A few years ago I speculated how long it would be until a university degree was a positive handicap when it came to getting a job. It would seem reading this letter from a solicitor in the Telegraph that that day is upon us. The key line is this:
Lack of practical experience means that many graduates would have done better to have left academic life earlier and attained the background which would make them a more attractive prospect to an employer with vacancies (and thereby future opportunities) to fill. The apparent self-esteem and expectations of some candidates render them unemployable.It was only a matter of time.
Patrick Crozier has just finished giving a talk about Japan, based on his recent visit there, and out of the conversation afterwards emerged a point about Japanese society that will seem very obvious to all those who have been aware of it for many years, but which only got to me tonight, for the first time.
The Japanese alphabet is diabolically complicated. In fact, if I heard an exchange between Patrick and David Carr correctly, there are three Japanese alphabets, for three different purposes which I didn't quite catch. And each alphabet contains characters beyond numbering. Something like eight thousand.
The upshot of which is that it takes about two decades of unremitting toil to become, in a basic sense, Japanese. What our cleverer or luckier or smarter pupils have done by the age of about nine, takes them twice as long and more. You think it's hard for Westerners to "penetrate" Japanese society? Well yes, it is. But so too, and for the same sort of reasons, is it hard for the Japanese themselves to get to the centre of it.
Suddenly the "conformity" and "collectivism" and "authoritarianism" of Japan makes more sense. Becoming Japanese is, in a basic sense, climbing an endless ladder of cultural complexity. Becoming British or French or Spanish or American, by comparison, is about as hard as passing your driving test. And once you're in, you're in, and everyone's equal.
I'm sure the internet is pulsating with places where all this is much more thoroughly gone into. But I only really got this notion tonight, and I have no links to offer whatsoever, except to Patrick's own Transport Blog, where, if you dig in the archives you'll find pictures of Japanese trains, and such like.
Joanne Jacobs says she's not sure about it, but reckons it's "worth a read". I'm sure Joanne won't be amazed to learn that I think that this Colby Cosh piece is a lot better than that. Sample quote:
See, this is the comical thing: tutors, as opposed to teachers, are doing more and more of the heavy lifting of a failing educational system. We've got these Kumon outfits, these Sylvan Learning Centres and the like, that are teaching math and reading to whole generations of children who are apparently coming out of public schools with no clue how to multiply five and seven. I notice, too, an increasingly lucrative trade in private tutoring for high-school students. I went to high school in the late '80s, and no one I knew was seeing a tutor or was employed as one. By 1995 I had friends who were basically earning a living on these kids. It's just standard now, it seems, for parents to send their kids to high school during the day and then pay someone to actually teach them, on the side.
What are "Sylvan Learning Centres" like? Anyone?
Cosh's further thoughts yesterday will to many be even more interesting, being his personal impressions of one home-schooled kid that ring very true to me, and confirm my impressions of such children whom I've met.
David Deutsch, pursuing his vision of what education should be in his logical, Oxfordish way, brings us to a similar conclusion:
So if we pursue the vision in a logical way, we come to the conclusion that the existing institution that comes closest to a non-coercive school is the entire town (or city, or society, or internet) that the children have access to, including their homes, and their friends' homes, and excluding only the existing schools.
This was the piece recommended by lars in his comment on this.
If I know Deutsch (which I only do from a few of his writings and by hearsay from various TCS people), he would forbid tutors that children themselves did not freely consent to. "Earning a living on these kids" wouldn't sound good to him.
Me, I'm just passing on what I read and like, even if a lot of it contradicts amongst itself quite a lot. When I try to teach these are the kind of prejudices I bring to it, if I can. If I ever have children, ditto.
This guy has been making just a tad too many waves, and has therefore (and this is pure guesswork on my part) gone anonymous. Allen Reece's T(each) F(or) A(merica) bosses said that a daily blog with his daily complaints about his workplace, superiors, etc, was out of order and could he please cut it out. Fair enough.
US readers of this, and for that matter British readers, may be interested to know that the TFA idea is now being applied to Britain, specifically in London.
Last week I spoke at a meeting organised by the London School of Economics Hayek Society, on the subject of philanthropy, charity, "helping", etc., and it turned out that the meeting had been sponsored by something called TeachFirst. One of the other speakers was Jo Owen, who runs (helps run?) Teach First, and mentioned it a bit in his talk.
The idea, for those coming to all this new (as I was), is that hotshot, high-flying, alpha-male crown-prince management consultancy types fresh out of their hotshot universities take a couple of years out from telling their elders and betters how to run their businesses, and instead make themselves useful by doing a tour of duty in one of London's more dramatic secondary schools.
That "TFA" - the stuff that Allen Reece is doing - is the original US version of all this was a penny that only dropped later.
What I like is that here is an example of "helping" that actually might be helpful, at both ends of the deal. Corporate Crown Princes are notoriously more clever than they are wise in the ways of the real world, and two years in one of the more grotesque of our capital city's schools is ideal for giving them a crash course in reality. The British economy's Crown Princes used to earn their spurs running provincial factories or godforsaken storage depots. "Give it a go. We're probably going to shut it soon anyway. See what you can make of it." (And see what it makes of you, mate!) Trouble is, hotshot management consultancies don't now have such enterprises of their own for their promising young men to play with. So now they are having to borrow them.
Meanwhile the schools are crying out for alpha-males to teach their rowdy young bloods to learn, not just science and history and geography, but basic civility and good manners. Civilisation you might say. Nice but overwhelmed women, and non-alpha males in corduroy jackets with arm patches, don't do it. They need Men men, and they are definitely desperate enough to take the Men being offered by this scheme, young and green though they may be. The slightly bigger wages needed for these guys are pin-money for the sponsors, but a godsend for the schools not to have to worry about finding.
Nice. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this scheme.
I mentioned my brief involvement as a Kumon helper, in this post last week. Anyone wanting an outsider's view of the Kumon maths system that doesn't take too long to read, and which emphasises both its methods and effectiveness, and the wider implications of that achievement for education as a whole, may find this helpful. It's part of the Adam Smith Institute "Around the World in 80 Ideas" project, which looks very good, both literally in the sense of looking good on the computer screen and (it seems to me) being well organised and easy and intuitive to use, and in the sense of covering a wide variety of subjects briefly and interestingly.
Sample paragraph:
Kumon's individualist approach overcomes the problems of the collectivist grade system. It allows pupils to move at their own speed: slower pupils are able to move at a pace which does not intimidate and discourage them, and faster pupils are able to move at a pace which does not frustrate and bore them. The method thus allows people to acquire a skill to the maximum level, which their own abilities allow, which will be of enormous utility for the rest of their lives.
Oh, I didn't spot this until now, but I get a mention! Much more important fact: Kumon are now getting seriously stuck in to the teaching of basic literacy. This is a more complex task than maths, but they believe that the same basic methodology applies. I wouldn't dare to differ.
Yet more evidence of the continuing importance, global influence and general vitality of Japan and its culture. There's more to that place than electronic toys.
Independent.co.uk has a story about a Unicef report on educational achievement or lack of it around the world. The report is full of the usual disturbing statistics, calculated to get the self-flagellating going and the public money flowing, just about everywhere. Lots of British children are bad at arithmetic. Britain is a haven of educational inequality, where quality of parent determines quality of education more than elsewhere, which confirms for me that British parents lead the world in cleaning up the educational mess caused by teachers, provided they know how. The Anglosphere in general is bad at literacy. (See my Libertarian Alliance Educational Notes No. 33 for a discussion of why that is.) So far so unsurprising.
For me, this paragraph contained the big surprise:
The survey showed South Korea and Japan at the top of almost every table. Germany, extolled until recently as one of the best examples of an efficient education system, came only 19th and had almost twice the British rate of failure in key academic skills.
Germany in educational trouble? That's a new one, to me anyway. Is that just all those East Germans polluting the successes of West Germans? If so, Unicef should have said, and I don't think it can be that.
Germany and Japan are often twinned for analytical purposes. Both started WW2 on the offensive. Both had the militarism smashed out of them, and achieved economic miracles during the peace that followed. Both societies have authoritarian family systems, and both love education. And now they are both said by many to be having similar problems.
But it isn't so. There's a fascinating article in Prospect (November 2002 - "Japan's Fake Funk" by Eamonn Fingleton), which says that Japan is doing fine thank you. This piece had me strongly persuaded, and I hope to have more to say about it over on Samizdata, Real Soon Now.
The truth is that Germany and Japan are now diverging. Japan is no more being laid low by its financial problems than the USA was crushed into insignificance by the Wall Street Crash and the depression that followed that disastrous episode. And Germany and Japan are now diverging educationally as well as economically, which suggest further economic divergence between them in the future.
Joanne Jacobs links to one of those reports that says that Americans are, in her phrase, "Global Morons".
- Thirty-four percent of the young Americans knew that the island used on last season's "Survivor'' show was located in the South Pacific, but only 30 percent could locate the state of New Jersey on a map. The "Survivor'' show's location was the Marquesas Islands in the eastern South Pacific.- When asked to find 10 specific states on a map of the United States, only California and Texas could be located by a large majority of those surveyed. Both states were correctly located by 89 percent of the participants. Only 51 percent could find New York, the nation's third most populous state.
- On a world map, Americans could find on average only seven of 16 countries in the quiz. Only 89 percent of the Americans surveyed could find their own country on the map.
- In the world map test, Swedes could find an average of 13 of the 16 countries. Germans and Italians were next, with an average of 12 each.
- Only 71 percent of the surveyed Americans could locate on the map the Pacific Ocean, the world's largest body of water. Worldwide, three in 10 of those surveyed could not correctly locate the Pacific Ocean.
- Although 81 percent of the surveyed Americans knew that the Middle East is the Earth's largest oil exporter, only 24 percent could find Saudi Arabia on the map.
But now hang on. Is this not exactly the kind of ignorance that successive Republican Presidents are constantly criticised for? (I'm thinking especially of Reagan and Bush Jnr.) And do not the exact kind of people who are now complaining about how, e.g., geography teaching in the USA has gone down the public toilet, to the point where X percent of Americans don't know where the Pacific Ocean is, then defend their Republican Presidents by pointing out that there's more to knowing your way around in the world than knowing where things are on maps? Are they not right? I think they are. I think that President Bush is at least as savvy in the ways of the world as any Euro-statesman just now.
And that US Army. It usually seems to arrive in the right places, when it matters.
Europeans have long complained about how "ignorant" the inhabitants of the USA are, ignorant that is to say, of such facts as the location of the Pacific Ocean, and indeed they are. But which countries have done better in recent decades, the European ones, or the USA? The top scoring countries in this international survey of geographical knowledge or lack of it were, see above: Sweden, Germany and Italy. Oh, I'm impressed. They've all been doing far better than the USA, haven't they?
If Bush Jnr. and Al Gore had had a geography test face-off during their fiercely close election battle, it's my clear understanding that Gore would have won, just as it's my clear understanding that a Gore post 9/11 foreign policy would probably have been a disaster, with President Gore knowing beforehand exactly where all the countries were on the map that he would never have learned how to handle properly.
Or is Bush really hyper-educated, and just pretending to be ignorant in order to suck up to all those genuinely ignorant Americans out there? I believe there was once a sketch on one of those Friday Night or Saturday Night or whenever Live comedy shows, in which a publicly bumbling aw-shucks President Reagan was shown in private as sporting a machine-gun ultra-high-IQ intellect with which he subjected even his most famously clever assistants to relentless private humiliations, but which was immediately switched off again as soon as he emerged back into the public arena.
I'm not saying that I'm in favour of ignorance, exactly. I'm just saying that, as Americans often say, book learnin' ain't ev'r'thin'.
You probably think I'm saying this just to be arkward. Well, yes, pretty much.
In the first sentence of this, I originally spelt "Straits Times" as "Straights Times", a blunder that was just waiting to happen. Rightly or wrongly, I corrected my original posting, in response to a comment (containing the inevitable joke) from John Ray, and added this as comment number two:
Thanks John. It's beginning to dawn on me that when you run an "education" blog, mistakes like that count twice.I've taken the liberty of correcting the posting, which said "Straights", until now.
That's one of the downsides of comments. Had John's comment merely been an email, I could have corrected the mistake with minimum visibility.
I was always one of those "could do better if he tried harder" pupils. It's not that I can't spell; merely that, sometimes, I don't.
Maybe, as some bloggers do, I should leave up all errors however big or small. Once you correct "obvious" mistakes, who knows what other retrospective airbrushings you may later decide are excusable? Is this a slippery slope I've just stepped onto? Have I entered the realm of education blog cheating?
Comments anyone?
In general, I am finding the handling of comments tricky. Where, now, does anyone put a comment on the above? As a comment on this, or under where my reply-comment quoted above was first put? What if there are now further comments in both places?
Learning is often hard to distinguish from making a fool of oneself, and then making a further fool of oneself in response to the original foolishness when it is pointed out. Sympathetic teachers are those who have recent experience of themselves doing some learning, that is to say, foolishness. Some teachers should be sympathetic/foolish teachers, but not all.
I started this blogging business because I felt that I wasn't learning enough from the other things I was doing, and it's working. Thanks to blogging, Brian's education is in rapid motion again, whereas before blogging it was nearly immobile. Blogging has placed me back in the zone of moderate discomfort, where we all belong for as long as we are alive.
Last Wednesday Giants & Dwarfs, who describe themselves as "A Blog on Academia and "Culture" (thanks for the email introducing yourselves gentlemen), had this tantalising report, tantalising because the link embedded in it went to something entirely different:
THE NEXT STEP into madness. The University of Hawaii at Hilo has been awarded a $2.5 million grant by the National Science Foundation, which will be used in part to teach "ethnomathematics" (everyone knows 1+1 doesn't equal 2 if you're of Hawaiian-American extraction).
Anyone know anything about this? It may not be as mad as G&D make it sound, but it does indeed sound decidedly unmathematical. I have never forgotten being told by the Professor of Maths at Essex University several decades ago that mathematics is the study of what everyone is compelled to agree about, regardless of race, colour or creed. And it's surely true that maths is that, even if that definition might be said to include some other things besides. Maths is a huge and expanding clutch of statements of the form "if this is true and this is true then it must follow that this also is true". If you're a Martian, never mind a Hawaiian, you may not get this or that bit of maths, but if the mathematicians have done their stuff right, you can't deny it. It says something very revealing about maths that when humans are trying to strike up relationships with aliens, by including messages in those rockets they fire off into the wild black yonder, they always include mathematical messages.
If all that "ethnomathematics" says is that the language in which the universally true statements of mathematics are expressed may be somewhat culture bound, then fine. But I suspect it of saying something more, something untrue. Comments are always welcome (and thanks very much for all the comments on postings here so far) but on this matter especially so.
So once again I type "Education" into google, and hit number one is this, from the Straits Times:
Education for education's sake best for S'poreI REFER to the letter, 'Education system has evolved with nation's needs' (ST, Nov 22), by Ministry of Education director of planning Tang Tuck Weng.
He said that what The Straits Times has called 'Singapore's famously rigid education system' is seen differently by objective external observers. He then quoted a statistical ranking, that placed Singapore in fourth place in its ability to meet the needs of a competitive economy, and said that far from being rigid, our education system has responded to changes in the needs of the nation and the economy.
What's good or bad about Singapore's education system?
But objective observers are less likely to spot the less-obvious faults of the system than someone like me who has gone through the system and moved on to study in America.Mr Tang's answer demonstrates the key problem with the education system in Singapore.
The rigidity of the education system stems from the fact that it is focused not on educating people, but on meeting the needs of the economy.
His use of the statistic simply substantiates my belief that the Education Ministry sees its main role as a producer of manpower for Singapore's economy.
It is still based on the old-style idea of centralised planning, with a ministry taking in all data and making a decision as to what sort of education is necessary for our children, with the belief that this will fit into the kind of economy we have in mind.
This is fine if the Education Ministry and the Government make no mistakes.
But …
Teh Peijing then goes on to describe a recent Singapore government imposed disaster concerning the manufacture of Singaporean engineers:
… I remember that not too long ago the Government was rather vocal in encouraging people to become engineers.
Which turned a lot of his friends into unemployed engineers. Now, says he, he notes a similar obsession with bio-engineering.
He votes instead for what he calls "all-round education":
I believe that the Ministry of Education should focus on educating Singaporeans, for the sake of educating Singaporeans.I believe that an education system focused entirely on giving Singaporeans the best all-round education, without considering the short-term needs of the economy, might be better for Singapore in the long run.
What we need is not a workforce that is deemed necessary by economic planners, but a workforce that is creative, dynamic, independent, rounded, passionate and entrepreneurial. I think such a workforce has a higher chance of survival in an increasingly fluid global economic situation.
Which sounds okay, but what exactly does it mean? What if the result is a plague of American-educated humanities academics who could no more turn out "entrepreneurial" Singaporeans than they could train bio-engineers?
For it is at this point that Mr Teh (I'm hoping that this is the correct way to address the gentleman) reveals that he too believes in the power of government to prophecy the future:
All in all, while the ministry has done an admirable job so far, we ought not to be complacent. Would it not be better to have an education system that pre-empts, rather than evolves in response to, changes?
To me, actually, it sounds worse. "Pre-empts" changes?
What I think we have here is an argument between one semi-deluded, my guess-is-better-than-yours centralist and another. Although Mr Teh talks much sense when he criticises his rival, I wonder which is actually better for Singapore, unemployed bio-engineers or unemployed "all-round education" persons?
Could it be that what Mr Teh really wants is a generation of ("passionate") political trouble-makers? Because that's what he would probably get. It might be no bad thing.
"Might" being the important word there.
If you are a specialist blogger, you rely heavily on the other specialist bloggers doing your specialism, until such time as you get the hang of it, and I find myself relying on Daryl Cobranchi, a lot. Yesterday, for example, Daryl linked to a column at SchoolReformers.com which is well worth a look.
Who owns children? The government or their parents? I know I know, the children own the children. But until such time as the children can look after themselves, who is ultimately responsible for looking after them in the meantime? Who makes the final decisions? Parents or government? Here are David W. Kirkpatrick's first two paragraphs:
If you ask parents to whom their children belong, or who should be responsible for them, once they get over the shock of such a question most would point to themselves. They might find it hard to believe that anyone would maintain the contrary.But a contrary view has a long history, going back to ancient Sparta. In that Greek city-state, when boys became seven years old they were taken from their families, placed in state-run boarding schools and trained to meet the needs of this military society. That would be extreme today but the essential belief that the young belong to the state has never died.
The history lesson that follows is an American history lesson, but America is an interesting place. Yesterday, someone, somewhere in the blogosphere, or maybe somewhere in among all those pre-blogosphere emails I still get, was asking about the whole idea of the "nationalisation of children". This would be a good place to look further.
Just to remind you all as you pour through in your millions, the daily drip of postings may be interrupted over the weekend, by the fact that it's the weekend. As stated earlier in the week, I'm now committing myself only to putting up stuff Monday to Friday. What I'll do at the weekend is anyone's guess, and I personally have no idea how I'll feel. So see you definitely on Monday. Maybe sooner. But maybe not.
There was a TV advert this evening for "educational toys" made by something called VTech. They have a website, inevitably. Lars, you want evidence of how lame computers for kids are? Look no further. I'm sure you'll be deeply unimpressed.
This adventure-based learning system can be extended with the range of Plug ’n’ Play Cartridges which can be purchased separately to adapt the Voyager Adventure System to a variety of skill levels as the child develops. Journey through interactive Boggle Chase, Photo Adventure (included), Alphaberts Time Travel Adventure, Ocean Adventure and Mystery Mansion Adventure, each guiding children aged 4-5 and 6-7 through a variety of educational activities for age appropriate learning.The Voyager Adventure System is available Summer 2002 priced around £49.99 with additional cartridges retailing separately for around £19.99 each.
I included that last paragraph because what hit me was the amount of money that parents are willing to spend on this kind of stuff. I'm not a parent of any sort, and so comments from parents who have actually purchased this stuff would be especially welcome, pro or anti. Personally, just looking at it all, and thinking of all the bedrooms and playrooms of friends and relatives I've seen full of this kind of stuff just piled up in cupboards or lying around on the floor, I'm not a believer. But if parents will keep a business like this in business, think how much more they would be willing to part with if these kind of toys actually did seduce their kids into being cleverer. (If these did, we would surely have heard.) £54.99, £24.99, £49.99, "additional cartridges" for £19.99. If this is what parents will pay for what are, frankly, little more than educational lottery tickets, … Although, as I say, expert knowledge of these gizmos from parents who have watched them in action (or inaction) would obviously be very helpful.
I promised the other day that by way of a change I would soon be mentioning (and I promised it rather sooner than now – apologies) some actual teaching that I'd done. Well, the most recent teaching I did was when I was helping my friend Mariana run something called a Kumon Centre, which is a franchised after-school maths club, managed locally but in accordance with a centrally imposed set of guidelines first developed and still presided over in Japan. I wrote a piece for the Libertarian Alliance about this experience, but the events I am about to write about happened after that piece had been published.
Regular school maths usually seems to involve the children working through only a few rather hard problems. Kumon makes them do many more much easier ones. Instead of hoping that they get, say, about half to two thirds of their stuff right, Kumon says they must get nearly everything right. At the heart of the Kumon method is the difference between a child painfully working out that seven plus six equals, er, thirteen? (anxious glance at face of teacher), and knowing with real certainty that seven plus six equals thirteen, with no doubts or hesitations. The usual educational emphasis is on "understanding". The Kumon literature talks of "mastery".
Each child does a clutch of sums selected for him or her personally (there is no everyone-in-the-class-does-the-same-stuff rule) each day, which are supposed to take about twenty minutes to complete. In schools, teachers do the teaching. With Kumon, the system does the teaching. All we did was mark the work the children had done, and then Mariana would follow the rules of the system to set them their next lot of sums.
It worked. Almost all children made steady progress, and in some cases - and in more than just maths by the way – progress was truly astonishing. Kumon sometimes seemed to administer nothing less than a psychological transformation.
But there was one boy for whom Kumon did not seem to be working its magic. Ali was the boy's name, and he seemed to be in such serious trouble that Kumon seemed beside the point. When he did sums they were all over the place. Answers were totally wrong, and figures written the wrong way round. He could hold a pencil and write, but what he wrote was crazy. We seriously doubted if there was anything we could do, and we were ready to give up right there. He would make repeated mistakes, both of calculation and in the way he wrote numbers, and we even started to believe that he might be "dyslexic", or even brain damaged. Also, Ali seemed to be an extremely arrogant little boy. He had a way of lowering his eyelids and raising his head that made him look as if he thought the world to be populated entirely by fools.
At which point I got very, very lucky. I said, let me have a try with him. I decided to do some teaching.
As I say, with Kumon, you're not supposed to teach. You simply shove the stuff in front of them and they do it with the minimum of guidance, and at the end you tell them how they've done, and they learn. The system teaches them, not us. But that wasn't going to work with Ali.
I sat Ali down in front of a clutch of Kumon sums and sat myself down right next to him. I got him to do each one exactly right, telling him exactly what to do and getting him to correct all errors immediately, as soon as he made them, and telling him exactly what to do whenever he didn't know.
I separated the task he faced into a succession of tiny steps and got him to do each step right before proceeding to the next. You start by writing your name there. No, there. What's your name? Ali. Good. Can you spell that? Good. Please write Ali there. Good. Now: what does this say? I point at a two. Two. Good. And what does that say? I point at a one. One. Good. What about that? I point at the plus in between the two and the one. No? That says plus. That means you are adding two to one. What does this say? Don't know? That says equals. That means what does two and one come to. What's it the same as? What is two plus one, two and one, two added to one? So. What's two and one? Don't know? It's three. Do you know how to write three? You do. Good. Please write three there, which is where the answer is supposed to go. Excellent.
And so on. I never made him guess more than once, and I was unfailingly polite. I always said please before asking him to do anything, and I never raised my voice. I never, that is to say, confused Ali being ignorant with Ali being stupid. I did nothing that would be unfamiliar to an averagely capable aerobics instructor working with a arthritic old-age pensioner, but for some reason this sort of thing, when needed by a child, is not always supplied, even in something as widely known as simple arithmetic.
Aside from not knowing the answers, Ali's biggest problem was writing the numbers the correct way around. He would routinely write mirror reflections of them instead. Not all the time, just rather a lot. (This was what had prompted the dyslexia diagnosis.)
When Ali did this - getting, say, the answer right but writing it mirrored - I would say well done, you got the answer right. The answer is five, and that's what you wrote. Well done. However, you wrote the five the wrong way round. Please rub out the five you did, and rewrite it the correct way round. Good.
As I say, you aren't supposed to do this in Kumon. If all the children were to get twenty minutes of solid attention, the way I was attending to Ali, the place would have stopped being the learning factory for everyboy and everygirl that it's supposed to be and would have reverted to being a few tutors helping a few rich kids. But I didn't care.
And the reason that I didn't care was that it worked. After about three sessions along these lines, Ali reached his personal plateau of arithmetical excellence (a few sums wrong but almost all of them right), just like any other Kumon kid.
There was nothing wrong with Ali's brain. Nothing whatsoever. He wasn't stupid, far from it. He had merely been misinformed.
Nor, in my opinion and in my brief experience, and despite my initial prejudice along exactly such lines, was he arrogant. My guess was there was something a bit wrong with his eyesight, and he did the lowered eyelids and raised head thing to correct it.
I don't know for sure how or why Ali had been misinformed and anyway, the cause of the problem wasn't important; what mattered was that the problem was being dealt with. My guess is that (a) his mother may not have been that sure about doing or writing out arithmetic and had consequently not been helping him with it, the way most mothers help most kids with easy sums. Confusions created at school were not cleared up at home. (The more I contemplate state education, the more important remedial home teaching seems to me to be.)
So how had Ali's school created these confusions? I surmise that at his school Ali had not had all his errors corrected, only some of them. Maybe, what with all the other kids to be worrying about, they just couldn't or didn't bother to find the time.
Maybe Ali's teachers had become gripped by the fallacy that ignorance is stupidity and that therefore to correct someone's mistakes - all of someone's mistakes, all of someone's numerous mistakes - is to launch an all-engulfing personal attack on them. (Better to boost the little kiddy's confidence and self-esteem by telling him he's doing better than he is.)
Maybe, what with Ali looking down his nose at everybody, they judged him to be difficult, and feared that if they told him the full story of how badly he was doing he'd make a scene. (That Ali and his family were Muslims might also have made them fear some kind of cross-cultural battle.)
Whatever the exact reasons, Ali had been getting wrong information. Here, two plus one was three, but here, where he'd put two plus one was two, no-one had objected. So presumably that was correct also. Numbers written both the right way round and the wrong way round were left unmolested, so presumably both answers were okay. Except that sometimes the wrong answers weren't okay.
Actually, I believe that Ali was very intelligent, and that had he been less intelligent he would have been less confused. He was getting a mass of bad information and, poor fellow, he was taking it all in, the way a less clever boy might not have.
As I say, Ali wasn't arrogant at all, but if he had thought arithmetic too silly and arbitrary and irrational to be worthy of his sustained attention, who could have blamed him?
I believe I did Ali some big favours, and in a very short time. With luck I convinced him that arithmetic could, if explained properly, make perfect sense and that he could make perfect sense of it. I told his parents that there was nothing – nothing whatsoever - wrong with his brain, only the information that had previously been fed into it, and with any luck they believed me. If Ali's learning environment later reverted to confusion then presumably Ali went back to being confused, but with more luck, both Ali and his parents will then blame society rather than Ali, and seek out non-confusion.
I could go on at even greater length, and in an earlier draft containing this (for another Libertarian Alliance Educational Note) I did. There are plenty of "lessons" here, I think. But this is blogging, and I'll leave this story to speak for itself.
Category: Brian's brilliant teaching career • Maths
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This from John Ray:
I did a post on October 24th in which I noted the great rise in average IQ that has happened in the last 100 years. I attributed it in part to the greater stimulation young brains now receive from modern entertainment media -- television and computer games in particular. Both have of course long been treated as evils by many of our professionally wise people -- who would keep kids away from both if they could.I am pleased to see therefore that a new research report has just come out confirming what I said. Far from holding kids back, TV and computer games greatly improve their intelligence. The killjoys still mutter and grumble of course but I am happy to say that my very bright and creative son was always allowed to play as many computer games as he liked.
I've been putting somewhat schizophrenic-seeming stuff here about how children should (a) not be coerced into attending school by governments, or for that matter by their parents, but (b) not be watching TV all the time, on account it stunts their education.
Allow me to (thesise antithesise) synthesise. I do think that TV, and now computers, have seriously deranged "education", if by education you mean the old command-and-control Prussian system. TV does this to the old system of education precisely because it supplies an alternative and in many ways better – certainly more amusing and less boring – education. (Lars, commenting on this, took me to task for not getting this, but I do, I do.)
The long term answer is: freedom for children, just as the long term answer has already been freedom for non-aristocrats, freedom for non-whites, freedom for non-men. Like Lars says, children should be allowed to pursue their own interests, and that way they'll contrive a first-rate education for themselves, integrating the old technology with the new.
My problem is this. If the only choice facing a child is (a) a well-administered "Prussian" education, kind but firm, which provides a not-too-bad education, or (b) a deranged and chaotic and/or hysterically fascist version of the same, then (a) sounds better to me than (b). And for most children now, those are the choices. Freedom for children, for most children, given the parents they now have, is not a plausible next step; it's parallel universe stuff.
I mentioned the acronym HSLDA in my recent home-schooling posting on Samizdata. This stands for Home School Legal Defense Association, and this looks like a good blog to learn more about what it does, and about home-schooling generally.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Internet could be the difference between home-schooling becoming an ever bigger and more significant movement, and being wiped out by its implacable state-education-equals-education enemies.
Just to say, I've recently done a couple of education-related postings for Samizdata, about private education in Saudi Arabia, and about a home-schooling ruckus in Illinois, the latter story having stirred up a few comments, all of them supportive of the home-schoolers.
Partly, I thought that these were good wider-interest stories that Samizdata readers would appreciate. And partly, I wanted to demonstrate to the world in general, and to Samizdata's Perry de Havilland in particular, that BEdBlog isn't going to hurt my capacity to go on contributing usefully to Samizdata.
If anything, I believe that the reverse will be the case. Neither of the above two stories would have got to me if I hadn't been roaming around looking for stuff for BEdBlog. And I also believe that some stories will be "researched" by me here, as it were, with several BEdBlog postings resulting from my efforts to keep me interested, and then when I have the story clearly in focus, I can sum it all up on Samizdata, linking back to here of course. That, for example, is what may well happen with this "No Child Left Behind" stuff that I've already written about a couple of times (here and here), and maybe also the UNESCO stuff (ditto and ditto).
It's like the relationship between the specialist press and the big national daily newspapers, in the dead-tree media. I want to contribute to Samizdata, and help it to get ever better and ever more widely read. I do not want to abuse and maybe even damage that amazing Samizdata hit rate (now running at around 1,500 per day) by posting an excess (for Samizdata) of thinking aloud - or just more specialised - education stuff, such as you BEdBlog readers are going to have to self-select to like.
Quoting yourself is about as crass and uncool as it is possible to get when blogging, but I can't put my point now better than I put it yesterday morning:
Actually, I don't think that the changes needed can come from the official system at all. I think it goes to the state of mind of the consumer/victims of it all. Do these people – parents and children (especially children) - decide that they're consumers, or that they're victims? That's what matters.
Yes, that is what matters, to me anyway, and it explains something that has been puzzling me.
Whenever, during the last few days, I needed (like a school teacher bluffing together tomorrow morning's lesson late the night before) to say something in a hurry about "education", I would trawl through google and through a few of the other edu-blogs, and above all through the regular electronic news services, looking for current "education stories". And up would come university funding rows, and national bullying guidelines, and national teachers' prizes, and national this and national that, and I would struggle to stay interested.
The UNESCO stuff gets my active attention, because if that gets going it will make the education of humans on this planet an order of magnitude worse (certainly a hell of a lot more expensive) even than it is already. But the national stuff, or at any rate the British national stuff? I mostly can't make myself care about it.
I think I now know why. Like the British national public sector in general, the British educational national public sector has had the stuffing knocked out of it over the years. It has lost its Will to Power. It is merely going through the motions, not because it believes in going through those motions, merely because it can't think what else to do. The British public sector has entered its decadent phase, the redoubling-your-efforts-when-you've-forgotten-your-aim phase.
Accordingly, if faced with a fierce conviction that there is a far different and far better way to do things educational, the British national public sector will retreat in confusion.
At present there exists no national counter-conviction of this sort. The general public of Britain are just as much a part of this decadent phase as any politician or education bureaucrat. The public also can mostly only think of "them" spending more money and enacting yet more rules and regulations and installing yet more committees and safeguards and guidelines and statutory obligations. And, it claps when prizes are awarded to any teacher seems to have retained the ability and willingness to keep on navigating through this ever-accumulating mess and is managing still to get some real teaching done.
The situation reminds me of a remark attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, or at any rate said by Ben Kingsley as Gandhi in the movie of that name, to the effect that it is "simply impossible for millions of Indians to be ruled a few thousand Englishmen unless the millions of Indians allow themselves" so to be ruled. Something like that.
That's how I feel about education. Some power structures are strong, viciously imposed, sure of themselves, and those ones have to be clandestinely criticised, and in due course attacked by force of arms and meanwhile resisted by force of arms, if they are ever to be destroyed. Gandhian pacifism doesn't work against a regime which, unlike the British Raj, shoots demonstrators dead, in whatever numbers the demonstrators choose to present themselves.
But the British education monster is not now like that. British education is not Nazi Germany, however much its libertarian critics are sometimes tempted by its routine horrors to shout out that it is. If you are, say, a fourteen year old English boy, and you have a clear idea of what next you want to do with your life, then the changes are that you can now do it. Civil disobedience - in the form of the refusal to do what they (which may even include your own parents) want, and the determination to do what you want – is really quite likely to work, provided you give serious thought to the tactics you are using, targetting your nastiness with care and also using lots of politeness and incidental concessions on issues that don't matter to you, in short provided that your disobedience really is civil.
Stubborn parents, full to the brim with Will to Power, would, I admit, be a serious problem. But most parents, in Britain now, aren't like that either. They too will defer to a strongly held, rationally argued plan.
All of which means that the state of mind of the victims is what matters. The latest bumblings of the compulsory-by-default system just don't matter nearly so much.
Expect more on this.
My next posting will be a down-to-earth piece about some actual teaching that I have actually done. Promise.
Frederick Crews, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley: "The essays that the graduating BAs would submit with their applications were often brilliant. After five or six years of Ph.D. work, the same people would write incomprehensible crap. Where did they learn it? They learned it from us."
Link via Newmark's Door
As a would-be radical child liberationist, postings like this one by Joanne Jacobs pull me apart like chewing gum being stretched out by a chewing gum chewer. Am I appalled at what my friend Alice would denounce as the "manipulation" of it all, or am I impressed at the sheer drive and efficiency of the stuff that Joanne is holding up for our admiration? (It's the usual stuff. High expectations. High academic standards. Frequent tests. Usually inept minorities making rapid progress. The kids also being "stretched".)
Both, in truth. I think that the arguments for freedom for adults do apply to children, even though children are indeed different. (Adults are also different, etc. etc.) But although I wouldn't want to be one of these efficient prison officer educators myself, I am impressed at how the best of these people go about their business. If you are going to be sent to prison for the crime of being young, it's probably better to be imprisoned in world that prepares you somewhat for life after your stretch inside than to be imprisoned in a place that prepares you to do nothing except whine and complain that you aren't being looked after and entertained properly by the big bad mysterious world that your plasticene games and dance and drama classes and yoof culture rebellions have so completely not prepared you for. I guess to the hardcore child liberationists, I must sound like a "progressive" Southern plantation owner, agonising about whether the slaves can handle freedom.
And here's another concession to the lock-em-up and smarten-em-up school of schoolers. Chucking the kids out into the streets as the streets now are wouldn't be ideal either, now would it? As so often, getting from here to there means choosing your next few steps with care.
Actually, I don't think that the changes needed can come from the official system at all. I think it goes to the state of mind of the consumer/victims of it all. Do these people – parents and children (especially children) - decide that they're consumers, or that they're victims? That's what matters. Expect a lot more from me about this last bit.
Over at the blog that got me started, Samizdata, there's a short posting (with a picture) by Perry de Havilland, about a high tech robot dragon, which performs "security" services. One of the commenters asked if this scary beast would eat her AIBO puppy.
I mention the AIBO because, unlike the scary dragon, the AIBO is designed to make friends with its human owners, and especially with children.
Ever since I first heard about the AIBO I was convinced that I was witnessing history fluttering its wings, and in particular the history of education.
I have a prejudice, which researching education issues for this blog is so far only confirming, that computers are changing education not by "changing education" but by changing just about everything in the world except education.
Children are allowed to muck about with computers in their class-rooms, but little now seems to be taught that couldn't have been taught, and probably better, with old-fashioned chalk-and-talk methods, such as they still use in high-powered university departments to explain the complexities of such things as nuclear physics. When children get home, they play games on computers. Lucky children, especially home-schooled children, often get to surf the Internet, and as that gets cheaper, many more will surely do this. But "education" – in the sense of the stuff now done by and in schools - shows little sign of being replaced by computers of anything resembling the sort we are now familiar with.
But I think that when historical hindsight eventually gets applied to now, historians may decide that the moment when these robots showed up – i.e. now - was the moment when all that started to change.
Children love these robots. Okay, not the dragon, but definitely the AIBO dog. And something you love is something you just might be willing to learn from. I can imagine a robot teaching a foreign language to a kid in a way that no current computer could begin to do, simply because the kid likes it, and trusts it, and wants to talk with it, and might be willing to experiment with other languages just for the fun of it. And rich parents will see that this kind of thing works, and will pay the bills for it. Soon, super-professor robots will be available for fifty quid at Dixons.
I know what a lot of people will say once this prospect becomes plainly visible. Spooky! Dangerous! Maybe even: pass some laws against these beasts now!!
Personally I find this prospect extraordinarily interesting, and not at all unapealing. Scary, yes, because there'll surely be big mistakes and misjudgements. But imagine if this kind of thing could be got approximately right. I believe that it will happen. For remember, however difficult it may be for the technies to devise such things, it only needs one bunch of them to crack it for the thing to happen. (Think of all the other "impossible" things that computers have done, and can now do for petty cash.)
The implications for human history are beyond calculation. One obvious one is that for the first time in many generations, we can anticipate, sooner or later, a world in which children will be unambiguously cleverer and better educated than their parents, so palpably that everyone - the children, the parents, everyone - will know it.
TV, when it first hit, created the first dumbed-down generation. All right, not dumbed down, exactly. This generation was – how can I put it politely? – differently knowledgeable. The baby boomers are the people I'm talking about, and they (we) know rock and roll, but not the Roman Empire. And the children of the baby boomers have became even more, er, differently knowledgeable. But the technological successors of the same TVs that taught us to forget about our education will, when the super-intelligent robot teacher pets finally arrive, create a similar cultural discontinuity, but in something resembling the opposite direction.
Blah blah blah. If this was an "essay", I'd waffle on for five more pages. Thank heavens for blogs. All hail the shortened attention span. I don't see that changing back again.
You've spotted the pattern by now. Something (anything - even something as feeble as this) every day. But I've decided to relax on that rule, and make BEdBlog activity definite only on a Monday-to-Friday basis. I may post things at the weekend, but I may not. But I will stick to the every-week-day-in-the-week-rule, even if it involves something desperate like paying Patrick to put some stuff here (while I'm off in Bali taking advantage of the cheap hotels over there just now).
So, maybe next weekend, my uninterrupted posting record is going to snap. Just thought I'd let you know, so that, if nothing materialises next Saturday, say, you don't jump to the conclusion that BEdBlog is a busted flush (whatever that is but it sounds very bad to me). I will remind you all again about this rule next Friday.
Class dismissed.
Buried in among all this from here a week or two ago is me complaining, from a position of sublime Brit-based ignorance about something called the "No Child Left Behind" campaign or initiative or Presidential (Bush jnr. in this case) Directive or program or whatever they call it over there. I say it's politics and I say the hell with it, was my line, going on nothing but the fact that it definitely is politics.
Well now here's someone who sounds as if he actually knows about it, Michael Lopez of Highered Intelligence (expect a properly organised link Real Soon Now blah blah blah), complaining a lot more loudly than me about this thing, which he calls the "No Child Left Behind So Let's All Stay In Place" Act - which tells you something more right away, yes?
Please read what Lopez says, but if you absolutely insist on only taking my word for it, at least read this quote that Lopez got from here:
Perverse incentives work. A law where the consequences mean that Arkansas has zero failing schools and Michigan has 1,500 is bound to have unintended consequences--every state strives to be Arkansas.
Says Lopez:
That is a very. . . poetic way of putting it.
Say I: That's politics. The difference is that when you or I or for that matter Michael Lopez start doing something idiotic, we can stop as soon as we realise that it's idiotic, say sorry, and switch to something non-idiotic in the space of about two days - maybe a couple of weeks if we're in charge of something complicated. But This Thing is now a law. To change a USA version of one of those you either have to wait about four years minimum, or else get the incumbent President of the United States to say very loudly: "I am an idiot." Good luck.
"There are many things the government can't do, many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people. It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people."
- Lord Acton, quoted by Gary M. Galles in a piece about Acton for the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Here's something to cheer up our weekend, from Apple a Day: The Daily Weblog of a first-year schoolteacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This is one of the entries from last Saturday (Nov 9):
Idiocy of the WeekI can't control whether heat or air conditioning comes out of the vents in my classroom (something made readily apparent as I baked last Thursday). That decision isn't made by me, or my principal, or the superintendent, or even anyone in the state of Louisiana. The decision as to whether my kids get air hot or cold is apparently made by someone at a company in Atlanta, Georgia, 525 miles away. (And let me assure you, there aren't a series of thermometers with ethernet connections at my school sending up to date classroom temperature information to the Peach State) Does this seem a little Soviet to anyone else? Would it be too much to give teachers control over a fricking thermostat?
Something tells me you haven't read the word "Soviet" on BEdBlog for the last time, and I don't mean only in connection with the old Soviet Union.
The most Soviet stuff I've heard recently has concerned the lying that afflicts the British state education system about how well it is doing. The statistics of British educational "achievement" are sounding more and more like Soviet steel production figures, and I'm sure it's just the same elsewhere. This used to be called "cheating", and only cheating pupils who were not old enough to know any better did it. If caught they were severely punished. Now cheating afflicts all levels of the British state system, most definitely including the politicians at the top, who routinely lie about exam results, and pressurise those lower down to do likewise. Just recently the disease has spread to include lying about how well the private sector in British education has been doing, only in this case the lies state that they have been doing less well than they have.
But back to the joys of downtown Baton Rouge. Have a read of this, from Wed Nov 6th:
I call the experienced teachers veterans. People use the metaphor of the 'war zone' often when describing inner city schools. I don't think that it's simply metaphor. When I showed up in Baton Rouge for TFA preinduction, a group of us cornered a second-year, and asked him to describe his first year of teaching. He paused, reflected for a moment, and then said, "Well -- I guess it's sort of like going to 'Nam." We all laughed ...then. But as my time here lengthens the parallels become more striking. The Veterans here in the schools, just like soldiers, have had long experience of being treated like mushrooms (i.e. kept in the dark and fed sh*t) by the folks above them. As a result, they rely primarily on each other for support. Here at my school, there's even a tendency to refer to each other by last name only, (making me "Reece," something I hadn't been called since I played ice hockey.) In both situations, what you find is the gallows humor and grim camaraderie of perpetually unpleasant circumstances. I should probably elaborate on all this, but for now I'll just leave it at that.
As will I. No matter what exactly you mean by "education", it shouldn't have to be like this. But I guess that's the Draft for you.
Although, I might not have minded if I'd been taught how to write by this man.
Thanks very much for a link, and for a quote from here and a supporting comment, to Daryl Cobranchi of Homeschool and Other Educ. Stuff, which is definitely going to be a regular read for me. (The "and" is supposed to be a squiggle but Samizdata Blogczar Perry de Havilland says that can cause trouble. I know. You learn something new every day.) Daryl, expect more references from here to you. And thanks for commenting on something else here, and thereby letting me know about this.
And apparently I have Steven Gallagher (who thinks and therefore can't sleep) to thank also. So thanks also to Steven.
Patrick (he's the BEdBlog caretaker), please can you put Homeschool etc. on the "Education friendly blogs" list? The link to the sleepless thinker will have to wait until the big links sort-out that I'll be doing Real Soon Now.
Finally, I'm picking up the threads of this "Education Blog" thing, and have an honest-to-god link from this guy (Steven Chapman) to this guy (Alex Standish of Spiked) to give you. Standish writes about how the environmentalist agenda has taken over the teaching of geography. New Zealand educated (which I didn't know until now) Chapman comments. Make of it what you will.
I'm as and maybe even more inclined to think that one bunch of old-school propagandists is being pushed aside by the next lot. If you set up a machine for compulsory "teaching", even if it is for compulsorily teaching children to think for themselves, don't be amazed if even nastier zombies steal it and do some more serious damage with it. Not sure. Discuss.
One thing I'm a bit more sure of is that turning the clock back is a hell of a lot harder than defending the existing settings, and that the only way to chase out environmental propagandising may be to banish propagandising of any kind. Then, if you want old fashioned geography like-we-used-to-have-in-the-good-old-days-in-New-Zealand, do what they do with a new soap powder: argue for it, sell it, push it, plug it, but don't compel anyone to buy it if they don't want to.
Do what I'm doing here, in other words.
Once again I typed "Education" into google, and what was hit number one? That's right. Professor Christopher Colclough of UNESCO. I told you this stuff wouldn't go away.
LONDON: Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and India, home to 61 per cent of world's illiterate's adults, will not be able to achieve 'Education For All' (EFA) by 2015 unless special efforts are made, said a Global Monitoring Report here on Wednesday.The 2002 "Education For All Global Monitoring Report: Is the World on Track" was launched at a press conference by Prof. Christopher Colclough, an eminent British education expert at UN Information Centre here today. It is prepared by an independent, international team based at UNESCO in Paris as part of the follow-up to the Dakar Forum and is funded jointly by UNESCO, unilateral and bilateral agencies.
Prof. Christopher Colcl