We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“In Soviet Russia, tractor production figures were always on the rise. In modern Britain we have our own equivalent: the annual increase in exam passes and improvement in grades, celebrated just as enthusiastically by the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as by those of New Labour. It is all built on a lie.”
Stephen Pollard.
I agree with some of Mr Pollard’s analysis, although I do not detect any support by him for the idea that the problem is more profound than whether schools adopt “progressive” or “traditional” methods. The whole notion that compulsory education might itself be a problem is not even addressed, nor does he touch on the idea of home schooling. And Stephen P. just takes it as read that however crap schooling may be, that the model of sending children to these places between the age of X and Y is broadly okay, it is just that the structure is a bit wonky and the teachers are all ideologues, etc. The problem goes a bit deeper than that.
Sheila Lawlor, director of the think tank Politeia, is concerned that the status of teachers is low and that too few people apply to become teachers. She regrets that in Britain it is rather easy to get a place in a teaching course whereas elsewhere in Europe the entry qualifications are strict. In an article for the Times entitled Get higher grades from teachers first, she writes:
Would raising entry standards at least to those of comparable European countries help to improve matters? Or would, as one union threatened some time ago, a GCSE Grade B in maths mean that applications to the profession collapse? Probably more terrifying for the Government than bad teachers is the prospect of no teachers. Yet far from threatening the supply of teachers, higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places. In France five candidates compete for each job. Here the highest entry levels set for medical school go along with the most sought after university places.
This is an interesting argument. Well, not exactly argument, since having raised the question of whether making it harder to become a teacher might not reduce the supply of teachers as common sense and two and a half centuries of observed economics might lead one to expect, she simply asserts that the converse is true: “Higher and tougher entry standards bring greater competition for places.”
I think the bit that is meant to be the argument is the next sentence, saying that in France – where, as the article has said earlier, the status of teachers is high, and the qualifications required to become a teacher are also high, there are many people who want to be teachers.
Back in 1974 the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture in which he described the beliefs of certain primitive tribes:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.
See, the tribe of the French get the cargo. Let us do as the French do and surely the cargo will flow to us!
Ms Lawlor, like the cargo cultists, is persuaded that by imitating some of the forms (runways, men with headphones, high entry qualifications for teaching) associated with a desired state of affairs (free goodies from the gods, high status of teachers) one can cause that state of affairs to come about.
To be fair to Ms Lawlor, economists do speak of certain goods for which demand, contrary to the usual way of things, goes up as the price goes up. I think they are either called Veblen goods or Giffen goods but trying to nail down which might apply here is giffen me a headache. I will concede that just possibly increasing the entry qualifications for teaching might conjure down a little status from the sky. Perhaps one or two easily-led souls might be induced to apply for a teaching course as a result. But compared to the numbers put off from doing so by the frequent unpleasantness and occasional danger involved in teaching in a British state school, this is very minor magic indeed.
Sorry. No airplanes land.
When I did education blogging I wrote a lot about something I called sovietisation. This referred to the baleful impact upon education of our present government’s mania for setting targets (often involving exam results) and then rewarding institutions according to how well they could fake reaching these targets. In this connection, see this posting by David Hepworth. It is based on a story that has already seen the light of day in Times Higher Education, although I couldn’t get further with the link in Hepworth’s posting than that.
This comment on Hepworth’s piece by a certain Rob Spence deserves, I think, slightly wider circulation:
I work in a university that’s in what is coyly termed the same “sector” as London Met – i.e. the widening access, non- “traditional” student sector. There’s a real tension between the government’s agenda to have 50% of people taking a degree, and the absolute imperative, driven by the funding model, to retain students. So on the one hand we are accepting students with at best a mediocre academic record, whose motivation is not study but lifestyle, and on the other we are being penalised financially if we fail to retain them. No-one can be surprised if these utterly apathetic students drift away, but the system insists that every student who decides, for probably very good reasons, that they don’t want to carry on, represents a failure on the part of the university, which then gets its funding reduced.
You are right, it looks as if they are cooking the books, but it’s actually quite difficult to keep track of non-appearing students, because whereas in the past we could just withdraw them, now we are expected to keep them on the books.
There are quite a few “ghost” students who register, but never turn up – we had one last year who registered, collected her student loan, and disappeared to Ibiza.
Quantifying success, eh? It can really get you into trouble. Especially if you are the government. You define success, but you end up trampling all over it.
You define educational success as, say, vast numbers of people going on to university who don’t really want to go on to university. But by the time the policy has worked its evil way, the thing being measured has done a cartwheel. In this case, the thing that the government pays for, people turning up at a university, is measured. But people vanishing soon afterwards is something that it is in nobody’s interests to notice. The university wants to hang on to the government’s money. The government wants to be able to boast about how swimmingly everything is going and how much it is helping. Only a few malcontents grumble, in things like blog comment threads, but if they get serious and loud about their grumbling, they too will find their interests seriously suffering, as they well know.
With enterprises that are responsible to themselves and to a gang of people in their immediate vicinity, people who are basically taking their own chances at their own expense, a mess like the one described so well by Rob Spence eventually gets corrected, because it costs too many people too much to persist with it. They change the definition of success to one that works better. Or they replace the boss, or even all the bosses. If all that fails, they shut the enterprise down and everyone goes their separate ways. Which is often acrimonious, because quite a few people may still be getting what they want for a price they can live with, but at least the badness for those who are not so happy with things stops. But when the government’s success measurements cause havoc, everyone is all too liable still to conspire to say that all is well.
What makes sovietisation so uniquely itself is the way that everyone knows the story – what is going wrong and why it is going wrong – but nobody has any interest in telling the story like it really is, up to and including the Minister for whatever it is being deranged, for he/she too depends on all those statistically encoded lies to tell the world that he/she is doing a great job instead of merely a very average or worse job. The Prime Minister likewise, come to that.
The answer is to denationalise everything. Not easy, I know. But necessary if you want this kind of nonsense to be kept within bounds.
I would not recommend spending major chunks of one’s only life helping to clean up the intellectual mess inflicted by post-modernism, but occasionally keeping tabs on the mess, and on those heroic souls who are part of this noble cleansing project, can be fun. In this spirit, I recommend this.
To start with I was merely going to do a(n) SQOTD, but the list of bits I found I wanted to recycle here from this conversation soon outgrew that plan.
Bit one, from David Thompson, in connection with a response to a posting he did about art bollocks (Thompson’s italics are here emboldened):
One postmodernist commenter took exception to my criticism – first by accusing me of arguing things I clearly wasn’t arguing, then by saying I was holding “entrenched positions” in which “aesthetic values” (in scare quotes), “scientific reality/clarity” (again, in scare quotes) and my own “reliance on logical consistency” (ditto) were obstacles to comprehension. Specifically, they were obstacles to comprehending Shvarts’ alleged (but oddly unspecified) “arguments of power, control [and] dominance.” The tone was, of course, condescending and self-satisfied. I’m guessing the commenter in question didn’t pause to consider the possibility that one might find pomo bafflegab objectionable precisely because it represents the “power, control [and] dominance” of what amounts to a priestly caste.
Bit two, also from Thompson (the Windschuttle essay he refers to is here):
In the essay linked above, Keith Windschuttle names various academics and educational advisors who claim that truth and reality are “authoritarian weapons” and that disinterested scholarship is merely “an ideological position” favoured by “traditionalists and the political right.” This presents a rather handy excuse to dismiss political dissent without having to engage with inconvenient arguments. Presumably, if you prefer arguments that are comprehensible and open to scrutiny, this signals some reactionary tendency and deep moral failing. On the other hand, if you sneer at such bourgeois trifles, you’re radical, clever and very, very sexy. (Though I wonder what mathematicians and structural engineers would make of this claim. Is there such a thing as a rightwing calculation, or a rightwing bridge – I mean a bridge that’s rightwing because it doesn’t promptly collapse?)
This reminds me of a very funny bit in this book where John O’Farrell (his subtitle is: “Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, 1979-1997” – here’s hoping you ain’t seen nothing yet mate), recalled that certain leftwing university radicals of his acquaintance used to regard smiling as rightwing.
Since Stephen Hicks is the grandee being interviewed here, let Hicks have bit three:
The function of language is to express one’s thoughts. If you think truth is possible, then you work hard to understand the world clearly and completely. But if you doubt that truth is possible, that has psycho-epistemological consequences: you come to believe that the world is at best fuzzy and your mind incapable of grasping it – you come to believe deep down that all is fractured and disjointed – and your writing will tend to the fuzzy, the fractured, and the disjointed. And in consequence you will come to be suspicious of clarity in others. Clarity, from this perspective, must be an over-simplifying.
It’s tempting to dismiss postmodernism as being such obvious and such obviously self-destructive intellectual junk as not to be worth bothering with. Just hold your nose and walk on by, don’t complain about it, it only encourages them, etc. But postmodernism has had, and continues to have, a hideously destructive effect on the study of the humanities in universities (somewhat less so on anything with pretensions towards being in any way scientific), and it will only go away if the next few generations of scholars can be persuaded to treat it with the contempt that it deserves. So keep it up, Hicks, and thank you, Thompson, for talking with him so interestingly.
Some time ago, I asked here, non-rhetorically: What use is handwriting?, and I got a lot of very useful answers, such as that techies can communicate very well if they can hand-write, in ways that just wouldn’t work with any gadget more complicated than a pencil or felt-tip pen. By attaching labels to hastily sketched diagrams or graphs, for instance.
Now, for similarly pedagogical reasons I ask: What use is algebra? I refer to the most primitive sort of algebra, where you merely tiptoe into the swamp of abstraction and say things like: if a is 2 and b is 4, then what is a plus 2b? What is the specific value of writing out algebraic equations with small letters in them, and then either substituting particular values for those letters, or else deducing some of those values? Why go into letters, if all you then do is get out of them again, which seems to be the rule when you first start out at algebra.
I’m guessing – guessing because it is decades since I myself did any of this – that there is value to an equation, as a generalisation, quite lacking in the mere specifics of what happens in the particular case when a is 2 and b is 4. An equation specifies a general relationship, and one that is often worth understanding, and impossible to understand without this on-the-face-of-it peculiar and regressive diversion out of arithmetic and back into mere letters. But can the commentariat rephrase, correct, expand on that?
Ideally, they would do this in a way that might convince a twelve-year-old whose ambition is to get rich – perhaps by being a Something in The City (assuming there still is a City for him to be a Something in when he reaches his twenties) – and who now gets up before 6am every morning to do a paper round. By the time I get around to teaching him things like algebra, he is tired. What’s the point of this?, he asks. I would like to be able to give him some better answers than I have managed so far. I both like and admire this boy, and would really like him to do well.
We meet every Tuesday night, so my next chance to pass on such things will be tomorrow evening.
UPDATE Tuesday lunchtime: Many thanks for all the comments, most useful. Lots to pass on and to think about, and not just this evening.
The BBC, anticipating the upcoming school holidays in the UK – lasting several weeks – has a news item up about the soaring cost of providing facilities for children to give them something to do. The story does not address the crucial question of why the cost is soaring. Is it increased regulation of child-care staff, or what? But beyond that, there clearly is a problem here, particularly for youngsters who are entering their teens and quickly find themselves getting bored after the first flush of pleasure of having free time wears off. When I was a kid, I was incredibly lucky to be brought up in a part of the world where I could help my parents run our family farm. At the age of 13 or 14 I was allowed to drive some of the farm machinery during the annual harvest. Under current UK health and safety regulations, all this would be made illegal, I suspect. I was paid an actual weekly wage based on the hours I worked on the farm. I remember thinking how cool that was. Many of my mates at school had summer jobs of various kinds, played some sports, went biking up to the coast, etc.
It seems to me that in part of the discussion about what “should be done” about feral kids armed with knives, there ought to be a recognition that one of the main problems that young people face in and outside school is boredom. And that can be cured, possibly, by working. We have to overcome our strange squeamishness over the employment of minors in actual jobs. I think that the rules and regulatory burdens should be relaxed so that apprenticeships become much easier for an employer to provide. I think some, if not all, of the young tearaways who are so worrying policymakers might actually feel proud of having a job, of earning money, of being able to brag about this to their lazier friends.
And please, dear commenters, do not tell me that all this is optimistic pie-in-the-sky speculation. We have a significant problem in the UK of young people who are a, being forced to stay in school well beyond the age at which they wish and can learn anything, and b, denied the opportunity to work, and c, becoming attracted to the fake charms of gangs and violence. By rejecting our horror of teen-labour, we might help to fix some of these problems.
My thanks to Shane Greer for alerting me to what, on the face of it, seems like very good news, from Northern Ireland:
The education minister has said she is very disappointed by grammar schools planning to set up a company to run independent entrance exams.
I was not disappointed at all, when I read that. If there is one thing that really, really needs to be got out of the clutches of the state, it is school examinations. Schools and parents and children need to be able to choose the best exams to take, and employers need to be able to choose which exam results they will take seriously. That way, exam results will change to suit the needs of the times, but will continue to be a meaningful test of educational excellence.
More than 30 schools have said the tests in English and maths, will be held over either two or three days.
The Association for Quality Education said the exams would be held in venues across Northern Ireland.
So far so good. But this is where the report becomes less pleasing:
However, Caitríona Ruane accused the schools of being elitist …
Ah yes, elitist. What kind of a vicious school wants to teach only those pupils whom it wants to teach, and to teach them really well? Monstrous.
… and said they could face legal action from parents.
Parents, that is, demanding better exams results. At present, the government pays for all such litigation. An independent exam system will have to pay the costs of resisting all such legal challenges for itself.
Now comes the really scary bit, the bit that got me putting this here, rather than only, say, here:
“They have a choice, people always have a choice,” the minister said.
“What I would say to them is think very carefully before you go down the route of bringing boards of governors into situations were they may find themselves spending their time in court.”
This is the language of the Mafia.
What is happening here is that the state has made something, in this case exam results, so complicated and legally challengeable that only the state can easily afford all the litigation involved in supplying such a service. Then, they impose “progressive” and “radical” change, i.e. they wreck the state system. At which point, some people and some institutions try to make an independent go of replacing the formerly adequate (albeit ruinously expensive for the mere taxpayer) state service with one that they have devised themselves. And, legally, they can go it alone. They can do this. But the laws they have then to obey are so complicated that it will cost them an arm and a leg.
Back door abolition of whatever it is the politicians want abolished, in other words. Nationalise part of something. Throw money and laws at all of it, thereby herding everyone into the arms of the state system, on purely cost grounds. Then shut down whatever bits of the state system they always had in mind to destroy, and defy the “private” sector to respond, in an impossible legal environment that only the state can afford to function in.
Only very wealthy institutions can afford in their turn to defy such arrangements. Politicians duly denounce them as: very wealthy. If the private sector decides to charge quite a lot for the now very expensive service that they provide, they are accused of charging a lot. And the politicians use those excuses to pass yet more laws, if they prove to be necessary, turning difficulty into impossibility. There’s a lot of it about.
The overall result in this case, Shane Greer fears, will be the destruction of the really quite good top end of the Northern Ireland education system.
As a child, I was indifferent at team sports – especially rugby union – and my preference was and is for individualistic games like golf, tennis, squash, martial arts (Bujinkan and fencing), or the odd game of poker (I guess some card games like Bridge count as a team game of sorts). One exception to the Pearce Crapness at Team Games was cricket. I loved playing it, unless some sadist of a captain put me on the boundary at point on a chilly afternoon with no prospect of a bat or bowl. I do not play much any more. My fielding was one of the best parts of my game: I once took a flying catch off a batsman who was beginning to rack up a big score and the catch was the pivotal point in the game. Our lot won. There is also the sensual pleasure of hitting a cover drive on the ‘sweet spot’ of the bat. You get a similar tingle down the spine when you do that in other sports, such as baseball. But cricket was my great team sporting love if only for the entirely selfish reason that I was just about competent at it.
I was reminded of all this by this excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph today. Like the author of that piece, I played cricket at a state school; cricket is being taught and played less in the public sector education system, to the detriment of the national game. Personally, as an advocate of private schooling and of reducing, not raising, the school-leaving age, I would not want to moan if the sport is taught less if that is what the parents, and just as importantly, the pupils, want (some kids hate team sports so much it has scarred their memories of schooling for life). But I would like to think that in a genuine private sector school system, where parents can use their consumer power to drive up standards, that the Greatest Game Known to Man would flourish a bit more.
I would be interested to know what fellow cricket nuts and Samizdata conspirators, Brian Micklethwait and Michael Jennings, have to think about this. Brian recently linked to this book, which looks very much worth a read.
Libby Purves writes in The Times about an astonishing piece of micromanagement in the British state education system (to which over 90% of children are subjected from 5 to 16). She rightly picks on the most horrific element.
… 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.”
There’s a lot of this. Shadow ministers continually criticise the government for “not doing enough” on this or that, or for insufficiently oppressive use of its draconian legislation, rather than offering an alternative policy involving some presumption in favour of liberty.
Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not mistake the public utterances of politicians as a direct expression of their personal beliefs. They are doing this in order to foster the impression that the Government is incompetent in the mind of the public, not as an adumbration of any particular policy of their own. The real horror is that the opposition has done expensive research and hard intellectual work to come up with this approach. They do not offer the public freedom, and not just because the public no longer finds liberty attractive. They know the message would not get through. In fact, for most people in Britain – and a very average most-person is the undecided voter a democratic politician must address – liberty is no longer intelligible.
Does the word “liberty” appear in the national curriculum, I wonder? … → Continue reading: More culture of control
Tony Blair’s support for City Academies – schools with some private sector funding and management – was a move in the right direction, albeit a small one. Now it seems that the Brown government is trying to water that down. Mick Fealty has a perceptive blog posting talking about the war of ideas being fought between Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and Lord Adonis, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools and Learners.
The glue behind Mr Blair’s school reforms is weak, and those trying to pull them apart deserve a detention.
It turns out that Mr Balls is not just unworried about Britain’s tax burden, he is also blinded to the problem of centralised, top-down state control of education. Apparently, one of Mr Ball’s colleagues says that the man is “entirely ideological. He has a strong belief in the role of local authorities in the delivery of services. He is a big state man.”
Lord Adonis on the other hand is a believer in school freedom and wants sponsors to keep having their say on how City Academies run.
I am not sneering; I am genuinely asking.
For the last few months I have been education blogging. I’ve never been much good at working out site stats, and things are made harder by my education blog sharing its numbers, or all the ones that I see, with my personal blog. But, going only by how the comment rate has gone from zero to detectable, my education blog is now showing occasional but definite signs of life. I reckon that education blogging is rather like teaching. To begin with you often achieve very little, but if you stick at it, good things may eventually start happening.
In connection with my education blog, and in connection with the helping out that I am now doing once a week at one of the supplementary schools run by the think tank Civitas, I find myself asking: what is the point of learning maths? I entirely accept that there is a point, in fact many points. It’s just that I don’t know much about what these points are. Some of the boys at the supplementary school – two in particular spring to mind – strike me as showing real mathematical talent, at any rate compared to the others. What can I say to them that might encourage them – and encourage their parents to encourage them – to get every bit as far in maths as they can? What use is maths? For lots of people, especially for lots of teachers and lots of children, that is surely a question worth knowing answers to.
I don’t need to be convinced about the usefulness of arithmetic. People cheating you out of change in a shop, or loading you with debt obligations that you did not understand when you made the deal – working out floor areas and carpet costs – getting enough nails and screws and planks when you are DIYing about the house – just generally keeping track of work. I get all that. And, I find, I’m pretty good at teaching arithmetic to young boys and girls, partly because I do indeed understand how important it is.
But what about the kind of maths that really is maths, as opposed to mere arithmetic, with lots of complicated sorts of squiggles? What about infinite series, irrational numbers, non-Euclidian geometry, that kind of thing? I, sort of, vaguely, know that such things have all manner of practical and technological applications. But what are they? What practical use is the kind of maths you do at university? I hit my maths ceiling with a loud bump at school, half way through doing A levels and just when all the truly mathematical stuff got seriously started, and I never learned much even about what the practical uses of it all were, let alone how to do it.
I also get that maths has huge aesthetic appeal, and that it is worth studying and experiencing for the pure fun and the pure beauty of it all, just like the symphonies of Beethoven or the plays of Euripides.
But what are its real world applications? Please note that I am not asking how to teach maths, although I cannot of course stop people who want to comment about that doing so, and although I am interested in that also. No, here, I am specifically asking: why learn maths?
Occasional Samizdatista Michael Jennings works as a Something in the City, analysing things like technological trends. Not at all coincidentally he has a PhD in maths. He is the ideal sort of person to answer such questions, and he and I have fixed to record a conversation about the usefulness of mathematics later this week. But I am sure that a Samizdata comment thread on this subject would help us both, if only by helping me to ask some slightly smarter questions.
I was rather surprised to find my own alma mater, CMU, listed at number five on the ugly list referenced by the previous article. So surprised in fact that I wonder if any of the list is valid. If the rest of the photos were as carefully selected to back up the story as his closeup of a small section of Wean Hall in the rain…
Wean Hall is far from the best looking building on the CMU campus but as you can see it is no where near as bad as the photo in the article made it look. I might add that my office was on the back side of this building, facing the parking lot and the old Bureau of Mines.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I will let the campus speak for itself. It may not be in the top ten most beautiful, but it most certainly is not among the ten ugliest.
→ Continue reading: I beg to differ
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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