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The founder of the X-Prize (well known around these parts due to events such as the space ventures side of things) now wants to launch a prize for people with good ideas on how to sort out education. (H/T, Instapundit). I can suggest two quick ideas: Give the prize immediately to Professor James Tooley. Or, Give it to me, as I have this brilliant idea – just get the state out of education, full stop. Simple, really. March 12th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Katharine Birbalsingh is an heroic, principled woman who, against hideous odds, is trying desperately to open a free school – the Michaela Community School – in a part of South London woefully ill-served by state secondary schools. It will provide academic rigour, discipline, a liberal arts curriculum including Latin, uniforms, sporting facilities and extended school hours to children in one of the most deprived parts of London, regardless of race or social class or ability to pay. For those children whose parents can’t afford to go private, the school will be a godsend – possibly the single thing that makes all the difference in their life between success and failure. Does it constitute a strong, persuasive argument against this project that Katharine Birbalsingh has a name which you can twist with an unfunny pun? Or that she’s disliked by some of her colleagues? Or that, in the eyes of her accuser, she speaks “BS.”? No, it doesn’t. Indeed I’d suggest that these comments are actually counterproductive. They draw attention to the fact that criticism of Katharine Birbalsingh’s noble project is based not on reasoned argument but on prejudice and incoherent rage. This is why they’re so well worth quoting: because they let the enemy do our work for us. – Delingpole comments on a comment. January 24th, 2012 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
This evening I attended the E. G. West Memorial Lecture, which was delivered by James Tooley, one of my favourite public intellectuals. The audience was large, and our response was attentive and at the end, enthusiastic. Tooley started by describing the discoveries of E. G. West concerning the huge contribution to education in nineteenth century Britain made by the private sector, which had pretty much licked the problem of mass literacy and mass numeracy, only for the state then to come crashing in, crowding out the private sector and stealing all of the credit for what the private sector had accomplished. Tooley then described how he has personally been finding the exact same story unfolding in the Third World right now. There too, the private sector is running state education ragged. In the course of his lecture, Tooley presented this complete and comprehensive list of exactly what the state should be contributing to the funding, regulation and provision of education:  As often happens with my photos, people who care about such things will quibble about technical adequacy and artistic impression. But, I trust you get Tooley’s message. I realised while listening to Tooley talk that I have been somewhat losing track of what he’s been up to lately. So when I got home, I ordered a copy of his book, The Beautiful Tree, which he mentioned in the course of his lecture, and in which I hope to learn many more of the details of what he’s been finding out about one of the great success stories of the world now. During the Q&A after the lecture, Tooley was asked what Britain’s politicians should be doing about it all. What reforms ought they to be trying to contrive? Tooley said he expected very little from our politicians, predicting instead that if changes along the lines he would like do come, it will be because of foreign educational enterprises opening branches here, offering a cheap and effective alternative to state education at very little extra cost. That, said Tooley, will be when the good educational stuff starts happening in Britain, again, if it ever does. LATER: A few more pictures here. October 19th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recently a friend told me something about kibbutzes (kibbutzim?) in Israel, which got me into speculation mode. My friend had, he told me, met quite a few people in the course of his various globetrottings who, attracted by the aura of idealism and general world-savingness that kibbutzes radiate, had spent time in a kibbutz. Such pilgrims, said my friend, had quite soon left, all of them disgusted by the experience. Far from being havens of a higher form of humanity, kibbutzes are incubators of nastiness and personal backbiting and unpleasantness of all kinds. Kibbutz life, said these people, had cured them of socialism for ever. Which makes me speculate that kibbutzes are, for this reason, a spectacularly good thing, for the people thus inoculated, and for the world, in more ways than I can count in a short blog posting. The only kind of people said my friend, who live well in kibbutzes are, well, the kind of people who live well in kibbutzes. People who thrive under totalitarian socialism, basically. Good at politics, good at screwing people without appearing too obviously to screw them, in accordance with the rules of rigid egalitarianism. There are lots of rules, to suppress individualism, getting ahead, getting richer, and so on, and the individuals who understand these rules use them ruthlessly to get ahead, and even, if you are flexible about how you measure wealth, to get wealthy. These “alpha personalities”, as my friend described them, stick around, ruling the kibbutz with a rod of egalitarian iron. Many of the people lower down the Greek alphabet, without whom these alphas would presumably be rather helpless, are the transients, some of whom my friend had talked with. Young idealists, for whom life on a kibbutz is some kind of rite of Jewish passage. They arrive, serve their time until they can stand it no longer, and leave, taking with them an education in the realities of egalitarian collectivism that is given to few others in what is basically, still, a moderately free world. They experience such a regime good and hard, in a form that they can contrast with a life outside that kibbutz that is still massively freer, and then leave, taking that knowledge with them. So, in addition to being one of the great new hubs of technological innovation in the world, the state of Israel, by permitting with its laws (including, presumably, a law which says that kibbutzes may not imprison those who no longer consent to being there), and encouraging with its ideological traditions, master classes in the realities of collectivism, is doing the world another huge favour. Kibbutzes are, you might say, re-education camps for precisely the sort of people who most require such re-education, and at a time in their lives soon enough to make a huge difference, to them and to the world. I am a huge admirer of that human semi-collectivity called Jews, and pretty much an uncritical supporter of the state of Israel in its ongoing struggle to stay in existence and to flourish. But, and please do not misunderstand this next bit, I sort of agree with some of the more admiring bits in the ravings of the world’s many anti-semites, present and past. Jews are rather special. A century ago or so, Jews did have an influence on the world that was far greater than their mere numbers would seem to have allowed. (I am a classical music fan, and the sheer scale of the Jewish presence in that world has been and remains extraordinary.) It did not follow from the super-achievements of Jews that therefore the Jews were evil and should all be murdered, and it does not follow now. But, they were a group of people very much to be reckoned with, and they surely still are, again way beyond their mere numbers in the world. I therefore now surmise that an ongoing education programme, which turns energetic, adventurous and idealistic young Jews from devotees of collectivism in devotees of something more like the opposite, has got to be one of the very best things now going on in the world. But, this is pretty much all speculation on my part. The question mark at the end of my heading is no mere afterthought. I admire Israel from afar, but have never been there, nor have I travelled very much in the world. (Maybe if I spent more time in Isreal, I would admire it less.) So I end with all the usual questions which thinking-aloud, but-what-do-I-know?, guess postings of this kind generally do and always should end with. Does any of the above make sense to any of our commentariat? In particular, how do the above speculations strike any readers of this who have pertinent knowledge of the matters I speculate about, of the sort which I do not have, beyond that small item of chat from a friend? I can well imagine that kibbutzes might indeed do a bit of the good I describe, but be doing a lot more harm in other ways. Also, my friend, being of a strongly anti-collectivist inclination himself, could have been suffering from severe selection error. Maybe the world is full of Jews who have lived in a kibbutz and would like nothing less than to kibbutzise the entire world. But, I like to think not. September 23rd, 2011 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Stretch yourselves. Answer these questions, if you think you’re hard enough:
Michael Gove to set out tougher teacher training rules, reports the Telegraph.
The questions quoted above were from the current versions of these literacy and numeracy basic skills tests. One in five trainee teachers fails either the literacy or numeracy part of this fiendish Educational Tripos on the first sitting. Oh dear. Is the correct word perthetic, pafetic, or pathetic? Answer: all three, with knobs on. You might think from this that I am going to urge the Secretary of State for Education to an even more drastic reform than allowing only two re-sits. One re-sit! One re-sit and then euthanasia! I make no such urgings. It none of it matters. The trouble is, to put in terms that an old D&D-er like the Minister would understand, is that it is a very bad idea to magic missile the orcs while the lich remains undefeated. The least of the problems with state education is that orcs who made a bad INT roll are let into the profession. Orcs can do quite nicely as teachers. A teacher needs to roll for three characteristics: – knowledge of the subject he or she is to teach, Of course it is good to have rolled high in all three, and, to be fair to Mr Gove’s latest initiative, he is probably right that a 1 in any of them probably should disqualify the applicant. But a good score in two qualities can usually compensate for one bad roll. But by Garl Glittergold’s holy nugget, I did not mean to get distracted by recommending this tweak or that tweak of Mr Gove’s new “tougher” criteria! It’s all pointless, I tell you. (Particularly as by Mr Gove’s express wish, a person who really had passed the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge would be refused a bursary to train as a maths teacher, if he or she had only a third class degree. Yes, really, even if they could work out how many bottles of vinegar were needed.) The point was this. You don’t fight the orcs, Gove the Mighty But Deluded. You fight the liches. Give the man his due, allowing for the fact that “Secretary of State for Education” is a useless character class that ought to be deleted from any future editions, he is doing better than any we have had for years. If he survives the liches, he may even take the fight to the Blob itself. Just leave the orcs alone. Head teachers can fight their own orcs, or hire ’em, you don’t have to worry which. It is unbecoming for anyone above fifth level to bash an orc. June 28th, 2011 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
The thing is, when you were ten years old, wouldn’t you have loved to have gone down a mine or up a chimney? – Patrick Crozier has dropped by (to help me buy gold on the internet), and we were talking about how education is probably the most vulnerable of all the big ongoing government spending sprees, in the face of the forthcoming financial meltdown. June 25th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ever before I wrote this, I was on the lookout for Fixed Quantity Of… theories, and even more since then. Usually these theories are fallacies. Often, changing how something is done, and in particular changing the rules or the overall setting within which something is done can quite dramatically change, for the better or for the worse, both the quantity and the quality of whatever is being argued about. Here is another such theory/fallacy, the Fixed Quantity of Education fallacy. Toby Young takes aim at it here. He and some friends of his are setting up a “free school”. Their critics in the state education sector object, because this new school will suck educational excellence out of their schools and make it available only to a privileged few. In particular, it is said that this new school will draw middle class children away from state schools, to the educational detriment of these schools. State educators who talk like this sometimes make it sound as if most of the good teaching that goes on in their schools is done by middle class children rather than by educationally expert adults. Perhaps they have a point. But the amount of satisfactory educating going on is very variable, depending on how relaxed or restrictive are the rules about how it may be done and who may do it. (For instance, if it were forbidden for parents to educate their children at home, that would, I believe, sharply diminish the supply of good education.) Toby Young says that the real reason the detractors of the educational venture he favours are so vocal is that they fear being shown up as bad educators, by a new school that creates a vast new surge of educational excellence, thereby proving that they could be doing this too. No upper limit on the total amount of available education is stopping them, only their own stupid educational ideas and habits. I am sure that he has a point. June 15th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
My favourite bit in the Eagleton piece that Natalie links to below is this:
Does it not occur to Eagleton that perhaps the British universities that all these wicked bankers and financiers attended educated them rather badly? While at university, Britain’s future financial elite were taught to accept a false view of the economic world. Now this elite “plunders” (as in “cuts the government grants of”) its educators. The educators educated the elite. The elite screwed up horribly, and now the educators are getting screwed themselves. The educators are appalled at this terrible ingratitude, this horrible injustice. What have they done to deserve this? I say: quite a lot. You teach financially ruinous ideas. The people you taught them to turn round and ruin you. I say: it serves you right. I say: that’s just about the most perfect punishment there could be for what you have been doing. My only worry is that things are actually not as bad as Eagleton says, and that Britain’s universities are in fact not being punished nearly enough for the financial ruin that they did so much to unleash upon the rest of us. June 7th, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
One can sympathise with Professor Terry Eagleton’s view that A C Grayling’s private university is odious. All decent folk were shocked when Professor Grayling announced that he was leaving the state education system. If he wasn’t going to stick with it, say I, he shouldn’t have married it in the first place. Yes, it must be the case that Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Niall Fergusson and the rest of this bunch who want to set up a private university all solemnly vowed to cleave unto to the Russell Group of Universities, forsaking all others, til death did them part. Nothing else – except possibly the reintroduction, unnoticed by me, of the grand old tradition that all the Clerkes of Oxenforde be obliged to take Holy Orders – explains the outrage in the Guardian comments about them slipping off to canoodle with the proposed New College of the Humanities. Listen to poor cuckolded Eagleton’s reaction to the idea of the floozy-college: he speaks of “the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit.” A disgustingly elitist university. Disgusting, I calls it. Well, we both do. I lied above. I think this is a splendid development. It is sure to be a learning experience all round. First, a learning experience for the students, at a very reasonable eighteen grand per annum – peanuts compared to the American colleges. Second, a learning experience for Eagleton and all his fellow toilers in the loyal universities. A bit of competition will buck them up. Thirdly it might even be a learning experience for Professors Grayling, Dawkins, Ferguson, Colley, and Cannadine. The first two named are hard atheists and soft socialists and have been very much given to denouncing the divisiveness of faith schools and demanding that any institution in receipt of state money be obliged to stick to the state line. (I have to admit that in a backhanded way Grayling and Dawkins have a point: the stupidest thing the religious schools, which are older, often far older, than state education, ever did was to let themselves be talked into taking the government coin. He who pays the piper calls the tune, fools. In mitigation, the smooth, reasonable bureaucrats who promised that the religious schools’ distinctive character would of course be preserved within the state system were difficult men to disbelieve.) Anyway, I think the New Collegians might be about to rediscover the concepts of freedom of association … freedom of schools to select their pupils as they see fit … freedom to set their own syllabus … oh, and freedom to educate for profit. June 6th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Commenting on this Guardian article, someone called “weejonnie” says,
Yes, it probably has. So spell it out. Tell the next person who makes this argument to you that since he is so sure that corporate profits are, as the original article puts it, soaring at the expense of homeowners, consumers and students, then there is no reason for him not to put his money where his mouth is. He can always give his new ill-gotten wealth away away to the poor students if it bothers him. If you get a bright one he might independently discover the concept of “risk”. March 29th, 2011 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
We have recently had a bit of a storm in a thimble about the subject of university degrees and how this apparently fuels the “Enemy Class/hegemony/Nanny State-which-must-be-smashed-by-something” sort of issue. The original subject was nannying government threats about issues concerning diet. Suddenly the issue came up of the sort of folk pushing for this: David Cameron with his Oxford University PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). Regular commenter IanB then constructed what I regard as an unwarranted and extraordinarily broad-brush thesis. He caused so much offence to our editor, Perry de Havilland, that, entirely within Perry’s rights as owner of this turf, IanB’s subsequent remarks were deleted. Now he has responded, over at the Counting Cats blog. He’s clearly upset, or at least, does not, in my view, fully grasp the reasons for the annoyance his remark caused. This is my take on the matter. There is certainly a “bubble”, or malinvestment issue, in higher education in much of the West. I also think that the school leaving age should be reduced. Heck, I also have argued that labour market rules should be eased to make it easier for firms to take on apprentices so that young people can do something productive and lucrative. A lot of graduates are likely to come out of universities feeling bitter and betrayed at having degrees that are of limited market use and yet are saddled with heavy debts. The whole model needs to be rethought, and radically. I have said so in the past and intend to repeat this point from time to time. But to target liberal arts degrees such as the polymath forms of PPE, Greats, History, in the particular way that IanB does is truly mad. Consider this paragraph from this comment thread: (February 20, 2011 05:35 PM)
(Emphasis mine) Now that’s madness on a motorcycle. “Entirely sinister”. “Evil”. No ifs, buts, or maybes. No, if a 20-year-old goes to college to study bits of economics, philosophy, politics and maybe history, there is no redemption for them. While Mr “B” might concede that quite a few libertarians/classical liberals have done such degrees – I know around 10 who have – in general, it is “entirely sinister” and should, presumably, be suppressed. Yet I know of people who did this degree, or others like it (I read history), with no end-goal of working in government, or of propping up some “establishment”; in fact many seem to have worked in business or done things very different. The degree may have started out as an entrance exam for government, but that is by no means its only, or even dominant, use these days. In any event, if we are worried about Big Government, nanny statism and the whole prevailing Precautionary Principle mindset – and we are – then it seems a bit arse-about-face to focus on the subjects that future politicians/civil servants choose to study, since how can we predict that learning a course A rather than B is going to turn out a certain mindset we approve or disapprove of? Sounds a bit like hubris to me. (Hubris, of course, is a word that comes from those poncey Greeks). Rather, would it not make rather more sense to cut governments down to size and worry about what the Davids, Johns or Nigels will study later on, if at all? Who is to say that in a private education world, or homeschooling one, that there will not be quite a lot of demand for polymath arts-type exams, as well as others? Let a thousand flowers bloom how they may, I say. A historical point: In the early 19th Century, many of the leading political figures of the day – Robert Peel (double-first at Oxford), W E Gladstone, etc, were classical liberals in their broad philosophy of government, and a grounding in the Classics, and understanding of the lessons of Ancient Rome and Greece, proved useful. Ditto the US Founding Fathers. They all did those dead languages about times long ago, no doubt to the bemusement of some. The writings and speeches of Cato and Cicero, or Seneca and Tacitus, were part of their mental DNA. Of course, some of this could have been self-taught, but without those fusty old universities, might not have been made nearly so widespread. Anyway, I see that IanB has no desire to return to these comment threads, which is a pity, since he is more or less one of the good guys with whom I agree more often than not, especially on things such as the nanny state. But I feel that I need to state these points for the record lest he gets it into his head that he is some sort of wronged party here. Anyway, if he wants to chat to me about this over a beer or three, he’s got my email address. Update: IanB has complained of my quoting him out of context, such as the paragraph containing all that use of the word “sinister”. Well, it was certainly eye-catching, and I was not going to reprint the whole thread.. I copied and pasted it because, as I replied to him in a private email, that was a paragraph that clearly summed up how he felt about these things. He’s a first-class writer; if you use words like “sinister”, or “evil”, to describe a fucking exam, then naturally, some folk are going to pick on it. We can do all we can with nuance and emphasis, but that paragraph was pretty plain in its meaning. Of course, we all write or say things we meant had come out a bit differently. I certainly have. Another update: BTW, I have re-calculated in my head the number of people whom I would call classical liberals/non-idiotarian Tories/even a few more sensible lefties, who have done liberal arts degrees at the more swanky universities in the UK (I have not included all the various folk in the US, as this would be a very big number). I come up with about 100 people. (The figure includes recently graduated students, as well as one or two people who are sadly no longer with us, or getting on a bit, and who played big roles in the libertarian movement, such as Chris Tame, or in the more conventional conservative/liberal side further back, such as Anthony Flew, Roger Scruton, Michael Oakeshott, Isiah Berlin, Kenneth Minogue, Shirley Robin Letwin, etc). Now, IanB might still claim that this is a tiny percentage, no significance, as is his wont. Then again, I would argue that this shows that the so-called “Enemy Class” is being quite effectively infiltrated by a fairly determined, if relatively small, number of folk on “our side”. I mean, take the think tanks: Adam Smith Institute, Institute of Economic Affairs, Taxpayers Alliance, Policy Exchange, Cobden Centre, Centre for Policy Studies…..Hardly a tiny, insignificant part of UK political/economic intellectual life. Many of them were founded, staffed and backed by people who did the sort of degrees that IanB largely writes off as “gatekeeper” exams. If they are “gatekeeper” exams, then it would appear that they are not quite performing as intended. In fact, the gate has a bloody great hole in it. February 22nd, 2011 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)
How about adding some math lessons to plot statistically the chance of an Arab suicide bomber and a gay socialist vegetarian pacifist wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt and no sense of irony all ending up on the same bus in London? Sigh…Math was never that much fun in my school days. State education is beyond parody. – Perry de Havilland commenting here January 23rd, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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