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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?
Christy Davies has an interesting article on the Social Affairs Unit blog which looks critically at one of the educational ‘given’ of our age:
Science we are told is something that every child should and must study. Most children hate it, fail to master it and never use it or think about it again after they have left school. It is forced upon unwilling and inept pupils because it is supposed to be good for them. Science is the twenty-first century’s version of Latin.
Interesting stuff. Read the whole thing.
This sums up the case for university top-up fees very nicely:
The new higher education minister, Kim Howells, today stormed into the education debate with a warning for universities that top-up fees would create a “cut throat” market.
Wow, a rabid free marketeer telling the universities that they are going to have to get their act together, not because little old he merely says so or else, but because there is now a market out there.
But it turns out that Kim Howells is against this market:
In his first speech since joining the Department for Education and Skills, Mr Howells risked the ire of his boss, Charles Clarke, with a series of negative remarks about the direction education policy had taken since he was last an education minister in 1998.
This is a classic case of something that happens a lot, namely a good idea being spread by someone who vehemently disagrees with it.
And here comes another combination of rightness and wrongness:
He questioned the government’s focus on the economic benefits of education and admitted that sending his children to university had left him “broke”.
In characteristically colourful language, Mr Howells told an audience at the University of Westminster in London today: “We’ve become very utilitarian in the department for education. I’m in a lucky position of having returned after six or seven years.
“Learning for learning’s sake is something we should criticise very warily. People want to learn simply because learning is wonderful and it’s the second best thing I know in the world.”
Howells has a point about learning for learning’s sake. But just because something is wonderful doesn’t mean that other people ought to pay for it. I think that classical music is wonderful, and governments around Europe pay a lot of people to entertain me at way below what it might otherwise cost me. But is this right, just because I get wonderfulness rather than usefulness?
There is also the fact that, I think, classical music would actually be very different and much better if it was not subsidised at all. Ditto education, especially of the “wonderful” sort.
The proportion of “wonderful” education that is now subsidised is now declining rapidly, thanks to the Internet, which is all part of how much more wonderful it has now become.
Diddy Kirton writes about the grief of trying to get that first job after graduating.
You have had the degree results; you’ve done the graduation ceremony; you have been welcomed home for a well-deserved holiday; and now, three months later, you are still lying on the sofa, your eyes glued to daytime television. What next?
This is when things can start to get nasty. Parents begin to get restless. Is this person they had thought was launched into the world ever going to get going? When is my son/daughter going to get a job?
Well, three months on the sofa is nothing. Expect 12 months or more. Graduates are finding it increasingly difficult to get work after completing their degrees – not because the job market is shrinking (it isn’t) and not necessarily because they don’t have the required abilities. Many of them just don’t know where to start and are terrified of the future.
I think that young people in this pickle are years behind already, in the sense that successful graduates (i.e. successful people who are also graduates) have, by this stage, for several years, been thinking about what they will be doing next, and have been networking within their future field of conquest, kissing arses and pressing flesh and generally putting themselves about. Indeed, they chose what to study with what they would do with it at the front of their minds. → Continue reading: Graduate jobsearch blues
The dependably readable William Sjostrom takes an article in the Daily Telegraph decrying the fact British students are in debt and turns it on its head:
My central point remains this: why do newspapers, staffed by people who happily go into debt to buy cars and homes, write as if students are clearly worse off going into debt to pay for university education?
Why indeed?
I’ve done several posts at my Education Blog on the theme of the educational gains to be got from blogging, by the blogger. Of course writing things communicates to others. But it also organises the thoughts of the writer, and makes them more likely to be remembered by the writer. Failing that, it makes it easier for the writer to access his written thoughts later, if only because the writer is likely at least to remember having written on that subject.
I did another such posting yesterday, in connection with something Michael Jennings said to me last week in conversation about how he blogs about computer matters with this benefit in mind.
Rob Fisher commented on this post, in a way that emphasises the point:
I certainly find that the act of writing a blog post forces me to get my thoughts into some kind of order, which is useful. The part of my website that gets the most feedback is a tutorial I wrote about how to use Linux to edit digital video; and I wrote this mainly because I knew I would forget half of it if I didn’t write it down – and if I’m going to write it down I might as well publish it.
I think this could explain the presence of a lot of the wide range of useful information available on the web.
I’m currently investigating the possibility of using a Wiki for publishing useful information. Wikis are interesting because they make web pages so easy to change; and even more interesting because they let other people add and amend information.
By the time I understand that last paragraph I will have had to have made some educational progress myself, although I am sure it is straightforward enough once you understand it. Educationally helpful comments, anyone? “Wiki”? I have heard that word, and the presumably related word “wikipedia”, but what does this stuff mean?
Blogging, it seems to me, blurs the distinction between the private and the public. It is not that this distinction is now of no importance. But blogging does shift the economics of (what do we call it?) message management? … towards combining the public with the private, wherever that can be done without too much risk. Simply, by doing both private and public communication simultaneously, you can save both time and effort, and that might make it economical to engage in forms of communication with oneself and with others that would previously not have been possible.
I think, as I said in my original posting, that this is one of the big reasons for the success of blogging. Constructing a helpful set of notes as one learns a subject area might be too difficult, and hence beyond you. Writing material good enough to reach a wide readership, ditto. But licking your notes into shape and sticking them on a blog, which obviously can be read by millions, but need not be in order to be an economic proposition, adds up to something that can make a lot of sense.
I did not set out with my Culture Blog with the self-conscious aim of learning about new buildings in London, but that is the way it is turning out. And I definitely did start Brian’s Education Blog in order to educate myself, about education, as the ambiguous name, I hope, communicates. Brian’s Blog About Education? A Blog About Brian’s Education? Both.
These friends of mine are in the business of helping businesses to set up blogs. They emphasise the benefits blogging can bring in the form of communicating with customers, and that must be right. But a company which blogs will be, it seems to me, a company which learns, individually and collectively, more than it would learn otherwise.
But of course there is a further potential benefit to blogging as self-education, I have already tried to illustrate with this posting by asking commenters to explain wiki to me. Commenters can help to educate you. Not all such help is truly helpful, but sometimes it can be very helpful indeed.
I would be delighted to hear about any other bloggers who have used blogging as part of their effort to further their own education. I would not be surprised if a consensus were to emerge here, or to have emerged from a comment-fest somewhere else of interest, along the lines of: this is (partly) what all bloggers are doing.
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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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