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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Australia is not famous for higher education. Indeed, “Australia” and “Higher education” would strike most people as an oxymoron in the “French Military Victory” class.
Needless to say, the Australian Government has long tried to nudge Australia’s university system towards some sort of quality, and has permitted private Universities to be established. In addition, the government has encouraged students from overseas to pay their way through Australian universities, as a way for universities here to raise money.
Recently, the government has also allowed Australians to enter universities by paying their own way.
This move towards a more financially sustainable education system has not been well received by many members of the Australian academic ecosystem. One of whom has put together a rather amusing parody website which takes a humorous potshot at trends in Australian university education.
Underling the parody is the normal assumtion that anything in the private sector must be inferior, and that any private qualification must obviously be worthless as it can be bought.
But the site has caused a bit of a flurry of attention in various educational quarters in Australia, and one consultant has been tracking the progress of this satirical site.
This recalls to me the time, long ago now, when I was studying like a demon in order to obtain the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) qualification, back in the dark days when networking involved lots of wires. As it was, I was dating a university student at the time and she was appalled that I had to acheive an 85% score to pass and obtain the qualification. She was doing sociology or something of that ilk in a Melbourne university and told me smugly that she only needed to score 55% to pass. Easy for her, but who do you think knew their subject better? After all, Cisco had a real stake in me being proficient in knowing how to use their product.
Thanks to Professor John Kersey for alerting us to these sites.
Harry Phibbs is one of those people who is not nearly as much of an ass as he often pretends to be. In fact, often pretending to be an ass is just about the only assinine thing about him.
Here he is, pictured at that Globalization Institute launch that everyone who was anyone was at, talking about I have no idea who, but almost certainly saying that they ought to be horsewhipped.
But he is and has long been an excellent writer. Here is his excellent description, at the SAU blog, of what it is like being a school governor (while remaining Harry Phibbs of course). I particularly liked this bit of reminiscence:
School governors are entitled, indeed encouraged, to visit the school once a term or so. They also have a chance to report on their visit. I once caused consternation at a primary school in St John’s Wood where I was a governor a few years ago. Reporting on a visit I had made to the school, I named a Bosnian child who had recently arrived at the school. He was unable to speak English but was very good at sums. Essentially his entire time at school was being wasted. For most lessons he stared blankly unable to understand what was going on. In the maths lesson however he managed to correctly complete a whole sheet of sums within seconds which kept the rest of the class going for the whole lesson. Of course he should have been given harder sums and special help to learn English. “We are letting him down”, I declared. Later it was proposed by one of the teachers that reports of governor’s visits should be restricted to general comments as it was “inappropriate” to make comments which should be made by school inspectors.
But I was backed up by the other governors who agreed there was little point in having school visits if specific criticisms could not be made. I never found out if the boy was given harder sums to add up.
Harry also writes about the beneficial effects of Jamie Oliver on school meals, and gives chapter and verse of how much money is spent on each pupil, and who by. (Clue: bureaucracy.)
Read, as we bloggers so often say, the whole thing.
I am watching a news report on Newsnight, broadcast by the BBC, about private education in Nigeria. The report is the work of Professor James Tooley, who I think is one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the world.
Tooley has been roaming the world in recent years, finding cheap, successful, private schools, which are everywhere outperforming the shoddy state provided schools. Nigeria is no different.
It is one thing to see white blokes in suits saying at some pro free market conference that the private sector is better than the public sector. Watching Nigerian parents explaining the same thing, to a BBC news camera, is something else again.
So why, Tooley is asking, is everyone in denial? There is no global crisis in education. The private sector is supplying higher standards at a fraction of the cost.
Now we are in white blokes discussing it all mode, and Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University is explaining that what Tooley has spent the last decade scrutinising with his own eyes is all a figment of his, Tooley’s, imagination.
Tooley has the advantage over Lewin. He has been there. He has seen it. He has found schools which, until he and his colleagues found them, nobody not directly involved with the schools in question knew existed. This is market success, says Tooley, and we should celebrate it.
Tooley’s report showed an incandescently eloquent private sector teacher in action. And he also showed a state school teacher in a state school classroom, a classroom filled with state school pupils who were busy trying teaching one another, while he, the state school teacher, was fast asleep at his desk.
Lewin says that this is all a tragedy, because he sees state failure. The state is, or should be, the educator of last resort. Market success is important to Lewin only because as far as he is concerned market success equals state failure, and state failure is bad bad bad. Lewin refers to “his colleagues in Africa”, who agree with him and do not agree with Tooley.
Those, I would guess, would be the state education bureaucrats who, time and time again, do not even realise that there is a thriving educational private sector in their own country, pretty much right under their noses. The government bureaucrats whom Lewin (I suspect) spends most of his African research time communing with, have little idea about this ferment of private education. Insofar as they do know of it, they do not want to know of it, because it makes them feel irrelevant. This is because they are irrelevant. And if they are irrelevant then so is the living that Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University makes helping to prepare all this state bureaucrats for their careers in state education.
Now Lewin is talking gibberish about why Britain nationalised its schools in 1870. What we have just seen, says Lewin, invites the withdrawal of the state from the provision of all public services. Well, yes.
The thing about Tooley is not just what he says. It is also the sincerity and enthusiasm with which he says it. He will never convert the Lewins of this world. But he does seriously contest what they say, and, just like the numerous private schools which he has found the world over – in Africa, in China, in India, in Pakistan, in fact everywhere he looks – he does it with a fraction of the resources that the Lewin side of this debate now commands.
For more about all this, read this Sunday Times article by Tooley, which I would never have found out about had it not been for the BBC.
The BBC, outrageously biased, rampant supplier of last resort of rampantly pro-capitalist propaganda.
As a general rule, whenever you hear or read that teaching unions are ‘angry’ then you can pretty much bet all your wordly worth that something good and positive is happening in the education sector.
I have yet to encounter an exception to this rule:
Teachers’ unions reacted angrily today after the Government vowed to press ahead with plans for 200 privately-sponsored city academies.
This hardly means that the (long overdue) commodification of education is upon us but then these public sector mafiosi possess bloodhound levels of sensitivty that enable them to pick up on even the faintest whiff of threat to their vested interests.
I wholly expect that even if these academies do start sprouting up around the country, the curriculum will still be politically-mandated and the sponsors will (in common with everyone else in the productive, non-looting sector) have to navigate their way through a miasmic swamp of diktats, edicts and regulations on their way to getting something resembling decent results.
But, for all that, they do seem to me to represent the first few, tottering, tentative, baby steps towards the long-term goal of levering the state out of the education business. Good.
For me, this was the biggest news yesterday. Synthetic phonics is now thoroughly established as a serious educational policy option.
“Synthetic phonics” is a somewhat jargonic way of saying the sensible teaching of reading, based on the idea that despite all the deviations (in English especially) from the rules, letters stand for noises, and the way to read is to work out what the noise must be from the letters. To say that this is how to learn reading is to miss the point. The point is: this is reading. Seeing the letters “e l e p h a n t” next to a picture of an elephant (which is precisely what I did see this morning when channel hopping – in a TV show supposedly helping children to read) and guessing that therefore this assemblage of baffling squiggles must mean elephant is not reading. Reading means seeing those letters on their own, and knowing that they mean elephant.
A good way to get to grips with the background to this story is to read the latest newsletter from the Reading Reform Foundation, who have been agitating on behalf of synthetic phonics for many years now.
At the heart of this argument is not the value of phonics as such. Even the most diehard look-and-say people now concede that phonics is part of the story. But, say the RRF people, too many teachers – teachers who have only been following or agreeing with the guidance they have been getting from the government – believe in a mixed approach. In other words, says the RRF, they confuse children by urging them to combine reading with guessing. Should some version of phonics merely be included in the government’s literacy strategy (it already is), in among picture books, stuff about “word shape”, and so on, or should literacy be based entirely on phonics, properly done? The latter, says the RRF. Personally I find the RRF argument thoroughly convincing.
At lot of what is happening here is not really an argument about what works best (synthetic phonics has been proved to work best), so much as an elaborate exercise in giving a whole generation of fools a soft landing. Too sudden a switch from the wrong methods to the right ones would reveal at once how bad the wrong methods were, and make an awful lot of experts look very inexpert indeed. So, although they must surely now know that they are losing, these people are still digging their heals in and fighting every inch of the way.
Kudos to the government, for, better late than never, taking all this on board, to use an unlovely Blairite phrase. For this is classic Blairism. Once again, New Labour (this kind of thing being the New bit) are cherry picking one of the better things that some Conservatives have been saying, and ramming it down the throats of their own natural (Old Labour) supporters, who will put up with anything rather than have too serious a fight with their own front bench and thus let the Conservatives back in.
My favourite moment in all the media reportage yesterday about all this came when a newsreader (I think BBC but am not sure) was reading the phrase “synthetic phonics” out. Exhausted by the effort of reading “synthetic”, she then stumbled over “phonics”, and had to stop, and try it again. Eventually she got it right. Maybe it would have helped if she had had a picture to help her.
Well, no, it would not. She should simply have read it better.
I quote at a bit of length because only when you quote at a bit of length do you get the real flavour of stories like this one:
A new anti-yob task force is to be set up to tackle the culture of disrespect and unruly behaviour in schools, ministers have said.
Otherwise known as a committee. This announcement will only add to the culture of disrespect. Disrespect of ministers.
The group, made up of teachers and heads who are experts in school discipline, will advise the Government on how to improve standards of behaviour.
One key part of their work will be to make sure parents take responsibility for the way their children behave, the Department for Education and Skills said.
But “taking responsibility” will not quite do it, will it? This would only work if parents actually changed the way their children behaved. This is a euphemism that communicates the underlying lack of confidence here. These people already know that none of this is going to work. If they thought that parents really could, and really would, make their children behave better, then this is what they would have said. → Continue reading: How to abolish bad behaviour in schools
One of the regular contributors to the Libertarian Alliance Forum posted this salutary tale concerning his local state school.
I felt that it deserved a wider audience.
Yesterday my wife went to register our oldest child at the local ‘gubmint’ school here in the Atlanta ‘burbs. It will be his first year in the public school system.
To prove that we live in the catchment area, she had with her an electricity bill with our address on it. There was a printed notice posted in the registration area. It listed the only forms of identification that would be accepted. At the bottom of the notice was printed “NO ACCEPTIONS!”
My wife found this illiteracy in a supposed place of learning to be very disconcerting, but carried on with the process.
Next, she was handed a slew of forms to complete and sign. One of the forms was a waiver for field trips. This form explained that “our student’s will attend a number of field trips…”
That was it. Glaring spelling mistakes on professionally printed notices, moronic misuse of an apostrophe on a form that must surely have been reviewed by the principal. A sickening feeling came over her and she had to make her excuses and leave, explaining that she would fill in the forms later.
The received wisdom of our day holds that only the state can be relied upon to provide children with a proper education. I wonder how long that canard can hold fast in the face of all the glaring evidence to the contrary?
[My thanks to Rob Worsnop who posted this to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
It seems a bit odd that the construction industry is going on a spending campaign to persuade smart young graduates to go into the trade. I am surprised that young people really need persuading. In this age of job offshoring, redundancies in the City and suchlike, it actually makes a lot of sense to get a skill in an area that cannot be easily outsourced. Many people in the construction, plumbing and electrical trades seem to be well off, far more so in fact than some young graduate toiling away in an office job. And thanks to new British regulations designed to prevent homeowners from performing any DIY activity more complex than install a shelf or rewire a plug – for their own good! – demand for construction and home maintenance professionals looks set to go on rising into the distance.
Anyone with a supposedly “secure” job ought to think about adding another, non-outsourceable, skill. One thing I always notice about British plumbers, for example, is that they all drive Jaguars or Mercedes. It is not rocket science to figure out why.
One of the more depressing discoveries I made from my first year or two of education blogging (Brian’s Education Blog still not working sorry blah blah) was the inexorable spread of cheating in Britain’s schools and colleges. The BBC reported yesterday that a diktat has just been emitted by a committee you will probably not have heard of until now, called JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), saying that this must stop and here is how blah blah:
A rise in the number of students in the UK, including undergraduates from overseas, is likely to mean increased plagiarism, a report has said.
Colleges and universities are being sent guidelines written by experts in the higher education technology organisation, Jisc.
The authors say: “student plagiarism in the UK is common and is probably becoming more so”.
JISC makes much of the presence of foreign students in large numbers, but presumably phrases this more delicately than the BBC’s report does, in its first paragraph above, with verbiage more like the following:
A “holistic” approach is needed which establishes “underlying cultures and beliefs”, “placing academic issues at the centre of the discussions”.
When you are saying that foreigners are cheats, words like “holistic” come in very handy, I should imagine.
However, another reasons why academic cheating is on the up-and-up is diktats from national committees, demanding that British schools (where most British students are still incubated despite all those dodgy foreigners) must do better and better, and get better and better marks, and better and better exam results. This is the process I call sovietisation, and the rot afflicts everyone in the entire education system, up to and including the Secretary of State him (now her) self. Simply, the politicians want the educational numbers to look better than they are, and they cheat.
Time was when the teaching profession was pretty much left to its own devices by London, but those days are long gone. And time was when, if you cheated, you had to make sure your teacher did not catch you at it. Nowadays, your teacher is liable to be the one helping you to cheat, so you can get through your exams, and he can tell London that he is doing a good job. And London will believe it, because London wants to believe it. I think the Soviet vibe here is clear enough. Steel production figures anyone?
Sending out yet another instruction saying that you jolly well must not cheat has a distinctly Gorbachevian air. It amounts to begging that our top-down command-and-control education system must please, please, not behave like what it is. There will be quotas, but no quota fiddling. Dream on.
See in particular, this posting, where I noted how continuous assessment encourages cheating, because it involves asking teachers themselves to tell the higher-ups how well they, the teachers (and the higher-ups), are doing. Exams at least get someone else to say how well things are going, and are more likely to be honest. Although of course the politicians put pressure on those to dumb them down too.
David Gillies responded to that posting of mine, with a comment which I copied over to Samizdata. Gillies noted, you may recall, that there is another reason why foreigners equals cheating. Foreigners equals money, and British colleges do not want to lose it by telling said foreigners that they have done badly in their exams. There is a lot of this about just now, and the less corrupt educational exporters must now be very afraid.
Perhaps there will now be yet another Initiative, demanding that each school and college must set in motion an Anti-Cheating Plan. The more obedient ones will comply, as best they can.
Others will say that they have done this, but their Anti-Cheating Plan will only be observable when the inspectors come calling.
They will, that is to say, cheat.
I am aware of the arguments in favour of home-schooling. The educational standards tend to be higher. Children are usually brought up as reasonable human beings and not part of a pack of savages. In principle, home schooling allows for an upbringing that is tailored to each child. The conscription of children in schools is removed.
And then something like this comes along.
There are two benefits of even the most useless schools. Children meet other children their own age, which is useful if one is not intent on becoming a hermit.
Of course there is plenty of unreported abuse that occurs in full view. In some schools abuse is ignored or even inflicted. But most basically of all, a 12 year-old child turning up weighing 35 pounds with burn marks and bruises in rags might be noticed. So having children turn up somewhere where their disappearance or injury will be noticed is a valuable function of schools. Perhaps they need to open twice a month for roll-call and then let them go home?
The New Labour administration has provided a worthy example of how governments mess up systems of accreditation, especially those established by themselves. Since these are designed to mirror the political biases and triumphs of their founders, rather than provide an objective appraisal of developments, governments begin to tinker with the tables when they produce the wrong results.
One example of this is the education league tables where the government has recently introduced the recording of vocational qualifications in order to offset the academic predominance of private and grammar schools. This has the additional consequence of downgrading academic performance even amongst state schools which are run on an adequate basis.
Under the new system, a distinction in a certificate in cake decorating is worth 55 points – more than a GCSE grade A in physics.
And a City and Guilds progression award in bakery was worth more than five GCSEs at grade C.
The public sector professionals thought this was a terrific wheeze.
But John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads’ Association, said the added complexity gave parents a better picture.
“In the past the tables have been too simplistic.
“The new tables give parents a broader view of the achievements of schools,” he said.
The more complex the better. No doubt parents prefer complexity since this makes those important decisions so much easier. Time for the market to provide an alternative.
This government hopes to cut its cake, cook it and eat it. However, although Britain is ending up like Golgafrincham, we cannot offload the cake decorators or the telephone earpiece cleaners, so all of the skilled workers and the professionals are emigrating, leaving the Golgafrinchams behind.
At Joanne Jacobs I learned about another of these teacher/pupil ruckuses where the teacher would appear to have behaved very stupidly.
17 year old Ahmad Al-Qloushi disagreed with his teacher, Professor Jospeh Woolcock, about America being great. Ahmad Al-Qloushi thinks it is. His teacher, Professor Joseph Woolcock, on the other hand, said to Ahmad Al-Qloushi that he needed therapy for expressing such an obviously bonkers opinion. The story is already bubbling away on the internet and will surely spread. Al-Qloushi has put his version of the story out there, and however much the Professor may curse, he cannot now reverse this. The Professor has filed a grievance, whatever exactly that means, against Al-Qloushi, for putting his, the Professor’s, name out there, but out there it is and out there it will now remain.
Whenever I hear about disagreements like this, I always think to myself: well, maybe the guy is a bit crazy. Maybe, in this case, the essay was a bit bonkers. And maybe Al-Qloushi had said and done other crazy things which he is forgetting about, and this essay was just the final straw in a hayrick of craziness that we are not hearing about. So, I am especially interested that in addition to reading Al’Qloushi’s complaint, we can also read the offending essay. → Continue reading: The lefty Professor versus the Arab college Republican president
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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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