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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What with termination of the Iraqi regime, George Bush in the Whitehouse, Bersluconi bestriding Europe and internecine war between the Labour government and the BBC, the editors of the Guardian must be scratching around urgently for some news they can celebrate.
They have finally found some: the emergence of the next generation of guardianistas:
The public sector is now the most popular choice of employer for graduates, new research revealed today.
In a Mori poll, 32% of students said they would like to work for a public sector organisation – ahead of blue chip companies and small to medium enterprises.
On the face of it, the revelation that nearly a third of graduates want to devote their lives to consuming taxes and finding ever-more bizarre ways to spend other people’s money, should be somewhat alarming. But maybe it is simply a doleful recognition that the private sector has little use for people who have spent three or four years immersed in ‘Gay Studies’ or the ‘History of Yoghurt’.
I suspect the real culprit here is the addle-brained article of faith for our political elites that lack of personal achievement is inextricably linked to feelings of self-esteem, especially the self-esteem that grows from having ‘qualifications’ regardless of how bogus they might actually be. It was this conviction that led to an explosion of state-backed ‘universities’ which tossed out potemkin qualifications like Palestinian candy.
The result, however, is no an upgrading of people but rather a downgrading of education to the point where image of a ‘graduate’ as a steely-witted young go-getter has been reduced to a laughable myth.
Graduate Prospects’ chief executive, Mike Hill, said: “The public sector has a great deal to offer young graduates looking for their first job, not least working conditions that often mean a better balanced life. This can include flexible hours, home-working, job-share and better holidays.
And that, for me, is the ‘money’ quote. Isn’t the term ‘better balanced life’ really a polite euphamsim for ‘easy ride’? Perhaps these prospective graduates have lost none of the survival instincts they were born with and are unwilling to undergo the rigours of the private sector that they know will shred their fragile intellects. Hence, find me a sinecure and find it quick.
“In addition, many graduates want to feel they are doing something good for society in their work. Research by the audit commission found that wanting to have a positive effect on people’s lives was the main reason why staff chose the public sector. That makes it an attractive option for graduates.”
As if we need a bigger army of Diversity Development Outreach Co-ordinators in order to set off the harmful effects on society of all those greedy people who devote their lives to the selfish pursuits of trade, innovation and enterprise.
I am willing to wager that it is the highly selfish pursuit of soft options and not sham altruism which is lying at the root of this new trend. But, let’s face it, the alleged desire to ‘do good for society’ sounds a lot more like the kind of thing that the paladins of the education establishment want to hear. But that is still a problem because clearly the education establishment is committed to pushing this message to its charges and, for as long as that is still happening, then the assembled forced of reason have a long march ahead of them.
Steve Sailer is a name I hear now and again, every few weeks, but I know very little about the guy. Someone commented on this, which I wrote last night (about men wearing their shirts outside their trousers), to the effect that Sailer had something to say about this, about a week ago, that was relevant. I couldn’t find it, but I did find this 1995 piece about the nuances of why race relations in the US army are so much better than race relations in US colleges.
It’s no surprise to me that treating people in a totally meritocratic way, regardless of race, makes for better inter-ethnic relations, or that armies can’t allow inter-ethnic rivalries to build up in the ranks, so they don’t. So it was another less than completely obvious idea that I found striking in this piece, which is that the way for an unpopular racial or ethnic group to make an admired impact on the wider society is for it to concentrate and conquer niches rather than disperse and try to do well across the board. Sailer’s point is that academic racial preference policies undermine (to name but one of their many drawbacks) this benign process, by over-dispersing the group supposedly being helped. → Continue reading: Niche achievement versus dispersed failure – Steve Sailer (and me) on race relations
My boredom with eating sandwiches or salad for lunch encouraged me to visit the ready-meal section of Tesco today. The result was lasagne. As it cooked at work, one of my colleages commented on how good it smelt. I realised there was a positive externality created by cooking the meal, so I suggested to the office that they should pay me for the pleasure they were receiving.
I had no takers. Had I pushed them, they might have argued that, while the smell was enjoyable, they had not consented to it and therefore had no obligation to pay for it. They might also have pointed out that although the smell was nice, I would be getting the real benefit (the eating part).
In this example, it can be seen that charging people to receive a positive externality is unfair and absurd. Yet this is exactly the argument many people use in favour of taxpayer-funded university courses. This argument, out of all the arguments for scrapping tuition fees, is the worst.
Two comments have appeared on a long ago posting of mine here about the menace to Western Civilisation posed by people dropping chewing gum all over the damn place.
Comment 1:
i like chewing on gum^^ It should have neva been banned!!! I feel sooooo sorry for the singaporeans….owell beta get on wiv my english assignment nowz…byebye 🙂
Lana
Comment 2:
Hi its me again (Lana) if anyone noes any interesting facts about Singapore then can u plz email me qt_mashi@hotmail.com, bcuz this is for my english assignment and its very important THANK YOU 🙂
Lana
You know what? Lana likes chewing gum, and I like her. She has her own individual take on English spelling, although maybe it’s her whole generation and they all spell because bcuz. But, she seems to be able to spell in the regular manner when she wants to (“any interesting facts about Singapore”) or when she is forgetting not to, plus she has a nice ingratiating manner and understands the value of a smile. I think she should be encouraged.
So, if anyone has any interesting facts about Singapore, please email them to her.
Those pleased that the Office of Fair Trading is investigating Britain’s top private schools definitely deserve a detention. Fines, if issued, would be worse for parents than the alleged crime.
The crime is that the top private schools run a cartel which conspires to raise the price of tuition. But since there is more demand for places as these schools than supply, meaning the price is below the market-clearing price, the allegation is quite obvious nonsense. As last week’s Economist pointed out:
Some of them think they could raise their fees by 50% and still fill all their places with the children of the super-rich. Headteachers don’t want to do that because it would weaken their claim to charitable status and limit their ability to select the cleverest children and thus get the best results. So if they have been colluding, it may be to keep the fees down, not up.
But even if private schools have been colluding to raise prices, a fine would not be justified. Private schools are non-profit distributing charities, and if they have more money, they employ more teachers and build better sports facilities. How does taking a school’s cash and giving it to HM Treasury benefit the parents?
Iain Duncan-Smith relaunched the Conservative Party yesterday, announcing that a future Conservative government would abolish tuition fees. Of course, political parties have to reach out to those outside their traditional supporters. But IDS is going about it the wrong way.
Margaret Thatcher got lots of people living on council estates to vote for her. It was not by being left-wing, but by applying her free-market principles to make their lifes better. By giving them the option to buy their houses from the state, she helped them to rise up the ladder of economic prosperity. By allowing parents to have a say in which state school their children could go to, power was taken away from government bureaucrats, enabling parents to take their children to away from failing schools. Her strategy for getting non-Conservatives to vote Conservative was entirely consistent with her principles. Voters believed her policies because they saw their consistency.
By simply adopting socialist policies – and moving the Tories to the left of Labour – IDS is alienating his core support. But worse, he is unlikely to gain the votes of those who support his policies anyway. There aren’t many Old Labour opponents of tuition fees that are going to jump ship and vote Tory. They are much more likely to vote Lib Dem, a rather more convincing party of socialism.
A wondrous row has erupted between two fat, middle-aged, uncouth, bearded geazers, one of them the British Minister of Education, and the other the Chairman of Chelsea Football Club. Mr Clarke is plugging a scheme to get sports clubs to help out with teaching the 3Rs to recalcitrant youth, and Mr Bates’ Chelsea are the only football club not to be cooperating. Mr Clarke slagged off Bates, and now Bates has been slagging off Clarke, pointing out that the British state education system is appalling and getting worse and he, Mr Clarke, should see to it instead of attacking defenceless football clubs.
I have dealt with some of the boring educational angles of this story in another place, but the interesting aspect is that Mr Clarke has now said that he wants West Ham to beat Chelsea in their forthcoming and crucial Premiership clash tomorrow. Or, to put it another way, he wants Liverpool and Newcastle (rather than Chelsea) to qualify for the European Champion’s League next year, and even more controversially, Mr Clarke supports West Ham in their desperate effort to avoid relegation, and accordingly he must favour the idea of one of the clubs above West Ham, such as Bolton, Leeds, or Fulham, getting relegated from the Premier League instead. Bolton, did you get that? I can’t remember a Cabinet Minister wading into sport like this. Supporting your own team in a new-laddish, post-modern sort of way is one thing, but to mix this kind of thing with serious politics is new, surely, and frankly rather unsavoury.
Since Ken Bates is making trouble for a politician, we here presumably all now support Chelsea against the abominable West Hamsters and the even more abominable West Ham support Clarke. And that’s quite aside from the Samizdata HQ being in Chelsea, and David Carr already being a Chelsea season ticket holder. I’m a Spurs man myself, that is to say, for the benefit of Americans, a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. But Spurs are never involved either in trying to get into Europe or in being relegated because they come eleventh in the Premiership every year. Very dull. So by now I don’t care what they do tomorrow and am happy to swing into line behind Chelsea also. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the Chelsea game tomorrow and keep everyone posted. Go you … Chels?
I’ve recently been writing at my Education Blog about the noted educator and educational theorist Maria Montessori.
Montessori recommended what for her time must have been a most unusual kind of object for young children to play with. She disapproved, it would seem, of the kind of complicated toys and dolls which, then as now, many parents get for their children. Instead she recommended abstract objects. What she had in mind was that children should not be overwhelmed with excessive amounts of information. Too little information, and children get bored. But too much causes them to switch off, in sensory self defence. That was her attitude. So, instead of dolls and train sets and woolly animals, she prescribed plain geometrical objects and matching sets of things like rods all the same size but of different colours, or rods all of the same colour but of different lengths. Or Montessori children may be presented with a set of identical sized blocks which different textures on their surfaces, like the different surfaces of different grades of sandpaper.
Whether by coincidence or by cause and effect, the Montessorian view of childhood objects has in recent decades made remarkable headway. Look into a child’s nursery or playpen now, and you will see all manner of geometrical shapes and blocks and wheels and surfaces. Felt covered cubes. Wooden zig-zaggy things to put in zig-zaggy shaped holes. Lots of different colours and consistencies of plastic. And so on.
The point I want to make here has nothing to do with the educational wisdom or otherwise of surrounding small children with such objects. No, I want to offer a theory about Modern Art, or rather, a theory about the (to many) extraordinary popularity of Modern Art. By “Modern Art” I of course mean abstract art – art that is not “of” anything, but is merely itself. → Continue reading: A conjecture concerning children’s toys and the current popularity of Modern Art
Since Samizdata, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, seems to be in us-Brits-great-or-what? mode today, please permit me to mention here that over on my Education Blog, I did a piece about the British Army as a teaching organisation, based on a conversation with a friend who is a captain in it. If what you’re now thinking is: “Wow, those Brits, how do they do it?”, well, I think this little piece goes some way towards answering that question.
At the centre of the piece is an accronym: EDIP. This stands for: Explain, Demonstrate, Immitate, Practice.
The other key principle “embedded” – to use this month’s mot du jour – in British Army practice is that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Quite junior officers start the “high powered” bit of their army careers by instructing at Sandhurst, and Sergeants and Corporals do most of the day-to-day training of the soldiers. At the end of it the soldiers may not be completely in command of what they’re doing, but the men who’ve been teaching them have it ingrained into them. Soldiering can be taught, and so can leadership, and this is how.
The thing I remember most vividly about that conversation was, well, how vivid it was. The question “Education – How about that then? – How does the army go about doing that?” is just about the best way for a civilian like me to get inside the head of a soldier that I could possibly have picked. “So, what’s it like killing people?” is useless by comparison. (a) It’s insulting. It makes it sound like that’s the thing they most like doing. (b) Half of them don’t know. (c) Those that do have no way of really telling you. And above all (d) they don’t want to talk about it. But asking them about how they teach is, as I said in my original piece, like taking the cork out of a shaken champagne bottle.
I want to do a lot more pieces like this one, about actual teachers and how they set about it, for my Education Blog, but so far have only done one more, about my friend Sean Gabb. So if any Samizdata readers are doing any teaching, of any sort, in the London area or near offer, and of a sort they wouldn’t mind me sitting in on and/or writing about (I promise to accentuate the positive – almost all teachers are doing some good things), please get in touch.
What do you think these are?
feg – jes – vok – gop – ruch – dez – thob – cag – shug – wiss – miff – sleck
Words that used to exist, but which have fallen out of use? Words that ought to exist, to describe things that exist, but now have no word attached to them so that we can talk about them? Douglas Adams produced a little book called The Meaning of Liffe, or something similar, full of such concepts, with suggested words to describe them. “Pimlico – the pool of stale beer into which the barman deposits your change” etc. etc. Ruch – to vomit or cough violently, while still trying to rush for a bus or appointment. Sleck – to refrain so ostentatiously from performing one’s duties that even very, very posh people, who hardly do any work themselves, notice. And miff? Well, isn’t that a word already? Are we not “miffed” if things don’t happen as we wish? So miff must be the verb of that, surely. And “gop” is the Republicans, isn’t it?
sprell – creld – splind – fland – blim – flut – smez – shrid – sprund – shrong – brost – flamp
Still don’t know? Clue: it’s to do with learning to read. These “words” are to be found on page 17 of the latest Newsletter, No. 50, from the Reading Reform Foundation. → Continue reading: “… doilible … snoiggal … wacespink … disclorping … thription .. illarptacture …”
Natalie Solent links to a typical education story from education.guardian.co.uk.
A six-year-old boy has become one of the youngest children to be permanently excluded from school, following an 18-month reign of terror that left some of his classmates psychologically traumatised.
The boy was thrown out of Ashton Vale primary school in Ashton, Bristol, after worried parents wrote a letter to governors demanding his removal. They reported him urinating on fellow pupils, stamping on children’s heads and scratching classmates’ faces. One parent claims he bullied her son to such an extent he needed speech therapy, while another victim began wetting the bed through fear. However, his father, a BBC technician, yesterday blamed the school for exacerbating his son’s bad behaviour and not acting quickly enough. “I think they’ve gone the wrong way about it,” he said. “At home he’s as good as gold.”
What’s this? The Guardian making a BBC employee look like an idiot?
He did, however, admit that his son had been given “more than enough chances” and had “taken it too far” at the school. “He’s always been naughty. He fights everyone all the time but doesn’t know when to stop – he just carries on.”
The boy was known as a trouble-maker at nursery, but the frequency of violent incidents has risen steadily and he has been suspended numerous times.
His father fears his unusual domestic environment may have had an effect on Troy’s behaviour. He has split from boy’s mother, but they still share the same home, despite the fact she is now expecting a baby with her new boyfriend, who lives in the Birmingham area.
Yes, that doesn’t sound good.
But to get more serious, here’s what Natalie says about this boy’s expulsion. → Continue reading: Including Troy and excluding Troy – Britain’s current education policy
Julius Blumfeld, a home educator himself, believes that it may be a while before the right to home educate in Britain is seriously eroded. (“Ask me again in ten years time.”) But I recommend also this rumination by Michael Peach about the future of home education in Britain, and on how to defend it. Says Peach:
Currently in England, although most Local Education Authorities would like you to think otherwise, we are pretty free to educate our children as we see fit. School is not compulsory, there is no legal obligation to inform the LEA of your decision to take your children out of school, you don’t have to let LEA representatives into your home, you do not have to let them see any of your child’s work, and you do not have to complete a pile of forms just to satisfy them that you are doing a good job (A statement of educational philosophy should suffice). From what I can tell we currently enjoy probably the most freedom in this regard anywhere in the western world.
So far so good, in other words. Which is also pretty much what Blumfeld had said:
At the moment, home education in the U.K. is off the Government’s radar. It’s just a quirky thing for a small minority. It’s nothing to worry about and it’s not worth bothering with.
But as Blumfeld had gone on to say:
… as more parents home educate their children, it will become increasingly visible. And as that happens, the pressure will grow for the State to “do something” about “the problem” of home education. The pressure will come from the teaching unions (whose monopoly it threatens). It will come from the Department of Education (always on the lookout for a new “initiative”). It will come from the Press (all it will take is one scare story about a home educated ten year old who hasn’t yet learned to read). And it will come from Brussels (home education is illegal in many European countries so why should it be legal here?).
As I say, Blumfeld preceded that by saying that in in ten years time things may have changed, and home-education might have become a “libertarian issue”, i.e. a political battleground.
Ten years? Peach thinks that things may be about to get nasty a lot more quickly than that. → Continue reading: The British home-education debate – is it about to hot up?
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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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