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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I think it is at least plausible to propose that a vast swathe of bad ideas and damaging policies are borne on the wings not of malevolence or even stupidity, but simply economic illiteracy: a fundamental failure to grasp how money actually works.
If that is the case, then this kind of thing is encouraging:
Personal finance education looks set to become a regular part of school life, following a series of successful pilot schemes across the country.
The charity the Personal Finance Education Group (Pfeg) has been working with teachers to help them provide extra-curricular lessons covering everything from straightforward budgeting to calculating interest and getting a good deal on a mobile phone.
One teacher said: “I think it will broaden their horizons; they will certainly have a better understanding of how to manage money. I think they’ll also have a better understanding of the taxation system and why you pay tax.”
However, enthusiasm should be tempered by the possibility that the subject is not being taught very well or, worse, that the whole thing is the project of ghastly statists who want to use this as a means of driving home pro-tax propaganda to a new generation.
But, those caveats aside, this could be welcome because even if it transpires that this is really all part of a lefty ‘get-them-while-their-young’ programme, the effect might be to start prodding young brain cells in directions that their teachers never intended them to go.
Peter Briffa catches Polly Toynbee talking sense:
The middle classes, who benefit most, might have preferred an earmarked income tax rise to extra university fees.
The government replies that 80% of taxpayers never went to university, so why should they pay too? Besides, if taxes rose, there are better spending priorities. Why should the 50% with too few opportunities fork out for the lucky ones? That’s very nearly a good enough answer – but it raises key questions, too.
For that is not social democratic thinking: on that basis, why should those without children pay for schools? Or those without cars pay for roads? Or the great majority who never use trains pay for the 4% who commute by rail? Or those outside London contribute �1bn a year to the tube? Or southerners pay for the Angel of the North, while ballet-haters pay for Covent Garden? And why should the majority pay for social housing or tax credits they will never use?
Once you start to question who should pay for what, the idea of national collective provision crumbles. Where is the line in the sand? Where does it stop? Is there really something about universities that is clearly, qualitatively different to any of the above? You might just argue that there is a stronger personal financial gain to be had from a degree which justifies a personal contribution. But the same case might be made for why the suburban commuter should pay the full cost of his train, paying for his pleasure at living somewhere salubrious. �
Very good! PT of course intends that all these very good questions should be answered with:yes. Yes, southerners should pay for the northern angel, yes ballet-haters should pay for ballet, etc. And yes, higher education despisers should pay for other people’s higher education. But for once, I like the cut of her jib. Asks Briffa mischievously: Is the penny finally dropping for La Toynbee? No of course not. She is incorrigible. But might not some of her readers find their brain cells being prodded into unfamiliar directions by all this flagrant logic.
This spasm of Toybee sanity reminds me of when people say that I should oppose some little government tyranny not for being tyrannical (that being perhaps too difficult or unpopular to do effectively), but for being inconsistent with some other not-so-tyrannical arrangement. Beware of asking for consistency in such circumstances, I reply, you just might get it, in the form of consistent tyranny. Toynbee starts by arguing for consistency and immediately finds herself sounding for the duration of her point like the purest sort of libertarian.
Heh.
Education experts are apparently flocking to Belfast. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaa humbug.
The pre-report linked to above includes an intriguing titbit:
Prof Brighouse is expected to recommend that schools and parents of pupils who perform worst in tests should receive extra Government money.
In his speech this afternoon, he will propose a financial incentive for schools to take on poorer performing students.
That could have some interesting incentive effects.
At first it reads like bad news:
China not to pursue profit-oriented education: official
BEIJING, Jan. 6 (Xinhuanet) — Chinese education minister said here Tuesday that China will not place profit-gaining capability as the primary par for education.
At a press conference organized by the State Council Information Office, Minister Zhou Ji said that education is basically a cause for social benefits.
Governmental encouragement of private investment into education does not mean gaining economic returns is the priority for schools, said Zhou, adding that more private funds could alleviate burdens of the government for financing education.
Meanwhile, China welcomes overseas partners who are able to provide quality education service to the Chinese.
A newly adopted law stipulates that private schools are legally equal to their public counterparts.
Statistics show that by the end of 2002, about 61,200 privately-funded schools enrolled more than 11 million students. A total of 712 programs were jointly carried out by Chinese and overseas educators, nine times that of seven years before.
“Profits pursuit in education might endanger equal rights of education for every Chinese citizen,” Zhou said.
What’s going on here? My take: the Chinese government knows it has to have great gobs of education if it is to race ahead economically like it wants to. But (just like India) it can’t afford to supply this entirely out of its tax revenue. So it is going to encourage private sector, profit-oriented education. But won’t encouraging profit-oriented education encourage profit-orientation? No, says the government. We won’t be encouraging profit-oriented profit-oriented education, only non-profit-oriented profit-oriented education. So there.
And the shorter version of the above reads: never believe anything until it is officially denied. In China, as in so many places, “official” is another word for “not”.
The point here is not the answer, which is contradictory waffle. The point is the question, which is: how about all this private sector education? How about it indeed.
I am increasingly starting to believe – and I seem to recall (quick phone call) our own David Carr hinting here not so long ago at something similar – that the next great challenge to statism and statist economic policies may come not from the likes of us, but from the East.
My day has been deranged by the discovery, which I made at about 4 pm, that Simon Schama’s televised History of Britain has been shown and is still being shown continuously on UK History (one of the free digital channels) throughout the day, from 7 am until 1 am tomorrow morning. I’ve been dipping into it ever since I found out about this, having only caught bits of it when it was on one of the bigger channels first time around.
Most of the historical personalities mentioned by Schama were reasonably familiar to me. I know who Elizabeth I was, and when. I know who Thomas Cromwell, Tom Paine, William Wordsworth were, approximately speaking. But one name, in the the episode about the Victorian age, was entirely new to me: Mary Seacole:
Mary Seacole, the “black Florence Nightingale” was once one of the best-known women in England. She was a Caribbean doctress who had travelled widely, and was able to put her skills to good use in the Crimean War. Denied the opportunity to work with Nightingale, she travelled there on her own to minister to wounded British soldiers. Thousands of them remembered her with gratitude and affection.
That’s her. That’s definitely who Schama was talking about. Denied an official nursing position, she simply went out to the Crimea on her own initiative, and got to work, feeding the soldiers before they went into action in the ‘hotel’ she somehow contrived to have built (I think that’s what Schama said), and then prowling the battlefield searching out the wounded and feeding them and caring for them, and even curing them with her West Indian remedies, which, said Schama, saved many a life, as the word “doctress” certainly suggests.
I’m guessing that knowing about Mary Seacole is probably a generation thing. I am of the generation that learned dates and maps and chaps, but which made no great effort to search out worthy people other than White Male worthies for deserved – and I dare say sometimes undeserved – celebration. So I’m guessing that Mary Seacole is now an increasingly well known figure among younger people with any curiosity about Britain’s past. But I’d never heard of her. Thanks to Simon Schama and the UK History channel, now I have.
And thank you also to the Internet, and in particular to Google (apparently some are complaining about Google – for its sinfulness in wanting to make money). All I had to go on was how the name sounded, but soon, up came the magic words: “did you mean Mary Seacole?” and the means were in front of my to satisfy any curiosity I might feel about this remarkable woman.
When I read The Wealth of Nations for the first time, I liked Adam Smith’s idea that lecturers would respond better to their students if the students directly paid their lecturers. But I wasn’t sure if it could work in the world of modern higher education. Well, it turns out that when Madsen Pirie was a lecturer at Hillsdale College in Michigan, he was indeed – in part – paid according to how well the students thought he did his job. And, as he explains on the ASI Blog, it seemed to work very well.
Of course, the less-radical introduction of tuition fees in Britain is doing wonders. Lecturers who I’ve spoken to say that students are starting to expect more as it is their money that is being wasted. And universities know that American students – who pay much higher fees – will sue if they don’t get what they are paying for. Anyone who cares about the quality of university education should write a thank you note to Tony Blair.
More news from the Independent concerning the globalisation of education, which is all mixed up with the global mega-success story that is the English language:
A successful Chinese industrialist was boasting proudly that his son was at a British educational institution, one of the best in the country. However, he couldn’t remember which. After racking his brains, he decided to call his wife on the mobile phone. But his wife couldn’t recall the name of the elite establishment either. In desperation, the entrepreneur had only one choice: he fast-dialled his son in the United Kingdom to ask where the boy was being educated.
This is a true story, illustrating not only the Chinese affection for mobile telephones, but also their enthusiasm for a foreign education. In China, to receive your schooling or your degree at an institution in Britain, or Australia, or the United States automatically puts you into the top league. The name of the university or school is not as important as the fact that you have tasted learning outside the People’s Republic. No wonder universities from the United Kingdom are falling over one another to meet this huge demand.
Last year, the number of Chinese students in the UK reached a new record – 25,000. But there are millions of people in China now who aspire to, and receive, a university education and would leap at the chance to get a degree from the UK. In the three years between 1997 and 2000, there was remarkable growth in student numbers within China, according to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. Numbers increased from 3.2 million students to a staggering seven million. (The government target is 15 million.)
Ironically, given China’s status as a Communist country, many of the new universities that are being set up to deal with this demand are private. There are 1,300 private institutions now in operation, and alliances between Chinese and foreign organisations are burgeoning.
While English educators fret about whether English people are well enough behaved, Chinese educators worry that the Chinese are too well behaved. Too dutiful, obedient, conformist, uninventive, inflexible.
Seriously, one suspects that the real product here is not just Anglosphere education, but Anglosphere education plus a bit of that Anglosphere attitude, hence the indifference concerning exactly which University their children go to. It could be a winning combination. Although I reckon word will soon get around which universities are the best.
It makes you wonder what Mao would have thought about it all. “I ordered you to have a permanent revolution and challenge all authority, but I didn’t mean this!” Attitude!
And quite aside from the impact of all this on China, there is the interesting matter of how it will affect Britain. How long before someone uses the word ‘swamped’ to describe what is happening to higher education? All those foreigners, taking our children’s places. And working too hard.
So Dianne Abbott’s decision to send her son to a private school is indefensible.
Says who? Says Ms Abbott:
On BBC2’s This Week, Miss Abbott, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, said: “I’ve said very little about this because anything you say just sounds self-serving and hypocritical. You can’t defend the indefensible.
Since Ms Abbot appears to be lost for words, allow me to assist. Here are a few things Diane Abbott could say:
- “I have realised that education is too important to be left to the state.”
- “Perhaps everyone should have as much choice as I do.”
- “If I am not prepared to condemn my child to the state system, why should anyone else?”
- “The pursuit of equality for all means everyone gets crap.”
But Ms Abbot has not said any of those things. And she never will.
As luck would have it, there is no category called ‘Honking Great Hypocrisies’ so I have had to settle for filing this under ‘Education’ instead.
But that’s appropriate too because this story is nothing if not instructive:
Labour leaders backed Diane Abbott, the Left-wing MP, yesterday over her decision to educate her son privately, days after condemning a Tory MP for saying he would do the same.
Ms Abbott has used her wealth, status and privilege to give her child the best, as is befitting the ruling elite. In fact, Ms Abbott is merely following in the best traditions of Britain’s socialist politicians who have always had a curious and inexplicable penchant for both private education and healthcare (while publicly denouncing both).
Labour MPs were taken by surprise by the news that she had chosen the £10,000-a-year City of London Boys School for her son, by-passing four comprehensives in Hackney and Stoke Newington, the constituency she represents.
In the past Miss Abbott has criticised the Prime Minister, for rejecting schools in Islington and sending his sons to the London Oratory School in Fulham, and Harriet Harman, the Solicitor General, for choosing a grammar school outside her constituency. She once said of Miss Harman: “She made the Labour Party look as if we do one thing and say another.”
Now where would anyone get that crazy, zany idea?
For a while now I’ve been noticing something called the No Child Left Behind Act, which Republicans were hugely pleased about when President Bush signed it into law as recently as January 2002, but which has now turned pear shaped, as we say in these parts, with extraordinary speed.
There’s more about No Child Left Behind today in the New York Times, because the Democrats now smell blood in the water on this.
The gist of No Child Left Behind is: (a) Education Must Be Better For Everybody, So There, but er … (b) you’ll have to pay for this compulsory improvement yourselves.
Here’s the start of the New York Times coverage today:
Congressional Republicans are nervous about a G.O.P. poll that shows them losing ground over education. But how could voters not be disappointed by the Bush administration’s mishandling of education policy generally, and especially its decision to withhold more than $6 billion from the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, the supposed centerpiece of the administration’s domestic policy?
The new law is supposed to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and wipe out the achievement gap between rich and poor children. Schools that fail to make steady progress are labeled deficient and required to provide students with costly tutoring and allow them to transfer to more successful public schools in the same district.
In some districts, more than 40 percent of the schools are called “in need of improvement.” The lack of money from Congress has licensed a backlash by states that never wanted to comply with the law anyway, especially the provision that requires ending the achievement gap between rich and poor.
This is classic statism. A bunch of people have a notion about how the world should be which they get all excited about. So, they get the government to say: that’s what must happen. Within a few years it becomes clear to all that these ‘education reformers’ would have done far, far better to have just sat on their porches, drunk liquor, and said howdy to passers-by.
The point is, the everyday language of government, so to speak, is a language of compulsion and suppression. No Child Left Behind was sold as … well, as: no child left behind! What it actually says is: you must supply “better” education, which turns out to mean education done by people with fancier exam results to their names, to everybody, and especially to poor people. If, on the other hand, you have been teaching poor people with great success for the last few years, but without fancy exam results to your name, guess what? Stop it at once you bad bad person!
No Child Left Behind – a textbook example of statism in action – has, because it is statism, made things worse.
I guess it’s all education in how the world works, but the people who need to learn their lesson are the idiots who unleashed this shambles. They need to learn how wrong they were. And it’s all part of statism that they will do anything rather than learn their lesson.
The Democrats will now make the running in this argument, but sadly, the only lesson they want anyone to learn is that More Money should be spent.
If more money is spent, that’ll be yet more education, this time in the folly of stealing money from one bunch of people and spraying it over another bunch.
As Perry de Havilland would say at this point: the state is not your friend. And that applies just as much to education as it does to anything else.
Here’s a strange article, by the Telegraph’s education man, John Clare, in today’s Telegraph.
It starts with lots of standard issue bad political news, about cuts and the resulting educational damage. Deranged plans for improvement, smashing down all that we’ve worked for over the last twenty years, blah, blah. The headline – “‘Government incompetence’ led to schools shedding 21,000 staff” – is all about that bad news. The usual political wreckage in other words.
But this, about one of those reports that journalists so love, is the interesting bit, I think:
The report laid much of the blame for the funding “debacle” on the “patently unfair grant culture” that the Government has imposed on schools.
It led to chronic disparities in funding, much of it allocated on an ad hoc basis to poorly conceived projects. “Schools emerge as winners or losers almost in spite of themselves,” the report said. “On the basis of some decision taken in the remoteness of Whitehall, a school can suddenly find itself receiving or being deprived of an extra £100,000 or more.”
Or, as one Inner London head put it: “Pots of money suddenly appear and disappear.” This year’s winners were failing schools, specialist schools, and schools with high proportions of pupils who are entitled to free meals and achieve poor exam results.
Okay, I don’t know what’s really going on here, but here’s my guess. What we see here is government activity done by people who have been pummelled with free market ideology and have accepted that free markets, although politically impossible to actually have, are nevertheless worth learning from. So the responses of consumers are faked by issuing that deluge of directives from London that I spent about a third to a half of my education blog complaining about. These directives give you extra money if you do what London says are good “outcomes”, and less if you don’t. Like in the free market, right?
Well, not really. These directives don’t actually have even the crude rationality of the free market. They aren’t actually the same as actual consumer demands, so instead of satisfied or unsatisfied customers giving you more or less money, you just get a kind of permanent government organised lottery. This month, the winning number is: Schools who are crap but considered by London to be getting better! If that’s you, you win! But, if your school is good but not considered by London to be getting any better, you lose! Next month, it’ll be something different. Next month it’ll be: Maths! Or: Languages! Or: The Obesity Directive! Or: Social Inclusion! Or: (Socially?) Excluding bullies, in response to the government’s Bullying Directive! And through it all, win or lose, you have to fill in form after form after form, because if you don’t even do that much in response to each bullying directive, you definitely lose.
When Tony Blair uses the word “reform” in connection with education, it is this process that he is referring to, and he wants more of it, but done better.
That’s what I think may be going, but it’s only me guessing really. Anyone with any better ideas?
Alice Bachini sincerely wants to be rich.
Hello. While I am on light blogging duties, I thought I would set you all some homework. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that my quest to become a hard-nosed international millionaire businesswoman is still pretty much in its pre-foetal stages. I have considered many career paths, and various means of propulsion along them, including the possibility of multiply launching the whole set, yet somehow time still feels short (which, as we all know, is merely a conceptual illusion and not a true insight on anybody’s reality), learning still seems really difficult due to the technomoronicism curse, and generally other more urgent things seem to get in the way. You know, things like making toast and gallivanting around London.
Therefore, I am calling upon my readers yet again to offer their suggestions, tips and positive ideas (no need to tell me I’m an idiot doomed to failure, thank you) in a financially-improving direction. Whatever I do has to be extremely flexible, realistic, and clever enough to work for me. And that means clever. But you people are clever, right?
Some calling himself “I’m serious, and I’m too lazy”, supplied this really rather intelligent comment:
Interview the twenty richest persons in the UK. Or set your sights higher, and interview the twenty richest people in the world. Write it all down. Find a publisher. Title it, How the twenty richest people in the world became that way and how they keep it. Or just title it, How? and put a big green dollar sign on a yellow background, or pound or euro if you wish. Put your picture on the back in dark glasses (see above). You will make lots if you find a publisher. Even if not all twenty give you an interview, the reasons why they won’t will make a book that sells. If none of this works at least you will have had fun gallivanting, and you will made some excellent contacts and some good stories to tell your grandchildren. By all means wear those dark glasses and only remove them once you have the interview booked.
Anyone here got anything to add to that? Read Alice’s blog a bit to find out what kind of person she is, and then tell her what to do. (You people are clever, right?)
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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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