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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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.
It is always refreshing to read an article trashing state intervention only to read in the by-line at the end that the author is a candidate for the State of Massachusetts’ Senate.
Going back to look up James D. Miller’s bio details, I see that he is ‘Assistant Professor of Economics, Smith College’. My ignorance of the American education system is profound. Yet it seems to me that this is not the profile I would expect for a British economics professor. A candidate for political office who publicly calls for less state intervention, and does not even ask for more tax money in education! We used to have one or two or those.
I am especially intrigued by Mr Miller’s references (linking to Thomas Sowell) to the two earthquakes in California and Iran during 2003. The reason fewer than 10 people were killed in a Californian earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale, whereas 28,000 were killed by a 6.6 Richter earthquake in Iran? One word: wealth.
I really must read more Sowell. And thank you James D. Miller for an educational article.
Not that I need to preach to the converted here, but I love the internet. How else could I read every daily edition of my hometown newspaper back in the US if not for the web? I like keeping up on who is engaged and who got married, who got arrested and which baseball coach got sent to prison for selling crack cocaine – it is local gossip news through a global channel, and I can never resist tuning in.
It is also interesting to note the range of opinions that co-exist in my largely conservative hometown. It is a wonderful place to grow up, and a wonderful place to grow old, full of lovely people, but I was somewhat surprised to read an editorial in Monday’s edition which stated that taxpayers have to be willing to foot the bill for public schools’ physical education classes. What surprised me was not that such an unquestioning, statist line could be uttered in the kind of place that was built on a can-do attitude and pride in one’s own ability to do for oneself; what surprised me was how the editorial writer did not even bother to craft an argument in favour of his or her opinion.
So I wrote my first ever letter to the editor. I do not think it will be published, and I would hate to have totally wasted the one minute it took me to read the article and the five minutes it took me to dash off a response, so I reproduce it here.
According to Monday’s Gazette editorial on gym classes in public
education, “Schools cannot turn their backs on students’ health, and the state and taxpayers have to be willing to foot the bill.” This is nonsense, at least if you accept the fact that it is up to individuals to decide to be fit or to be unfit. In the case of children, it is parents – not school systems – who must bear that responsibility. It is a scary state of affairs indeed when the notion that parents ought to be the ones taking responsibility for the food their children consume and the activities in which their children participate strikes so many as strange and unthinkable. “But it’s the schools’ job to teach that!” comes the cry. No, actually, it is not.
The incontestable fact of the matter is that our ability to do things for ourselves – including the ability to think, in some cases – is diminished when the government does those things for us. (Anyone who doubts this should look to those countries where Communism was not so long ago the order of the day, where people who lived under those brutal régimes quite literally struggle to make basic choices for themselves after years of having the government make almost all of life’s decisions for them.) This also diminishes us as human beings. The question we must really answer is whether we give priority to a population that may overeat and under-exercise and that consequently does not live as long as it may, or to taking away citizens’ autonomy “for the common good”. Such collectivist thinking ignores individual rights and responsibilities, and in doing so encourages moral and intellectual passivity. It is also, not coincidentally, the kind of sentiment with which any proud Communist would agree.
As for the question of Medicare and Medicaid, not everyone swallows the statist line that citizens must submit to having our finances looted by the government in order to pay for such services.
On the same note, it is a regrettably radical concept in this day and age, but I do not believe – as the Gazette editorial stated – that I or any other citizen must be willing to foot the bill for any other parent’s child’s physical education. Our schools have their work cut out for them as it is when it comes to guiding children in academic disciplines. There is no reason to pin the blame on them if Johnny and Susie do not realize that physical activity is a good thing. Of course the fact is that Johnny and Susie and any person with a functioning brain knows this; it is – and must be – up to them to decide whether or not to act on this knowledge. If Johnny and Susie’s parents wish to be let off the hook for parenting their children in this area, they need only look to editorials like the one in Monday’s Gazette to feel absolved of any such responsibility.
What I did not mention in my letter is that I experienced in two local school districts, as a child and teenager, downright lousy phys ed programs. In high school, it was so bad that your phys ed grade was based solely on whether or not you bothered to bring a change of clothes for the class. The teacher, who also served as athletic director and head basketball coach of the high school, would give you 50 per cent credit just for showing up. Calling that “physical education” was nothing short of a joke, especially as most of us used the period to do the homework we’d neglected to do for the next period’s class.
Is this really the reason why some kids are overweight? Hardly. But if I have learned one thing from growing up in an area with very little in the way of fee-paying schools, it is that the parents of kids who attend state (public) schools will always complain about all the things the schools are not teaching their kids that they are entirely capable of teaching their children themselves, be it how not to get pregnant, how not to catch a sexually transmitted disease, or how not to grow obese. It is time someone started making parents feel as crummy as they should for this attitude, so get guilt-tripping today.
One of the better ways to learn about policy trends, in any policy area, in any country, is to read something by someone who disapproves.
This article, about what its author thinks is wrong with all the various directions which Indian education is heading in, reads to me like a catalogue of all that is right about it.
Two trends in particular struck me as especially encouraging. First this:
A self reliant India needs very different intellectual support from the kind of intellectual labour envisaged by a government that in its enthusiasm for selling out to multinationals could only dream of bringing some outsourced functions of these multinationals into our country. …
“Self reliant” reads to me like “futureless backwater”. So, what I take this to mean is that Indian education is now turning out people who are very employable indeed, and on the world market where the real money is to be made and where so much of India’s economic future will be created.
And second, there is this:
A self reliant and democratic India also needs its citizens prepared for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel, fulfilling some technical function, but as thinking beings able to defend and safeguard democracy. …
… which the guy put in italics of his own, meaning that this was his biggest point. “Preparing for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel” sounds to me like preparing them against the globalised world. So what this all says like to me is: “The education system isn’t turning out enough political mischief-makers.”
There is also much complaint in this article about “para-education”, which sounds to me like free enterprise education, rather than the state-provided shambles which most Indians were stuck with until recently.
So, then: India doing really well. This has been one of the decade’s great Global Stories. Long may the story continue.
This looks really interesting. I have just learned about it by reading this:
A right-wing think-tank will this week launch a national chain of cut-price primary schools in a drive to open up private education to middle-income families.
The first New Model School will start work in September, charging less than half the average fees of many independent primary or “pre-prep” schools.
Teachers have already been appointed, and tomorrow the school starts advertising for pupils to join the inaugural class of five-year-olds.
So what are these people trying to accomplish?
The New Model School Company aims to establish a chain of local schools, each subscribing to the same ethos and curriculum. A New Model School can be created wherever there are enough interested parents to start one. Organisational structure and support will be provided by the New Model School Company. Curriculum materials will be developed by its sister organisation, the New Model Curriculum Company.
And who are they?
The individuals who have formed the New Model School Company were brought together by the social policy think-tank Civitas (www.civitas.org.uk). Our aim is not just to set up a single successful school, but to provide a model of excellent and affordable schools which will improve the lives of many children and their families.
Our ambitions for the school are far wider than success in exams. The final aim of education is the formation of strong moral character, good manners, and the development of well-informed judgement. Good citizenship is not a subject of the school curriculum, but an aspect of conduct and behaviour that arises from a knowledge of the foundations of the culture, its history, values, and institutions.
If you would like to know more about us, you can telephone Matthew Faulkner on 020 8969 0037.
Because of my continuing interest in such matters, I plan to stay continuously interested in this venture, and will certainly be phoning that number myself in due course. But I think I wlll wait a while before doing that, because something tells me that this guy’s phone will be ringing fit to burst for the next few days.
I especially like that it is being set up by a “right wing think tank”. The idea of saying that was presumably to discredit the whole venture, as, maybe, is the slightly derogatory expression “cut-price”. (like there is something wrong with that). The more likely effect will be to make all “right wing think tanks” look better, if this is the kind of thing they do.
Also, by branding these places “right wing”, the Indy will scare lefties away from teaching in these places, and the political tone of them will undoubtedly be more free market in orientation than your average school. When these people talk about “history, values and institutions” that is not merely code for higher taxation and caving in to public sector trade unions.
I love it, and will almost certain have more to say here about this in the future. I really hope it works.
Every few days, with this in mind, I trawl through whatever google has to offer under the heading of “education”. Mostly, it is dreary and depressing stuff about how (a) things are terrible, and (b) it is all the fault of those other bastards, or (if it is Africa) (a) things are terrible, and (b) things are terrible. Only when it comes to Chinese people or Indian people is the education news ever very good by the time national newspapers get hold of it, and of course that only depresses other people.
So, this story made a nice change:
The quality of education and behaviour of pupils at Probus Primary School have been praised by Government inspectors.
Ofsted inspectors highlighted children’s good behaviour and attitudes towards learning and the partnership with parents and the local community.
The report notes the improvements made since the last inspection and concludes that achievement is satisfactory overall and standards are rising.
It said: “Probus is providing a sound education for its pupils. There is good teaching through the school. The school is well led and managed and there is a good partnership with parents. There is a good team ethos and members of staff are supportive of each other.
“Pupils are well cared for and those with special educational needs make good progress.”
What this really illustrates is probably only that whereas national newspapers like bad news, local newspapers prefer good news. The national newspaper definition of news is: whatever someone does not want printed. Local newspapers are such that whatever someone does not want printed tends not to get printed, because that someone plus all their employees and friends and relatives add up to a significant slice of the readership. Thus, local newspapers are full of sickeningly satisfactory happenings, where everything went according to plan and everyone was happy and satisfied with the outcome. The news, every time is: our readers are good people, successful people, happy people.
There is occasionally bad news, so bad that its occurrence cannot be concealed, in which case the story is how nobly our readers are coping with the situation, but on the whole, there is simply not enough bad news to go round.
Britain as a whole cranks out enough misery, conflict and personal embarrassment per day to satisfy the nationals, and of course the nationals also have a whole world of misery to contemplate beyond their nation’s borders.
But Truro and Mid Cornwall, the area reported on by the newspaper that supplied this Probus Primary School story, is just too nice a place for all the news to be bad.
A battle is brewing in Japan between education authorities and liberal minded teachers over the place of national symbols in the Japanese school system, reports Aussie expat Cameron Weston, for Australian news website Crikey.com.au:
Most countries have no law in place that compels its citizens to stand, put their hands on their hearts or do anything else when the national symbols are displayed. Most people do it because they want to, and this is the way it should be. Patriotism is something felt, not imposed. Forcing such action impinges on the basic tenets of democracy and freedom, and democracies have laws that enshrine this principle.
But what if the symbols of your nation had a deeper historical meaning, if they spoke to a past that some were ashamed of, of policies and deeds which some considered criminal?
And what if you felt strongly enough about this that you refused to stand and sing the anthem or to gaze upon the flag of your nation? In a democracy, you would be allowed to do so.
You might still reasonably be called a patriot by some, a person of conscience by others, ignorant and a traitor by others still but it would all be a matter of opinion, and hopefully then of discussion and debate. In 1999, amid some controversy, the Japanese LDP government passed legislation making the rising sun flag (‘Hinomaru’) and the national anthem (‘Kimigayo’) official, legal symbols of this nation. In a country where voluntary adherence to tradition and fixed social rites underpin the very fabric of society and daily life, it is ironic that the government felt that these forces were insufficient to ensure the flag and anthem remained venerated national symbols – they deemed that a law needed to be passed….
However, in the last few months, as the new school year begins, the debate has been taken to a new level. Teachers across Tokyo have been issued with a directive from the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, compelling them to stand and sing the national anthem and for them to in turn compel their students to do the same. No debate, no discussion; this is a direct order.
If the teacher refuses to do so, he will be open to public censure and criticism from his superiors, further warnings and potential expulsion. So far this year, over 200 teachers have refused to stand and many have received written warnings as a result. Miwako Sato, a music teacher who received one such warning when the law was first enacted in 1999 sums up the problem for many teachers perfectly, “Many people in other Asian countries do not want to look at the flag, the symbol of Japanese occupation of their lands, even 60 years after World War II, and I believe its coercive display at school ceremonies is against our Constitution,” she said.
Ah, the Japanese constitution. What I tend to get out of Mr. Weston’s article is a feeling that although Japan has lived under that constitution for over 50 years, it has never really embraced the spirit of the document (which is a bizzare mixture of the liberal and the statist).
But the fact that the more reactionary elements in authority in Japan feel the need to legislate nationalism, and to make it compulsary, gives me heart; I doubt they would have felt the need to do it if people were embracing the nationalistic message willingly.
And the resistance of teachers and the media is a good sign too. Anyway, read the whole thing.
We agonize a lot here about Islamic fundamentalism. But what can be done about it?
There are many reasons why Islamism of the most belligerent sort now stalks the earth, but one of them is that in many parts of the world, if you want an education, your only choice now is often either an education presided over by Islamic fundamentalists, or no education at all.
It is this problem which a group of businessmen in Pakistan have set out to remedy. With financial help from people of Pakistani descent who are living it Britain, they have established The Citizens’ Foundation, and there was an article about the work of TCF in the Times Magazine yesterday by Joanna Pitman.
Quote:
The six of them – all highly successful top-level managers – met in August 1995 and began to think seriously about the problems. They addressed poverty, health, intolerance, population, education, water and sanitation, and concluded that the solution to all these issues was education. In Pakistan, education remains desperately, stupidly low on the list of government priorities. The state schooling system, riddled with corruption, has been either non-existent or on the point of collapse for many years. The result is a massive intellectual deficit: out of a total population of 145 million, the country has 28 million children entirely unschooled and 41 per cent of adult men and 70 per cent of adult women illiterate. Ironically, in some areas, the first parents queueing to send their children to TCP schools rum out to be government schoolteachers.
The six businessmen decided to set up a corporate-style charitable organisation to build and run schools offering high-quality education to both girls and boys in the poorest areas of the country. Within four months, the ground had been broken to construct the first five schools, paid for out of the pockets of the founders, and by May 1996 all five were operational. Only once the schools had been running successfully for a year did TCF begin to expand – not through advertising or asking for funds, but simply by taking people to see the reality and letting them spread the word.
Its target is to build 1,000 primary a secondary schools by 2010, which will cater for 350-400,000 children at a time, offering them a high-quality, secular education that is the envy of most government schools and comparable to the country’s elite private schools. “We want these children to compete with our own children,” says Saleem, whose four teenage children are being educated at the best Pakistani private school and at the American School.
I have been unable to locate this article either here or anywhere else (although if someone can correct that, please do), and so have taken the liberty of scanning it all into my Education Blog, where you can now read the whole thing. If you do that, you will not, I believe, regard your time as having been wasted.
This project strikes me as an example of all kinds of good things, but in particular of the benefits that can come to a poor country when people from it are able to go and live in richer countries, and are then able to do something about the depressing circumstances from which they thought at first only of escaping.
In general, I believe that if Islam ever does get past confrontation and accommodates itself amicably into humanity as a whole, the Islamic diaspora will be an important part of this process.
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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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