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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There is demand. There is supply. There is planned ‘diversity’. If anyone told the teachers that multi-culturalism was dead, they forgot to listen. For they have come up with latest revision in government plans to revive language teaching: teach them gypsy. Since English Romanies talk in English or an Anglicised version of Romany (Romanglish?), will they teach the pure version which has very few speakers in this country.
In a move designed to promote tolerance towards gipsy communities, schools will be encouraged to teach the language, culture and traditions practised by about 45,000 people in Britain.
The Government-backed initiative comes just days after ministers told schools they had a legal duty to promote greater race relations by celebrating cultural diversity across the curriculum.
Since race and culture are not synonymous, and multiculturalism has promoted actions described as racist to increase, we can look on at another “legal duty” achieving the opposite outcome to that intended.
Ginny Harrison White, the president of the National Association of Teachers of Travellers, said the project would “go some way to increasing knowledge of gipsy communities and help break down barriers of prejudice”.
Gypsies will have the teaching of their language taken over by the state. Parents, interested in their children’s education, will choose more economically useful options. So Somali, the language of a failed state, will not be taken up with fervour either. And those who do partially learn, the blighted, will understand that they can insult gypsies better.
If you wanted to escape the crap system by educating your children yourself, the baleful eye of the state has turned your way.
The guidance says that education must be suitable for a child’s age, ability and any special needs. Resources and materials should be provided. In a further development, adults must play an active role in children’s education, rather than leaving them to complete work-sheets all day.
The guidance says that councils should intervene if they have concerns over standards of education. They can then ask parents to submit projects, assessment, books and field trip diaries to satisfy local authority inspectors.
Parents failing to meet official requirements may be taken to court and issued with a school attendance order – forcing children to attend a state school.
The draft proposals, which are out to consultation until the end of July, have been broadly welcomed by home education groups, who hailed the decision not to make registration compulsory.
With the thin end, home education will become a postcode lottery, and the level of intrusion will be dependent upon the attitude of the local authority inspectors. One can imagine that Departments of Education, which are ignorant or unsympathetic of home-schooling, will use their powers to ‘discover’ failures, force parents to send their children back to state sinkholes and stamp out a practice that they deem an ideological competitor. This is the road that could lead to registration and prohibition.
It is no secret that I am opposed to conscription of any sort, be it military, judicial or educational. I am all for having armies, juries and schools, but not ones which depend on forcing the unwilling to become chattels of the state. Not only do I think it is morally indefensible, it produces strange results when people are compelled to do things they never agreed to do.
Most people can be convinced that getting an education is a good thing, but to force who cannot see that to attend a school just means that they will disrupt the education of those who are willing to be there. You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. Moreover, state schools seem to bring out the most control obsessed aspects of people who run such places.
Pupils at a new £46 million flagship school will not be allowed break times and will have no playground to run around on, leading to fears for their behaviour and health. […] But parents, educational experts and health campaigners believe banning teenagers from letting off steam during the school day will increase their risk of becoming obese, and could damage their attention spans during lessons. […] Dr Alan McMurdo, the principal of the academy, said: “Research has shown that if children concentrate on lessons throughout the day, then their work improves. “We are not intending to have any play time. Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored.”
So children are going to be dragooned into coming to this place under threat of law but “Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored”. Might I suggest arrogance and stupidity in equal measure. Might I suggest that they will indeed be bored and the way they will let of steam will be to trash this nice new school and run wild in classes… I sure as hell would.
Nikki Giovanni found one of her Creative Writing students a trial.
“And every class I’m saying, ‘Mr. Cho, take off your (sun)-glasses please, take your hat off please. Mr. Cho, that’s not a poem. Can you work on it please,'” Giovanni recalled. “And then I finally realized that something is not wrong with me, something is wrong with him, and I said to him, ‘I’m not a good teacher for you.'”
One day, she arrived and found her class of about 70 students had dwindled to fewer than 10. When she asked a student after class about it, he confessed that “everybody’s scared of (Cho).” Giovanni later had him removed from her class after she threatened to resign.
Why did it have to come to that? Imagine if every class Cho Seung-hui had attended had taken place at the invitation of the teacher- an invitation that could be rescinded at any time.
In reality his memories of school were of humiliation, but imagine if, from the age of twelve onwards, or from even earlier if your imagination can stretch that far, school had been an option he could choose if he wanted it.
What if Cho’s concepts of “school” and “college” had been formed by classes like the Karate class described by Brian Micklethwait?
What struck me, so to speak, about these “martial arts” classes was that although the children present may have supposed that all there were learning was how to be more violent, what they were really learning was no less than civilisation itself.
The children were all told to get changed into their Karate kit in an orderly fashion, and to put their regular clothes in sensible little heaps. They all lined up the way he said. They all turned up on time. They left the place impeccably clean when they’d finished, all helping to make sure that all was ship-shape and properly closed-up when they left.
Were these children being “coerced”? Certainly not. They didn’t have to be there, any more than The Man had to teach them Karate if he didn’t want to. If they wanted out, then out they could go, with no blots on their copybooks or markings-down on their CVs.
Having reached the age of twenty-three, Cho was no longer forced to be taught – but his teachers were still forced to teach him and his fellow students to associate with him. True, there were a few last ways out from his menacing presence; the students could jeopardise their education by skipping class and the teacher could jeopardise her career by threatening to resign. Unfortunately by the time these sanctions were employed Cho had already got away with too much.
I sometimes think that practically every problem, inefficiency and cruelty of our education system has at its root compulsion. People who are forced into each other’s society tend not to behave well to each other. Wherever the doors are locked, be the locks visible or invisible, those inside seem to revert to the hierarchy of the baboon troop. There is still room for free will: most do no worse than learn a few habits of obsequiousness or sullenness that can be shaken off. Cho was not forced to become a mass-murderer. (In fact I see his own claim to the contrary in his video as a sort of twisted acknowledgement of this fact; the thought that “I don’t have to do this” had to be actively denied.) No, he was not forced to pull the trigger – but force did play too large a part in his life. Imagine if the doors had been open for the bullied Cho Seung-hui to walk away, or if the adult Cho Seung-hui had been shown the door at the first sign of discourtesy. Imagine this was the case not just for Cho Seung-hui on certain pivotal occasions but for everyone on all occasions. Then, I think, he would have learned differently.
The other day I pulled a couple of quotations from this book, which I mostly liked although it has some annoying parts too. What got me wondering is why so-called US “liberal” academics are capable of writing penetrating and thoughtful pieces on certain areas of life but also clearly dumb as stumps on economics. Take this passage from Professor Hanley on page 72 and 73 of the book, where he defends racial quotas in universities:
“Suppose that a white male applicant loses out on a college place to a black male applicant, even though his SAT score was higher… I think the sense of unfairness here springs instead from the intuition that since the white student didn’t do anything wrong, and since his score was higher, he deserves the place ahead of the black student.”
“To which I say, bullcrap.”
This professor has a nice line in reasoned argument. Let’s go on.
“This is once again simply ignoring structural discrimination, if it’s not just plainly racist.”
Define “structural discrimination”, Professor. What is it? How can a person be discriminated against where no actual conscious human being has decided that Fred is going to get a fairer deal in a college admission than John? Structurual discrimination is a sort of catch-all expression that in fact simply says that over a long period of time, certain racial groups have underperformed in certain ways and that there might be factors that should be corrected. But for how long does the impact of this “structural discrimination” last? 10 years? 20? 100? What sort of empirical evidence does Prof. Hanley think will be needed to show that this is over and we can revert to the idea of treating people equally before the law, like those fuddy-duddies such as James Madison said should be the case? The Professor does not say, although he swears a lot and thinks that people who disagree with him are idiots. I guess he is so struck by his own moral grandeur that he cannot imagine anyone decent disagreeing. What a jerk.
He goes on:
“If we’re granting that the white student is a beneficiary of structural discrimination, then we can’t say that he is more deserving (of a college place). Desert is a matter of what you’ve done with what you’ve got. We have no prior reason to think that the white applicant has done more – so we have no reason to think that he has been unfairly done by.”
So presumably the honest thing for such a professor would be to give up the pretence of holding SAT or other education tests at all. Why not say this: “White folk are beneficiaries of former discrimination in their favour, even if the folk today are not to be blamed for what their ancestors did. As a result, no matter whether the white college applicant is a clever, conscientious person, he or she should be wiling to let people from racial groups we think are the victims of ancestral discrimination take first place in the queue. And if you disagree with that judgement, then you are an evil person and quite possibly a Republican.”
I take back what I said about this book and its author a day or so ago. He is not as smart or as funny as he first appeared (well, we all make mistakes). He is, in fact, a thug with a fancy academic title. Sadly, there are a lot of them.
A gentleman by the name of Fabian Tassano is justifiably angry about the raising of the compulsory school-leaving age to 18 years. Quite so. Arguably – and I do argue – the school-leaving age should be cut. Many teenagers, including the brightest, are bored stiff at school and their boredom leads to many of the disciplinary problems we see around us. Better, perhaps, to let teenagers work, discover the value of money, and then pick up their education when some of that youthful energy has already been channelled into a payslip. This has been the argument from a number of liberal educationalists, such as Prof. James Tooley, for years. Such a view horrifies the power-freaks in the political establishment who would probably like us all to stay in education until the age of 30, but the trend towards an ever-higher school/college-leaving age cannot go on.
Reading some history, it does seem as though we live in an age when in some ways, youngsters seem to stay young for much longer than used to be the case. By the time my old man was 18, he had already become an officer cadet in the RAF and by the age of 21, was navigating fast jet aircraft. One of my great uncles joined the naval academy at Dartmouth by the age of 15. The average age of many pilots in WW2 was 21. Now, if you believe the educationalists of today, a person aged 18 is not fit to put in charge of an electric toothbrush, and yet at the same time, things like the age of sexual consent have been reduced. So in some ways people are thought to be more mature, in other ways, less so.
I am a bit miffed that Tassano moans that Samizdata has had nothing to say on this issue. Had he been reading this blog in January, he would have seen that we were on the case, thanks to Alice Bachini. Pay attention, Fabian.
If you think that lower class yobbery is a problem in this country, as most seem to think it is, then is electing an upper class yob to be the Prime Minister the best next step in the right direction?
Perhaps it is. Perhaps a man who can look louts in the eye and say: “I know exactly what you are because I used to be exactly like you, the only difference being that I at least paid some of the bills for the havoc and misery I caused, and, being rich and lucky, I had the chance to learn a few manners, turn over a new leaf, get a job and make something of myself. You are not so lucky. Shape up now or face a future of utter misery, which I and my rich and well-connected friends will now do our considerable best to make worse for you.” It takes one to catch one, in other words. And perhaps something similar applies to dealing with foreign despots and thugs.
As with everything involving what sort of Prime Minister Mr Cameron may choose to be, we shall just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, the fact that he is now thought by millions to be the best we can now do as our nation’s senior politician is hideous proof of the failure of mass state education. Could not the great middle/working class come up with anybody? Well, John Major I suppose, and now Gordon Brown. As a long lost friend from my better-spent youth used to say: Dear oh lor!
My thanks to Clive Davis, who writes about Cameron’s Bullingdon Club past, and who links to this description of Bullingdon Club yobbery by Libby Purves, and to this diary item (scroll down a bit) by Christina Odone, who says:
They were excessive (dinners routinely ended with the trashing of the restaurant in which they were held) and exclusive – no grammar school or state school boys, no Jews were allowed (though a rather dashing Iranian did squeak through the election process in my time).
My first impression of this preposterous club was when, as an Oxford undergraduate, I was accosted in the middle of Tom Quad, in Christ Church, by a third year in his cups. He tried to grope me and then, when I shoved him away, he doubled up and was sick in the ancient fountain.
This poor impression was little improved when I grew more familiar with the all-male club: initiation rites climaxed with drunken carousing that spilt over in the street and college quad; humiliation of “outsiders” was encouraged; acts of vandalism routine.
It was more Bacchanalian feast than Brideshead Revisited, and I wondered what kind of a future lay in store for 20-year-olds who thought nothing of wrecking a Michelin-starred restaurant after having spent £1,000 a head there.
Well, a pretty good one, of course. (And I wonder just who that “dashing” Iranian was?) “We’ve all done things we regret,” Mr Cameron now says. But actually, not all of us, in fact hardly any of us, were this appalling. The fear now is that if and when Mr Cameron enters Number Ten, this open thuggery will be replaced not by anything resembling true decency or genuine political wisdom, but by thuggery on a far grander scale, legally sanctioned, and covered in and disguised by an expert layer of smarm.
Meet the new Soviet, same as the old Soviet:
Teenagers will learn about the threat to the environment from climate change and what they can do about it, under reforms to geography teaching.
They will be encouraged to recycle consumer goods and to question whether they really need another imported pair of trainers. Other topics to be studied include the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said: “With rising sea temperatures, melting ice-caps and frequent reminders about our carbon footprints, we should all be thinking about what we can do to preserve the planet. Children are the key to changing society’s attitudes to the environment. Not only are they passionate about saving the planet but children also have a big influence over their own families’ lifestyles.”
In due course, and perhaps even early course, children will be encouraged to rat their parents out to the authorities for ‘unGreen’ behaviour. Such is the pattern for the legitimisation of ruling class ideologies;indoctrinate the young and persuade them of the need to meekly accept poverty, austerity and political control for the sake of ‘saving the planet’.
‘Global warming’ does indeed present a grave threat; as a tool of political power it is a threat to freedom, prosperity, trade, progress and all the health, wealth and happiness that those things make possible and if anyone has been inclined to regard the whole ‘climate change’ nostrum as a joke, then I humbly suggest that this is a mistake. Our masters are clearly taking it very seriously indeed and we have a momentous battle on our hands if we intend to stop them from going down the path that they already begun to forge.
This is a battle we must win – for the sake of the children.
Update: the Libertarian Alliance is also calling foul on this exercise in political propaganda for children.
We are coming into the final stretch of the college basketball season and it seems a good time to make the following observation.
The only category of education that presently has its accomplishments tested on a competitive basis (that being sports) is also the only category of education that is motivating and developing disadvantaged students to achieve their highest personal potential at what they are being taught.
Does it surprise anyone that the only part of education where student achievement can not be rigged (better/best football team, etc.) is also the only part of education that is producing marketable graduates from the disadvantaged communities? Or that it accomplishes this with less need for quotas and reduced expectations than any other category of education? In many cases these kids are able to move straight into national and international professional careers straight from high school. And when they do attend college, the academic education they receive is a by-product of their athletic educations.
And is it any surprise that a very disproportionate share of disadvantaged students gravitate to the only service of the education industry that is intractably merit judged and race indifferent at every single level of education from Pee Wee league to NCAA?
What better model could we ask for when we look to improve the motivation and education of disadvantaged students in other categories of learning?
Greetings Samizdatistas, greetings Commentariat. Long time no see. I expect Brian would have blogged about this were his education blog still going (I for one would love to see it back) but instead the task has roused me from the sweet repose of my “resting contributor” coffin. Here goes.
On the face of it, the idea of raising the school leaving age to eighteen might seem reasonable, especially given that the British government still plans to permit either schooling or “vocational training” when it bans young people from full-time work. After all, the idea apparently works fine in Canada. They simply enforce the law by taking away young people’s driving licenses if they attempt to work for a living. Clearly it is the working teenagers we need to worry about when it comes to youth crime, truancy and so on. Work is bad for you, and encourages bad behaviour! Young people should be writing essays, not mending cars!
But underneath the face of it, I have a few questions:
- Does “approved training scheme” mean “what the government likes” or does it mean something more sensible and informed?
- How much will it cost to approve all post-16 on-the-job training schemes?
- Since when did working for a living exclude learning useful things? Why is it assumed that jobs and learning are mutually exclusive? Is this because all entry-level work is exploitative labour nowadays?
- If this is the case, why does it not apply to graduates with arts degrees working in burger bars and so on? Is it acceptable to be exploited as long as you have wasted five years of your life acquiring thousands of pounds worth of debt, for some reason? Why?
- What will 16 year olds without private financial support be expected to live on if they are banned from honest work? Will they be expected to acquire early student loans? Join a homeless shelter? Or merely become heroin salespeople?
Just wondering.
The Executive Committee of the Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union has today (5JAN) issued proceedings in the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the decision to suspend the Christian Union from the Guild of Students; such acts by the Guild violating the rights of association of religious bodies and representing religious animus. The Court will be asked to quash the decision to suspend. The committee has also instructed Paul Diamond, a leading Civil Rights Barrister to represent them.
The action was taken after the students advised both the Guild and the university authorities that it had failed to support their right as Christians to the freedoms of speech, belief and association.
The 50-year-old Christian Union (CU) at Exeter University is currently suspended from the official list of student societies on campus, has had its Student Union bank account frozen, and has been banned from free use of Student Guild premises, or advertising events within Guild facilities, because the Student Guild claims the CU constitution and activities do not conform to its Equal Opportunties Policies, which have only recently been introduced.
That’s the Christian Union point of view. Here is the Exeter Students’ Guild point of view. It appears what’s wrong with the Christian Union (though there seems to be a side dispute about what it is called) is it expects members to be Christians – and this is written down somewhere.
I find it very difficult to believe that the Student Friends of Palestine welcomes applications from hardcore Zionists, or that the change-ringing group offers opportunities for extended bongo solos, or that their Amnesty branch is really open to those who think the Uzbek government is a bit wishy-washy and needs positive reinforcement in the form of fedexed floral tributesfrom the society to its president in order to hold the line on law-and-order. It is just those bodies have not recorded such obvious facts in their constitutions.
Clubs don’t and shouldn’t appeal to everyone. That’s the whole point of them. They provide social opportunities through giving scope for people to get together with people with whom they know they’ll have something in common. That’s why traditionally they were so much a part of student life, as escape from the non-discriminatory potluck of faculty and accomodation. If Exeter Students’ Guild doesn’t get that, then why is it offering subsidy to societies at all?
Update: A notice that is rather strangely hidden away, but dated the same as the threat of action above, says that privileges have now been ‘restored’. Though nobody seems to have changed their mind about anything, there is to be a “consultation process” instead. Does this mean the Christians are expected to be persuaded not to be Christians? [Is this consultation going to involve lions?] Or is the question being postponed in the hope that it might go away, or that a new set of officers might have a better idea? All very odd.
A couple of years after the University of Cambridge rejected government (in the shape of one of its agencies plus the recently ‘reformed’ charity commission) ‘guidelines’ for the control of universities (i.e. giving great power for the Chief Executive and a board of management with a majority of non-academics upon it) the University of Oxford has now done the same: first by a meeting of the academics and then by postal ballot.
Oddly enough many ‘conservatives’ think this is a bad thing. Lord Butler (a former civil servant who now, for some reason, is master of University College at Oxford), John Redwood MP and the Daily Telegraph newspaper have all campaigned in favour of the “reforms”.
Their arguments are two fold.
Firstly they say that universities should carry out the changes or the government will force them to. This is clearly the argument of cowards “bend over or the bully will just make you do so”.
However, there is a second line of argument. It is claimed that the changes will help the university be run “like a business”.
Either something is a business or it is not. If it is a business its objective should be to make money and it should be under the control of its owners (or those they appoint).
Claiming to “run something like a business” is one of the great fallacies of our time. Bringing in people who have worked in private companies into government departments or charitable activities does not make these things run better – it just inflates the administration bill. → Continue reading: Good news from Oxford
A couple of days ago the Congregation of the University of Oxford voted to give outside professional managers more power over the university (it is not a done deal yet – but the plan is now well under way).
The vote showed how things are done in modern Britain. Half way through the debate a letter from the government was produced (by some ex top Civil Servants who are now Oxford dons) and read out – basically the message of the letter was simple, the government has not pushed ahead with ‘reform’ of the university because it expected the people there to “reform” the place, but if they do not do so… So change will be “voluntary” in the sense of an “offer you can not refuse”.
Scholars have been living in Oxford for a long time, perhaps there really were some there in the time of Alfred the Great (as the old stories say). First on an informal basis and then (in the 13th century) in organized ‘colleges’ – communities of scholars who ran their own affairs.
There has always been some government involvement in Oxford. Grants of property (as capital) by various Kings to start up some of the colleges (although private individuals financed the creation of others). Parliament (under the influence of various monarchs) laying down rules concerning religious practices. Even sometimes changing the structure of the university (as with the reform measure of Gladstone).
However, the basic structure of Oxford remained. Colleges as groups of self governing scholars. I can remember when the only non academic staff at Oxford were the cooks, cleaners and the men who guarded the gates of the colleges (who also kept important records). → Continue reading: A bad day in Oxford
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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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