Critical thinkers are people who reason well, and who judge and act on the basis of their reasoning,” Hand says.

“To become critical thinkers, children must learn what constitutes good reasoning and why it’s important - and these are philosophical matters.

“Exposure to philosophy should be part of the basic educational entitlement of all children.”

And so they should be forced to do it whether they like it or not. That’s what “entitlement” generally means: the government forcing people to receive what it wants to shove down their throats, and this time it’s no different.  People have the “basic right” to do as we bloody wel tell them.

The stupid thing is that if the people who think this were actually to try doing it themselves, and just ask if others might like to sample it, it might be quite good, and lots of children might really like it.  And then it might spread, in the hands of people who got the point of it, and wanted the share the good news.  But can you imagine the intellectual chaos, to say nothing of the rebellions from school teachers, that would result from any schools, never mind all schools, being made to do this kind of thing?  Because, don’t you dare, as these wretched authors do - perhaps because they know no other way of saying: “this is a good book, please buy it and read it” -, confuse something being a worthwhile activity with it being something that everyone should be forced to submit to regardless, and have done to them by grumps who think it a ridiculous diversion from their real job.

Many teachers would surely say that what these bossy academics call “philosophy” is just intellectual common sense, and is embedded in the general texture of what they do.  Just as they also teach manners and morals, which people also often say should also be separate modules in the national curriculum, in everything that they do, or try to.  Insofar as these people seem semi-aware of this themselves, then it turns out that they aren’t saying so very much.  They are definition hopping, between two different notions of what “teaching philosophy” means.  They use the separate-module-in-the-syllabus foolishness to get publicity, because it is such a daft idea, but if challenged that they are merely hinting at compulsion to sell their books and boost their own prestige, they will retreat into claiming that all they are really saying is that teaching should be done intelligently.  By jingo, what a brilliant idea.  Let’s (not) buy the book about it.

They are, in short, being philosophically sloppy.

Yesterday was the hottest day of the year, and everyone at Kings Cross Supplementary seemed to be in a bit of a mood, certainly me.  Small Boy’s disposition was particularly negative, it having been severely aggravated by the fact that his little Nintendo games machine was doing something “mysterious”.  He used this word over and over again.  I am impressed that at his age he knows such a word, and its precise meaning, but I couldn’t solve the problem, which was making the games machine work as Small Boy thought it should.  Also he was coughing a bit, and I have yet to learn the medical diagnostic skills that are evidently part of the skill set of a Real Teacher.  Was Small Boy actually ill, or just reluctant to have yet more Education done to him, after a day spent having it done to him at his regular school?

We looked at maps of the world in a map book I had brought with me, and he pointed out different countries.  I persuaded him to allow me to pronounce country names that he didn’t know.  Namibia.  Zimbabwe.  Libya.  He pronounced ones he did know.  Morrocco.  Egypt.  Then he wrote, very badly, a list of countries, one of which was “United”.  But I guess that names of countries are often rather confusing.  How was he to know that United was part of United Kingdom when the Kingdom bit was quite a lot below the United bit? 

Small Boy used interesting arguments to explain that he needed no more Education.  I can already read, he said.  He came dangerously close to saying: “I already know everything”, which is obviously blasphemy if you are being Educated, and I subjected him to a big speech about he obviously had More To Learn because Everyone Has More To Learn.  (It never ends.  It’s a permanent treadmill.  You are Educated and Educated and Educated.  Then you die.  Welcome to the twenty first century, kid.  One of the more depressing things about being a teacher is the things you hear yourself saying.)

Smart Boy and Smart Girl both prefer talking with me to having Education done to them, but Miss Head Teacher was adamant.  They must do sums in the class.

The most memorable moment of the evening for me was when Mr Maths also made a speech.  “Smart Girl, why are you wandering around?  Sit down in your place.  If everyone wandered around, there would be Anarchy instead of Order.” It was like in a movie, where the script writer has completely abandoned realism in order to explain the Underlying Point Being Made In This Scene, except that Mr Maths really said that.  I’m afraid I was not much help to him, probably because I am an anarchist.  But eventually I was able to contribute to the imposition of Order with the necessary mixture of prison guarding and maths tuition.  So I guess that means I’m not an Anarchist any more.

Seriously though, one interesting educational issue did crop up, which concerns the methods used to teach things like long division and “long multiplication”.  (I’d never heard of that one before.) Every teacher and every school seems to use a different method for these things.  There’s the “grid” method, and various others I can’t remember the names of.  Do different methods confuse, for doing something like multiplying 57 by 34?  Or do different methods throw light on the underlying things that are really going on, the way that speaking several different languages is supposed to make children cleverer by giving them an instinctive philosophical grasp of what language is (and is not) that other children are denied?  I suspect that the clever kids – and all the kids at Kings Cross Supplementary seem pretty smart to me - do actually gain a bit from having sums that they find easy taught to them in an unfamiliar war.

Just after writing all that, I went in to the Civitas Office to find out how I was doing, in their opinion.  They were nice, but the message was unmistakeable.  Less Anarchy, please.  More Order.

Miss Snuffleupagus reports and reflects:

When I worked in all-boys schools, I learnt a foolproof method of breaking up fights. I simply had to put myself in the middle of the two combatants, and they would immediately step away from each other. It had something to do with being in a predominantly male environment. The boys instinctively knew that hitting a girl, or even coming close to doing so, was unacceptable. Male teachers for instance, could not use my tactic successfully. They had to separate the boys by force.

Having used my clever method for years, it has become an instinctive reaction when I see a fight. I forget that in a mixed school, the constant presence of the girls means that chivalry is not cherished by the boys, as it is in a male-only environment.

Entire books could be (have been?) written about what happens to behaviour when a school switches from all boy to boy-girl.  I remember being told by an academic at Royal Holloway College, which was near us when I grew up, that when they did that switch, one of the big changes was that all the gays suddenly came blazing out of their closets and started dressing like they were on TV or something.  All that well-dressed competition?  Don’t know, but that’s apparently what happened.

Indeed.  The Bishop takes a bash at eco-brainwashing in a (private) school:

Not if we should recycle, or when we should recycle, but why we should recycle. The person who wrote this is clearly intellectually challenged. Do they really believe that it is always best to recycle? No matter what level of resources is required? Who would want their children taught by someone who believed such nonsense?

If he can teach reading, writing, grammar, comprehension, manners, then maybe yes.  And perhaps yes because they also want recycling to be taught also.  The market will decide.  The Bishop’s most pertinent complaint is that the teacher didn’t capitalise a film title.

A national religion (and I do agree that this is that) is a very hard thing to resist.  Next: home-ed by anti-environmentalists.

More science teaching woe.  That’s a Buckingham University report, which I found because it is linked to from here.  Can’t afford physics teachers.  Can’t keep ‘em.  Often can’t even get ‘em to apply.

Indeed:

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

Key question: how much have they been rewarded.  Well, I would say that 11 percent just for “Fuck off!”, with 3.5 percent extra for the exclamation mark is somewhat excessive.  On the other hand, “off” is a word that frequently gets spelled wrongly, as “of”.  But, on the whole, I don’t favour swearing.

Other examining bodies said that their marking schemes would not reward such language. Edexel said: “If the question was ‘Use a piece of Anglo-Saxon English’, they may get a mark, but if they had just written ‘f*** off’, they may get sanctioned. If it was graphic or violent they may get no mark for that paper.”

Opposition spokesman Nick Gibb said:

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

No.  What he really said was:

“It’s taking the desire for uniformity and consistency to absurd lengths.”

Says Coffee House: You couldn’t make it up, and in order to demonstrate that things ain’t what, correction: are not as, they used to be, also links to this.  Charles Pooter gets all post-modern about it.

I’m too busy socialising today to write anything much here today, but I just read this, by the excellent Paul Graham, and I suggest you might like to read it also.  It’s about how you learn to like what you truly like, as opposed to what you merely find impressive.  Education means developing your tastes, as well as just your skills.  It makes your life more fun, as well as more productive.  It doesn’t just make you more expensive, it makes your pleasures cheaper.

The Civitas blog has a posting up, by James Gubb, about Frank Furedi’s publication entitled Licensed to Hug.  Gubb’s posting is sympathic to the points Furedi is making, which is encouraging to me, because I am just the kind of unmarried, childless, rather eccentric and wrong-side-of-middle-aged man who is liable to be put off teaching, or any other kind of helping or working with children, by the fear of being thought, or worse, the fear of being accused of being - a paedophile.  I have now undergone the police checking routine twice.  Fair enough, those are the rules and these are the times we live in.  Postings like Gubb’s suggest that Civitas appreciates having a man like me helping out at their schools, and all the more so because of this scarily unhealthy climate of suspicion that Furedi describes and denounces.

It’s a huge subject, and a difficult one to write about, but one thought does occur to me about why I like working for the two Civitas schools I do work for.  (Actually, I have stopped working at Hammersmith Saturday, but that wasn’t because I didn’t like it.  It was merely that I was surplus to requirements.  I was told they had problems, which was true, they did.  But these problems had actually been solved by the time I showed up there.  Hopefully I will soon be helping out somewhere else.)

So anyway, the thought that occurs to me is this: that both the Civitas schools I’ve been teaching at consist of one quite big space, with several teaching operations going on in different parts of the same space.  This actually has a big bearing on this sensitive issue of sexual misconduct, and, more precisely, of the fear of being accused of it.

My previous attempt to help at a school didn’t involve me teaching in a big space, along with other teachers and pupils.  I was on my own, that is to say I was on my own with the one kid, not in a little room, thank goodness, but out in the open area between the classrooms.  So far as I know, nobody ever suspected me – certainly nobody ever accused me - of anything untoward or inappropriate.  But it did occur to me that if a child took against me and accused me of something wicked, it would be my word against his.  (It usually was his, at that school, rather than hers.  That’s because my job was to take troublesome boys for one-to-one teaching, out of classes that they might otherwise disrupt or otherwise be a bit of a problem in.) That was a slightly scary thought.  It wasn’t likely to happen, but if it did ...  What if I had then got caught up in some quasi-legal mincing machine which assumed all such accusations to be true unless proved otherwise?  Not good.

At the Civitas schools, on the other hand, in the event of such unpleasantness, it would not be only my word against a child’s, and any child tempted by the thought of such wickedness would know that.  For that reason alone, a child almost certainly wouldn’t try such a thing.  If a child did try it, the enormity of making such an accusation would quickly be explained, and that would be the end of it, for if a child did make such an accusation, there would be plenty of witnesses to say that I did no such thing, it was all a misunderstanding, he didn’t mean that, etc. etc.

Not only that, but if the personal code of conduct, as it were, that I follow (about such things as bodily contact, shaking hands at the end, and so forth) were to be observed by any of my colleagues, and considered by them to be unwise or open to misunderstanding, then they could straighten me out before any trouble ensued.

Nothing remotely like any of this has happened.  But in this matter as in so many others, I am extremely glad that these other teachers get the chance to keep an eye on me and to watch me in action, in among and as a natural consequence of the way the place works rather than in some kind of self-conscious inspection process.  In general, if I’m not doing what they want, they can say so.  In general, in an open space, they can get to know me, my character, demeanour, general approach, strengths and weaknesses as a teacher, and so on.  In the event of needing to reassure somebody about my good character, they’d be comfortable about doing that, because presumably that’s what they have good reason to think that I have.

Likewise, I learn a lot about teaching, and about the proper behaviour of a teacher, from being able to watch them in action.

Working out in the open like this really is a huge improvement on being on my own, the whole Licensed to Hug thing being only one of them, but a significant one, I think. 

Terence Kealey thinks there’s no problem with University exams, no grade inflation.  But here are a couple of recent pieces ...

I’ve been told that if I didn’t give out more firsts to my students then it would reflect badly on me and my teaching, with the unspoken threat of my visiting lecturer contract not being renewed, even though all my observations and assessments by peers and managers have been excellent.

… that say otherwise.

Prof Geoffrey Alderman, who used to be in charge of safeguarding standards at Britain’s largest university, the University of London, blamed grade inflation on “a league table culture”.

He told The Independent newspaper that lecturers were under pressure to “mark positively” to secure a good position in the tables.

“The more firsts and upper seconds a university awards, the higher a ranking is likely to be,” he said.

“So each university looks closely at the grading criteria used by its league table rivals and - if they are found to be using more lenient grading schemes - the argument is put about that ‘peer’ institutions must do the same.”

This later bit strikes a particularly ominous note:

He said universities were particularly “generous” when they marked non-European Union students, who pay far more in fees.

Both are in the Guardian, with the second quoting something said to the Independent.  It seems that in this argument the free marketeers are defending the status quo, and the lefties are attacking it.  Kealey was responding to all this stuff.

Go here, and you learn about a podcast interview with Professor Alderman, and find a link to Alderman’s own website.

And look what it says there:

In June 2007 Geoffrey joined the University of Buckingham as Michael Gross Professor of Politics & Contemporary History.

So he’s at the very same university that Terence Kealey is the Vice Chancellor of.  Hah!  Alderman doesn’t sound like any kind of lefty.  He favours complete autonomy of universities of the sort they have in the USA, just as Kealey does.  But, he also favours good and honest external examiners.  At present, he says, we have neither.

A complicated argument, pulsating with ironies of all kinds.  But it’s clear who the politicians are inclined to believe.

I can’t find the Independent front page article about what Alderman said which he refers to in that podcast.  It happened while I was abroad, I think.  Link to that, anyone?

Well I’m right to be taking my Swedish Lessons seriously, because this evening it was all over the news that David Cameron is going to introduce school choice like they have in Sweden.

Fraser Nelson has already been writing about this in the Spectator, on page 3 of this:

Michael Gove’s school reform policy would be at one and the same time the most politically exciting and (in terms of bureaucratic activity) least demanding act of a Cameron government. It simply promises to grant funding of the national average - by then about £6,000 per pupil - to any new schools that are set up. When enacted in Sweden, the reform was so successful after just four years that it was irreversible. The same prize awaits Mr Cameron.

Nelson says that the only problem will be cracking ahead quickly with the necessary legislation.  I haven’t finished trying to make sense of Cowen’s piece, but already I think I can see all kinds of potential problems with this policy.

Here’s an interesting twist on a familiar argument.  This is Terence Kealey writing in yesterday’s Telegraph:

The degree system in British universities is “rotten”, with grades based on “arbitrary and unreliable” measures, says Peter Williams, chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the government-sponsored body responsible for maintaining university standards. Not since Gerald Ratner announced that his products were “crap” has a chief executive made such a suicidal remark. In this case it is not true.

Williams’s major complaint is that whereas, 10 years ago, only 45 per cent of students got firsts or upper seconds, now some 60 per cent do. This, he says, reflects grade inflation.

So far so predictable.  Grade inflation.  But of course.

But here comes the surprise:

Actually, because our admissions procedures tend to work well (i.e., we tend to admit only students with appropriate A-levels) 100 per cent of students should be getting firsts or upper seconds. The only students to get lower seconds and thirds should be those who succumb to laziness, drunkenness and the other ills that student flesh is heir to. Since no one reviewing our universities can doubt that the students are more serious than ever, no one need be surprised that their degrees are getting better.

Because the league tables reward universities for awarding firsts and upper seconds, there is, admittedly, pressure to inflate the top grades, but my experience of the examination system in Britain is that underhand practices are uncommon. I hate to sound like a minister or Dr Pangloss, but students are getting better grades because they are working harder. We should be pleased.

So what does Kealey think Williams is up to?  Here’s his answer:

Williams is being political.  The QAA is power-hungry and resents the autonomy our universities have retained in this target-driven world.  He wants more bureaucracy and he wants his QAA to supply it.

The QAA is already too intrusive.  The best universities are in America, yet American higher education bureaucracy is trivial.  There are no external examiners at American universities, for example, and the US equivalents of the QAA are pussy cats – which is why American unversities flourish.

The QAA and other bureaucracies damage higher education because universities flourish only by self-regulation.  Universities do best when they are independent, because scholars are innately self-critical, so only when external agencies displace self-criticism with arbitrary ticks in boxes do standards slip.

It’s the QAA, not our degree classification, that is arbitrary and unreliable.

So there.

Incoming:

Brian

In the spirit of spreading the word and looking for constructive feedback, I’d appreciate you taking a quick look at our new baby, Beanbag.

A bit about us: we are what’s politely called ‘seasoned professionals’, we’re all parents and we’re based in Bristol, so we’re well used to the debates about standards in education. We put together Beanbag because, as parents, we wanted as much as possible for our kids, not just state vs private. I suppose you could say that we believe that old chestnut: if it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a whole community to educate one. Beanbag is very much a grassroots project - it’s free of charge to use so we don’t spend on advertising. Anything you can say about us will help. Any questions, feel free to mail me or call 07725 471429.

Kevin Gibson
Beanbag Learning

I don’t now have the time to do much more for Beanbag than just copy and paste that email.  But I do like this, from the About Us section:

Our schools do all they can, but they can’t be all things to all children. There are literally thousands of really good teachers, tutors and education professionals that work outside of the school system. So we can’t understand why it’s harder to find them than it is to find a hire car in Romania.

I guess the good ones are too snowed under doing all the teaching they can manage to be bothering with advertising.