Patrick Crozier was today kind enough to link back to this January 2006 Samizdata piece of mine, and whenever that happens, knowing that others may be reading it, I reread it myself.  It stands up pretty well.

I also looked at the comments, and found this very educationally relevant comment, concerning an enterprise of which I previously knew nothing.  Someone called “pommygranate” was responding to a point I had made in my piece about the speed with which people will respond to changed incentives.  (I think that if incentives truly do change, people respond very quickly indeed.)

I have spent the last three years working with a London charity that takes in violent but intelligent black boys and tries to turn them into decent human beings. Their results are staggering. My time there has given me an insight into the Welfare State and has convinced me of a number of indisputable facts

i) children respond rapidly to a change in their personal circumstances. If incentivised properly and disciplined fairly, they are capable of complete change.

ii) the older they get, the less the magnitude of change possible. By 14, attitudes are set for life.

iii) 95% of the boys we accept have no adult men in their lives. This is the single largest contributing factor to a slide into an anti-social life.

iv) people do not value what is for free. We charge the parents £2 a week for their boys to attend class. It is a nominal fee but a crucial part of the program.

apologies for the shameless plug but go to eyla.org.uk for those wanting to find out more (and helping out, especially if you are a successful black male)

The other day I found myself watching a TV nature show in which it was explained that apparently the same point, about whether they have adult males in their lives or not, applies also to juvenile male elephants.  Orphaned young male elephants were on the rampage, killing other animals for no obvious reason.  The biggest single improvement in their behaviour happened when adult male elephants were introduced into the herd.

One of the themes I hope to explore here from time to time is question of what kind of animals humans are, young humans in particular, and hence what kinds of teaching and influence work best with them.  We have long had horse whisperers in our midst, and there is now a dog whisperer doing very well for himself, and for dogs and their owners I hasten to add, on the telly.

How do human whisperers do things?  I suspect that the word “successful”, which occurs right at the end of pommygranate’s words, has a lot to do with it.  Not in the sense that the men working that human whisperer magic have to have a certain minimum income, but in the sense that they have to behave like they are someone, to have, as we say “something about them”.

This is an important question for me personally.  I am now trying to teach young boys, and I really want to know how to do this better than I do it now.