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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The following posting was written with my education blog in mind. However, although in general this enterprise is rattling along fine, it is for the time being ungettatable. I’m hoping that this is (a) because this is now Sunday afternoon and every internetter in the world is internetting and my blog empire’s hardware can’t cope, or even better (b) because Atlas (he knows who he is) has unshrugged and is finally getting Brian’s Culture Blog going, but in a way that has interrupted normal service. Alternatively, (c) one of Richard Branson’s slaves read what I put about his Lord and Master on Transport Blog the other day and has turned the Virgin army of hackers loose on my life, in which case it was nice knowing you all.
Anyway, I read what follows through again and found that it will do okay also for samizdata.net so here it is:
Joanne Jacobs links to the following piece of dialogue, originally posted on Notes From The Ghetto Teacher on October 29th.
Today, we were discussing 15th century literature and the invention of the Gutenburg Press. I asked them to write a short essay on what they’d learned from the chapter and lecture. One of my students tentatively raised his hand:
Student: Miss?
Me: Yeah, baby?
Student: When was the 15th century?
Me: Between the 14th and 16th, baby. Do you mean what years are in the 15th century?
Student: Aww … dawg … naw … I’m sayin’ … what century was the 15th century in?
Me: [pause] Write it down a piece of paper then read it back out loud.
Student: [writes it down slowly] Fif-teenth century.
Me: Right. So, what century is that?
Student: That’s what I be aksin’ you.
Some days, I just want to throw my chalk.
Now I have far less experience of teaching in a ghetto than does the Ghetto Teacher (she presumably has quite a lot and I have none), but what I want to know is: what would have been the problem with just giving the answer, along the lines of: “The fifteenth century means the one hundred years between the year 1400 and the year 1500”?
→ Continue reading: Well when was the fifteenth century?
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
– Frederic Bastiat
Thousands of British students have gathered in London today in order to protest against a Government proposal to introduce university top-up fees. Coming from across the UK, they started marching at noon today (I am pleased to report it is pissing down with rain) in protest against a Government plan to require students to pay for at least some of their own university education. The protestors are backed by trade unionist and assorted socialist groups, who are claiming 20,000 students are marching. Police have said there are closer to 10,000 present.
Mandy Telford, president of the National Union of Students (NUS), said: “Education should be based on your ability not your ability to pay. Going down that road is putting a price tag on degrees and that’s not positive for society.”
Society? It is not ‘society’ which takes money from one group of people by force and gives it to another, only the state (or organised crime) can do that to whole sections of the population by force. If students are entitled to take other people’s money in order to educate themselves, and the object of this education being to benefit themselves, why not also for food? For housing? For petrol? For clothing? In fact, why should they need to pay for anything from which they benefit? It seems they do indeed want that invidious form of outright theft called progressive taxation to fund the priorities of others and of course students are just the thin end of the paleo-socialist wedge being offered up here.
Ms Telford [of the National Union of Students] said students were converging on London from across the country. She said: “The march will send a very clear message to ministers. Students are angry and their families are angry.
Well I am bloody angry too! These ‘protestors’ are nothing more than parasites calling for the state to continue to engage in theft on their behalf. What makes their needs and priorities so much more important than mine that they feel they have the right to take my money for their benefit? Well up your, you scruffy leeches… you will get very little from me. Any future business of mine will be off-shore benefiting someone else’s economy, and 10,000 of the reasons are marching through London today.
Because of the vagaries of the internet, comments are occasionally attached to Samizdata pieces that were posted many weeks ago. Such comments are liable not to be noticed. Well, my email this morning contained the text of a most helpful and interesting comment from Lisa Wylde on my piece about dog expert Jan Fennell. Here’s what Lisa said:
I was fortunate to get a place on one of Jan Fennell’s two day foundation courses. This was spent in her home, and to see how content and relaxed her own dogs were was an absolute inspiration. I have been interested in canine behaviour for many years, and it is interesting to see that many of the “experts” do not own dogs themselves – or indeed some of them own ones with “problems”. Of course there are some behaviourists, such as the late John Fisher who have a lot to teach us, unfortunately not all of them are as dedicated to the canine mind and spirit as he was.
You state that you should “ignore them all the time” this is not actually the case, simply that when YOU want to play and fuss your dog – YOU call them. Assuming they respond to your call, you can play, cuddle, fuss, whatever you want to do. But if you are sitting on the settee watching the tv, for example, and the dog comes to you uninvited, and plonks his head (or body!!) on your lap – you would quietly push them away, because you had not instigated contact. This is why some people believe it is cruel, “ignoring your dog all the time” but this is not actually what you do – just simply when you are relaxed and want to play with the dog you do so, and you would both enjoy it more, but if the dog was demanding to play, barking, jumping up etc. although you may accept his behaviour in the park when you are appropriately dressed, you may not appreciate the same “request” by your dog when you are dressed up ready to go out! Consistency is the key, if the dog knows that you will only play with it when you want to, and therefore learns manners, both of you will really relish that quality time together!
Lisa, thank you very much for this. This was the aspect of Fennellism that had been most bothering me, and you have answered my bother perfectly. After all, if you are supposed to ignore your dog all the time, then quite aside from the cruelty to your dog aspect, what, for you, is the point of having a dog? I knew there was an answer that I hadn’t assimilated, and I sort of knew what it was, in fact I must have read this answer myself in Jan Fennell’s book. But, I hadn’t absorbed it properly. Thanks for your explanation, and for your general confirmation of what I have believed of Jan Fennell ever since my sister and brother-in-law first told me about her, which is that she is definitely on the right track – the right dog track, you might say.
Alpha dog Brian with two pack members
In my previous posting here, about Gordon Brown’s plans to wreck the British economy, I said that all that was one reason I was happy. Here’s another: Brian’s EDUCATION Blog. It’s not for me to be saying how good this is, but I can say that so far I am managing to keep on doing whatever it is I’m doing. I’m not running out of things to say.
For example, I’m already thinking about a post I hope to do soon concerning the vital importance to the development of Silicon Valley not just in a general way of Stanford University, but in particular of just one academic at Stanford University, a man called Frederick Terman. I’ve semi-known about this man for almost as long as I’ve known about Silicon Valley, but there’s nothing like having to write regularly for a specialist blog to make you learn the outlines of a story like this properly, by the simple procedure of writing it out. Quite aside from what others may be learning from it, think what Brian’s Education Blog is doing for Brian’s Education. The ambiguity of the title is entirely deliberate.
And what about the writings of others that I might otherwise have missed? → Continue reading: BEdBlogging BEdBlogging BEdBlogging
More stuff from my Brian’s EDUCATION Blog beat that deserves the Samizdata treatment.
Daryl Cobranchi picks up on a “state repression of home-schoolers” story. Here are the first two paragraphs of it:
A public school superintendent has sent police in squad cars to the houses of homeschooling families to deliver his demand that they appear for a “pre-trial hearing” to prove they are in compliance with the law.
Bruce Dennison, regional superintendent of schools in Bureau, Stark, and Henry counties in Northeastern Illinois, has contacted more than 22 families, insisting that they need his approval to conduct education at home.
Dennison is, legally speaking, quite wrong, or so something called the Home School Legal Defense Association argues (see their Nov 13 2002 story). Sadly, these days, something can be wrong, legally speaking, but still be true, factually speaking.
Nevertheless, for what it’s worth (and I hope it helps the home-schoolers of Illinois), Regional Superintendent of Schools Bruce Dennison, you are now also being denounced on the other side of the Atlantic.
Daryl Cobranchi blots out “The Kingdom” (i.e. Saudi Arabia) from the story he’s quoting from and says: Guess where this is? The quote he copies and pastes says all the usual things about how private sector education in these parts works better and costs less than the government’s efforts. I guessed India, through having already done a piece about Indian education for my new education blog.
I was also going to hide this posting away in the same place, but then I thought Saudi Arabia? That’s definitely Samizdata territory. That’s of a lot more than merely educational interest. So here I am here with it, and here’s the paragraph that follows the ones that Daryl recycled, from Arab News:
Essentially I am not an enthusiast for the privatization of the education system on a wider scale. However, the experience makes us appreciate the private sector’s quality and apparent superiority. The quality of government schools s not because of a shortage of funds. At the same time, it is the sheer size of the government bureaucracy and machinery that weighs it down and renders it ineffective.
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid‘s use of the word “essentially” reminds me of how Kingsley (novelist father of novelist Martin) Amis used to say that “essentially” is another word for “not”. The grammar doesn’t quite work out with the above quote, but that aside, if this man is not an enthusiast for the privatization of education, it makes you wonder what a Saudi Arabian who is an enthusiast for the privatization of education would be like.
Alice Bachini observes that many want to penalize success. Nothing unusual there!
I don’t exactly know what the Centre For Analysis Of Social Exclusion is, but it doesn’t sound good to me. So its suggestion that our crumbling state-funded universities should be allowed to charge students top-up fees might seem at first very sensible and welcome.
However, what this frighteningly-named body actually wants is for state-educated pupils to be exempt from those fees. In other words, it wants people who fund not only their own children’s education but also those of other people’s children, through their taxes, to continue doing so at university level, only much much more heavily. To the tune of up to ten and a half thousand smackers a year, in fact. Because this is “fair”. Of course.
“Parents of students from independent schools have signalled their ability to pay for education and research shows that these students earn significantly more in the labour market,”Abigail McKnight, a research fellow at the Economic and Social Research Council’s centre, said at the weekend.
Quite so. Independent schools produce pupils better equipped to do well in life and earn more money. Success breeds success… and it seems that to many this is an outrage: how dare they! They must be made to pay!
So, the redistribution of wealth, in advance of the event of actually earning it, on the basis that one’s parent’s did so first; what do we call that idea, I wonder?
I doubt that these proposals will get through, but the fact that they can get taken even slightly seriously for a second demonstrates, in my view, both the latent socialism in New Labour institutions, and the acceptability of socialism in Education circles. Well, socialism isn’t going to help British universities one little bit. Until they get free from the state and allowed to charge money where they want, their towers will keep crumbling and they will continue to leak their best people across the Atlantic.
Oh bother, I should start saving up for those Harvard fees right now.
Alice Bachini
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.
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