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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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.
Not a phrase to grab you by the heartstrings, is it? But these are the words to listen out for if you want your child to learn to read properly. “Synthetic phonics” tells you that this is probably being done properly. If, on the other hand, they tell you that they’re using “eclectic” or “a mixture of” methods, watch out. “Dyslexia” looms.
I also put “dyslexia” in inverted commas, because what we have here is that very common modern phenomenon, a damaged brain diagnosed as caused by its own inherent damagedness when actually it is a brain that has been damaged by having damaging signals thrown at it from outside. The mental radar screen registers muddle not because it is muddled, but because it has been muddled.
The situation is actually a little more complicated than that, or the problem would probably not have got as bad as it has. There is just enough physical basis for the notion of “dyslexia” for the false claim to persist that dyslexia and dyslexia alone causes all reading difficulties, and for a multi-billion pound industry to spring up to fail to solve the problem. The reality is that good teaching automatically gets around almost any inherent, genetic predisposition towards reading difficulty, and teaches virtually all children to read successfully. Bad teaching, on the other hand, is something that the majority of children can hack their way past. They do it with difficulty, but they do it. The become literate despiteall the muddle they are subjected to. But not so the “dyslexics”. They don’t “crack” reading. They don’t get its inherent nature, because they have not been explicitly taught it.
And the explicit nature of reading that is not taught to an appallingly huge number of children these days is that each letter has a name and makes a sound or sounds (the name and the sound(s) not being the same! – obvious point but frequently overlooked), and that when you are confronted with a word, that is to say with a string of letters, the way to spell it out is to spell it out, one letter (or letter group like “ch”) at a time. Don’t guess. Don’t read only the first letter and then guess. Don’t look for the pattern of the “whole word”. Read. That’s synthetic phonics. Dee Oh Gee spells duh- o- guh- DOG.
Why don’t they teach that in all schools? Because they are ess tee you pee eye dee? Because they are mostly parts of a N-A-T-I-O-N-A-L-I-S-E-D I-N-D-U-S-T-R-Y? Both, and much more that’s far too complicated to explain in a posting that would keep anyone’s attention.
So what brought all this on? Partly of course, I’m getting into the swing of having arguments that will eventually find their proper home in ‘Brian’s Education Blog’. But the particular provocation was a really good article in last Sunday’s Observer (Review Section, cover story).
You can also chase up the synthetic phonics story in more detail by going to the website of the Reading Reform Foundation.
A British news story today concerns the constant and presently insoluble problem of violence in schools. Pupils attack teachers. Parents now attack teachers. Some teachers have always been hateful to some pupils. Pupil-to-pupil violence has long been so routine as to be regarded as an intrinsic feature of juvenile human nature. What is to be done?
Are you a free(ish) adult? If so, ask yourself what you do about unwelcome violence in your life. Answer: if the violence occurs in places you don’t have to frequent and have no control over, then you stay away in future. If the violence invades your turf, you ask it to leave, and if it doesn’t you call the police. Mostly this works. It’s called freedom of association. Unwelcome violence is mostly dealt with, by the same methods used to solve the problem of unwelcome rock music emerging from unwelcome loudspeakers, unwelcome propositions from street traders, unwelcome programs invading your television. You keep clear of it. You withdraw your consent. You switch it off. You concentrate on the things that everyone directly involved thinks are okay.
But most schools, and especially most state schools, don’t work by these rules. There the assumption is that badness won’t be walked away from. Teachers must teach everyone, however appalling and unwelcome and uninterested in what is being taught. Parents are entitled to education for even their most grotesque brats. Bad or even sadistic teaching has to be complained about and negotiated with. Bullying requires a national help line and a national policy in order that it may fail to be eradicated. Badness (which just means something that those involved vehemently disagree about) must be corrected, reformed, improved, and when all that fails, punished, agonised over, fussed over, Ministerially taken charge of and, finally, tolerated.
It is inevitable that a parallel but alternative universe of educational niceness will arise, and it is. Nothing in this educational free market is taking place without the consent of all those directly concerned. Pupils who refuse to follow the rules which the teachers insist upon have to leave. Teachers whose teaching seems pointless or nasty or educationally worthless have to find others to teach, or other things to teach, or something else to do. Parents who don’t like what they’re getting keep looking. It’s called freedom.
I have in mind that some time during this new century I will start a specialist blog devoted to education issues, very roughly along the lines of Patrick Crozier’s UK Transport, although less expert about education “policy” than he is about transport policy, and in general rather more chatty and personal. If I do get this going, stories from and advertisements for this alternative and expanding voluntary universe of educational excellence will be especially welcome.
If you have such stories now, don’t wait for Brian’s Education Blog… send them to Samizdata!
Of course, some libertarian parents don’t pay twenty grand a year to avoid state schools; they keep their kids out of school altogether. Which arguably costs more, as it can mean the loss of an income, although the older they get, the easier it is to do other things than run circles around them all day. And if you work out how many minutes of teacher-time a child in a class of thirty actually gets to himself (something like ten minutes) the prospect of home educating is less overwhelming. It’s mostly a matter of setting them up, and then letting them get on with it.
Advocates of the Taking Children Seriously school of libertarian parenting believe in letting their kids decide for themselves whether they want to spend all day in a classroom doing rote spelling followed by long evenings sweating over homework assignments. The impressive results of independent schools like the one where I taught for seven years don’t just come from their less violent and drug-crazed atmospheres; those kids are made to work like…well, I can’t think of any adult job where you do a seven hour day in a compulsory unpaid job not of your choosing followed by two or three hours of homework, plus regular testing. For, oh, eleven years.
What I remember most about attending school is its mind-blowing tediousness. This is not an experience I could honestly recommend to an innocent small person, and it always amazes me how so many people who patently hate school when they are actually there, suddenly decide it’s just wonderful fun when their kids get to the age of five, or four, or two months, or whatever the school starting age is in the UK these days. I personally think they learn more from “Spiderman” (narrative structure, characterization, moral theories) than from any number of weirdly patronising and contrived government tests.
However, as a home educating adult, I do vastly appreciate the ability of schools to keep huge numbers of noisy unruly children out of the places I want to go in the daytime with my flawless well-behaved angelic ones (ahem). Except that, the ones who have guns probably aren’t too bothered about whether or not their parents are jailed when they truant.
Alice Bachini
I’m thinking of starting a specialist blog of my own, dedicated to educational issues (“Brian’s Education Blog”?), and the following is the kind of story I have in mind to be featuring, along with things about government education reports and such like. In this case, however, The Times (paper version, yesterday, June 8, news section, page 12) got there ahead of me:
Lorraine Crusham decided to go private after her daughter was assaulted by 20 pupils at the local state school (Glen Own writes).
Nicole, 15, was a few weeks into her first term at Bridgemary Community School, in Gosport, Hampshire, last year when the attack occurred.
“I’d only just dropped her off at school when I received a call saying she had been hurt by a group of boys and girls,” Mrs Crusham said. “She had a massive bruise on her faced and had been kicked up and down her body. Two teachers were also assaulted.
“The school swept it under the carpet, claiming that she had instigated it by insulting someone the day before. But she had been off the previous day. I immediately took her and my 13-year-old son James out of the school.
“James was bullied for having red hair and being Scottish. One teacher suggested he could avoid it by dyeing his hair a different colour. I asked what else they thought I should change – his accent?”
Both children are now boarding at Shebbear College, Devon, where fees cost more than 12,000 GBP a year.
This story illustrates a more general report next to it, headlined “Parents go private as order collapses in state schools.”
On the subject of things Scottish, Freedom and Whisky linked recently to another story about school unpleasantness, and tentatively suggested that it might be something to do with compulsory school attendance laws. I agree, although the young people mentioned in this story were older than the current school leaving age of 16. I believe that almost all seriously nasty and bullying behaviour perpetrated by people who are not career criminals is the result of circumstances that both the perpetrators and their victims can’t (or feel that they can’t) escape from. Nicole Crusham was lucky. She could escape. Millions of others aren’t so lucky.
A free market in education talked about in London and Newcastle – and being done in India
On Saturday (March 16, 2002) I attended a day-long meeting (“Private education: the poor’s best chance”) at the Institute of Economic Affairs. This was one of two meetings (the other being in Newcastle) marking the launch of the E.G.West Centre For Market Solutions in Education, the Director of which is Professor James Tooley.
 Professor James Tooley James Tooley is one of my favourite people. He has discovered a whole world of private sector educational success being achieved by the world’s poor, in places like India and South Africa, and is busily telling this story back to the world, hence the E.G.West Centre.
The final speaker in the morning was Fazalur Khurrum, President of something called the Federation of Private Schools Management, India, which is based in Hyderabad. The story he told was of a hubbub of small private schools in the Indian city of Hyderabad.
Before him was Dr Sugata Mitra, the Director of Research for the Indian free-market-education giant NIIT. He was the star performer of the day. NIIT can see the day fast approaching when it will have gone as far as it can in educating the kind of Indians who are easy to reach and can afford to pay individually serious money. What about the massed millions of India’s (and for that matter the world’s) seriously poor?
Dr Mitra talked about a fascinating project, in which he stuck an internet-connected PC in a wall, protected by see-through armour plating, in various Indian versions of the back of beyond, and awaited results.
A smart and adventurous poor kid sees the computer. He starts pushing buttons. Other kids assemble and join in. Their poor fathers and uncles watch from behind. Their poor mothers and aunts watch from a distance. (He showed some film of all this, and it was like watching a wildlife documentary, with different humans behaving in different, yet classically human ways.) Within a few days there were a cluster of computer literate children helping each other to have fun and find out about the world, and learning about computers. All this was done by the machine and by the juvenile punters. No “staff” were involved. Dr Mitra watched it all from his office in New Delhi, through a video camera, and by eavesdreopping on the computer. He calls this his “hole in the wall” project.
 Dr Sugata Mitra I could go on. On Sunday I did, at unbloggable length, partly provoked by the embarrassingly boring British people who talked after lunch. The lunch only seemed free; they were the price. What they said wasn’t even fluorescent idiocy – that would have been interesting. It was just generic brand idiocy. For that you’ll have to wait until the Libertarian Alliance (by which I mean me) gets around to toning the insults down and publishing it all as an Educational Note.
A final point. A big reason why even very poor people prefer paying for private education in India is that this way their kids get a good start learning English. In Indian government schools, teaching English to children under ten – even teaching in English – is forbidden.
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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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