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]
|
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
From yesterday’s Telegraph comes this amazing story:
A 10-year-old girl saved her family and 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami because she had learnt about the giant waves in a geography lesson, it has emerged.
Tilly Smith, from Oxshott, Surrey, was holidaying with her parents and seven-year-old sister on Maikhao beach in Phuket, Thailand, when the tide rushed out.
As the other tourists watched in amazement, the water began to bubble and the boats on the horizon started to violently bob up and down.
Tilly, who had studied tsunamis in a geography class two weeks earlier, quickly realised they were in danger.
She told her mother they had to get off the beach immediately and warned that it could be a tsunami.
She explained she had just completed a school project on the huge waves and said they were seeing the warning signs that a tsunami was minutes away.
Her parents alerted the other holidaymakers and staff at their hotel, which was quickly evacuated. The wave crashed a few minutes later, but no one on the beach was killed or seriously injured.
I missed this yesterday, but Norm Geras, linked to today by Instapundit because of another posting about Guardian foolishness, caught it, to whom thanks.
I am sure that some time during the last few months I have blogged things which have at least suggested that blogging etc. is capable of replacing the existing media. If so, apologies, and if not, lucky me. This tsunami disaster has made clear what has long been obvious, that the old media and the new media complement and feed into each other, or at any rate they ought to.
Bloggers in the right places at the right times can feed stories not just to other meta-bloggers, but to the mainstream media. A few of them were, after all, actually there. And then other bloggers, as I have just done, can point blog readers towards particularly choice mainstream media stories.
I particularly admire the way that the Guardian, for all that it is easy for the likes of us to criticise it for all kinds of other reasons, has at least learned how blogging can actually help in times like these, not just by telling the terrible story, but by helping to make it less terrible.
As regulators impose more onerous capital adequacy and reporting requirements on the Western world’s banks, investment firms and brokerages, demand surges for increasingly sophisticated computer infrastructure to keep track of all the new systems deemed necessary to make the regulations work. As a result, demand is rising, according to this Financial Times article, for graduates with science degrees, especially in the field of physics. And it does not come as much of a surprise to learn that Britain’s mostly state-run education system is not doing a very good job at churning out young physics students. I am shocked, shocked to hear this!
I would greatly prefer it if clever folk with scientific knowledge were engaged in the potentially fruitful areas of nanotechnology, biotech, aviation and civil engineering, all fields likely to see continued rapid growth, than working to make increasingly Byzantine bank regulations work better. It looks like a waste to me. We want our budding Isaac Newtons and Richard Feynmans working on spacecraft, not greasing the wheels of the latest EU banking directive.
Carol and Peter Williams live in Alton, Hampshire, with their son, also called Peter, who is a chess champion. Which was how the trouble started. The Williams family is now locked in battle with their Local Education Authority (LEA) about whether Peter should be allowed to pursue his education at home, or should instead be forced to attend school.
I heard about this via Daryl Cobranchi (such are the ways of the Internet), and emailed first Daryl, and then Carol Williams, who emailed me thus this morning
I would not say that education (I hate that word) is the subject. It is about freedom of choice and the desire to encourage your children in the subjects they enjoy and/or are good at.
I will now give a potted history so you can see how we got where we are today with the LEA.
Peter started playing chess when he was 5 years old. The rapid progress he made showed us this was way above the expected level of the average 5 year old. When Peter became 6, for a period of around 6 months, he had one day a week off school to study chess more in depth. Every week we had to write a letter to the school asking permission for this, after this period we decided to request that this was made a permanent arrangement, this is where it all started to go wrong. The school granted us a maximum of 15 days per year, stating that Peters’ education would suffer otherwise. As he had just taken his SATS tests and achieve above average marks in all bar one subject, this argument did not hold water. We wrote back stating that this was not acceptable to us. We subsequently received a letter from the LEA’s Barrister stating that the offer had to be withdrawn as it was illegal to allow children time off from school. This is absolutely incorrect as Hampshire LEA’s website states that discretionary leave is entirely at the discretion of the Head . At this point we made the decision to withdraw Peter from state school and teach him at home. → Continue reading: Carol Williams on why she does not now want her son Peter to go to school
I don’t usually much enjoy denunciations of liberal bias, because they so often seem to me to be as tediously and unthinkingly abusive as the liberal consensus that they denounce so often is. But I did enjoy this piece by Mark Bauerlein, entitled Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual (linked to recently by Arts & Letters Daily)
The essence of Bauerlein’s description of liberal bias is that it is a social process, and not just a political conspiracy. Quote:
The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they’ve reached an opinion through reasoned debate – instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they’re stuck with abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren.
Quite so. What I like about Bauerlein’s piece is that it addresses how it feels to be a typical academic. And your typical academic does not feel biased, in the sense that he thinks what he thinks through a great and continuous effort of mental will, in full knowledge of several alternatives. On the contrary, he thinks that what he thinks is the most natural thing in the world. So, if you do call him biased you immediately lose him, and prove to him only that you are stupid, about this and about much else.
Unchallenged extremism is one problem. Another is the resulting tedium. Bauerlein takes a J. S. Mill line, to the effect that even if the orthodoxy is right (which he doesn’t think it is) it still needs to be kept on its intellectual toes by facing regular in-house challenges.
But he writes about liberal academics more as confused and ignorant barbarians than as fully functioning enemies. His job is not so much to oppose them as to rescue them. He feels sorry for them. → Continue reading: On liberal academic groupthink and on why it may be worse in the USA than in Britain
Last night I attended a seminar on education organised by the Social Affairs Unit (there is as yet nothing about this event on their blog), at which the speaker was Francis Gilbert. Gilbert read a bit from his new book, I’m a Teacher, Get Me Out Of Here!, and if this bit was anything to go by, it is a very good book. (See also this posting here earlier this year.)
I will not here recount – and could not hope to recount – everything that was talked about, but I do note with approval that Francis Gilbert, after he had finished reading from his book, invited us to think about how much better education would be if it was run by the man who has recently taken over his local corner shop, and has made a great success of it, and by a few thousand others like him, instead of by the Government.
However, I will focus on one very widespread and wrong clutch of related ideas that cropped up in the course of our discussion. It was said, echoing something that Francis Gilbert himself had said, that education is not “like oil or bread”. The most important qualities of education are beyond measurement or quantification. The thing is just too complicated and … I think that the word ineffable may even have been used. Unlike oil or bread.
The conclusion we were invited to draw from this was that education, unlike oil or bread, cannot be supplied entirely by the free market, as a lot of us, taking our lead from Francis Gilbert, were enthusiastically recommending. It is just too complicated a thing to dole out in easily measurable little packets, like oil or bread.
But it simply does not follow that because something is complicated and immeasurable, even ineffable, that it cannot and should not be supplied by tradesmen. → Continue reading: The false argument for state control from immeasurability
The University of St Andrews Students’ Association has threatened to ban the student newspaper, The Saint, for not complying with an Equal Opportunities Policy. The Saint is an independent newspaper, run by students, but pays rent to the Students’ Association (the union) for the use of an office. Unlike student newspapers at many universities, it is not funded by the university/taxpayer. Nevertheless, the tabloid publication has won several prestigious national awards and is regarded as one of the best student newspapers in the country.
Three years ago, a campaign against The Saint was run by a group of anti-capitalist students. They charged that it was too right-wing, and a flat window on College Street was taken up by posters attacking the newspaper.
The student union has repeately tried to compete with The Saint, bringing out a succession of free newspapers and a magazine, but none have enjoyed success – or regularity of production. Union officers have complained over several years that The Saint doesn’t give their side of the story.
Now the union has found that the newspaper is in violation of the union’s Equal Opportunities Policy on the grounds that it does not respect students’ “right to dignity”. This seems to refer to a section of the paper called ‘Halo’ which features pictures from parties and events, generally of students fairly drunk and in strange poses. There is a caption underneath each photo. The issue apparently came to a head after they featured a student union official who objected to the caption used. Some students fear that the Equal Opportunities Policy could be used to censor other types of reports.
Such as the Department of Trade and Industry, or the Department of Education, for example. Yes, I know it is an old joke but… is it really a joke?
|
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.
|
