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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To me, a blog, Brian’s EDUCATION Blog, me and blog both doing well.
Well I hope we’re doing well. “Up and running” is the usual kind of expression used for such events as this. Up and staggering around bumping into furniture but mostly lying in pram and sleeping would be more accurate. After vital initial help from expert Movable Typist Alex Singleton (of Liberty Log) my blogynaecologist is now Patrick Crozier (UK Transport and Croziervision), but it still looks an ugly brute despite their best efforts. I know, what must it have been like before?
But the text is starting to roll. Yesterday I did a ramble about what BEB stands for, blah blah blah but necessary. And today, Patrick has just posted a piece about a Maths textbook entrepreneur, whose website he saw on the side of a van.
I think one of the biggest mistakes made by Classical Liberals in Britain was to allow (and, indeed, encourage) the government to start funding education in the 19th Century. He who pays the piper calls the tune and it was only a matter of time before the government took over education and began to run it as the state monopoly we are still lumbered with today.
As with all these monolithic government services they are indifferent to the needs of their customers, exisitng primarily as fiefdoms of a professional education establishment. Well-to-do families can afford to escape the system but not so modest income and poor families whose children are left victimised by the shambolic sausage factories through which they are processed.
To date, there has been insufficient challenge to this state monopoly but that could all be about to change. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting James Stansfield at the October ‘Putney Debate’ hosted by Tim Evans. James works with the famous James Tooley, a former socialist who has seen the light and now campaigns for a free market in education. Together they have established the EG West Centre at the University of Newcastle; an academic research body dedicated to spreading radical ideas about the provision of education by means other than the state.
The man after whom the project is named, EG West, was a British-born academic who did most of his work in Canada in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Swimming completely against the tide of the received wisdom of that era, this man who concluded, from his meticulously documented research, that state education was a disaster. Unsurprisingly, he was pilloried by the rest of academia and the education establishment as some kind of dangerous madman before being proved absolutely correct.
→ Continue reading: A single candle is lit
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective.
In both the United States and Britain home education is on the increase. Roland Meighan, formerly special professor of education at Nottingham university estimates that at least 1% of school aged children are home educated in Britain. In the United States the figure is 5% with a growth rate of 20% each year and rising. In both the United States and Britain home education is increasingly a step taken by families disillusioned by the provision of mainstream education.
However, the content of this disillusionment seems to vary enormously. In the States, despite a growing number of secular home educators, the religious reason continues to dominate. In a society that separates religion and state, religious parents, especially those on the fundamentalist right are likely to withdraw their children from schooling. In contrast, Britain has no such separation of religion and state. Religious education and a daily act of worship are mandatory in state schools and the government is set to forge ahead with plans to increase the number of state funded schools with an explicitly religious foundation despite the protests of the National Secular Society. Of course, for some religious families this weak inoculation of school based religion is insufficient, especially when evolution is taught routinely in biology classes, but those who withdraw their children for religious reasons are very much in the minority of British home educators.
In the United States, Ronald Presitto1 tells us that the right of parents to raise their children according to their religious convictions is at the heart of the divergence between ‘home schooling’ and the educational establishment. In contrast, most British home educators begin with pragmatic concerns – children are withdrawn when severe bullying incidents fail to be resolved, when they are too bored to tolerate the standardised national curriculum, when their special needs are not taken into account or when the only school place offered is at some dismal, failing institution where you wouldn’t leave a dog. Some do start out with convictions about individualised education or religion, but these are the minority.
What American home schoolers and British home educators have in common is the reaction of their ‘authorities’ to their presence. From local officials to policy makers to government ministers there is a swathe of opinion that believes that parents are not to be trusted with their children and that the State, whether it is secular, socialist or broadly Judaeo-Christian, represents safer hands and inculcates more objective values. Recently in Britain the host of a prestigious legal radio programme (Radio 4 ‘Law in Action’) opined exactly that in his weekly Guardian column – teachers are trained, accredited and hand down the official package to children, but heaven (or not) only knows what parents might be doing to their children. → Continue reading: Behind the scenes in home education
For some years now, sister Daphne and brother-in-law Denis, with whom I had a most happy stay last weekend, have been telling me interesting things about dogs. I promised to do a posting about this earlier, and here it is. (“Education” is an odd way to categorise it, but this was the best I could find.)
D&D have two dogs themselves, but more to the point they’ve also been reading a particularly interesting book about dogs, The Dog Listener by Jan Fennell. Denis did a very positive customer review of this book for Amazon. However, these customer reviews apparently come and go, and Denis’ one, which was there a week ago, seems now to have gone. Luckily I had already copied and pasted some of what he had said:
Her suggestions are so simple that, as a dog owner for many years, I thought they could not possibly work. I was so wrong that I was amazed. Within days my two labradors were so much more relaxed and better behaved that I experienced a fresh delight in keeping dogs. … Over the years I have read many books on dog training and this is the best.
Jan Fennell’s wisdom is based on the observation of dogs and dog packs in the wild, including wolf packs, dogs being the domesticated descendants of wolves. In this respect Fennell’s work resembles that of Monty Roberts, the famous “man who listens to horses” alluded to in the title of Fennell’s own book, and the writer of the forward for it.
I read through The Dog Listener while staying with Daphne and Denis, and I can’t say that I grasped all of its subtleties. But a few core notions I do now understand. → Continue reading: Dogs and dog people – is Jan Fennell the new alpha-dog-expert?
A ‘Bear Of Very Little Brain’ such as I does not quite follow every twist and turn of the A-Level scandal, but the story goes something like this: the government wants more students in higher education for good reasons and bad. So the government puts direct and indirect pressure on the exam boards to make the exams easier by changing their mark schemes and structures. This manouevre is kept secret; they would like us to think that they have made students cleverer by good magic. The ruse does not work. As grades go up and up people start to talk about “dumbing down.” Finally the jump in the number of A grades is so embarrassing that the exam board start secretly moving the goalposts. This is a betrayal of trust: even if the level of achievement necessary for a good grade is objectively set too low, once the board has publicly stated the criteria it is bound to stick to them as part of its contract. To secretly mark students down is close to libel.
What a mess, hey? What’s a poor Education Minister to do? In an article called Estelle, here is your way out of this mess the Telegraph’s John Clare puts forward his advice to the beleaguered Estelle Morris.
But I’ve got some even better advice. I know a breathtakingly simple way for Estelle to get out of this mess entirely. It’s this: Get out of this mess entirely, Estelle! Yes! It’s that easy! Kick over your ministerial desk, make a barbecue of all your papers, hurl your dispatch box over the balustrade of the magnificent interior balcony of Sanctuary Buildings, and be gone and free within the hour. I don’t just mean resign. I mean make your last act the complete and inalienable renunciation of government interference in A Levels, AS Levels, right through to X, Y and Z Levels, with every record so much as touching upon the subject shredded or electronically wiped to make sure your courageous decision sticks. Because government interference is the only cause of all this mess and government butting out is the only cure.
The comedian Alexei Sayle once said very wisely that he objected to the use of the word “workshop” in any connection other than light engineering. I now feel similarly about the phrase “limited edition”, which should, I believe, be confined to publishing. Sadly, this phrase is now applied to cars, clothes, portable telephones, in fact to any manufactured product where they have to decide beforehand how many they’re going to make in each little burst of manufacturing. In other words to all manufactured products.
The latest manifestation I have observed of limited edition feaver is: limited edition potato crisps. That’s right, Walkers Crisps have just produced a six-pack “limited edition” bag, containing two Heinz Tomato Ketchup flavoured crisp packets, two Branston Pickle flavoured crisp packets, and two Marmite flavoured.
In my opinion the Marmite crisps are very nice (as are the crisps flavoured with Marmite’s deadly rival, Bovril, which have long been available), the Tomato Ketchup crisps are okay, and the Branston Pickle crisps are disgusting.
Talk of limited editions raises the question: are there potato crisp collectors? If so, do they collect their crisp packets unopened, or do they merely preserve the wrappings? If they do collect the crisps unopened how do they ensure that the crisps do not get broken inside the packet, even as the packet remains unopened, and if the crisps are preserved in mint condition, how can the crisp collector tell?
It was with questions like these in mind that I consulted the
Walkers SHOWCASE website mentioned on all the crisp packets.
At this point my posting takes a sudden lurch away from harmless frivolity and towards seriousness, because this is what I found:
Welcome to Walkers SHOWCASE!
Walkers has invited every school in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Eire to post their students’ best work on the Walkers SHOWCASE online gallery. What better way to show off the children’s talents – not only across the school, but to children’s friends and relatives – and to everyone with an interest in education around the world?
If you have been chosen as your school’s SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, your first step is to register your school. This takes just a few moments – but one part of it is your agreement to keep to the SHOWCASE Charter. You can review the Charter before proceeding with registration by clicking on the SHOWCASE safety button on the left. As soon as you have registered you can start uploading exhibits – everything from collages created in Reception to interactive games devised in a sixth form project.
Have fun!
I hate this. These people take no pride in their product. I expected – well, I was looking for – testimonials from satisfied crisp eaters, discussions of the relative merits of Marmite and Bovril crisps, intricate analysis of just why it is that the Branston Pickle crisps are so horrible, news of other Walkers products. Instead we observe what is now called a Public-Private Partnership, and of the most vomit-inducing kind. If I was a teacher and they made me the school’s SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, I’d feel like a whore.
I realise that as a good little libertarian, I ought to be willing to defend everything that capitalism does however tasteless (including whores, of course), but when it comes to capitalists stalking the wastes of the public sector in search of captive juvenile audiences for junk food adverts, I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. I wouldn’t want a law against it, but surely no self-respecting school would do this.
Perhaps I should overcome my dislike of such things. I don’t know, I really don’t. I would especially welcome comments on this.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator to four children aged 8-15. She is a supporter of ‘Taking Children Seriously’ and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective.
All kinds of disparate and quiet groups become politicised when they are attacked by the state, scapegoated and weakened. That’s what Brian Micklethwait pointed out in an article on August 26th on Samizdata. He cites as an example Britain’s gun owners, who were made to take the blame for the actions of evil people and who as a result “suddenly started to care about things like libertarianism also.”
It’s a point well made, but when he goes on to say that another group who may be about to experience a similar process are ‘home schoolers’ (the British term he was struggling to find is actually ‘home educators’ or ‘home based educators’) he is several years behind the movement. Micklethwait is quite right that across the English-speaking world there are various efforts of “professional state educators” trying to erode the rights of home educators on the grounds that it is “a strange and scandalous legal anomaly.” However, what he has not realised is that we home educators have been on to them for some time and politicisation is well and truly underway, even maturing in certain sectors.
The home education movement in Britain is at least twenty five years old in its established form and the last ten years have seen a massive rise in politicisation, much of it associated with the communication benefits afforded by the Internet. One home education support group (Education Otherwise) was instrumental in getting a change in the law so that parents can now automatically de-register their children from school without the old legal loophole of needing to establish and prove their educational provision before de-registration could take place. → Continue reading: The Politicisation of Home Education
Russ Lemley sees trouble ahead regarding California’s attack on home schoolers
I share Brian’s sense of unease about the reasons about why the Libertarian movement may pick up steam. It’s because the state has decided to harangue certain people who just don’t see the reason why they’re being bothered. It upsets their lives, causing a great deal of grief and consternation about what to do next. To avoid possible punishment, some parents may decide to send their kids to public schools, albeit not because they think it’s the right thing to do.
The general reaction to the Education Department’s ‘guidance’ in California has been one of derision. Private (especially Catholic) schools don’t require teachers to have a credential, and their students simply perform better. My wife went through the accreditation process. I attended a couple of classes with her, and they were a joke. They were basically PC bullshit sessions that had nothing to do with how to be a good teacher.
I am hoping that many home-schooling parents will simply ignore the Education Department’s ‘guidance’ and continue to keep their kids where they are. Still, all you need is one idiotic bureaucrat to ‘enforce’ this crap. When that happens, though, I’m not sure how home-schoolers will react. It could get ugly, in a non-violent sort of way. There’s been a movement among Christians, mostly, to pull their kids out of public schools because of their concerns about the moral environment. If the state decided to clamp down on home schooling, they could be in for a nasty surprise.
Will this help build support for the Libertarian cause? Maybe. But I sure don’t feel happy about it.
Russ Lemley, Torrance, California
It is a sad fact that one of the things that causes the libertarian movement to get stronger is other groups in society getting weaker.
Consider Britain’s gun owners. Until recently they were very content, using their guns to attack targets, animals, and even the occasional bad human being. Most of their intellectual effort went into discussing amongst themselves which guns were the best, how to hit targets even more accurately, how to make sure that the only other creatures they shot were creatures they were trying to shoot, and so forth.
Then suddenly the government (worse, almost the entire country) held the gunners responsible for a couple of gun massacres of good human beings and decided to take their guns away from them. Somebody had to take the blame, and the actual perpetrators were already dead.
Suddenly a sublimely apolitical group got politicised. Suddenly they found themselves trying to persuade others of the wisdom and rightness of them being allowed to go on using their guns, which you can’t do only by talking about the technicalities of guns, although God knows they tried that. They found, far too late, that they would have to learn about politics, and in particular about whatever political principles might allow them to keep on owning their guns, or failing that, might one day allow them to own guns again. Thus many persons who formerly cared only about guns, suddenly started to care about things like libertarianism also.
I believe that another group which is about to be policised are the home schoolers, and not just of Britain but of the entire Anglosphere. Everywhere you look, in Britain and in the USA certainly, and I’m sure everywhere else where “education otherwise” is still allowed, efforts are being made to end what appears to professional state educators as a strange and scandalous legal anomaly. → Continue reading: Guns, the attack on home schooling, and the growth of the libertarian movement
Remember my July 10 post, “Tell me about special reading”? Well, you can all stop thinking I’m just another middle class mama boasting about my wonderful offspring. I am and I do, but not today. The purpose of this post is to downplay my kid and up-play, if the term is allowable, the system that taught him to read so quickly. Evidence that this might be a group rather than an individual effect was provided by a little sign posted up on his classroom door at the end of term. It said that 95% of the children in his year were ahead of the national average in literacy, and 54% of them were more than a year ahead. In case you are wondering, the school is an ordinary state school in an area that is mostly middle and respectable working class but includes some children from welfare enclaves.
So what’s this post doing on Samizdata? Early Reading Research (ERR) certainly is not a system designed to appeal to libertarians. The teacher is boss. The kids listen and participate as a group, in unison. Scientific it may be, but in spirit it is a throwback to systems the Victorians would have recognized.
But that doesn’t matter. The libertarian morals to be drawn are (a) it’s taken thirty freaking years or more to overthrow the fraudulent orthodoxy that monolithic state education enthroned, and the job ain’t done yet; (b) that when you next hear statists moan on about how horrifically complicated, interconnected and hard to solve social problems are, mentally add the words “so long as you refuse to admit that you were wrong”; (c) watch the buggers in the educational establishment. Watch them with the eyes of a hawk. Sure, they are by now in their heart of hearts convinced that phonics is the system that works. But a little matter like the interests of actual children won’t override the fact that the last thing the Special Needs “community” want is sudden, clear improvement in children’s literacy. It would make them look bad. Worse, it would make them look unecessary. Expect them to obfuscate, distort and delay reform in every way imaginable. They’ll tell themselves that gradual change and a “mixed approach” are the best thing all round, which is true when the best thing is defined as covering their tails.
One final point. I can talk “mixed approach” too. I’m not saying ERR is the best and only system for all time, just that it knocks the National Literacy Strategy into a cocked hat. I’m not saying that there are no children with real special needs, just that there are much fewer of them than will keep all today’s legion of special needs teachers in their jobs. And I have no idea of what Jonathan Solity’s political opinions are. If he ever reads this and finds himself agreeing with me, I suggest that he keep very, very quiet about it.
Following on from Brian’s post on synthetic phonics, here are some words from a guest blogger:
It is great! I don’t even do it because I do my sunshine work. (I am not going to tell you my name) You spell out words and stuff and do synthesis and segmantatean.
That was written by my son. Some of it he typed himself, some of it I typed at his letter-by-letter dictation. He was taught reading at his state school by means of a scheme called Early Reading Research, which is being piloted in several schools in Essex. He says “I don’t even do it” because he has completed the scheme at the age of six years and three weeks. “Sunshine work” is presumably the next scheme on. As you can see, although not yet a giant of literature he is competent to write down in a comprehensible fashion any idea that he can express verbally. He gave up on spelling the word “synthesis”, but so might many adults.
This rather misleading BBC News 24 story discusses the scheme. The article is better than the headline; I bet you 95% of readers saw the words “real books” and either applauded or condemned without reading further. ERR has little to do with the discredited system whereby children had books thrown in their direction and were told to get on with it. Rather it consists of tightly structured sessions of about twelve minutes, three times a day, where they do “c-a-t spells cat” (synthesis) and “dog is spelt d-o-g” (segmentation). Then they finish with some exemplary reading from real books.
The scheme is popular with his classmates and with the teachers. I gather the same is true wherever it has been tried. So why isn’t it famous? Guess.
I’m getting good feedback about Brian’s Education Blog, which is encouraging considering that it doesn’t yet exist. (I’m waiting to see which software to use.) Patrick Crozier gave it an anticipatory mention last Tuesday, in his non-transport blog, which I missed at the time.
And Kevin Marks (no relation of Paul) emailed in response to my piece about synthetic phonics:
Good to see you picking up on this. Some more links:
Read America are a leading synthetic phonics organisation, whose Phono-graphix programme is excellent – they did the research to optimise it for speed of teaching, and it avoids learning complex and fragile rules by rote, which are the downfall of most phonics schemes.
The textbook for parents is great.
Sign me up for an education blog, BTW. I’ll try and persuade Dad to join in too.
Dad would be John Marks, who is an education expert and not anything to do with the John Marks who is a drugs treatment expert. I expect to be supplying lots of links to John (education) Marks’ various campaignings and muck-rakings, about such things as phoney exam results.
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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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