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One of my favourite films, when I was growing up, was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that strange children’s classic written by James Bond creator, Ian Fleming. Every Christmas it came on the telly some teatime or other, which my memory recalls as being just after that year’s screening of The Great Escape, another all-time classic, or just before an omnibus edition of that year’s Doctor Who series.
Anyway, enough of nostalgia. The most disturbing character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the ski-slope nosed Child Catcher. He was nearly as bad as a Sea Devil for pure evil intent, rounding up children on behalf of a child-hating Baroness.
And now, in this wonderful sceptred isle of Tony Blair’s modern Britain, we have an equivalent, the school truancy protection officer. Not content with taking over private charity schools and ideologically convincing the majority of the docile British population that the one-size-fits-all state propaganda farms, also known as comprehensive schools, are far better than any alternative, the do-gooders just can’t rest.
Because, God forbid, children aren’t willingly attending these educational swamps, despite being able to get an A-grade Mathematics exam pass for knowing how many beans there are in a ten-bean bag. And what’s worse, their parents are often ‘colluding’ with them, by helping them with their truancy. Those nasty people! And apparently this is not good enough for ‘Society’, so we’re going to have slap £100 pound on-the-spot fines onto these sadistic child-destructive malcontents. → Continue reading: Revenge of the Child Catcher
The latest social engineering proposals from the government are out on University education.
If I wanted my son to get into Britain’s ruling class, this is what I would now have to do, according to these plans. First, I would get him into the most expensive private school I could possibly afford. Then at sixteen I would have an arranged divorce with my wife, and I would move with him to the worst sink estate I could possibly imagine. Somewhere grim and remote would do the trick, perhaps the Belle Vue South estate in Carlisle?
And now comes the tricky bit. Once ensconced in Carlisle, we would track down the very worst comprehensive school or sixth form college in North Cumbria, and bung him right in there on the register. But what we wouldn’t do, of course, is actually send him there, oh no. → Continue reading: An admission of failures
Posting looks as if it may be thin here today, so a quick comment on the economics of the internet.
The usual story is that the big, bad, old organisations could be in trouble now as the internet whistles into existence a million new nimble players to run rings around the big, bad, etc. … blah blah.
But how about this for a train of thought?
Selling text on the internet is working, okay, sort of, but it hasn’t really taken off. There’s too much free stuff, and anyway, people don’t want to pay. Maybe they’re scared that if they start surrendering £30 here and £30 there, it will never stop and they’ll be bankrupt. Maybe they just reckon the prices will come down, and they’re waiting.
But what if you are a huge, globally celebrated organisation which wants to be able to swank even more than you do now about how much beneficial impact you are having on the world, to your donors, charitable or political, and would actually quite welcome the simplicity of not having to be too businesslike about it all, and to have to chase every last cent for every bit of virtual stuff that you part with?
What if you are the BBC? Despite all that our bit of the blogosphere may say, the BBC still counts for a hell of a lot in the world; that’s why our bit of the blogosphere complains about it so much.
Or what if you are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? → Continue reading: Big brands getting even bigger by giving it away
“Academic cheating is a major problem and has negative results on everyone involved.”
So goes the first sentence of a recently composed essay on cheating in academia. To get the whole essay, though, you’ll need to pay for a membership at DirectEssays.com, an Internet operation that promises access to “over 101,000 high-quality term papers and essays.” For $19.95 a month, you can see the anticheating tract in toto, and a lot more besides. DirectEssays is one of several Internet operations selling term papers that students hand in as their own work, and business is booming.
Cheating, especially Internet cheating, is becoming more and more the way of the academic world. A recent study found that 38 percent of the students polled had committed “cut and paste” plagiarism – that is, copying sentences or even several paragraphs from the Internet and implanting them in their own work. Forty percent of respondents admitted to copying without attribution from written sources – books, journals and the like – in the past year.
Suppose you met someone who argued that there is a moral right to sex. He said that it is unfair that some people don’t have sex at all, particularly those who are less well endowed physically. Thus the government should make sexually successful people have sex with those who are missing out.
You would probably think the argument used is outrageous. It would be an act of violation. It uses compulsion. It treats people as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself.
Now let’s look at schooling. Some people argue that there should only be comprehensive schools. Grammar and private schools should be abolished. They point out that if less academically gifted children spend time with people who are high academic achievers, it raises their ambitions and helps them to be successful in life. But this right to have bright people at your school, is just like the right to have sex without the other party’s consent. It is violation of the child. It treats the child’s life as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself. It is based on the principle of slavery.
Who do you reckon wrote this?
But the truth is that a university degree is not the best educational attainment for the majority of people. Most jobs do not require such a level of education, although I firmly believe that education should not just be about what job you get. But for many, a university education provides little in terms of other personal development. Joining the job market earlier, or learning vocational skills, could be much more beneficial to the individual and society as a whole. Becoming a plumber or a butcher, rather than a teacher, is now a job with real security.
Some ghastly Conservative, talking sense of a sort, but doing it in that voice that we all hate and the memory of which still keeps the Conservatives in the bucket market unelectable, the one that goes: “Thanks to my hard-work and all-round merit I have reached the pinnacle of human achievement and am now a smarmy back-bench Conservative MP with ministerial ambitions.” Right? Certainly right as in not left.
Let us read on:
I know this is a case that many may find unpalatable, but we must recognise that the striving for equality should not blind us to the fact that we are different. We cannot all be a concert pianist, or a David Beckham. In the same way, a university education does not suit everyone.
→ Continue reading: Higher education debates
I’ve already linked to this amazing Guardian article from my Education Blog, but it deserves wider blog-reader notice than that.
Sandra Thompson was used to her son’s weekend rhythm – the immediate relaxation and laughter of Friday afternoons, the dark mood that descended every Sunday as another week loomed. “With the first mention of school, Thomas must have had the same thoughts – are they going to be at the bus stop, are they going to get me today, do I have enough money on me to cover what they take?
He should have been out of there.
Mother and grandmother offer a picture of a boy whose main problem seems to have been his inability to behave like a child. “He loved being one-to-one with adults,” says Sandra. “He loved to have conversations, but you couldn’t talk about something silly. He always wanted to know adult stuff, and sometimes I didn’t have the answers. He was constantly asking about the war with Iraq, and wanting to know the ins and outs of what countries had been attacked in the past. He always wanted to know what it was like to be older. He couldn’t wait to learn to drive, get his own place, go to college, make his fortune.”
So why the hell did he have to wait? Okay, I will give you the driving, but why not his own fortune, his own place, his own life?
While waiting about to make his fortune and start his life, he filled in time by going to anti-Iraq-war demos. He was pretty good at that apparently.
This is the bit that made me most angry about being a member of this pathetic dim-witted species of ours.
In his final report, the headteacher of his primary school described Thomas as one of the most courageous boys he’d ever met because of the years of bullying he’d survived.
What is so depressing is the sense you get from all the adults who presided over this disaster that there was simply nothing they could do about it. “He couldn’t crack it in school.” And I couldn’t crack it when I tried to make it in the building trade half a lifetime ago. As soon as I realised I was hopeless at doing building I stopped doing it, and did something else. It really wasn’t a difficult decision to make.
Here’s this teacher, the Head of his School no less, and he is well aware that this poor kid is being driven crazy, but what could he do? Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. And boys gotta go to school, no matter how completely horrible it is for them.
No.
More than 200 mourners packed St Paul’s Church, Wirral, to say goodbye to Thomas Thompson, many of them children. By the day after the funeral, Sandra had received so many cards that she had to display some of them on the floor around the mantelpiece. “He was a lovely lad,” says his grandmother, “and he touched a lot of people’s hearts.”
So why the hell didn’t they do something to help the poor kid while he was still alive?
I have to force myself to be sympathetic to mother, because frankly, it doesn’t come very naturally to me.
Her eyes get wet. “It’s hard. You’re empty. There are no words to describe it. You start asking yourself all sorts of questions. Were you a good parent? Did you do everything you possibly could have done? Should you have bypassed his decision and gone up to the school? But how would you ever have let him grow up if you’d done that? You go round in a circle – if only, what if? You do live through but the one thing that you can never get over is that you’ll never see him again in this life.”
You were a bad parent. You didn’t do anything like all that was possible. You shouldn’t just have “gone up to the school”, you should have yanked him out of there. And any world which didn’ t tell you that loud and clear is crazy.
A little boy called Arran Fernandez that’s who. This lad is clever enough to have caught the attention of the UK Times [No link – you know the drill]:
A BOY of eight has become the youngest person to receive an A at GCSE.
‘A’ is the top grade and the GCSE is a national examination paper for pupils of age sixteen.
As pupils across the country received their results, Arran Fernandez, from Surrey, celebrated the grade awarded for a mathematics paper that he took when he was 7 years and 11 months. Only 32 per cent of candidates – most considerably older – reach the same standard.
So little Arran must be the brainiest kid in his school, right? Wrong. Because little Arran doesn’t go to ‘school’ at all:
Arran, who is also the youngest person to pass a GCSE at any grade – a D in the subject when he was five – is educated at home by his parents, Neil and Hilde.
Another successful product of Britain’s small, but growing, home-school movement, I’d say.
His father, Neil, a political economist who achieved a grade A at O level maths when he was 13, is evangelical about the benefits of home tutoring.
“I believe that every child could do this, given the right encouragement,” he said. “Why are children held back in their earliest years? And why are parents, who are their best educators, discouraged from realising and exercising their ability to teach?”
Because so many generations of parents assigned those abilities over to the state, doubtless believing that the state would do a better job of it. That same state is likely to respond to the increasingly successful reclamation by trying to put a stop to it.
Following on from Mr Carr’s education piece, earlier in the week, comes further ‘pragmatic’ news from the UK’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
In a bid to make the UK’s A-level mathematics courses more ‘accessible’, this august and incorruptible State body has announced it will be making the subject even ‘easier’. Is this possible? And please don’t laugh at the next bit, it’s really not funny. To study it, you won’t even need to have studied elementary algebra, beforehand. Yep, you heard that right.
No doubt the honest government which rules us won’t then take the increased grades, which they hope will result from this heavyweight dumbing-down operation, and use them to promote how effective their education policies have been? Yeah, right.
Is the UK the only country in the world in which even Homer Simpson could get an A* grade, in a higher education mathematics qualification? Maybe, not this year. But give them a chance. I’m sure they’ll get there eventually. Everyone must have prizes.
In the meantime, the poisoned A-level gold standard is going the same way as the Pound Sterling gold standard, i.e. straight down the pan to get the UK government off the hook of its own continuing failure. Expect all private schools to abandon A-levels, entirely, within the next few years, to replace them with the International Baccalaureate. A-levels will then become purely the concern of the State system, which will suit the State admirably, as they’ll be able to inflate their achievements to levels of magnificence previously undreamed of, without any reference required to any kind of external reality. What a banana.
So as I gaze lovingly at my A-level certificate, up there on the wall, I wonder if now is not the time to replace it with a small poster of Kylie Minogue, in the hope that when she visits she’ll be much more impressed. I should be so lucky.
We all know the old saying: there’s lies, then there’s damnable lies and and there’s government education statistics:
Leading independent schools are preparing to abandon GCSE, one of the central props of the Government’s tottering exam system.
Pupils at leading schools commonly take 12 subjects, many of them a year early, and up to 90 per cent of the papers are graded A* or A.
“It’s like Boy Scouts collecting badges,” said Tony Little, who has just completed his first year as head of Eton. “One has to ask what the educational value of it is.”
Methinks that Mr.Little is being polite. I suspect that what he really wants to say is that an exam system that is so ‘dumbed-down’ as to ensure that virtually nobody fails is about as much practical use as a chocolate teapot. Handing every schoolchild lots of certificates to wave around doesn’t mean that they have actually been educated.
The elite schools’ decision to break ranks without waiting to see the details of the Government’s plan to replace GCSE and A-levels with a national diploma will alarm Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary.
It suggests the schools have no faith in the Government’s claim that academic standards will be protected from further debasement.
And they are right not to have any faith because the government is not concerned about education it is merely anxious to present lots of impressive statistics in order to convince everyone (including themselves) that children are being educated instead of merely processed. This isn’t education it’s a puppet show.
However, it is difficult to hide the sordid truth from the people whose business it is to actually help young people learn lots of things and it is gratifying to witness some of them breaking rank. Hopefully this is the start of a trend as people who truly value education begin to realise that it is far too important and precious to be left to the government.
In Does Education Matter? Alison Wolf attacks, tin the words of the book’s subtitle, “myths about education and economic growth”. Here are a few paragraphs from the Introduction:
From the premise that a full-blown ‘knowledge economy’ is arriving now on our doorsteps, it is easy to slip into prescribing more and more of the raw material which apparently makes this possible: education. And of course it would be stupid to deny that education is central to any modern economy. Imagine the UK today – or the USA, or Greece, japan, Brazil – being run by a population. which is more than go per cent illiterate – the level of eleventh-century England.’ Imagine Microsoft or British Aerospace research and development in the hands of people all of whom had left school after only a primary-school education, or a drug industry dependent on people whose academic training was the intermingled science and alchemy of Newton’s day. Who could doubt that education matters?
But what doesn’t follow is that vast amounts of public. spending on education have been the key determinant of how rich we are today. Nor is it obvious that they will decide how much richer, or poorer, we will be tomorrow. The simple one-way relationship which so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn’t exist. Moreover, the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity become. Developed countries have now moved well beyond providing basic education. for all, and instead spend more and more on higher education, technical provision, vocational programmes, and adult training.
These are my main subject matter, for they are also the main recent targets of government policies inspired by ambitions for growth. Unfortunately, while an overwhelmingly strong case can be made for the state’s responsibilities in basic education – and, indeed, for the latter’s economic importance – not one of these newer enthusiasms deserves any such.accolade.
Alison Wolf
I did a posting yesterday at my Education Blog about a suggestion for a more “free market” approach to Britain’s examination system. It is of course not a suggestion for a real free market, merely for a centrally licensed franchise system.
Anyway, this comment appeared today about this, which gives an excellent if anecdotal feel for the state of education in Britain now:
A friend of mine (source protection here) was asked to mark double the usual amount of scripts this year because that particular exam did not have enough markers. That’s 400 scripts in about 4 weeks.
Reasons for the lack of recruits: a) the markers are paid peanuts b) it’s just at the beginning of the summer holidays, and most teachers would rather have a rest than do even more marking c) teaching is such a depressing business to be in at the moment that many of the sparkiest – who would make competent examiners – are getting the hell out.
Exam board solutions:
This year they offered to pay schools for supply cover so that instead of teaching, examiner-teachers could spend school time marking scripts. Not surprisingly, the take-up was small.
Gossip from my anonymous friend: exam boards are considering making a deal with schools whereby if the school wants to sit that board’s exams, they’ll have to supply n teachers to mark them.
I can’t wait to see it all implode, necessitating some market solutions rather than this government-sponsored-shoe-string job.
My worry is that the “market solutions” they resort to will, like that proposed “free market” exam franchising system, not be real market solutions. The government will stay totally in command of the curriculum, and the “free market” will just be another more complicated way to pay state hirelings.
A real free market in exams would mean competing curricula, competing exams to examine mastery of said curricula, and teachers, parents, pupils and employers organising, advising and choosing at will, to suit themselves and their various ambitions and purposes. The government’s job would be to stay out of it all, while every so often making the occasional discouraging remark about how education is over-rated and that it prefers ignorance, especially for children, thereby giving the adults who are organising everything the confidence that the government would continue to stay out of everything, and thereby getting the kids all excited about it.
Dream on Brian. Which is what I am for, I suppose.
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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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