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]
|
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
‘Clovis Sangrail’ points out that the ‘dumbing down’ of educational standards is politically and ideologically motivated.
In the most spineless demonstration of inadequate journalism we get the following report from the Times Higher Education Supplement.
“Hefce report questions value of costly initiatives and argues for open entry to university, writes Claire Sanders. Universities would need to scrap entry requirements to make any real headway in admitting students from a broader range of backgrounds, according to a highly controversial report commissioned by funding chiefs.
The review of widening access raises doubts about whether policies to reduce inequality through education can ever work and will fuel the debate over why the participation of disadvantaged groups in higher education has stalled despite billions of pounds being ploughed into the area.
A review team led by Stephen Gorard of York University argues that in the near future discrimination based on school qualification could seem as “unnatural as discrimination by sex, class, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and age do now”. Instead, a “threshold level” could be introduced, equivalent to perhaps two A levels, and places to specific institutions could be allocated according to students’ location, disciplinary specialisation or randomly.
Professor Gorard, who led the team from York, the Higher Education Academy and the Institute for Access Studies, said: “As research indicates that qualifications are largely a proxy for class and income, then why use them as a means of rationing higher education? The Open University has operated an open-access scheme for years that has clearly not damaged standards.”
This is either ignorance so vast that it clearly indicates the man should not be employed by York or else a deliberately misleading set of statements driven by a political agenda. Firstly, as any half-arsed tyro knows, evidence of association is not evidence for causation. Thus, in particular, we do not know that [high] class and income cause qualifications, indeed the reverse causation might hold: qualifications make people rich. Secondly, even if the causative link might be asserted, where does this leave the universities? In order to widen access they should accept those with poor education, because they have been discriminated against. Ignoring issues about positive discrimination this can only be true up to a point-or should they accept the innumerate to do mathematics and the illiterate to study English? “No, no, don’t be ridiculous” Professor Gorard would say, “two A levels rule that out. Look at the Open University”.
Well, I do look at the Open University. Ignoring the fact that in my subject an Open University degree is not taken to be evidence of high ability, the OU (as I am sure Gorard knows) has a requirement for a Foundation Year. And this is intended to make up for the absence of standard academic qualifications at a reasonable level.
Why do I get the feeling that Professor Gorard (a former teacher of maths and computer science who is quoted as saying on his appointment “I want to help build a centre of excellence for research on the effectiveness and equity of education systems.”) views equity as meaning “without regard to proven ability”?
I do not argue that wealth or class (whatever that means these days) does not help a child, I am sure it does. My problem is that opening the Universities to anyone with 2 Es at A level does not redress the balance. This is just another way to hide the rolling avalanche of failure that is (the average of) state education in the UK. It is not the (semi-private) universities’ job to fix the inadequacies of the pre-18 education system. If we attempt to do so, then we do so at the cost of miserably failing to train the top 10%. In a few years we have lost our research base and then we are stuffed. No industry, no educated ‘elite’, nothing to give us an economic edge in anything.
This is the route that the USA has partially gone down, and they only stem the rot by recruiting able PhD students from overseas.
Reposted from ‘Canker’
There is an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement that claims not only are radical Islamists trying to recruit at UK universities, the universities are doing little to combat it (a claim they naturally deny).
I do not know who is correct, but as Shiraz Maher claims the universities are not on top of this problem and he was a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, I am inclined to think the worst.
One doesn’t expect much good news from Africa, and Kenya may be notorious as among the most corruptly governed countries in the world, but this is what I call a public service.
A strange note in the commentary which I take to be a sign of a global, not just an African, problem:
People are so into their daily lives, running here and there, they don’t have time to read. In fact they only read when they need to sit for an examination. We hardly have anyone reading for pastime or for knowledge.
I have heard similar things in Britain, from both the non-readers and academic acquaintances responsible for teaching non-readers. In a world dominated by bureaucracy, qualifications no longer have any necessary relationship to knowledge, and reading is an act of compliance.
But being an outdoor librarian seems like a good job to me.
Human beings are a strange lot. Despite being blessed (theoretically at least) with the powers of critical analysis they are nonetheless wont to form an unquestioning consensus around an idea that makes little sense and produces consistently awful outcomes. In fact, the awfulness of the outcomes seems to be directly proportionate to the dogmatic insistence that there cannot possibly be any other way of doing things.
I can think of no clearer example of this than compulsory education: a bad idea which is (by and large) badly implemented by the state in the form of day-prisons which act as a factory for producing unacceptably large numbers of witless, traumatised, ignorant, semi-literate teenagers and not an insignificant number of violent, anti-social thugs.
Nor is this a secret shame. Indeed, it is the subject of much national hand-wringing about ‘what to do’. And yet, if I dare to suggest that the whole idea of incarcerating children for at least 10 years and then indoctrinating them with the things that politicians think they should know about is both counterproductive and immoral and bound to produce very little except awful outcomes, the reaction I get is rather similar to the one I imagine I would get if I were to demand that all pregnant women be injected with rabies.
Still, the best way to deal with a ‘truth-that-dare-not-speak-its-name’ is to speak it; often and boldly. That is why we need press releases like this one from the Libertarian Alliance:
“State schooling is an instrument of ruling class control. It is a means by which ideologies of obedience are imposed on the young.
State schools have always encouraged intellectual passivity and trust in the authorities. In the past generation, they have begun also to celebrate illiteracy, innumeracy and a general ignorance of the world. Add to this endemic bullying and temptations to unwise experimenting with sex and recreational drugs, and we have in state schooling a comprehensive absence of what used to be meant by education.
Rising truancy levels are to be welcomed. They show that increasing numbers of the young are withdrawing from the process of mass brainwashing. The young may not yet be expressing positive discontent with the corporatist police state New Labour and the Conservatives have made for us. But they are beginning to vote with their feet.
While the Libertarian Alliance does not encourage breaches of the criminal law, even if the law happens to be pointless or malevolent, we do look forward to a time when state schooling will be as dead an institution as the workhouse and the debtor’s prison.”
And when that day comes, human beings (being a somewhat strange lot) will be disinclined to recall or even believe in a time when there was a consensus around state education.
On page 31 of the August edition of the BBC History magazine, Mervyn Benford writes that, in Britain, “it was the demands of industrialisation that made the government educate the masses” an interesting statement considering that the industrial revolution occurred before even the tiny government subsidy to education in 1833. Benford goes on to write that, in 1862, “just 1 in 20 children went to school” – an absurd statement of the sort that E.G. West exposed more than forty years ago in Education and the State.
An historian should not say to themselves “I will pretend that every child who has not been to school for X number of years, without a break, has never been to school”. This is ‘history’ as in “first there was darkness, but then the state moved into the darkness and said let there be light”. As Ludwig Von Mises (and many other people) have pointed out, it is not the most stupid students or the most lazy (not always the same people of course) who become collectivists – on the contrary it is often intelligent and hardworking students (whether children or adults), people who seek out knowledge.
For the wells of knowledge have been poisoned. The above is one example, but it is one example from a legion. A child or an adult who seeks knowledge from the media or the ‘education system’ is betrayed.
Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:
David Ashley, headmaster of Greenslade primary, says that pupils who bring in packed lunches “are allowed chocolate on a biscuit but not a Mars bar”. If such sweeties are spotted, parents are called in for a quiet word.
At Charlton Manor primary, the head, Tim Baker, says: “Children get stickers for healthy boxes . . . If a child brings in a chocolate bar, we take it out of the lunchbox and give it back to the parent at the end of the day.” Pupils give each other away, he confides: “They say, ‘Miss, he’s got sweets in his box’.”
Perhaps the scariest thing about the article from which that comes is the vaguely approving tone. Here is information about what is being done, no questioning that it needs and should have government attention.
So I need to try hard to make this particular grammatical error far fewer often. I must write “less” on less occasions, and “fewer” fewer infrequently. It’s the fewest I can do. But realising precisely when to use “less” and when to use “fewer” remains fewer than obvious to me. Personally I blame my primary school teachers. If they’d wasted fewer time teaching me gorgeous italic handwriting (which is fewer than usefewer in this digital age) then I might have picked up more of the key rules of grammar instead. But one can’t improve one’s English unfewer one’s mistakes are identified. That’s why I’ve been much too carefewer on countfewer occasions in the past. Sorry, it’s all been mindfewer thoughtfewerness on my part. Bfewer you all for pointing out my linguistic reckfewerness. I recognise now that my writing has been fewer than perfect, and I’ve learnt my feweron. But don’t expect less mistakes overnight. Quite frankly I still couldn’t care fewer.
– diamond geezer
|
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.
|
