Favourite blogger of mine, Shanghaiist, is blogging about the Chinese earthquake.  Schools have of course not been spared.  This was Juyuan Middle School, in Dujiangyan.  “Death toll not confirmed. Rescue efforts still underway”:

Count your blessings.

There’s no link in this posting to the Kavanagh column mentioned, so I’m guessing it was paper only.  Anyway, here’s what James Forsyth says about it:

Trevor Kavanagh’s column in The Sun today brilliantly details the way that £1.229 trillion has been added to the public’s tab over the last ten years - an astonishing £20,500 extra per person. 87 percent and 90 percent increases in health and education spending respectively have not resulted in the transformation of these services. Indeed, all it has done is test to destruction the idea that all these services needed was more money.

There is now fierce debate about whether education is getting better in Britain, or worse.  On Question Time recently, for instance, a Labour Lady pointed out that there are now many more graduates in the teaching profession than there used to be.  But does that mean that teachers have got better?  It could just mean that graduates have got worse, and that potentially good teachers who aren’t graduates are being kept out of the profession by credentialism.

But my point is: there is fierce debate.  If the education budget has been nearly doubled, there ought not to be any debate.

Guido:

If you are going to make classical references, best you spell ‘em correctly.

Which supplies some party political balance for this.

Although, this particular gaff is not really about someone being unable to spell.  I mean, Jason Whatsisname can spell Argonaut.  He just didn’t.  I often make such mistakes here, and then either correct them if I spot them, or if someone else does.  Or not.  So this may really be about the tendency of internet stuff not to be “proof-” read (note the printing origins of that phrase) properly.

On the other hand, I suspect that the Labour person who miss-spelled (which is another whole spelling argument - see the comments in my earlier post) excellence as excellance really did semi-think that that’s how excellence is generally spelt.

So, maybe not balanced after all.  Which might be either because Guido is a sneaky person, or because Labour people actually are worse at spelling than the Conservatives.

I think I am glad about this, not because I hate literature and art and all that, but because I love it, but a lot of them don’t:

For generations, the study of literature has been a pillar of liberal education, a prime forum for cultural self-examination, and a favorite major for students seeking deeper understanding of the human experience.

But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the “outside world,” but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can’t find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.

I can still remember a one-to-one lesson (more of a conversation really) which I did with Smart Girl (who is Smart Boy‘s sister) in which we discussed how she might set about choosing a boy friend.  One way, we agreed (and I think we really did agree – I honestly don’t remember this as just me telling her and her staying quiet), to check out boys is to put them through ordeals, of the sort that happen to Young Men in Literature.  As Author, she would put her Young Men through dramas and disasters and triumphs, and her Young Ladies would thus be able satisfactorily to choose between them, on the basis of more than mere charm and good looks.

If they wrote about things like that in Literary Criticism, maybe people might want to read it.

The author of the piece quoted above thinks literary criticism needs to become more like science.  I suspect that this belief is more like the problem than the solution.  The desire to produce “theories” of literature is, I feel, the problem.  But his point is that these theories can and should be tested.  It is worth reading, as we bloggers say, the whole thing.

This working boy did the school’s IT.  But this working boy, also in IT, didn’t go to school.  Which didn’t, says the story, hold him back.  (The way it usually does?)

He said: “There aren’t very many jobs for teenagers around except washing-up at hotels or chopping chips for a chippy.

“I wanted to start up my own business doing something that I really enjoyed, was good at, and that I could fit into my free time, at home - and hopefully I will be able to earn some money at the same time.”

There are five comments on this story in the Bridport News, all of them very positive.

Linked to by Carlotta.

Fareed Zakaria says that the USA’s relative economic decline is (see page 6 much exaggerated:

The United States is currently ranked as the globe’s most competitive economy by the World Economic Forum.  It remains dominant in many industries of the future like nanotechnology, biotechnology, and dozens of smaller high-tech fields.

In particular, says Zakaria, the USA remains pre-eminent in higher education:

Its universities are the finest in the world, making up 8 of the top ten and 37 of the top fifty, according to a prominent ranking produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.  A few years ago the National Science Foundation put out a scary and much-discussed statistic.  In 2004, the group said, 950,000 engineers graduated from China and India, while only 70,000 graduated from the United States.  But those numbers are wildly off the mark.  If you exclude the car mechanics and repairmen - who are all counted as engineers in Chinese and Indian statistics - the numbers look quite different.  Per capita, it turns out, the United States trains more engineers than either of the Asian giants.

But isn’t the point that “per capita”?  A smaller proportion of a vastly greater number is still a huge absolute number.

Joanne Jacobs makes a similar point about the continuing qualitative superiority of US education.

Nothing here from me today.  Instead, if you haven’t already, have a read of this posting.  Concluding words:

I took my year sevens out into the school car park this afternoon for a lesson on symmetry, we were looking at hub caps, to escape the heat and get some sun. I got some odd looks from other staff walking, especially as I was getting them to take pictures on their phones. An assistant head came to see what was going on as I think the lesson might have been outside his comfort zone. He actually asked ‘and you’re allowing them to use their phones?’ It’d be a mighty show of defiance from the class to walk out with phones in hand. And having made it that far it be weird for them to congregate in the car park taking pictures of wheels. I cheerfully explained what we were doing and he went away looking somewhere inbetween confused and bemused. Admittedly it was a risky lesson but it was with a class I could trust my life with.

And it’s always nice to get some fresh air.

And in more ways than one.

Simon Hoggart (quoted by Iain Dale) writing about the Prime Minister’s latest performance at Prime Minister’s Questions:

It was awful, and it’s getting worse. When I was at secondary school we had a temporary teacher for a term. He was hopeless. There is no group more cruel than young teenage boys, except young teenage girls, and we treated him unmercifully. At the end of term a friend and I saw him cycling down our street, and, separated from the feral pack, felt great pity. We stopped him, apologised for our class’s behaviour, and said we hoped his next post would be happier. I would have told us to go to hell, but he seemed pleased, which was more than we deserved. I haven’t had that feeling since until watching poor Gordon Brown.

Iain Dale emailer:

The analogy is wrong in one vital respect. GB isn’t some hapless young temporary supply teacher. He has been the all powerful deputy head at the school for the past eleven years who has bullied all the pupils and the staff and plotted every day to remove the head. Having done that pupils and staff have discovered that he is nothing more than, to use the old Scottish expression, “a big Jessie.” Hence with merciless desire for revenge the pupils are taunting him and the staff plotting to remove him. He deserves everything he is enduring!

Okay, it’s not really about education.  It merely uses education to talk about politics.  But insofar as education is a power struggle, and it all too often is, education is itself highly political.  And whatever you think about that, these quotes are just the kind of spread-the-net-a-bit-wider stuff that I like to feature here.  When I notice them, that is.

Earlier this evening I was watching a movie called I Want Candy, which is about a couple of aspiring movie makers who get their start by making a porno movie.  In it there was a scene where a lecturer was lecturing a quite large room full of aspiring movie makers, and I was trying to work out just what was so very, very depressing about it.  It absolutely wasn’t merely the teacher, even though he was indeed very depressingly and very well enacted, by McKenzie Crook.

Then I got it.  Teaching a large number of people how to do a job which only a tiny number of people ever get to actually do for real is an inherently absurd activity.  It just doesn’t make sense.  By far the more intelligent strategy for the teacher, if he actually wants to accomplish anything beyond collecting his pay check in exchange for damn all, is for him to start not by doing much in the way of actual teaching, but instead by searching through all the students in the room, and picking out the one or two who look like they are the least unlikely ones to actually make it to being real movie makers, and concentrate all his efforts on making these few even better.

The usual explanations given for why some things are taught in huge assemblages of students, while other things are taught by teachers on a one-to-one basis are that the nature of the skill requires this, or the student is paying for special attention, or the pupil gets special attention by threatening to wreck the classroom otherwise (whcih amounts to the same idea).  But I think another reason is that teaching someone to get ahead in a fiercely competitive trade or profession just doesn’t make sense any way except one-on-on, very intensely.

The best concert violin students have individual teachers.  The best aspiring athletes have individual coaches.  It’s not the nature of the skill that demands this.  It is the ruthlessly competitive nature of the field that the pupils aspire to enter.  The best violin teachers don’t teach vast throngs of violinists.  They teach a very select few, and lavish tremendously detailed attention on these few.

If someone is teaching a highly competitive trade to a large throng, the chances are that neither he nor his pupils are very good.  If the teacher was any good, he’d pick a few potential winners.  If a pupil was any good, he’d find a better teacher.

If there was a large demand for people who could play the violin really, really well, on a scale approaching the demand for people who are merely literate and numerate, then violin playing would be taught in large classes, just like literacy and numeracy.

In the past, when the demand for literacy and numeracy was not nearly so great, these things were also taught one-to-one.

This has been a thinking-aloud posting, and it may not be right.

Here.  But it’s not very good and not very long.  The accompanying text is a long more informative.

For more than 35 years a horse riding school has been helping to improve the lives of children with disabilities.

Based at Barnards Farm in Debden Green, the Saffron Walden and District Riding for the Disabled Association (RDA) gives children the chance to learn new skills and have fun.

Chairman Helen Kent said: “The club provides so many benefits to the children who come here. They all have a great time, but also learning to ride really boosts their self-confidence and self-esteem.

“Many would not have the opportunity to try horse riding if it wasn’t for the club.”

It’s a charity, dependent upon donations and sponsorship, not state funding.  The usual complaint about a totally non-state education system is that the difficult children would fall completely through the net, or rather the non-net.  Well, these children are pretty “difficult”, but something is being done for them.

It looks like Ray Lewis (see below) is about to be very busy:

Boris Johnson put tackling youth crime at the forefront of his mayoralty today with a pledge to bring in “respect schools”.

He said he hoped to set up 100 Saturday courses where troubled teenagers could combine sport and academic subjects.

The Mayor conceded that his hardline approach involving “competition, discipline - and punishment” would be unfashionable with many Londoners.

But he insisted that unless the causes of violent crime were dealt with, the problem would never be solved.

Presumably the pupils at these courses will simply be told to attend, and then told to pay attention.  It will be that or just regular punishment, like jail, right?  Well, I don’t know how this will work.  Time will tell.

Iain Dale enthuses about new London Mayor Boris Johnson’s first appointment:

What fantastic news that Boris Johnson’s first senior appointment is to make Ray Lewis a Deputy Mayor with an important role in tackling youth crime. For those who don’t know him, Ray runs the East Side Young Leaders Academy, which is a charity specialising in giving young black kids a real education. It relies on more traditional teaching methods and discipline plays a key role. Lewis says every child emerges with at least two A Levels and three quarters go to university. Polly Toynbee will have a seizure when she learns of this appointment as Ray Lewis is living proof that her liberal creed has failed black, inner city youngsters.

Lewis’s academy has been financially supported by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice and is a working example of how voluntary sector organisations can make a real difference to people’s lives.

Personally I have doubts about creaming off the best voluntary or commercial sector people and making them into politicians.  They risk migrating from the solution to the problem, I think.  The now admirable Ray Lewis may come to regret this move.

Libby Purves in today’s Times:

One unalloyed good that new Labour promoted is music in schools: slowly it is creeping back to prominence, and the Music Manifesto includes a demand that children should sing for at least five minutes a day. So far, so good. But in a classic example of meddling overmanagement, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced last year a “national songbook” of 30 songs that every 11-year-old should know. This prissy, prescriptive idea has just been abandoned because nobody could agree on which 30. Instead, the Sing Up website has a hundred, ranging from Clementine to Polish skipping tunes, and puts new ones up weekly. It still hasn’t nerved itself to include Land of Hope and Glory, but it’s doing fine.

Yet Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, instead of tossing his hat in the air and singing “Let my people go!”, proved that he is well in training to be a modern minister (aka an annoying, bossy pest) by criticising the decision to abandon the compulsory 30-song list. “This Government,” he thundered, “is so paralysed by political correctness and terminally afflicted by dithering that it cannot even decide on a simple thing like the songs children should learn.”

I am sorry to hear a Cameroonian so infected with new-Labouritis. Michael, man, chill! It is not the role of ministers to prescribe which songs children sing. Insist they sing something, provide an online facility to help timid teachers, pop in the multiculti stuff - fine. But a compulsory list of songs to be learnt by 11? Mad micromanagement: bossy, borderline fascist. ...

Guy Herbert of Samizdata is also appalled, both by the government’s micromanagement and by Gove’s attitude.

Herbert goes on to quote various other gruesome stuff from www.curriculumonline.gov.uk.

Here.  Quote:

Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and Right, though in different ways. Educational romantics of the Left focus on race, class, and gender. It is children of color, children of poor parents, and girls whose performance is artificially depressed, and their academic achievement will blossom as soon as they are liberated from the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in American education. Those of the Right see public education as an ineffectual monopoly, and think that educational achievement will blossom when school choice liberates children from politically correct curricula and obdurate teachers’ unions.

I am certainly a romantic in the sense that I believe that millions of children could be doing massively better than they do at school.  But I do not hope to see “educational” achievement blossoming.  Just achievement.

Murray’s point is that many are of limited “intellectual ability”, and maybe they are.  But many non-intellectuals do indeed flourish, as soon as they leave school and get stuck into real life.  This is because in real life, intellectual cleverness is not, to put it mildly, the only virtue that matters.

To repeat something which I suspect you are going to read a lot more at this blog if you stay with it: good education does not mean mere exam success, higher academic standards, etc.  It means what you need to learn to have a good life.  And for many, the best way to start learning about real life is to start real life.

Quote again:

The parallels between the trajectory of the Soviet Union’s attempt to reform its economy and the trajectory of the federal government’s attempts to reform the public education system are striking. By the mid-1980s, Soviet leaders knew that they had to introduce supply and demand into the economy, but they couldn’t bring themselves to try honest-to-God capitalism, so they tried to decentralize decision-making and permit some elements of a market economy while retaining central price controls and government ownership of the means of production. The reforms were based on premises about human nature that were patently wrong. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the educational romantics - and George W. Bush is the Percy Bysshe Shelley of educational romantics - knew that public school systems everywhere had become bureaucratically top-heavy and that many inner-city schools were no longer functional. They knew that the billions of federal money spent on upgrading education for disadvantaged children had produced no demonstrable improvements. But they thought they could fix the system. Bush’s glasnost was to implement accountability through measurement of results by test scores. Bush’s perestroika was a mishmash of performance standards and fragments of a market economy in schools, while retaining public funding of the schools and government control over the enforcement of the new standards. ...

Amen.  But, the conclusion to be drawn from this is not to be satisfied with the Western educational equivalent of the Brezhnev regime.  The conclusion, which Murray hints at obliquely but does not spell out: capitalism for all!  The real thing.

It worked and works for adults.  Freedom for adults – all adults - had and continues to have exactly the kind of transformational effects that anti-romantics regard as delusional.  Yet they happened and happen.  So, why not try the same thing with children?

If the modern electronic industry (in the form of things like the thing I’m typing this into) had not happened, most anti-romantics would say that it was utterly impossible.  Yet capitalism routinely extracts extraordinary achievements from very ordinary people indeed.  The subtitle of Murray’s article is: “On requiring every child to be above average.” Under rip-roaring capitalism, just about every adult is “above average”, by the standards of pre-capitalist times, and by the standards of the still severely non-capitalist places now.

Maybe children can’t do freedom.  Maybe, by their nature (nature again), they can’t handle it.  But we could at least make a start with adolescents.  We could at least liberate the big children, the children who aren’t really children at all.

The mischievous mind of Alex Singleton turns the usual anti-lefty complaint on its head.