From today's Guardian:
Ruth Kelly had better watch out. She may have arrived as education secretary proclaiming herself the champion of parents, but it's pupil power which could jump up and bite her, for secondary school pupils are about to get their first union.The English Secondary Students' Association (Essa) is the first union for 11-19-year-olds. It is the brainchild of secondary student, Rajeeb Dey, from Chelmsford in Essex, who heard that Ireland and most of Europe have a union, while England does not.
I wonder what the teachers' unions will make of that.
Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, welcomed the move, saying: "It is essential to realise that children and young people are not merely citizens-in-waiting. They are citizens in their own right. So listening to what children and young people have to say is not just a matter of courtesy. It goes to the very heart of what it means to be an active citizen."
I agree, sort of, but I also want to vomit. Just a little.
Natalie Solent seems to be in an educational mood just now. First there was this:
I hereby submit my new general theory on the learning of foreign languages. This article in Le Monde about the oil for food scandal was of particular interest because it was of interest.
I took O-Level French at sixteen. Since then, linguistic stagnation, slightly ameliorated by tourism. But since I've been on the internet and can read French stuff which is about things I want to read about I have started learning French again.
I have these little insights from time to time. The great thing about blogging is that you can exhibit them and win either way. If the so-called insight was and always had been obvious to the entire world apart from me it doesn't seem to matter. Readers simply do not linger there. But if the reaction is "Natalie, you have put into words that very thought most needed by a suffering humanity; here, take all my worldly goods as a partial recompense," that is OK, too.
I kept that last paragraph in not because it is especially educational, but simply because I like it. Bloggers are as good as their best postings, but not as banal as their worst. Discuss. Although I suppose the insight that if you write down an insight, you are more likely to reflect upon it intelligently, and if it is true and valuable to remember it, is educational.
And then for her next Natalie did a longer posting about the question of those little life skills, i.e. the kind of essential stuff that you may get taught at school, but may not. Like: cooking, sewing, keeping a diary and thereby keeping appointments. And I would add: typing and driving.
The first of these two Natalie postings actually says a lot about the second. You learn the life skills you are interested in learning. And I entirely agree with her that the Welfare State hugely interrupts that process, by dis-incentivising the learning of anything. Or, to put it another way, necessity is the mother of education.
Sean Gabb's latest Free Life Commentary, Number 128, is up. It is an uncompromising attack on the entire principle and practice of State Education. Sean describes the present mess, and concludes:
The only answer is to get the state entirely out of education. The education budget should not be expanded, or its administration reformed. It should simply be abolished. That £49 billion - now, I believe, £63 billion - should be handed back to the people in tax cuts; and these should be directed at the poorest taxpayers. The schools should be sold off or given away, and the bureaucrats be made redundant. The people should then be left to arrange by themselves for the education of their children.The argument that parents would not or could not do this falls flat on any inspection of the third world, where parents make often heavy sacrifices and choose often highly effective schemes of education. There is also the experience of our own past. A generation ago, E.G. West showed how growing numbers of working class people in the 19th century paid for and supervised the education of their children. The beginning of state education in 1870 should be seen as ruling class coup against an independent sector that looked set to marginalise its legitimation ideology. And that reaction was promoted on the basis of fraudulent statistics.
Left to themselves, it is inconceivable that parents would not do substantially better than those presently in charge of state education. How they might do this is for them to decide. Some would pay for a conventional independent education. Some would send their children to schools run by their ministers of religion, or by charitable bodies. Some would educate their children at home. Many do this already, by the way; and Paula Rothermel of Durham University caused a stir in 2002, when she looked at a sample of children educated at home and found they performed consistently better in standard tests than schoolchildren - indeed, she found that the children of people like bus drivers and shop assistants were receiving a better education than those committed to the care of state-certified teachers. Parents could hardly do worse than the present arraignments manage. They could easily do better.
This is not a "left" or a "right" wing cause. It is about allowing children to get an education which is not directed to moulding them to believe as suits the convenience of their betters, and which really will enable them to make the best of their own lives.
Such are precisely my opinions. The only reason I do not belabour my readers here every day with such views quite as relentlessly as I might (aside from the fact that this would make this blog even duller), is that opinions is all that they would be, coming from me. I have very little direct experience of what Britain's education system is like in reality (although I am now beginning to acquire it). Sean Gabb, on the other hand, has taught for the last several years in one of the less stellar (i.e. not one of these) of London's universities, and daily confronts both what the products of Britain's state education system are like, and, equally important, how those products compare with the products of the education systems in other countries. When he compares, for example, the English fluency of young English people with that of young African people (as he does earlier in this piece), he has actual direct knowledge on which to base such comparisons.
On the other hand, Sean has been an uncompromising libertarian for just about as long as I have know him, and this is a case of prejudices refined and informed, rather than merely deduced from his relatively recent day-by-day experiences as an educator. Sean, like me, is predisposed to judge state actions to be, on the whole, bad, and the actions of free people to be, on the whole, good. Some would say that such prejudices render our particular views on education nearly worthless. I would say (and I'm sure Sean also) that if you do not have such prejudices, you should.
As for the Department of Education, I'd like to see an experiment: let the position go unfilled for four years and see if it has any impact on the educational abilities of the nation's youth. I'm guessing no one would notice if we didn't have a Secretary of Education. Everyone just keep on doing what you’re doing, and get back to us.
Same here. But teachers and schools here would definitely notice. Suddenly, the only initiatives and shake-ups would be their own.
And here's another political row (see also this earlier posting) being fought out on the terrain of school history textbooks, this time the one between Taiwan and mainland China. China View says that Taiwan and mainland China share a common history, which is true. But China View stirs this truth in with the claim that therefore Taiwan simply cannot in the present or ever in the future be politically independent from mainland China, which is false.
The BBC reports on a fairly typical piece of public sector failure, in this case of the inelegantly named UKeU. See also these earlier BBC reports, here and here.
The basic problem seems to have been that the people running this thing thought that a good educational idea (even assuming that this is what it actually was which it probably wasn't) is enough for the whole wants-to-be-educated world to come pounding on your door. But, in business in general, and most definitely in education in particular, there is a little thing called reputation. You have to have one of these, it has to be good, and it can take a while to establish it.
And the other problem, of course, is that shovelling stuff onto the internet and exchanging emails with students is no longer rocket science, and is being done by other universities. As Americans would say: wow, never saw that coming.
The attitude of the Minister who inherited this mess reminds me of those comedy sketches about maintenance men who say "Who installed this then?" when the answer is: "You did, mate." You, as in this government. You set it up.
Current Minister Howells says that the "marketing" was poor.
However …
... he would not call the failure of the project a disaster because he was interested in the lessons learned.
Ah. A learning experience.
Category: Computers in education • Higher education • Politics
A recent Islamabad news item:
Pakistan's Education Minister Lt Gen (retired) Javed Ashraf Qazi has said that a few of the Madarssahs or religious schools situated near the country's border were involved in terrorist activities.According to Dawn, Qazi who accompanied the outgoing US ambassador Nancy Powell to a community school in Nirola said that the government was keeping a close watch on the activities of seminaries suspected of being involved in terrorist activities and was contemplating serious action against them.
He further added that the government was seriously trying to streamline the madarssahs into a compact system and had even entered into collaboration with the Wafaqul Madaris in this regard.
"Streamlining of madaris is going on at a good pace and the ministry in collaboration with Wafaqul Madaris is taking every possible measure for timely Madarssah reforms," the report quoted him as saying. (ANI)
As I wonder what I'm going to add to that, I'm watching a BBC4 TV show about Who Runs America (scroll down to the final one), and an FBI terrorist chaser is being interrogated about his work by a bloke from the BBC. Yesterday there was a Presidential Election in which the War on Terrorism was the number one issue.
It may be that all this effort will eventually come to be thought of as a huge overreaction to what was actually a quite minor problem. But that will only happen if there are no more major terrorist successes, and personally I'd settle for that. The FBI guy is talking about this War being "won". But if that happens, it will be because, one day, people realise that hey, we aren't thinking about that Terrorism thing any more. He won't get a big parade. He'll just find his department downgraded, and if he is personally felt to have done well, he will simply find himself assigned to other duties.
Meanwhile, for the time being, the interest that the rest of us have in the nature of Islamic education is going to be about more than just how they teach things like the 3Rs.
Instapundit has been colonised by invaders called "Althouse", "Totten", and such things. And the pieces seem to be longer than usual, and as such things to link to, rather than just little snippets to acknowledge links from.
Today there is an Althouse piece, full of further links, about schoolchildren being used to assist in the US Presidential Election:
I firmly believe that once the state compels young people to attend school, deprives them of their freedom, it owes the highest duty to them to use their time only in ways that benefit them. To see them as a source of free labor or to exploit them for any purpose that is not itself a good reason for depriving the young of their freedom is a great wrong.
Regulars here will all know what I feel about this. Don't compell school attendance, and allow children to play whatever politics they want, and to have real votes, at will.
UPDATE: Don't miss the UPDATE.
Adam Balling reports on an odd use for a publicly owned school. I got to this from here.
This convention was a fine Orwellian display, complete with doublespeak, ritualized hatred, and the policing of "thought crimes." All who disagreed openly were barred from the radical teach-in at the public school. I was only there because I went in "under cover." That the San Francisco Unified School District rented its space to an exclusionary meeting of terrorist-supporting fanatics – in violation of state and federal laws, and possibly the USA PATRIOT Act – defies description. These people want America destroyed, and are not shy about it.
Towards the end of Balling's report:
The message at this conference was intended to guarantee the outcome of a triumphant Palestinian revolution that would be a nationalist massacre: the ethnic cleansing of Jews. If allowed, the elimination of Israeli society by force – the desired victory – would be genocidal. The Marxists and fellow travelers at Horace Mann Middle School, however, did not call it genocide. They called it "all forms of resistance" against "the imperial rule" of "Zionist apartheid settlers" and on behalf of "the right of return for all Palestinians." Do not be fooled: the only tangible result of these stated objectives would be the mass murder of all but those Israelis who managed to escape. The invading Arab paramilitary would not take the time to build camps.
Quite a lesson. I wonder if Horace Mann Middle School will get into any bother about this. Perhaps it already has.
I'm guessing that Horace Mann would be this Horace Mann, yes? I wonder what he would have thought about this conference.
I've just done a posting about a Kim Howells outburst on Samizdata. (The posting was on Samizdata, not the Kim Howells outburst.) It was one of those pieces where I only realised at the last second that it would do for Samizdata, instead of merely for here.
I was going to include this rather striking photo of the man here, along with the rest of the original posting, but for Samizdata it was beside the point. But here it is here anyway.
I find writing for Samizdata hard, and for here relatively easy, or that's how it is at the moment. Here I have the mind fix that I have no "readership" to alienate with bad writing, just the occasional passing freak in pyjamas. This may not be true, but I find it more relaxing to assume.
At Samizdata, there are many, many, fully-dressed readers to worry about. Samizdata postings have to be of a certain standard, and that can be worrying.
So now you know. I think that all six of you are trash.
Here's a headline to savour:
House parties planned to educate voters on educationThe nation's largest union is teaming up with teachers and liberal political groups to sponsor simultaneous, education-themed "house parties" in Palm Beach and Broward counties and across the country Wednesday night.
The social calendar will never be the same.
Bring your concerns about public schools, not booze or funny hats.
Yes. What do you think this is, a party? This is education we're talking about. You're not here to enjoy yourselves.
Organizers hope the first-ever National Mobilization for Great Public Schools gets more people focused on education issues before the general election and beyond.
So, that would be "educate" as in propagandise, and "education" as in spending lots more money on schools.
While the event is billed as nonpartisan, the main sponsor is the National Education Association, the 2.7 million member union and teacher professional group that has endorsed Democrat John Kerry. Co-sponsors include MoveOn.org, the Web-based liberal organization that regularly bashes President Bush.
And they'll be doing some non-partisan Bush-bashing.
The federal No Child Left Behind law, the cornerstone of Bush's education-reform program, is billed as a key discussion topic. A Web site previewing the festivities claims "the White House and Congress are failing to provide the basics. Worse, the White House now plans to cut education programs in the first budget after the election."
Which makes me think that "No Child Left Behind" may not be as bad as I had been
assuming.
This guy certainly thinks that it is doing some good.
The president began putting the first part of his education reform package into place literally hours after he took the oath of office. The morning after the inauguration, he and Mrs. Bush listened carefully as Reid Lyon and other top education researchers presented their findings at a White House forum on reading pedagogy. The president made it clear that he wanted federal reading policy to go "wherever the evidence leads."From his gubernatorial days, Bush already had a good idea that the evidence was leading straight to phonics. Following Lyon’s advice, he had pushed local districts in Texas to adopt phonics-based curricula and saw reading scores in the state shoot up, particularly for minority kids. The number of third-graders – 52,000 – who failed the reading test at the start of the Bush governorship declined to 36,000 when he left for the White House and has since dropped to 28,000, now that all his reforms are up and running. Since then, the evidence has become irrefutable. After reviewing dozens of studies – some using magnetic resonance imaging to measure differences in brain function between strong and weak readers and among children taught to read by various methods – the National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress, concluded in 2000 that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, required phonics-based instruction.
Within a week of taking office, the Bush administration devised a strategy for getting a $6 billion "Reading First" phonics initiative past the relevant House and Senate education committees. The administration was offering school systems a deal that went like this: "The federal government will give you lots more money than ever before for early reading programs. Nothing obligates you to take the money. But if you do take it, the programs you choose must teach children using phonics." Hardly a single legislator raised doubts about tying federal reading dollars to instructional approaches backed by a consensus of the nation’s scientific experts.
This "scientific experts" stuff strikes me as somewhat questionable, but I'll leave those questions for another time.
This is why there should be a free market in education:
The council at the centre of a legal wrangle over the future of a community school wanted to "eradicate" small rural schools, a court heard today.Parents from Hermon school in Pembrokeshire, west Wales, are fighting plans to close it, and have taken their case to the High Court.
Pembrokeshire Council wants the 53 pupils and those from nearby Blaenffos transferred to a £1.5 million school at a third village, Crymych.
In his closing submission in the case, Nicholas Bowen, representing the parents, said the council had "a determination that big is beautiful and small needs to be eradicated".
He added: "What they have left out of the account is the real compelling evidence that things are extremely successful from a parental point of view and from an education point of view in this happy community school.
"There has been no proper consideration of all the arguments put as to why the status quo should be supported.”
He said part of the council’s case relied on planning guidelines which meant the centre of the community was regarded as being in Crymych.
He said: "They have devalued the importance of the community and the importance of the asset, by reference to planning guidelines which have absolutely no proper place in a decision like this."
He said the guidelines were "mumbo-jumbo".
Yesterday Rhodri Williams, for the council, told the court the council had no blanket policy to close small schools, and that the new school at Crymych was just 1.8 miles from Hermon.
The phrase "… just 1.8 miles" says it all.
If there were a completely free market in education, there would surely be someone willing to run a local school in this particular locaity, for all those for whom localness is what matters most.
I recall my mum getting involved in a long drawn out national dispute about small hospitals, which the Powers That Be were then busily closing, but are now busy rebuilding under a different name ("health centres" etc.). The same error was embodied in that decision, which is to measure only some numbers, and to make those numbers better by building bigger, while forgetting other things that are not measured, like miles travelled by the poor bloody punters to get to the new mega-places. (This is especially bad if the poor bloody punters are sick or injured.)
Capitalists often make mistakes of this sort, but when they do, their customers start screaming, desert in droves, take their business elsewhere, and – one way or another – the bad decision is reversed. Often at great expense, but reversed. It's all very public and it makes the private sector look bad because of its best feature, which is that, messily, it does correct the worst of its mistakes. And it is this all too imperfect arrangement that the politicians have finally learned that that they must somehow recreate. Mostly, they try to fake it. That is a start. But one day, I hope we have it for real.
The public sector just steamrollers forward, and uses its own cock-ups as reasons for being given yet more money to waste.
This article by an aspiring Conservative politician Ali Miraj about an unruly visit to a South London school is worth a read. The kids are out of control, but they aren't evil.
His recommendation is that teachers and schools should be, you know, better. Great idea. But the banality of his prescription shouldn't deflect attention from the excellence of his description of how things now are.
The complete lack of discipline was overwhelming and disturbing. My thought - somewhat predictably - was that this would never have happened in my day. It would have led straight to detention. But my day was only 11 years ago. Had things really got this bad in schools?We have all heard the stories about deteriorating classroom behaviour, but it is very different experiencing it at first hand. What these children needed was a firm, metaphorical kick up the backside. They had no respect for authority. It was only when the head of year entered the room and threatened the troublesome children with exclusion that a momentary hush descended.
Then it got worse. A near riot broke out in the neighbouring classroom where my colleague was talking about the attractions of medicine as a career. Half my class promptly jumped up and ran next door to play their part in the fracas. Those remaining looked at me apologetically. "Carry on, sir," said one of them, reassuringly.
He made some headway, however, and satisfied himself that although lacking in respect for authority, these kids were not stupid. Like he says, schools ought to be … better.
I've been linking to quite a lot of American material from here lately, and here's another link to something else American, in the form of a piece by Steven Yates called How I Survived Government Schools.
But although American, it sounds extremely like the government schools here in Britain:
I also do not question that there are teachers out there who care about children and are sincere, serious, and dedicated to their craft. But they are also caught up in schemes like "classroom management" (the euphemism for teachers as social directors, controlling unruly children in today’s politically correct environment of hypersensitivity) and teaching to standardized tests. Many suffer from high levels of stress, and some eventually leave the profession out of frustration. There are too many agendas in government schools not under the control of teachers, or even of principals and local districts. They result from directives coming from Rome on the Potomac, often with huge sums of money as a reward for compliance. In most states, districts either follow the new federal guidelines or they lose federal dollars. Teachers either teach to the test or their recertification is refused! The current buzzword: accountability.In sum, whatever anti-Christian bias exists in government schools is not their only problem. From the start, I perceived an anti-education bias, in the sense of education as what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called an adventure in ideas. In this conception, a primary purpose of education is to produce informed, intellectually curious and vigilant citizens for a free economy and a free society. That School-to-Work, Workforce Investment, No Child Left Behind, and other unconstitutional federal programs do not have this as their primary purpose, you can rest assured!
You do not need a resolution by some religious body to remove your children from government schools. You don't even need to be a Christian. You only need a strong sense that your child's mind might be at stake.
For Rome on the Potomac read, I don't know … Babylon on Thames?
Here is a reminder that sometimes "education" isn't quite as nice as it sounds:
The Chinese military surgeon who exposed the government's cover-up of the Sars crisis was released yesterday after seven weeks of "political re-education", his family said.Jiang Yanyong, 72, a semi-retired general in the People's Liberation Army, had been detained at a secret location where he was forced to undergo daily study sessions aimed to make him renounce a critical letter he had written about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
I wonder exactly what lesson this man chose to learn from this dose of education, although maybe "detention" would be a better word for what he endured.
The lesson they were trying to teach him was don't make trouble.
A lot of the educational news concerning China is now quite good. This story is a salutary reminder that not all of it is.
I recommend a read of this article by Peter Oborne, about Oliver Letwin's analysis of the Government in general, and of Gordon Brown's manic meddlesomeness in particular. Here is the particularly educational bit:
Letwin's arguments are partly set out in his speech on 'Gordon Brown’s Big Government' published on Tuesday. He demonstrates, with felicitous use of examples drawn mainly from government reports, how Gordon Brown’s obsession with central control has doomed New Labour's well-intentioned attempts to reform public services. The Chancellor’s insistence on micro-managing every area of public life through Whitehall-imposed targets, endless bothersome initiatives, grants-in-aid, public service agreements, etc., is squeezing the life out of our hospitals and schools.Less and less of the investment intended for the national public services actually reaches its destination. Instead it is captured halfway by the bureaucrats and regulators setting and monitoring the targets, interpreting the data and managing the schemes. Letwin demonstrates, for example, that of 88,000 new posts created in education by New Labour, just 14,000 are teachers and teachers' assistants. Meanwhile the task of the teachers themselves is made far more wearisome and difficult by the New Labour army of bureaucrats. Letwin claims that the new regulations just issued by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority mean that a teacher in charge of 30 five-year-olds 'is expected to write a report on their pupils' aptitudes and achievements which exceeds the length of Paradise Lost'.
Which of course pulls things in the opposite direction of all this, to say nothing of making the Conservatives sound a whole lot smarter than I did in that posting.
Gratuitous photos of Oliver Letwin and Gordon Brown:
And see also this piece about the burdens imposed by Mr Brown. And by his predecessors, because it didn't start with him.
Eduwonk identifies the No Child Left Behind thing as one of the big undiscussed stories in US education right now, pointing out …
How President Bush's mishandling of NCLB has created a mess for his signature education law, alienated even supporters, and potentially hamstrung some school improvement efforts.
I would like to think that this is not only what is happening, but what is now seen to be happening. But that may be too optimistic, and the fear I expressed in that Samizdata piece, that Spend More Money will now make all the running, will be the truth of it, and certainly so in the short run.
In general, when a government announces that absolutely everyone ("no child left behind") in some rather-hard-to-help category of people is going to be "helped", expect trouble – that they won't actually help everyone being the least of it.
Oh no! A Five Year Plan.
Parents and children will be able to choose from a higher-quality of schooling in their local community under education reforms published today by Education Secretary Charles Clarke.Under the government's 'Five-Year Strategy for Children and Learners' plan, every school will be an independent, specialist school with new freedoms to run their own affairs, backed by the security of an historic three-year budget so they can achieve the highest standards for every single pupil.
Mr Clarke said that every reform will be firmly rooted in five key principles: greater personalisation and choice, with the wishes and needs of children, parents and learners centre-stage; opening up services to new and different providers; freedom and independence for frontline headteachers, governors and managers; a major commitment to staff development with high-quality support and training to improve assessment, care and teaching; and partnerships with parents, employers, volunteers and voluntary organisations.
Mr Clarke said that these principles would deliver new guarantees for all pupils and parents and for all those who deliver education and children's services.
In other words, what I said here, towards the end. In other words, this is actually a very good five year plan, as five year plans go.
Tonight I will be attending a soirée chez Tim Evans, and we will no doubt be agreeing about how Tim saw this coming but the Conservatives didn't.
This is their policy! Will they yelp that the Government stole it? (Bad idea. If it's a good idea then it's good that the government is doing it.) Or will they oppose it, and promise merely to throw money at education? (Even worse. Why, until now, was this their idea?)
Right answer for the Conservatives: agree with it, and split the Labour Party. Say: vote for the party that really believes in this stuff, unlike the massed ranks of the Labour Party, beyond the front bit. But that's probably too clever for them.
See also, Tom Utley in the Telegraph covering the same ground. He reminds me that I forgot (c) pretending that the Government's policy is not what it is, which is stupid, on account of being stupid.
Although, this Telegraph leader says that this is an example of the Conservatives leading the debate and that "Labour is on the run".
We shall see.
UPDATE: I keep looking for stuff to blog about on Samizdata, which needs things today, and all I keep finding are further links to add to this posting. For example this one, about the man who is trying to take over Marks and Spencer. He's going to sponsor some schools, apparently.
This could be a Conservative vote winner.
Disruptive pupils will be sent to tough new day units and subjected to "no-nonsense discipline" under Tory education plans to be unveiled this week.
No doubt the actual details of the policy will involve the odd spot of nonsense, but I'm talking politics here, and politics is always nonsensical.
There are plenty of people in the upper reaches of the Government who understand that discipline is crucial to making state school function adequately, and that the key to discipline is being able to exclude unruly pupils. But lower down in the system are people who fatuously hope to achieve discipline without either violence or exclusion. "Society" must be "inclusive" blah blah. Can't be done. The Conservatives have a strong issue here.
Matthew d'Ancona, in today's Sunday Telegraph, made me smile with this:
A minister close to Mr Blair once asked me what would be a good objective for the Prime Minister to announce in a forthcoming conference speech. I said that he should commit his Government to reducing the percentage of parents who send their children to private schools - not by penalising those schools in any way, but by making the state sector so attractive that parents no longer felt the need to look elsewhere. The minister, normally garrulous and Tiggerish, went strangely quiet.
Much is made, by people in my corner the political opinion map, of the phrase "schoolsandhospitals". But d'Ancona ruminates on the differences between schools on the one hand, and hospitals on the other – between education and health. In particular, he speculates that the Conservatives, who still get nowhere on the health issue and just bleat that they will spend more money, might actually make some headway with their complaints about and policies for education.
Another reason why health is different from education is that the kind of clever, young, opinionated people who make the running in political policy creation are usually right in the middle of that time in their lives when they are least concerned, personally, about health. They are, in short, very healthy. They have no recent experience of serious healthcare, and they face no immediate prospect of it. They have hardly any sustained experience of - or, yet, much fear of - what it is actually like to spend a year in a hospital, or to have to combine staying alive with suffering from a chronic disease. They may learn from some survey or other that "people" care very much about the NHS, but this is a truth they most of them must accept at second hand.
By contrast, these clever young persons have just emerged from a couple of decades of the best that our nation's educational system can offer. They are good at this, and that is pretty much all they are good at. No wonder they take it so seriously, and want everyone else to, and are full of opinions about how to improve it, even if the teachers dread these plans.
However, voters are different, and so are many of the more senior politicians who seek their votes. Voters are old. Voters have young children. Voters have dispiriting jobs, which they seek medical excuses to avoid every now and again. So voters know about health and care about health even if policy wonks care less about it.
But second, and probably more important, is the fact that many millions of voters must surely feel, and with some justification, that they could teach their children, and other people's children, just as effectively as the actual teachers do. They could be wrong, but that is surely how they feel. They all have years of experience of the most important thing that goes on in schools, which is the teaching that goes on in classrooms, and the only reason they don't then teach for a living themselves is that they've more lucrative and interesting ways of spending their lives. If all state school teachers disappeared to the West Indies for permanent holidays, they would rapidly be replaced, by the electorate, and in a way that might very possibly be an improvement. This may not be true, but lots of people surely think this.
But your average voter would have no such confidence if he was suddenly asked to perform a hip replacement. Medicine involves real knowledge, real training. Teaching? Anyone can do that.
So, when people think about health, they think: could be far worse. Don't mess with it.
When they think about education, they think: could do far better. Give it a good kicking. What's the worst that could happen?
This looks like a really interesting little row.
One of Hounslow's most successful schools has been severely criticised by a website claiming to represent some of its students.The Heathlands School, in Wellington Road South, has some of the best results of the borough's schools, and was recently awarded specialist science status, to much acclaim.
However, apparently not everyone is happy with this, and a website, called www.voiceofheathlands.co.uk' has been set up by an anonymous group, who claim to be students, but are only contactable by email.
I tried to get to that website, of course I did, but got no result. Maybe if you click that link you'll get luckier.
What is more, googling for Heathlands School didn't even clarify for me exactly which school this is. Not this one, I'm assuming. And certainly not this one.
They say that their aim is to ask questions, criticise and flag up issues which they feel are of concern at the school.It is unclear, however, whether the website is a genuine attempt to get across students' views, or whether it is merely a half-term prank.
Meaning, I presume, that "This is local London" doesn't know who to ring, or does, but isn't getting any answers. I can tell them a guess/answer: neither exactly, and both, a little bit, I daresay. What it most definitely is is politics. "Flag up issues". That's politics-speak for grab hold of some problems and shout about them, thereby making them worse and very possibly insoluble.
Hounslow Local Education Authority has refused to comment on the website.
Don't know what's hit them, in other words. Website? Website? What's that? What do we do? How can we close it down? Ought to be a law against it, blah blah blah. Say nothing. We must have a meeting, and then say nothing more eloquently.
The authors of the website claim to have set it up because: "We felt it was about time to do something, and raise our voice against the wrongs we saw.
Like I say, politics. "Voice". "Voice" means poltiics, every time.
"Through experience, we knew that talking to the school, through the school council, would achieve nothing, so we looked for a more powerful means to bring our message forward."
The point about a website is that you don't need anyone's permission to say what you want to say. You don't have to get it past any editor, who may have fishes of his own to fry. And there is not a lot of expense involved.
And everyone else can ignore you, or of course start their own website and say you're prats.
Their main complaints, which are posted on the website, are that the specialist status is making the school selective, rather than open for all.They also criticise the political leanings of their teachers, and an assembly on the benefits of Margaret Thatcher's leadership, and cast a sceptical eye over the relationship the school has with local multi-national pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
Which certainly makes this sound like a lot more than a mere "half-term prank". Interesting that these clearly left-wing websiters at least perceive the teachers to be – or try to present them as – Thatcherites. I wonder what they really are. My guess is, they gave Thatcherism a respectful look-in, in some school discussion/debate they organised. They refused to present a united front of wishy-washy leftism. That would be my guess. But that could be quite wrong, and maybe these teachers are indeed gung-ho pro-capitalists. If so, hurrah! This will be even more fun.
Regarding the specialist school status, and the school, as a whole, they claim: "Many students feel that they are ignored, and have no way of channelling their views.
"Most students on the school council feel it is a puppet organisation.
Well, not an organisation that the school's actual bosses will allow to take over the school, that's for sure.
"The school used to be so proud of being unselective."
Not all of it, evidently. Otherwise, why the change? Maybe, they were just so good that thousands more people suddenly wanted to send their kids there, and they had to choose, because they didn't have enough room for everyone, whereas before, anyone could come.
The issues surrounding GSK were: "The school's close relationship with GSK is looked down upon by the majority of pupils in the upper years of the school.
"The introduction of Lucozade into the school canteen blatantly suggests that the school has some kind of agreement with GSK, which produces Lucozade, which it is not open about."
They continued: "Also, we have complained for many years, through the school council, that we have trouble affording the food in the canteen.
"This has always been ignored; prices continue to rise, and we are told it is a matter which the school has no influence over, due to the private catering company setting prices.
"We would like to know why the school has the influence to introduce Lucozade, but cannot make the food affordable?"
The students also raised concerns that there were now plasma screens in reception, a lot of extra CCTV cameras around the site and a painted tennis court, which has little benefit'.
Politics, politics, politics. What did I tell you? Not that they don't have a point. Maybe on this matter, they do. If the real agenda of GSK is to sell Lucozade, that is a bit tacky, I think.
However, they did admit that: "Heathlands is a good' school, which achieves some of the best public exam results in the area, and has a highly-respected reputation."The exam results have a lot to do with the commitment and dedication that the staff show towards pupils."
So, Thatcherite bastards and committed and dedicated teachers. Or are the teachers divided between these two groups? I'm guessing not, or they would have said this.
No one was available to comment from Heathlands School at the time of going to press.
And they don't know what's hit them either.
It will be interesting to see if this story goes anywhere. Maybe I should try to help turn Heathlands School into a Global Focus of Fascination, as per Cecile Dubois.
But anyway, fascinating. What an interesting mixture of things going on here. As with the previous post, material for many novels.
I support - and will seek to provide aid and comfort to - both sides in this row. I support under-age trouble-making websites and Thatcherite schoolteachers.
But sadly, I fear that the shut-down of the website is permanent. Those teachers knew at once who was behind it, and threatened expulsion if they kept on with it. It's over, in other words. If so, shame.
I see that the Independent has done a piece about that Bill Cosby speech:
Scholars of race issues in the United States have a new text to ponder, from Bill Cosby, arguably the country's most beloved black entertainer and an icon of the African-American community. Its message was harsh: Poor black people – or some of them – are "knuckleheads" who mangle the English language.Two weeks ago, Mr Cosby criticised the black community in a speech in Washington DC to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v The Board of Education, the court ruling that led to the desegregation of schools.
He said that after all the sacrifices earlier generations made to win racial equality in America, there were blacks today, in the poorer class, who let those pioneers down. "The lower economic people are not holding up their end of the deal," he said. "These people marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around."
I wonder how much the Internet contributed to this story getting an airing in the British press.
Natalie Solent links to this story:
Zimbabwe renewed its offensive against "racist" private schools yesterday by arresting headmasters and members of governing bodies, who are accused of raising fees without permission.Teachers and others in the private sector went into hiding as the government warned a delegation of concerned parents: "We will do to you what we did to the white farmers, and we will take over your schools."
Says Natalie:
The dragon is eating its own tail: 90% of the children in these schools are black, and include the children of members of the cabinet, including Mugabe himself.
I wrote about the cricket manifestation of this process for Samizdata yesterday.
Not good.
Yes, an interesting posting over at Samizdata about a row in Japan about the compulsory respects that must now be paid to some (very controversial) symbols of Japanese nationhood, in Japan's schools. So far, over 200 teachers have rebelled.
Scott quotes at length from this article.
Yes, another foray into a foreign language here at Brian's Education Blog.
This probably won't cause nearly as much fuss as the original ban, but it may be a rather neat solution:
Paris-AP - France is set to ban Muslim headscarves from public schools this fall, but may allow students to wear bandannas instead.The education minister tells French radio the bandannas "may not be conspicuous." In January, the former education minister said bandannas would fall under the ban.
Some Muslim girls wear bandannas to cover their hair – an alternative to the traditional head scarf. Some girls feel the bandannas make it easier to blend in to the crowd.
France's president signed the measure into law last month in an effort to maintain the tradition of secularism in the classroom. It bans what French officials call "conspicuous" religious symbols from public schools.France's president signed the measure into law last month in an effort to maintain the tradition of secularism in the classroom. It bans what French officials call "conspicuous" religious symbols from public schools.
The ban has drawn outrage from Muslims in France and abroad. They say it mostly targets their religion.
I guess it all depends what you mean by conspicuous.
This makes an agreeable change from the usual guff:
Education minister Andrew Mulenga yesterday insisted that education was not a fundamental human right according to the Zambian constitution.
The trouble – one of the troubles – with calling education a "fundamental human right" is that it then becomes the obligation of others to educate you, and you can just sit there with your arms folded and wait for it to just be poured into you. Calling it a human right undermines the notion that education might be something which is best achieved by being actively pursued rather than merely poured into a passively open mouth.
Good for the Zambian constitution.
The newspapers and TV are full of stories about how angry the teachers are. This puts it all in perspective:
Like the Grand Old Duke of York, Doug McAvoy, in his 15 years as general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, has repeatedly marched his troops to the top of the hill and then marched them down again.
Under his direction and leadership, the biggest teaching union has religiously opposed every education initiative introduced by both the Tory and Labour governments.
Delegates who give up their Easter break to attend the annual conference - the union's "supreme policy-making body" - have always reserved their special venom for national tests, school league tables, performance-related pay, academic selection, and Ofsted inspections.
For the past 15 years, every conference has climaxed with a series of votes for industrial action on one or more of these issues. On every occasion, the media - usually starved at Easter of domestic news - have helped fan the flames with headlines promising imminent classroom chaos.
Yet in all the 15 years of Mr McAvoy's tenure, the NUT has never once taken national industrial action - a record that fills this latter-day duke not with dismay but pride. For the fact is that everyone who attends the conference enters a virtual world.
The 900 or so delegates, most of whom revile New Labour, know that their resolutions will be rejected by the great majority of the union's 250,000 members, but they pass them just the same.
Mr McAvoy knows that the union's influence on governments of any hue is, and always has been, negligible, yet he presses his case with undiminished enthusiasm.And the media know that the conference is a charade, yet they - we - report its doings as if they really mattered.
Yes, that makes sense. I confess that I had been wondering what all the hoo-hah about a possible teachers' strike was all about. Not much, it would seem.
Not being keen myself on "national tests, school league tables, performance-related pay, academic selection, and Ofsted inspections", you might expect me to sympathise with these rebellious NUT folks. But I hate all that rigmarole because I hate nationalised industries, and that is inevitably the kind of thing that nationalised industries consist of. They are inevitably either cursed with lots of overpaid drones or with lots of over-managed drudges, but also with bureaucratic procedures that offer no automatic means of knowing which is which or who is who. To solve each problem inevitably results in the exacerbation of the other problem. The point about markets is that they at least provide some clue as to whether you are contributing as much as you are being paid or not.
These teachers insist on the perpetuation of nationalised education. They abominate the idea of a total educational free market. They just don't like the politicians telling them what to do, because they regard themselves as all being over-managed drudges. But they would, wouldn't they?
The problem is that people move to houses in the catchment areas of good schools. Lots of parents want their kids to go to a few good, but oversubscribed, schools. An Conservative Education Spokesman Tim Yeo is floundering.
Mr Yeo's suggestion that schools could be prevented from using proximity to a school to determine places would mean that popular schools would have to find other ways to choose from hundreds of families seeking a few dozen places.
Doug McAvoy, NUT general secretary, suggested that headteachers would have to "pull names out of a hat". Mr McAvoy said that it raised the prospect of people who had homes beside good schools having to drive their children to less good schools that could be miles away.
"Parents are not going to like that," said Mr McAvoy.
And in particular middle class parents who have taken out huge mortgages to get near to a desirable school are unlikely to be keen on such a scheme.
But Mr Yeo appeared to contradict what would be a highly controversial proposal by also saying that schools would be allowed to decide their own admission rules.
That would mean schools being able to continue using distance from the school as grounds for admission - which would mean that better-off parents could still buy into catchment areas.
Mr Yeo emphasised that the pupil passport proposals were about expanding choice, particularly for families living in deprived areas."I want all parents to have the kind of choice which at present is only available to those who can afford to choose where they live," he said.
Not being fascinated by the pronouncements of politicians about education, I may have got this all wrong. But it seems to me that Yeo's policy will only work properly if popular schools are allowed to expand, and if it is also accepted that unpopular schools might close, if they persist in being unpopular. But since expansion takes time, any expansion plan is by its nature a risk, and the possibility of your school disappearing is also a risk. And why would the people in charge of schools take such risks unless there is the prospect of profit. For as long as these schools are run by people on fixed salaries that don't increase all that dramatically even if their school gets very popular, why would they take such risks? And if they wouldn't, then this means that there is this vast mob of parents chasing a fixed number of popular school places, and the unpopular schools stay in "business" (the inverted commas being because it isn't really business at all) simply so that there are enough places for everyone.. Which is pretty much the situation we have now. Yeo wants to fake some of the aspects of a free market, while omitting to include various other essential features. And since that would have daft consequences, he wants actually to restrict other seemingly market-like activity, such as schools deciding who they let in. Like I say, floundering.
Or am I missing something? It wouldn't surprise me a bit if I was. It's only politics and I do not give this my full attention.
I have just done a posting at Samizdata entitled Anti-Americanism as teacher testing which may be of interest to readers here, in which I make use of a classroom analogy to explain (at least part of) the current wave of anti-Americanism that the world is now indulging in/suffering from.
The piece isn't really about classrooms at all, but I do deviate a little into education theory, concerning the claim (mostly bogus I think but in some cases true) that "children need limits".
Here is a useful, as opposed to snide and Guardian-readerish, summary of Conservative Party education policy. Their opposition to university fees …
On universities, meanwhile, the traditional Tory line of slimming down state involvement is reversed: the party is committed to abolishing fees, which inevitably means the state being more involved.
… is highlighted, quite reasonably, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
In the latest issue of Prospect, Philip Collins writes about the public sector generally, and Ofsted inspections in particular:
The better regulation task force recently asked government to tell it how many regulators now existed because it was struggling to count them. No doubt there could be fewer of them. And, of course, the inspectorate has never been exactly popular with professionals. David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, has recently responded to criticism by saying that Ofsted needs to become more rigorous in its methods, to drop in at shorter notice and leave well-performing schools alone. Inspection in the future will be less burdensome, less intent on naming and shaming and more directly concentrated on dispersing good ideas. This change of focus is possible partly because Ofsted's initial work, attacking entrenched failure, has been a success. Its alarming report on reading standards in London was the catalyst for the national literacy strategy in 1998. Ninety per cent of schools now show satisfactory improvement between their first and second inspection. The proportion of 16 year olds who obtained no GCSEs above grade D has fallen every year since 1994, when inspections were introduced. For all the anguish that Ofsted inspections create, most teachers would prefer to reform the system rather than abolish it. And the information provided is indispensable for parents. Britain probably now has the most transparent schools system in the world. As David Bell said recently: "It is easy to forget what the education system was like without the publication of examination and test results."
Well, that's one way of looking at the public sector. I am of course a public sector pessimist, but Collins writes throughout his piece as if the right (instead of wrong) new procedures, the right (instead of wrong) new reforms, the right (instead of wrong) new initiatives, will finally make it all work well. At one point, for example, he even lists some massive spending increases as prima facie evidence of improvement, when for those of us who oppose the whole idea of a large and active public sector the ever increasing cost of the thing as all part of what a catastrophe it is.
Collins is a sort of friend, in the sense that he is a very good friend of a very good friend, and I therefore wish I could say that I liked his article more than I did.
I take friends, and therefore friends of friends, seriously, not just for their own sake, but as sources of information. I pick up some of my best postings at social gatherings, when trusted individual friends report to me on individual experiences which I can pretty much guarantee are true, and one of the more vivid such recollections I gathered recently was from my friend John Washington. He works at what it is most definitely a good school, by practically any way you care to measure these things. Certainly the parents involved think it's good, or they wouldn't be paying the quite large fees. Yet Ofsted insists on an elaborate inspection of this place every few years.
When I last spoke to John, they had just been having such an inspection. He and all his colleagues had been filling in lots of forms about their pre-prepared written "lesson plans", even though this not a procedure which John actually follows; he just turns up and teaches.
A few things I recall in particular from what John said. One, his guestimate of what all this was costing was "around £40,000 I suppose". Two, the school had to pay this. Three, the amount of paperwork involved filled, if I recall John's hand gestures accurately, about half a room.
Who the hell is going to read this report? And what possible purpose does it serve? It seems to me that inspections like this embody the same error that Philip Collins himself makes in his Prospect article, namely the belief that if enough things are done, and (in this case) if enough "information" is gathered, eventually the gatherers will chance upon the perfect system (in this case of state education). Actually, the endless and ever more expensive search by bureaucrats for systemic perfection is one of the major problems of the system, and will go on being for as long as the search persists.
The government is continuing to do something about education. Now the something that it is doing is that it is going to sack a lot of the people whom it had previously hired to do all its previous somethings:
Did the Budget signal a change in the government's attitudes to schools and colleges?Are ministers about to trust schools and teachers to do their own thing? Is there about to be a bonfire of targets?
The decision to give more money directly to head teachers while, at the same time, cutting the number of jobs in the ministry could certainly be spun into a message which suggest that the days of "Whitehall knows best" are over.
It was certainly a bad day for the staff of the Department for Education and Skills: 31% of them will lose their jobs by 2008. That is 1,460 fewer headquarters civil servants.
If they could all be retrained as teachers - preferably of maths, IT or foreign languages - Gordon Brown would have made a useful contribution to solving the teacher shortage too.
I can't see these people ever wanting to be teachers. They, more than anyone, know what torments the government now heeps on teachers for they now do the heeping.
Here's my prediction. The targets and initiatives will remain in place. But, it will now be even more impossible for schools to get straight answers from the DfES about whether the DfES agrees that your school has met these targets and done its duty by these initiatives, and thus whether your school is therefore entitled to the money which meeting these targets and acting on these initiatives ought theoretically to entitle it to. And once the DfES has finally agreed that you are entitled to the money, there will be even more agonisingly prolonged delays than there are now before you actually do get the money.
Here are two stories involving Muslims being urged to embrace "modern" education. Here's an Indian BJP man urging Muslims to get educated (and join the BJP):
Seeking to diospel the general perception that BJP was "anti-minority", Joshi said "the mere fact that the Muslims are less in number than the Hindus in the country does not make them a minority. The community can contribute as much as anybody in economic development if they take up modern education in a big way."
Funny. I thought that is what a minority is. Perhaps Mr Joshi could use a little more education himself.
And here's a Pakistani politician pushing women's education:
"Sindh government is anxiously working for promotion of cause of education, raise the academic standard and universalisation of education in the province." He was talking to a delegation of edducational experts, teachers, intellectuals and journalists of Sindh who met him at Chief Minister House here Wednesday.
Presumably "universalisation" means educating females as well.
Politics is only politics. But these kinds of pronouncements are bound to have consequences, if not immediately among educators and bureaucrats, then in the minds of the next generation of Muslims and women.
Where would I be without helpful emailers? (See also: immediately below.)
One of my many unpaid research assistants, Tim Haas, emails me with update news from the BBC about the recent threat to regulate Home Schooling.
Here is the original scare story that this all refers to.
Says Tim:
Of course the headline and subhead ignore the real story - that the welfare manager who called for more stringent regulation because of a case of home educator abuse was completely wrong - but the rest of it isn't so bad.
Indeed. Sample quote from the new BBC story:
A leading education welfare manager has apologised for stating wrongly that a child, who died from natural causes, had been subjected to abuse.
Jenny Price, general secretary of the Association of Education Welfare Managers, said she regretted that the information, published in good faith, had been incorrect.
And, having had complaints from home educators, Mrs Price says it is clear some education authorities "do not fully understand the home education ethos".
You can almost hear the angry phone calls, can't you? Phrases involving "fingers" and "burnt" suggest themselves, or even other phrases involving "stick" and "hornet's nest".
I can't remember when I said it, but I definitely did say, here, some time or other ago (yes – I said it here), that the Home Education "commmunity" (which really is something of a community) is too dangerous a beast to be simply steamrollered by the state education machine. If Home Education was at all severely messed with, the politics of this would be horrendous for the messer, I think.
Here's what I put here on May 12 2003, apropos of whether Home Ed might ever spread to France. I apparently talked with someone about how …
… any government which took on the home-schoolers of Britain would have got itself the Political Enemies from Hell. Think of all those terrifyingly bright children who'd overrun morning television. Consider the fact that many home-schoolers have considerable demonstrating experience. I may not hold with their political views about war, peace, etc., but these people do know how to lay on a good demo and to mobilise the media. And they must be, almost by definition, among the most intellectually self-confident people around.
Of course I hope that isn't just wishful thinking, but I really do think that.
I like the idea of daily postings, and I even like them at the weekend. There is something satisfying about an uninterrupted posting record. But what to put today?
Well, this morning I encountered yet another policy initiative here, but this one is different. It is from the Conservatives, and it just might do some good, if only by making the people who ought to be suffering to suffer.
But I thought about it a bit and decided that the political implications were at least as interesting as the educational implications, so I said what I had to say about this at Samizdata rather than here.
But then I wanted to say here that I'd said all this there, as is my wont here, and that ought to involve me saying in more detail why I liked the sound of this policy. Basically what it is is education vouchers, dressed up as something else. Funding follows parental choice. Popular schools get more money and expand. Unpopular schools get less and wither away. That kind of thing. Good idea, I think. For why: see all my previous posts here since this blog began.
Luckily a commenter called Tim Worstall has commented in more detail, and says the kind of thing I had in mind better than I could. Quote:
You leave out some other implications of the policy: vouchers will quite obviously not pass through the LEA's : at one bound the system will be free of a bureaucracy that swallows 30% of all input. This has the interesting side effect of making state education equally funded with private at £5,000 or so a year per pupil (at the level of the school), without higher central government spending. And even more: removing education spending from local council budgets (where it currently rests along with the LEA's ) goes a long way to making local taxation more reasonable and responsive to local spending.
There will of course be an outcry from the LEA staff as the implications sink in, that they're all going to be out of a job soon, and yet there is even a solution to that inherent in the cunning plan. The number of LEA employees with teaching credentials is within a fag paper of those teaching posts unfilled by a shortage of trained graduates.
So, real choice in schooling, abolition of a bureaucracy, solve the teacher shortage, end the "resources" crisis in state education and go at least halfway to getting a handle on council tax.
Maybe my old flatmate will actually get re-elected, into Govt this time, and I can look forward to some falconeration? Maybe just the odd quango post to start with? Usual rules, all meetings held standing up, pay of those attending publicly calculated minute by minute, any decision costing more by that meter to take than is at stake immediately made by the Chairman and, most important, a sunset clause.
For the benefit of Zanzibarian (and such like) readers of this, "LEA" stands for "Local Education Authorities". But what does that bit about his old flatmate mean? Maybe he will explain in a further Samizdata comment.
Anyway, as the American blog-commenters say: what he said.
I did some googling, and I rather think that Tim Worstall must be this guy.
This government does love a good shake-up, doesn't it?
This time they want a six-term school year, so students can do their exams a bit sooner and apply to universities a bit sooner, which will apparently help.
There has to be an easier way to arrange that.
The independent schools are getting grief from the "Office of Fair Trading". Perry de Havilland comments here.
This brings to mind that old chestnut of a complaint about government interference in markets. If you have lower prices than your competitors, you are "undercutting" them and indulging in unfair competition. If you charge more than your competitors, you are indulging in predatory pricing. If you charge the same as your competitors, you are indulging in collusion.
The complaint this time is that independent schools are colluding.
The Office of Fair Trading is nothing of the kind. Independent schools should stay independent, and should be allowed to charge whatever they like for their services. If they all get together and agree to the same price, that should be their right. If you think they are all overcharging, then set up a school and undercut them yourself. The only morally decent way to interfere in a market is to participate in it. Otherwise, butt out.
I have a piece on an educational theme over at Samizdata, in connection with this New York Times story. It's about a somewhat tactless libertarian economist, who may nevertheless have done something to improve education in his home town.
As usual at Samizdata, the comments are now piling in, several of them saying that the economist, whom I defended, is a pillock, for trashing his own neighbours in a magazine, no matter how obscure.
But this comment particularly intrigued me, about the – presumably unintended – consequences of the "No Child Left Behind" program that President Bush has introduced.
An American ViewGiven the "no child left behind" with its requirements for validation (= testing) teachers seem to have little control over curriculum and "teaching" is geared towards passing the next test with little concern for "education." All the paperwork that's related seems to be especially difficult to keep up with in the smaller schools in states like Montana, Wyoming, etc. leaving the schools in danger of loosing monetary support from Big Brother, effectively killing them.
There seems to be some scattered trend towards the local citizenry giving up and supporting education themselves but it doesn't appear to be very widespread. The U.S. Dept. of Education seems to have suggested recently that some of these problems can be "worked out." One can only wonder what that means.
Any further comments on that? I leave it to you to decide whether to put them in the peace and quiet of here, or the monkey-fight that Samizdata comment threads often become.
Joanne Jacobs has more comment on that NYT piece by Emily White about e-schooling which I also linked to on Sunday.
Commenting on this kind of thing:
Yet it is also true that there is a beauty in high school: those long, exhausting hours full of other kids, everyone trying to interpret one another. It's a beauty that Gus Van Sant evokes in his new Columbine-inspired film, ''Elephant'' -- kids break dancing and taking pictures and making out, even as the school day is headed for darkness.
... JJ says:
Some students like the social interaction of school; others can't handle it or prefer not to or go to schools where the danger is too dangerous to be beautiful.I see why I've been unable to break into the New York Times Magazine. I lack the right mentality.
Quite so. When I read those bits about Gus Van Sant I thought, yes, Emily White has indeed got the right mentality that you need to smuggle anti-school-compulsion anti-government-meddling stuff into the New York Times, and good on her. You nod towards matters artistic, of the sort that Middle America wouldn't have heard of or wouldn't approve of if it did hear of them, but concede nothing of substance.
It's true. Many kids do enjoy their schools. So admit it, and let that be the bit where you sprinkle on a dash of Gus Van Sant, and making sure also to splash in the word "Columbine" itself, which as we all know is an issue which proves beyond doubt that everyone in the world should vote Democrat and read the New York Times every day for ever. It could well be that those very paragraphs clinched it for this article getting published by the NYT.
(Actually, Columbine is the case against compulsory schooling and government meddling in hundred foot high flaming letters, in about five distinct ways, but simply to mention Columbine is to score NYT brownie points. We're talking about a conditioned editorial reflex here, not a conscious thought process.)
But, as Joanne Jacobs agrees, what White's article actually says is that many kids don't like regular schooling, and that if that's so they shouldn't have to submit to it, and they don't have to submit to it.
I wonder what Gus Van Sant thinks about that.
Thailand may not be a grain of sand exactly, but look at its education controversies, and you do see the entire educational world writ smaller.
From the Straits Times:
BANGKOK – At the heart of the rejection by King Bhumibol Adulyadej is a transition from a very conservative, typically Asian system of education to a globally competitive system.The Bill sent back by the King contained several errors described as technical, with most arising out of confused terminology.
With the career paths of some 500,000 government teachers at stake, those technicalities could have turned out to be critical, which is why the Bill was rejected.
The administration has admitted its error, and the Bill has been killed. Legislators and their committees will go back to the drawing board when Parliament reopens after its three-month recess, which began this week.
While there was unnecessary haste, too little consultation, and overconfidence on the part of the ruling party in pushing through the Bill, there was no sinister intent.
The Bill was supposed to decentralise the system and restructure the work force – teachers – according to skills, competence and seniority. But 500,000 teachers constitute a substantial body of people, and many among them were district education officials worried that the proposed structure in the Bill made their jobs redundant.
Quite naturally, they lobbied the King in a petition against the Bill. Whether this had a bearing on the Palace's decision is something the public may never know.
The rejection of the Bill thus has no bearing on political stability, other than the fact that it is a loss of face for the government which has been shown up in this instance to be, at the least, mildly incompetent and, at the worst, overconfident and therefore sloppy, given its superior position in Parliament.
But the controversy is a reflection on the critical nature of the change being sought.
As in many countries, in Thailand's private schools, quality education is available to those who pay for it.
In the kingdom's public schools, the traditional teacher-disciple relationship is still very entrenched, with the teachers' authority unquestioned even on academic issues. This lack of debate does not breed creative competitiveness.
Also, in today's globalised world, working knowledge of English is an asset.
With the school system largely in Thai, English skills are rudimentary among many who go through the government system.
As noted by the Asian Development Bank in its report this year, the Thai education system lags behind that of others in the region, especially in science and an area crucial for national competitiveness – creative problem-solving.
And in an indication of the nature of the stakes, a mere three weeks ago Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra replaced his education minister with Adisai Bodhiramik, a former commerce minister who is considered more capable of pushing reform.
Same old story in other words, with only the usual Asian tweaks, to the effect that children pay too much attention to their teachers in state schools rather than too little, and that state schools are in trouble because they don't teach enough English. Otherwise: private success public failure, not enough science, concern about global competitiveness, entrenched teacher and bureaucratic interests and consequent political grief, despite a dominant governmental position politically, as this politician turns out to be better than that one at "pushing reform" – it's all familiar stuff.
I tried to pick out the best paragraphs of this story to illustrate the point about how familiar it will all seem to people thousands of miles away from Thailand, but it was all so relevant to this theme that I ended up copying and pasting the entire thing.
Do they use the word "initiative" in Thailand, I wonder?
Oh goodee, David Miliband has had another idea about how to harass teachers and complicate everyone's lives:
Every child could be offered a place at US-style summer camps, it emerged today.Ministers believe the move could fire enthusiasm for school and build youngsters confidence.
Three pilot projects which ran this summer were deemed successes, the Department for Education and Skills said.
Now Schools minister David Miliband is poised to launch the scheme nationwide following further analysis next month.
Natalie Solent is not impressed:
… A pilot scheme was successful and so they are all convinced that a burst of wholesome exercise and outdoor living will send the young lads and lasses home flushed and happy for some reason other than the usual Ecstasy tablet / successful shoplifting expedition / fornication.So we're back to ten mile runs and outdoor living, eh? What's the betting that next year's miracle cure is the long-neglected educational virtue of cold showers.
These poor deluded innocents never seem to figure out that experimental pilot schemes frequently succeed because they are pilot schemes; i.e. new and not offered to everybody. Remember Home-School Contracts? When some head teacher first thought up that wheeze it probably did work well. Gosh, thought the kids and the parents, a contract, we better take this seriously. But once every child in the country gets one in his school bag at the end of the first day back it becomes just another bit of paper to sign.
Wise words. Some good may come of this idea. More harm. Huge expense. Oh, and crooks organising camps that turn out not to be, while the kids stay at home and the parents get their cut of the swag. Just you wait. If I am wrong, I like to think I'll have the decency to link back to this and admit it. If I'm right, you can count on me linking back.
The sad thing is that instead of spending his life making the lives of headmasters hell, David Miliband might have made quite a good headmaster himself.