From here, I went to here, and then to here.
Very interesting. The UK only just misses out on a medal. But I think the interesting thing is what an incredibly close race it is. This suggests to me that something else is involved here besides government policy, which, if it mattered a lot, you would expect to cause things to vary much more according to mad political whims, or maybe differing national psychology or political development. (See for instance the top end of the murder rate page.)
Could it be that people stay at school as long as they can afford to, and as long as they want to, and that the government merely hovers around the outside of it all, fussing? Surely not.
And a great site in general.
Commenting on this, Charles Copeland links to this webpage (with no apparent connection to anything else I could find anywhere) about Media Studies, which offers an alternative view of the benefits of higher education.
For some reason the original posting saying the above is misbehaving, so I've done it again and will delete the first one, if I can.
The comments at the Samizdata posting are piling up.
Yes, the old posting is now gone. I wanted to add the bit about comments piling up, and couldn't get into it, but I seem to be able to revise this posting. I don't know what caused this, but it seems now to have stopped.
This, the top story (about anything) at the Telegraph site today, is interesting:
Children are starting school less well prepared than ever because parents are failing to raise their youngsters properly, according to the Government's Chief Inspector of Schools.In an interview with The Telegraph, David Bell, the head of Ofsted, said that too many children were receiving a "disrupted and dishevelled" upbringing. As a result the verbal and behavioural skills of the nation's five-year-olds were at an all-time low, causing severe difficulties for schools.
Mr Bell said that one of the key causes was the failure of parents to impose proper discipline at home, which led to poor behaviour in class.
Another serious concern was the tendency to sit children in front of the television, rather than talking and playing with them. This meant that many were unable to speak properly when they started school.
"It is difficult to get hard statistical evidence on what is happening across the country," said Mr Bell, "but if you talk to a lot of primary head teachers, as I do, they will say that youngsters appear less well prepared for school than they have ever been before."For many young people school is the most stable part of what can be quite disrupted and dishevelled lives. This should worry us because if children don't all start at broadly the same point, we should not be surprised if the gap widens as they go through the education system."
I have the feeling that the word "dishevelled" is going to get quoted a lot.
One of the things I'm learning about blogging is: if all you have to say about an article is that it is interesting, then leave it at that. Don't comment just for the sake of it, or you're liable to end up with a rather unwieldy posting consisting of something else stitched onto the original quote, which not many will want to plough through.
So: that (the quote above, before the irrelevant essay bit) is interesting.
I just did a long piece for here, and then realised it would also do for Samizdata. And since Samizdata is Clapham Junction to this place's Piddlebury Halt, I stuck it there, and then found myself adding a rant about how the government should get right out of higher education, the way you do. The top two thirds is about a rather interesting out-of-the-usual-boxes article by Mo Mowlam in yesterday's Independent.
Something similar happened with that stuff about that poor schoolboy who committed suicide. Only that time, I'd done the piece here before realising that Samizdata should be told about the story too.
The specialist blog feeds the generalist blog.
I did a posting about the interface between transport and sport (bear with me), provoked by Patrick Crozier giving a talk about Formula One motor racing earlier this evening, at my home.
And a commenter linked to this.
This story from the New York Daily News illustrates the dilemmas of the worldwide debate about exam standards very nicely:
An independent panel appointed to look into why an alarming number of high school kids bombed out on the June Math A Regents Exam has found the statewide test was too hard.So the scores will be bumped up so that many of those who failed will get passing grades.
"In short, students in June 2003 were held to a higher standard than their counterparts a year earlier," the commission of math experts said in its report.
But the panel, appointed by state Education Commissioner Richard Mills, also found that teachers messed up by trying to anticipate subject matter.
"The teachers were teaching to the test," said Assemblyman Steve Sanders (D-Manhattan), chairman of the Education Committee. "The problem was, they guessed wrong."
The panel found that teachers, believing the test would be heavy on trigonometry, drilled students on their sines and cosines. But the test didn't have a single trig problem, the report said.
I'm starting to have heretical thoughts about exams, which can be summarised by me saying that I think this "panel" may well have done the right thing.
After all, the purpose of exams is to arrange people in order of merit. It must make distinctions. If they all get A*, which is apparently what is happening with children in England doing their A levels just now, the result is that the Universities don't know who's the best, so they interview them all, and go by how eloquently they talk or how politely they suck up to the interviewers. (I read that point made better by someone else recently, but I've lost the link. Sorry.) And if they all get F– you get the same kind of effect. So the logical thing might very well be to do what these people have in effect done, which is: first mark all the papers, and then decide which numbers get you into which grade.
The obvious objection to this procedure is that it fails to make any distinction between this year and last year and next year, or this decade and last decade and next decade. If the standards lurch around from year to year, who is to say whether this fifteen year old is any brighter than that seventeen year old?
Okay, cards on the table, I don't know the answer any more (I suggest) than you do. I don't see how you can have an exam system which separates the smartness of the examinees from the skill with which they were prepared for their exams by the teachers. After all, presumably, some teachers guessed right about what was going to be in these particular exams, and as a result, their pupils will presumably get a higher grade than they "deserve". Or, more simply, some pupils were relatively lucky in having teachers who did not "teach to the test" (to quote Assemblyman Sanders' words). They too presumably did rather better than rivals who actually "deserved" to do as well as they did.
On the other hand, pupils who have been better taught, are pupils you'd rather have at your university, regardless of how much worse they might have done with worse teaching, or how much better other pupils might have done with better teaching.
Okay I give up. I've failed. Micklethwait: F–.
UPDATE: According to the bit at the end of this I think it must have been GCSEs rather than A Levels where they got all those A*s. F––.
FURTHER UPDATE: ... and what is being said about A levels is that too many people are getting A, so could they please introduce A*s for those also. See this.
Catherine Maskell writes in the latest Spectator about cleaning up after Warwick University students. It is not nice. Concluding paragraph:
Having two brothers, and an ex-boyfriend whose sick I was more familiar with than he was himself, I must admit that it wasn’t a complete surprise to see how utterly and conveniently useless the average British male under 25 is. The posh and privately educated ones are just exaggerated, more offensive versions of their lower-class counterparts. What they want, more than anything else, is a mother-servant. Someone they can whinge to even as they clear up after them. And nobody, not even his mother, knows this better than the average British cleaner.
I'm sure I was exactly this terrible. Although I don't remember combining being a Marxist with maltreating any cleaners, the way some of Ms. Maskell's tormentors do, apparently.
The Labour government is right. The least they could do is pay for some of this coddling. And the Conservatives are wrong. That's because it's their children and the children of their voters who ought to be doing the paying.
The foreigners, who do pay, behave far better, she says.
The following article (headline: "Children of few words") appeared in today's Daily Telegraph, but only in paper form. Its author, Jennifer Chew, is a leading contributor to the work of the Reading Reform Foundation and a vigorous promoter of the Synthetic Phonics method for teaching literacy. I have simply scanned in this article, which is quite short, in its entirety. I hope no one objects.
The results of this year's reading test for seven-year-olds should be of interest to anyone concerned, about education.
Reading is the foundation for all later educational attainment, and a good start in infant school is vital. Reading attainment at seven has been shown to be one of the best predictors of GCSE performance.
Unfortunately, the results are not published in a form that makes their significance easy to grasp. The "expected level" is Level 2, subdivided into 2A, 2B and 2C.
This year, 84 per cent of seven-year-olds reached Level 2C or above – not bad, one might think. What is often not realised, however, is that only Level 2B and above represents an adequate standard. Those who reach only Level 2C have little chance of reaching Level 4 – the expected level – at 11 years old, or of performing adequately at GCSE.
This year, only 69 per cent reached Level 2B or above, which means that nearly a third of seven-year-olds – almost 200,000 children – will probably not read well enough at 11 to cope with the secondary- school curriculum.
The reading test is a comprehension test based on fiction and non-fiction. passages. Children must read each piece of text and answer questions about it.
About half of the 30 questions are multiple choice and the rest require an answer in the form of a word, phrase or sentence. Comprehension involves reading the words accurately and making sense of them. So we need to know whether the problem is with word-reading or making sense of them or both.
However, the test does not make this distinction and so does not tell us what teachers should focus on to get more children to Level 2B. Other tests, though, show that it is often word-reading that is weak in Level 2C children. Their comprehension is poor because they cannot read enough of the words accurately.
If these children were genuinely incapable of better word-reading, we would be stuck with the current stagnant standards. But there is a type of teaching – true Phonics – that can greatly improve word-reading and so remove this barrier to comprehension.
With this method, some infant schools are already getting 88 per cent or more of their children to Level 2B. The children are not super-intelligent, but are taught letter-sound correspondences at a much faster pace than is prescribed by the national literacy strategy.
They are taught to use this knowledge to read all words, apart from a few less regular ones that are explicitly taught.
In spite of claims to the contrary, the national literacy strategy does not present letter-sound knowledge as the first strategy children should be taught to use in word-reading. Rather, letter-sound knowledge comes into play after words have been identified: the teacher identifies words and the children then break them down and build them up again, or the children attempt to identify words by sight or from contextual and pictorial clues and then check a letter or two (usually not all letters) to see if they are right. Research and common sense suggest that this is less effective than true phonics.
In one school, the first children to be started off with true phonics, six years ago, have just taken the tests for 11-year-olds. Eighty-nine per cent of them reached the expected Level 4 in English as against the national figure of 74 per cent.
Most worrying of all is the 18 per cent of seven-year-olds who fail to reach even Level 2C. After nearly three years in school, these children are virtually unable to read, making up the "long tail of underachievement" that is a. recurring feature of British performance in international comparisons.
In schools that teach true phonics, the proportion failing to reach 2C is seldom more than three per cent. If all infant schools used this approach, the "long tail" would all but disappear. So, too, would the underachievement of boys, which currently causes concern: boys perform at least as well as girls when using true phonics.
Better infant-school teaching could largely solve literacy problems – and many wider education problems – throughout the school system. The evidence has been repeatedly presented to the policy-makers, but little changes.
And, as if to make my point for me, again, about how some schools are, for some children, an absolute joy, here's another Samizdata commenter, "Monsyne Dragon":
From my experiences as a kid, I know EXACTLY how this poor kid felt. I also was very mature for my age, from day one. My parents called me the "35-year old midget" . (U.S.) Public school was hell. Utter hell. I ALSO had the good fortune of going to a private school for two years. It was a school specifically for very talented and/or very high IQ kids. About 80% of the students there were "over-mature" There were NO troubles with socialization there. The kids weren't isolated, and there was none of the unending harassment of the public schools. The kids there weren't trying to be over-adult in compensation for anything, they were just being themselves, and when put together with others of the same level of maturity, they were FINE. Kids who had been doing HORRIBLY grade-wise (including me) got top grades. Some of the kids there had been getting violent out of frustration at public school previously. There was none of that at the private school.The public schools' political agenda simply won't let them recognize several basic facts:
1) People mature at different rates, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
2) For kids, being in a large group consisting of exclusively the same physical age as themselves is UNNATURAL, and not very good for their development (my private school divided kids into groups by broad age-ranges. kids 4-5 years apart were in the same group)
"Modern" public schools foster a "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere that does harm to many and may lead some to violence, either against themselves, as in this case, or against others.
Every now and again, when you ramble on about education, you say something or talk about something which yanks the argument away from the arid vacuities of national statistics to the inescapable truths of individual experience. This Guardian piece, and my various links and reactions to it, have had this effect, although mostly at Samizdata rather than here.
I really recommend these Samizdata comments. Monsyne Dragon isn't the only one showing a few of his educational wounds to illustrate more general things. There are others, all with important points to make that are worth attending to, including the point that I probably (at Samizdata) went way over the top in blaming the wretched mother as much as I did. It's hard not to blame somebody in situations like this. But, as "Eric Blair" says (I'm guessing that inverted commas are once again in order):
I'm not sure I'd blame the mother too much. I know what it was like to be bullied, and the 'rents were the last ones I would have told.I do blame the teachers. They knew I was being bullied, and did nothing about it. Worse, they tried to tell me I was the problem. Stupid shits. I can't believe how angry this is making me thinking about it after 30 years.
God, what an ugly thing it is.
Amelia asked this:
Where was the Dad during all this?
Indeed. It all rather reminds me of this movie, in which Hugh Grant filled in for Dad.
I'm guessing Monsyne Dragon had a Dad paying attention to his circumstances, if only to pay for the nice school. Yes, it would seem so. He says "my parents".
After doing the piece below on the Thomas Thompson case, I rehashed it for Samizdata, because I thought it deserved … to be rehashed for Samizdata. The comments are now beginning to accumulate there, one of them from Rob Fisher, who says:
I'm reminded of an essay by Paul Graham about school society. It's ostensibly about why smarter than average kids are unpopular at school, but it touches upon some deeper truths about what school is really like. I hope I'm not quoting too much, but it seems relevant.
It does indeed. Below I reproduce the bits that Rob picked out:
They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.
Notice that Graham doesn't say that "in the abstract people in poorer countries are monstrously cruel to one another". He merely notes that cruelty happens, without claiming that the people being cruel are cruel by their inherent nature. Yet he makes that exact claim about children. I think he's flat wrong, and that children, like adults, are nice or nasty depending on the pressures they face. A few are truly evil, even in a nice world. A few are saints, even in a nasty world. Most children, like most adults, go either way, depending.
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
That's certainly true. But then comes this:
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids all locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
I bloody well do have a "problem with this". I think that prisons are inherently savage places. I think the way to handle the disasters of kids "running around loose" would be to deal with each disaster case by case, as adult "disasters" are dealt with, rather than by imprisoning all children, even if they can quite see the point of not being allowed to run around loose. Besides which: what happens during the school holidays. Some adults have their work cut out, but not all.
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.
But if you tell children quite clearly that they are in prison, some of them are going to be all the keener to escape, and if you stop them, then where does that leave any plan for a kinder, gentler prison?
It seems to me that any curriculum, no matter what combination of activities it contains, will be meaningless and stultifying to many children. The idea that you can solve the problem of a compulsory curriculum by having a different compulsory curriculum is to concentrate on tinkering with the wrong half of that phrase. (The trouble with "progressive" education is that it grants the child every freedom imaginable, except the freedom to go somewhere else if the child thinks it's horrible or a waste of time. Freedom must include the freedom to leave.)
To make a more general point, many regular readers of this blog may be puzzled by the way I oscillate between arguing for children's liberation, as in this post, and quite polite discussions of this or that school or teaching method, often of a highly disciplined and "structured" sort, for example as done in the British Army, or as might be involved in them being sent away to a school in Romania. The reason is simple. I believe in freedom for children. And I believe in good teaching, which can most definitely involve highly structured teaching. Freedom means you can leave. It doesn't mean that you can tyrannise your teacher in his classroom. Some kids sent to Romania might be imprisoned there, if they want out but aren't allowed out. But the lucky ones would only go, and then go back, back if they liked it and felt they were getting good things from it, despite the inevitable downsides of one sort or another.
Practically any half-decent teacher is welcomed by some children, and is simultaneously experienced as a tyrant by other children who are forced to submit to that teacher against their will. In other words, there is actually, now, quite a lot of freedom for many children. Many children are living pretty much the life they want, given the choices they now have, which explains why quite a lot of officially compulsory schools are actually quite nice places, instead of being run by the nastiest psychos in them. (In particular, many children would surely be horrified if obliged to stay at home and be mucked about by their parents. Freedom and home schooling are absolutely not the same thing, however large the overlap may often be.) Hence (a) my unswerving belief in freedom for children, combined with (b) my eagerness to discuss sympathetically the work of many apparently "compulsory" teachers and teaching systems now. It may seem a contradiction, but from where I sit, it's not.
Graham, it seems to me, is honest enough to see what many schools really are and what many schools really do, but he draws back from the conclusion that, it seems to me, ought to follow. They are (for many children) prisons. And they ought not to be (for any children).
This is a fascinating and thoroughly depressing article, about a boy who killed himself because he was so dreadfully unhappy at school.
Sandra Thompson was used to her son's weekend rhythm - the immediate relaxation and laughter of Friday afternoons, the dark mood that descended every Sunday as another week loomed. "With the first mention of school, Thomas must have had the same thoughts - are they going to be at the bus stop, are they going to get me today, do I have enough money on me to cover what they take?
Simply, he should have got out of that place at once, and pursued his very definite interests in living a more adult life, and done it in the adult way to which he was clearly suited.
There were reasons for that singling out, numerous and at the same time insufficient. Thomas was a highly articulate child, well-spoken, and without the usual local slur. He was overweight. He was easier with adults than children, and more confident around girls than lads. He preferred the Human League to Eminem. And because of this he was bullied, relentlessly. And because of that, on the afternoon of July 2, he took an overdose of painkillers and died later that day. He was 11 years old.
It's seldom you come across a story where the contrast between what a child was doing and what that child ought to have been doing is so screamingly obvious.
I would like to think that this article reflects a deeper disenchantment with the whole demented idea of compulsory education itself, among the Guardian-article-writing classes.
Please go and read the whole thing.
Rootling around at the education section of the Telegraph, I came across this, which is a database of facts, experiences, opinions, and I dare say, also fictions about Britain's universities.
I went to Aberdeen, because it is top of the list, then went to comments, because that sounded like it might actually tell us something, and then chose this comment, because it sounded juicy, submitted by that prolific fellow "anonymous":
my brother did psychology at aberdeen (starting in 2001) and hated it so much he left after a year. tho ppl were great and he made some great friends the course was v bad. he's quite a good student but no nerd at all and loves going out but he was really complaining about lack of work and assignments and lack of quality. his girlfriend started psychology at marburg uni (in Germany) at the same time, and what she did was way ahead of his course. i guess if u like the town, can cope with weather and the weird accent and dont happen to have applied for psychology u should go there. apart from that ...
I wonder if anonymous's brother learned about capital letters during his year at Aberdeen? Maybe he also had a (psychological?) problem with them?
Anyway, my point is, if you're choosing a university, or helping someone else to choose one, and if you are the sort who likes biased gossip to get the feel of a place (I definitely am), as well as broader and more statistical and respectable stuff, this looks like a very useful resource.
I wish I'd been able to wander around something like this when I was at school.
Here is a story which illustrates the difference.
The first private company to take over the running of an entire education authority is to be fined yet again for failing to meet its targets for improving GCSE and national test results.CEA@Islington will lose half of the £908,480 fee that it was due to receive for overseeing Islington Council's schools this year, despite achieving its best ever GCSE grades.
Provisional GCSE results released by the north London borough yesterday show that 37.5 per cent of its pupils achieved at least five top A* to C grades, compared to 32.9 per cent last year. However, it failed to reach the target of 39 per cent, the figure agreed when the company won the Islington contract three years ago. The figures compare with a national average of 51.6 per cent last summer. The latest fine means that the company has been penalised three years running.
Both the council and CEA@Islington welcomed the rise in results, but recognised that more needed to be done.
CEA@Islington may in some sense be a private sector enterprise, but it is not operating in the private sector. It has one customer: the local authority. And it would appear that it has only one definition of results, namely exam success. In the private sector it would have lots of customers, and they would decided, individually, in accordance with their many and various ideas of what educational quality consisted of, whether they thought CEA@Islington was doing a good job for them. The aggregate of those decisions would determine CEA@Islingon's income.
This, on the other hand, is just an operation in churning the public sector up, and getting the people who work in it to accept payment by "results", instead of just salaries for showing up, which may be a good idea, but which may not (see above). In this story shows, the process of arguing that the contract between CEA@Islington and Islington Council should not be stuck to in the future has already begun. ("… despite achieving its best ever GCSE grades"). When the time comes for contract renewal, there will be a lapse back to public sector business as usual. Potential rivals will be wary of plunging into such a difficult and hazardous "market". This time the "contractor" will have a far better idea of what it can expect to achieve, and thus what to demand in its wage negotiations. Because wage negotiations is what it will be, with the company's management merely replacing the union as the negotiator. Very soon the company will become a mere part of the problem it was originally hired to solve.
When an apparently dramatic change is made in the public sector, the initial results as often quite good, but then they lapse back towards mediocrity again, when the underlying interests of the parties involved assert themselves.
In contrast, a move towards a genuinely free market often starts with chaos, only gradually followed by real and continuing improvement.
Which is just one more reason why privatising things, for real, can be so very difficult. After all, chaos can erupt in the public sector for all kinds of reasons, and how do you know that this chaos is good chaos, chaos with a future, or just chaos chaos?
Have a nice week.
I am utterly confused about whether standards (whatever exactly they are) in British schools are going down, or whether improved primary school teaching has actually improved matters somewhat in recent years. So I smiled quite a lot at this letter in yesterday's Guardian, from Catherine Wykes:
After years of falling exam standards, shouldn't we be celebrating this year's rise in standards as evidenced by the drop in GCSE passes?
Maybe so.
More examination angst.
Six Brazilians have been turned away by immigration officials at Heathrow Airport after failing a quiz about the Beatles.The group said they were on their way to Liverpool's Mathew Street Festival this weekend, which celebrates the lives of the Fab Four.
Reports say immigration officials refused to let them into the UK when they failed to answer basic questions about the band.
They apparently did not know who Yoko Ono was and thought Ringo Starr was dead.
Organiser of this weekend's festival Bill Heckle, from Cavern City Tours, told the Daily Post: "Portuguese-speaking immigration officials asked them simple questions about the Beatles, such as how many of them are still alive and what songs could they name?"
Well, okay. The Home Office attitude is that these bloody foreigners will try anything to weedle their way in Britain, and its their job to frustrate their dastardly tricks with dastardly tricks of their own.
But a related question is more serious. Would it make sense, as I believe David Blunkett has suggested recently, that would be new British citizens should have to pass exams, in such subjects as English, British politics, British history? And what kinds of entrance exams do they have in other countries?
Success for a home boy:
Arran Fernandez surprised educationalists two years ago by passing a GCSE aged five. Yesterday, he was celebrating again after becoming the youngest person to get an A* grade in the exam.The Surrey schoolboy was seven when he took the higher-tier GCSE maths paper and topped this GCSE roll-call of young achievers after scoring the highest possible grade.
Like 12-year-old Jonathan Prior, who last week became the youngest person to pass an A-level this year, Arran, now eight, does not attend school but is taught at home by his father, Neil Fernandez.
Arran said: "I'm very proud of myself and so are my family and friends."
But he added that he planned to take a break from exams and would not move straight on to A-levels in 2004. "I study English and French and also I'm studying geography and astronomy," he said. "Daddy doesn't think I should go to school. We've done topics that aren't in the syllabus, such as complex numbers and groups."
Sounds like Daddy, who sounds like an interesting guy, has a point. And note the telling little detail "and friends". Home schooled children are often accused of not being able to make those.
Incidentally, school is not the only arena to display ranking slippage. Do you think that, like US generals, A grades at GCSE will eventually come in five different versions above the basic A, in the form of one to five star A grades?
David Carr of Samizdata also comments on this story, but he apparently got in a muddle about the difference between A (which anyone with two brain cells to rub together can get in their sleep) and A* (which requires over a dozen brain cells and full wakefulness). But, as is usual at Samizdata, there are some interesting comments.
Keeping up with Alice, who is now back from her camping trip, took me here, and to this article by Sarah Fitz-Claridge, entitled The Education of Karl Popper.
In about 1917, Popper came to a clear realisation about school: "... we were wasting our time shockingly, even though our teachers were well-educated and tried hard to make the schools the best in the world. That much of their teaching was boring in the extreme – hours and hours of hopeless torture – was not new to me. (They immunised me: never since have I suffered from boredom. In school one was liable to be found out if one thought of something unconnected with the lesson: one was compelled to attend. Later on, when a lecturer was boring, one could entertain oneself with one's own thoughts.)" On returning to school after an illness of over two months Popper was shocked to find that his class had hardly made any progress, so, at the age of sixteen, he decided to leave school. He enrolled at the University of Vienna, where the cost of enrolling was nominal and every student could attend any lecture course. "Few of us thought seriously of careers – there were none ... We studied not for a career but for the sake of studying. We studied; and we discussed politics."At university Popper initially attended lectures in many different subjects, but he soon dropped all subjects other than maths and theoretical physics. He thought that in mathematics he would learn something about standards of truth. He had no ambition to become a mathematician, and says: "If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations."
I think that one of the best ways to write about education is to write about the educational experiences and opinions of people who are deservedly famous, or for that matter deservedly infamous.
I've had a pre-occupying day, so I've let Sarah Fitz-Claridge do most of my thinking and writing along these lines today. It's a formula I expect to use again many times in the future, and not necessarily with writings already available on the internet in their entirety. Linking to aready internetted stuff is useful, but it is also faintly parasitical. All I've really said here is: have a read of this. But that is something.
Category: Education theory • Higher education • Maths
[1]
[0]
More Australian sadness:
Children in Melbourne have been banned from dressing up as Batman, Superman and the Incredible Hulk because schools say the action hero costumes encourage aggressive behaviour.
This means that in twenty years time, our cricketers have a chance. David Carr of Samizdata spotted this story, and has a laugh about it.
This is rather sad:
SCHOOL students are being deprived of the chance to perform popular musicals and plays because of sky-rocketing performance copyright fees being commanded by licensing corporations.Performance copyright laws in Australia make few allowances for schools, forcing them to pay up to $10,000 in fees for performances they seldom profit from.
As a result, many schools are being forced to cancel plans to stage popular musical productions.
Critics claim the exorbitant copyright fees are placing the creative development of students who are striving for careers in the performing arts at risk.Roseville College music director John Barnes said the school no longer staged big musicals. A performance to farewell a principal was nearly ruined because the school couldn't afford to pay thousands to stage a section of My Fair Lady.
Yes, well, I don't know what that signifies exactly or what if anything ought to be done about it all, but it makes a change from the usual fare here, of homeschooling and school schooling of the more usual sort. Maybe there's some kind of gay angle? Anyway, if you want to read all of it, all of it is here.
I put a piece about "Connections Direct" here, and I put a piece about it at White Rose. And at White Rose, Stephen Hodgson commented thus:
Brian, I am unfortunate to have had first hand experience dealing with "Connexions" because my school (a combined secondary school and sixth form college of around 1,400 students aged between 11 and 18) handed over my personal details to this organisation without my consent: They passed on my name, date of birth, home address, telephone number and goodness knows what other information they held on me to Connexions in exchange for £1. (Connexions have subsequently sent me a vast amount of junk mail including a small booklet which explained that, "Connexions are here to offer you advice on important life-changing decisions - like starting an apprenticeship, getting a job or having a makeover" and I also received a phonecall from an idiotic bureaucrat who insisted that I hand over my personal information for the sake of allowing them to "monitor the quality of service" or some such rubbish.)
At White Rose I described this most peculiar enterprise as "creepy", and it was certainly a creepy for Stephen. But I think that in order to set up something like this, the people who set it in motion had to be the sort who wouldn't understand such language to describe all the help they are providing.and all those "connexions" they are making.
I remember watching the New Labour project assemble itself in the late eighties and the early nineties, and these people were immensely impressed by capitalism, by all the fun you could have shopping, and by such things as credit cards and those supermarket cards, then in their early stages. My guess is that the sort of people who are involved with an outfit called Demos, or at any rate people in the general Demos milieu, had a hand in this "Connexions" nonsense, and that they imagined that what they were doing was not pestering people and making creeps and jackasses of themselves, but rather "reinventing government" and "learning from the retail revolution" blah blah blah.
But somehow, I didn't expect to be writing about nonsense like this here. Nonsense yes, in abundance. But not this particular nonsense.
Follow the rumour from her, to him, to this:
I'm sick of all this whining following good A-level results about what second-rate subjects students choose. What did the older generation learn with their supposedly breathtaking mastery of long division etc? They learnt to attack and exploit the poor all over the world, abandon the vulnerable of their own society, and generally not give a damn about anything apart from the statistics of "progress".
Maybe with our more humanities-based curriculum, with its emphasis on finding something for everyone, we might learn that numbers are to serve people, and not the other way around.
Says Peter Briffa:
There's one for the root causes brigade: long division turns you into a rampaging capitalist.
If only it were that easy.
Thank you to the Chris Tame and the Libertarian Alliance Forum for the link to this HLSDA article about homeschooling in Taiwan:
Homeschool Freedom Grows in TaiwanDr. Shou-kong Fan, President of Mu-Jen Chinese Christian Home Educators Association (skfan@seed.net.tw), recently reported to HSLDA that homeschoolers in Taiwan continue to enjoy freedom in educating their children. He feels that the Taiwanese government has been favorable toward homeschooling families because of the commitment of the homeschool movement to work with the government in a peaceable and respectful fashion. He also reports that the media has given homeschooling positive coverage, both because of the academic and social success of the children, as well as the additional time homeschooling parents are able to spend with their children.
A father was recently denied his right to homeschool because of his lack of higher education. Fortunately, this denial was reversed after the Chinese Christian Home Educators Association sent a prayer alert throughout the island. Taiwanese homeschoolers have expressed thanks to the pioneer homeschooling families in the United States who have successfully homeschooled their children. Statistics from the U.S. have enabled the Taiwan homeschoolers to deal with the government and convince officials of the value of homeschooling.
One of the greatest needs facing homeschoolers in Taiwan is the need for higher education opportunities. Because the homeschool movement in Taiwan is relatively young, few homeschool graduates have sought admission to Taiwan's colleges. As a result, most higher education institutions have not developed policies that are favorable to homeschoolers. Most homeschool graduates are then forced to seek admission to a college in the U.S. or some other country that is more favorable to homeschoolers.
Please pray for Taiwan homeschoolers as they continue to expand public and legal recognition of homeschooling.
Amen.
I don't know if it's education, but it's fun. The site calls it snowflakes, but I think they mostly look more like paper table mats. This is a kind of internetted version of what people complain about children doing in primary schools instead of having the three Rs pounded into them.
Where would the world be without Professor Dave Barry?
Category: Learning by doing • Primary schools • The Internet
[0]
[0]
On the ITV news this evening there was an item about an Indian family in Britain who, disgusted by the educational options offered to them in London, were sending their child to a school back in India.
I believe that in the years to come, many more British children will be educated overseas, especially in Eastern Europe.
A friend of mine, born and educated in Eastern Europe and now living in France, even toyed with the idea of starting just such a school, in her native Romania. She herself was actually in no position to run such a school, and in any case probably lacked the temperament for such a job, but there was nothing wrong with the basic idea. Life in Romania is cheap, compared to life in Britain, as are teachers, but the teachers are very good. Schooling in Romania is only now beginning its descent into the age of television, computer games and violence against teachers. It could have worked. In other hands, I think it will.
The catalyst for all this will be the arrival in Britain of large numbers of legal, well educated immigrants from Eastern Europe, courtesy of the EU. Many of these will be recruited to work in Britain as teachers. But they will have a nasty shock at how difficult teaching in Britain has now become. However, the idea that they might be able to contribute to the education of British children will now be firmly in their minds, as will the low level of education here. Eastern Europeans are frequently shocked at the low quality of individual people in the west, in such sharp contrast to the high quality of so much of the mere stuff that is made here. So they mostly don't now see this opportunity. But once they get here, they will. So, some of them will go back home again and get it organised, while others remain here to do the selling job.
Well, we'll see. I'm not the entrepeneurial type myself, so this could be nonsense. But as of now, I can't imagine why.
No links because I thought of this myself. But if anyone can suggest any ...
I recommend that you read The Ratchet by Natalie Solent. All of it. It's about the many subtle ways in which anti-discrimination laws harm those they are intended to help.
There is a lot about education in the piece, and it once again illustrates that how well people do in their education, and how the world of education in general conducts itself, is profoundly influenced by forces at work in the wider society, in this case legal forces, which in their turn give rise to subtler social forces.
Let's start off with the observation that black school leavers are less qualified than their white counterparts. (It does not affect my argument whether this is through the racism of their teachers or their own bad behaviour.) By insisting that they will not be openly penalised for this in the job market, the anti-discrimination laws ensure there is less of an incentive to study. The problem never gets solved. It just gets papered over. Although the rising generation may never explicitly make the calculation "I don't have to work so hard because I'm black," that is the message that will filter down through the millions of little allusions, jokes, observations and examples that make up each individual life experience.And of course, many of them do explicitly make that calculation. They don't work and mock their classmates who do. It has its inevitable result: blacks really are, on average, less well educated than whites. Prejudices come true.
As I say, you really should read the whole thing.
I have friends who fear that the blogosphere is inevitably the triviasphere. This kind of piece is proof that it need not be so.
I just caught a TV advert for something called Connexions Direct. I went to the website the advert was plugging and explored.
Connexions Direct can help you with information and advice on issues relating to health, housing, relationships with family and friends, your career and learning options, money, as well as letting you know about activities you can get involved in.
I dug further.
Finding someone to talk to.Connexions Direct Advisers are here to listen to your relationship problems and can also help you to find support in your area. You can contact us via email, text, phone or webchat or pop into your local office. Look in the Connexions Service section for details of where your local office is.
My immediate reaction is that anything with a website that ends with .gov.uk has no damn business arranging relationship counselling. (I've picked out the creepiest bit for the title of this posting.)
My next reaction is that, what with the .gov.uk thing at the end of it, it will cost a lot and achieve very little.
And my next is that insofar as it is a good idea, the effect of anything ending in .gov.uk, with its potentially vast budget no matter how little return it may be getting, is liable to crowd out any voluntary initiatives offering similar stuff.
And my final reaction is that maybe White Rose, the website that deals with government snooping and suchlike, might also be interested. You can see how the email list of such an operation might be quite appealing to a snoopy sort of government. Maybe the advice will, as promised, be confidential, but the fact that it was solicited might not be quite so, so to speak. And what are we to make of this, from their Privacy Policy?
If you register to receive updates your information will be held on a secure server and the data will not be shared with any organisations outside Government.
Whereas organisations inside Government can fish at will?
It will be used only to provide you with e-mail updates on the topics you have requested or postal information if you request that service. If you respond online to a consultation exercise your data will only be used to facilitate the analysis of responses.
Hm.
Does anyone out there know anything about this operation?
Here's a story about the progress of homeschooling in the USA:
Cassandra Stevenson isn't old enough to drive or vote, but she's already a college graduate. Five years ago Cassandra, now 15, entered her freshman year at Danbury's Western Connecticut State University before most of her contemporaries had hit middle school.She and her older sister, Samantha, who at 19 has a master's degree in astrophysics from Wesleyan University in Middletown, never went to high school -- or elementary school for that matter. Like a small but growing number of Connecticut youngsters, they were homeschooled.
Masters degree in astrophysics. Propaganda that potent just can't be bought. No wonder homeschooling is spreading.
Cassandra attributes her academic achievements to the home instruction her mother, Deborah Stevenson, provided around the family dining room table."Homeschooling is more like college than a public or a private school is," said Cassandra, who lives with her mother in Southbury. "You learn what you want to learn and what you need to learn. The curriculum is fitted to you."
Yes that seems such a simple idea. I'm surprised more people don't learn things that way.
While off-the-charts success stories like Cassandra and Samantha's are relatively rare, a National Home Education Research Institute study showed that the majority of home-educated children score at or above the 80th percentile on statewide standardized tests.Such statistics may account for why the number of home-educated children in Connecticut has increased six-fold since 1990. Despite such gains, only about 2,100 of the state's about 630,000 school-age children are being educated at home, according to data provided by the state Department of Education. About 250 Fairfield County youngsters are homeschooled, the state Department of Education's Student Census Report shows.
I like it when someone else can do educational numbers for me.
The statewide increase is part of a larger national trend, said William Lloyd, a researcher for the home education institute who estimates that last year about 2.1 million children were homeschooled – up from 500,000 in 1990."It used to be homeschoolers were thought to be earth mothers in California or Oregon," Lloyd said. "Now it's seen as a mainstream thing."
That's the key line in this story for me. A "mainstream thing".
What all of the above means is that in the short run, homeschooling is going to grow and grow, to the point where homeschoolers will exist in such numbers that their abolition, or even their excessive harrassment, will become a political impossibility. And if there are comments saying I'm wrong about that, it will be because this point has already been reached.
But then another question will kick in. For as long as homeschooling is done by mums like the mum of Cassandra and Samantha, it's pretty much bound to do really well. That at any rate will the retrospective put-down from the critics. But what if Mrs Typical Homeschooler starts to be Joanne Schmo rather than Alberta Einstein? How well will it work then?
I'll place my bet now. I think homeschooling will continue to outperform the state and even private school alternatives by any measures you care to dream up, provided the comparisons they make are half way fair.
After all, being well educated means learning how to find out about things that your teachers have no idea about. I reckon Joanne Scho might still crank out a few astrophysicists.
Of all the education news stories of the last day or two, this one struck me as the most interesting:
It is a shadow that hangs over the thousands of young men who aspire to earning a living from their favourite pursuit, playing football: What if they fail to make the grade?As the multi-millionaire players of the country's best teams prepare to kick off another lucrative season, the pain of coming to terms with the dashing of dreams can be especially hard for those forced to give up the game through injury or because they have been released by their clubs.
Today, instead of finalising their pre-season training, up to 80 would-be players will be visiting a jobs fair at Keele University, the first of its kind organised by the FA Premier League to prove that there is life after football.
The more I ruminate upon it, the more I believe the growth areas in education to be everywhere except in "schools". The way to sort out a lot of the problems in education is to denationalise, and to allow individual pupil choice. But how do you do that? It has to be done gradually, and it has to be sneaked past the special interests, and if they do see it coming, it has to be too popular and to make too much sense to be opposable. In general, the way that education is going to develop in the future is for adult institutions to diversify down the age range.
In particular, I believe that the big sports clubs are going, logically, to be drawn towards teaching more and more indoor stuff as well. If the big soccer clubs of Britain were to open up schools, not just for the boys they considered possible future stars, but for boys who were merely keen to learn about life with a soccer slant to it, starting with boys of, say, twelve, no one would stop them, provided they did it half reasonably. Their big problem would, on the contrary, be the government being so keen to help.
The basic problem for most teenagers is that they aren't going to be able to do what they would most like to do, and this applies with special ferocity to aspiring soccer stars. Most of them really aren't going to make it. They are liable to be very disappointed.
This story is only about the soccer people taking some of the bump out of the otherwise very hard landing that soccer boys get now if the soccer clubs decide they've no more use for them, which is what it decides for most of them, of course. And what I think it shows is that thought is going into the education of the "others", the ones who don't make it, the ones who if only they can be offered the right alternatives, could do fine, or not, depending.
In short, the world of soccer is thinking hard about education.
Four out of five players who signed on with Premier League clubs in their teens would be released by the time they reached 21, he added. Some of those eligible to attend today's fair will have been with their clubs since the age of eight.
Did I say twelve?
To help them, the league has assembled an all-star line-up of university admissions staff and employers to try to help them develop a new career.Kate Coleman, education and child-protection manager at the FA Premier League, said: "The league takes the education of young people very seriously and we have worked very hard in conjunction with our academies [established at individual clubs] to encourage scholars to realise the importance of gaining academic qualifications. Unfortunately, not every player who joins a Premier League Academy will sign a professional contract with their club and get a career out of the game. The event at Keele will be a useful opportunity for those players who have been released by clubs to assess what options they have for the future."
Universities including Loughborough – famous for its sports science degree – Cardiff and Leeds Metropolitan will be attending the event. A wide range of employers at the fair will include the armed services, the fire brigade and the John Lewis Partnership.
I guess all I'm really saying is: interesting.
I've already mentioned here Alison Wolf's book Does Education Matter?, and have also quoted from it in a Samizdata posting. Here's another chunk, from the concluding chapter. And for this I already have a category classification nice and ready.
The last twenty-five years have been the heyday of education policy directed purposefully towards economic ends. One result has been a fixation on quantitative targets which allow governments to monitor progress and pronounce success. These necessarily emphasize what can be easily counted and easily measured; so we have policies intended, above all, to increase numbers, whether these be of qualifications gained or of students enrolled. The most extreme manifestations of this trend – such as outcome-related funding which paid people for NVQs delivered, or franchising schemes which offered backpackers free scuba-diving courses – have foundered because they so visibly undermined quality and invited abuse. But the basic principle of targets has not vanished. How could it? For this is the quintessential approach of any centrally run and directed system which measures success by quantity. If you believe that more education equals more growth, and that government can and should deliver one through the other, then, like a compass needle to the pole, you will be drawn towards quantitative targets, whether they are the NVQs of the early 1990s or the 50 per cent enrolment in higher education that currently enthuses our political classes.
This approach is precisely analogous to the way in which Soviet planners ran their economy, and it has precisely the same drawbacks. Numerical targets have to be concerned with things that can be counted easily (like tractors or examination grades), not with more complex attributes which require judgement a