On The Subject of Education Again

PJTV has a video of a large demonstration in Washington DC, against Obama’s proposal to cancel a school programme similar to that recently hard-won in Los Angeles.

A few points I’d like to note about this, apart from obvious that the teaching unions connect this with the objections to the LA scheme.

Each pupil on the scheme costs the government half what a child not on the scheme costs. Even so this costs money, because in a sop to the unions bad schools do not lose funding when they lose pupils – they are in effect paid for pupils no longer there. This is probably why it is the only such scheme in the US that has not triggered general improvements in the local schools (as has the similar Swedish system).

People still proclaim their love for Obama, despite opposing his policy (DC is administered by the Federal Government). That really does bemuse me, when he has done nothing beneficial for them. Obama said he would keep the scheme going if research showed it working, which it does. He is willing to go back on that for a union – so who can now deny he is a socialist?

Obviously the NUT opposes the Conservative’s similar policy for the UK. We shall have to see what arguments and slogans they come up with. The best slogans are succinct but point clearly to sound arguments, and ‘Put Kids First’ seems to fit the bill to counter the unions.

On The Subject of Education …

This is the response of parents in LA to poor schools, on Reason TV. Demand choice, demand ‘charter schools’, self-administered state schools. These sound identical to official Conservative Party policy, the policy that convinced me I could support Cameron despite other reservations.

Note that the teachers’ unions just don’t get it. They simply do not understand why this is popular, why it has worked in other places, nor do they understand that the choice is not theirs to make. They have no legitimate say, apart from their say as parents if they have children in school. Their choice is where they are willing to work and on what terms after this decision has been made.

Notice also the disingenuous debate. One person, I can only assume in the teaching union, criticises the idea of freedom of choice because the term was used by segregationists. What possible relevance does that have, apart from dishonestly linking demands for freedom to oppression? Really sickening.

Update: I have just noticed that one of the signs held by a protesting teachers’ union member says “Our Schools No Privatization”. Well actually they are not your schools are they? They belong legally to the state, and morally to the mass of parents reliant on the schools. I am glad these are taking back control.

Modern Educational Ideas

At the moment I am struggling my way through a book. Yes, I am well-educated and can read even quite long words. The book is well-written and contains all the information needed to grasp the idea it presents. Those concepts are quite sophisticated, but they are within my wit, no more difficult to understand than some of the concepts I teach my more able students (I am involved in vocational training).

The book is Descarte’s Error by Antonio Damasio, and it concerns the functioning of the human brain, with particular emphasis on the influence of the body on emotion and thus on reason.

The problem is that the subject is well outside my field, and I don’t have the basic grounding. I am having to learn the fundamental knowledge in neurophysiology, and so I have to read slowly, refer back frequently, understand a new vocabulary and a structure of basic facts and concepts. Only then can I grasp the more sophisticated ideas in the book.

This morning it struck me that I am suddenly like an ideal product of modern educational trends, the trend not to teach facts and knowledge, but to teach the ability to find out information.

I have the ability to carry out literary research, look up new ideas in secondary sources, be they paper or digital. I even have the ability to carry out primary research if needed – after all I have a science degree, and the fundamental difference between a diploma and a traditional degree is that the degree should contain an element of original research.

However in the fields of neurophysiology and psychology I have only the sketchiest of actual knowledge. I knew the brain had a temporal lobe, but had no idea where it was (it’s the bottom bit). I had heard the term ‘limbic system’ but had no clue what it meant (the evolutionarily ‘old’ bits, but the definition varies).

That is why I find the book hard going. That is why every student going through the UK state school system at the moment will find areas of life difficult. Academic life will of course be affected, but so will politics, management in all but the simplest fields, business and so on.

They have every bit as much ability as I to read through a book and understand the concepts, or to find out new information. What they are going to lack is the structure of basic knowledge in a wide variety of fields, and gradual specialisation in increasingly narrow fields as they progress.

Without that structure of knowledge, a structure that is not inherent, and will not be significantly assisted by teaching those in the start of their secondary education how to do basic research then sending themselves off to write an essay on what a peasant might have thought about Tudor England, they cannot easily take on new information.

The ability to read non-fiction or to research efficiently depends on a structure of knowledge, in order to direct the research, understand and order the new information, express that information if passing it on and to help recognise erroneous conclusions (either one’s own or any contained within a book or article). The structure of knowledge should be imparted in primary and secondary education. The ability to discover knowledge for one’s self should be emerging in the end of secondary education and through tertiary education.

I do not work in the field of child education. My assumptions about modern theories comes, I admit, from popular not academic sources. However I not only know academics who despair of the lack of basic knowledge of those seeking university education but I also see the lack of knowledge in some of those I teach who were educated in the 1990s and 21st century. Only once did I make the error of assuming that the class member who had a CSE* in maths might struggle with that element of the course I was teaching, compared with those with GCSEs. He had more thorough grounding in maths than most of the younger students.

*For the non-British (or very young) reader, CSEs were exams taken at age 16 before 1988. They were taken by the pupils considered less academically able (the more able took O levels). GCSEs were taken by pupils of all the normal range of abilities from 1988 onwards. So the CSE holder would have had an education earlier, but with less depth by the standard of the day.

Gross Stupidity – 144 Times Ordinary Stupidity

It appears that NASA is going to bomb the moon. OK, not really bomb just drive a craft into it at high speed.

That is not the stupidity. There are very good reasons for doing this. The impact will penetrate deeper in the moon than we could on a reasonable timescale any other way, and imaging and sampling from another spacecraft (even possibly from the Earth) will allow us to analyse what is there, especially water. This is important if we are going to set up a permanent base on the moon, and there are sound (although I will admit debatable) reasons for doing that.

No, the stupidity is in the comments. Almost every one is against the project. Some for economic reasons, which I think have missed the point but could argue a case. The rest really do beggar belief. They think that NASA is doing significant damage to the moon. The actual moon. The 70-billion-billion-tonne satellite orbiting Earth. The one hit by huge numbers of asteroids with a lot of energy many thousands of times in its 4-billion-years or so. This one, with the scars that make it obvious it can take an impact.

I’m quite pleased with this picture. Taken with quite an old DSLR and 300 mm lens.

One suggests that we might shift the moon’s orbit and cause climate change of “omega” proportions.

I know I am supposed to be open, sceptical and doubtful, not scornful, but it is hard. It is difficult not to wonder why these people think they are knowledgeable enough to have something relevant to say. Are they arrogant enough to think that, despite little scientific education, they have seen some great catastrophe not considered by NASA engineers and scientist? Is the standard of world science education so low that people with scientific education can think these things? I can’t think of any other explanation.

It does strike me as significant in the environmental movement though. these are people who are worried about humans having an impact, however trivial. They have no sense of proportion at all. They have taken onboard the green lobby’s most extreme ideas and blown even those out of proportion, in scale or in time. Why are these people arrogant enough to think that humans could possibly do something in a universe of 100 billion galaxies, with maybe 100 billion stars in each that is relevant to except to us?

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Perhaps Children Really Are Smarter

A lesson in the dynamics of media response to protest

At least in the case of Marcus the sheep, the children seem to have more sense than the adults responding to the story. The most satisfying aspect is that the children seem to have learnt the intended lesson, about the origin of their food. I suspect some will also have a better idea of collective decision-making and even of media hype.

The last of these is of course where the evidence that the children are more intelligent or more aware than adults educated years ago breaks down.

Media hypes a self-selecting group of activists. People who support or accept the children’s decision do not make any fuss. This must be borne in mind when reading about any protest; the media coverage can be dominated by a self-selected few. Once the story is out there is social pressure not to be seen to disagree.

With the “overwhelming majority” of the children at the school who had a say in the fate of Marcus favouring selling him for meat I strongly suspect the same is true of adults reading the story. Even of those that would have chosen differently themselves it seems likely that many would support the children’s decision. That is, however, completely irrelevant in how the story is presented. Only the adults who object to Marcus’s slaughter matter, because the story is about them, not about the sheep.

Is there a term ‘meta-irony’, for describing the fact that ironical satirist Paul O’Grady fails to see irony in campaigning to save a sheep from slaughter when the idea of the project was to teach the children about the origins of food, and the result of the open vote shows the success of that project?

All You Need To Know About Balls

Warning: article contains a photograph. Do not scroll down if you are of nervous disposition or violent temper.

Ed Balls is not the most popular man in British politics. He revolts me. He is a known Brown sycophant, but I think the real reason he is detested is that he plays politics. He is like those people who get involved in the student union, or the committee of their club. The politics is more important than what actually gets done in the job, because the job is trivial, the prestige, the petty power and socialism are everything.

The title of Mr Balls’s article in today's Grauniad, Old Tories In Disguise, is the first sign of despair to all who care about education. It is clearly simply an attack piece against the Conservatives, as if Balls cannot quite believe Labour are in power, and like the press still think of them as opposition. Instead of a positive attitude to dealing with the education system, Balls just wants to use it to beat the hated foe.

The article continues in that vein, meaningless hot air designed only to attack the Conservatives, wrapped in self-satisfied dogma. It is treated as self-evident that government compulsion and guarantees are a good thing, without considering the corollary that freedom and self-reliance are therefore bad.

How can the man in charge of schools use the phrase “…less than 30% of pupils…”? Either he is ignorant of very basic grammar (as is whichever SpAd helped him write the piece) or he can only think of children as statistics, a continuous quantity with no individuals, just an amorphous mass.

I take no responsibility for vomit damage to keyboards, or screens broken by thrown objects.

The piece is also dishonest. Talking about Conservative policy, the so-called ‘Swedish model’, although I can think of far better Swedish models and this policy is used in many other places, he claims that it is going to be more expensive by only considering Sweden.

All I can say is ‘Balls’. Education is already expensive in this country, and the vouchers could save a lot of money, whatever the Swedish experience.

A similar system is more expensive in Washington DC. That is a sop to the unions, because the government guarantees each existing school’s income, so all voucher costs add to the budget. The pupils who get places on the voucher scheme actually cost the state about half what the other pupils do.

Voucher schemes are in place in a growing number of areas of the USA, and not only do the voucher pupils get generally better education, but the ordinary state schools have improved. Costs have not gone up. In fact the only place where the state schools have not improved is in DC, because there is no incentive to keep pupils. So the system that is more expensive is worse for precisely the same reason. That is very strong evidence that Balls is wrong, that voucher programs don’t make state schools worse. Competition makes them better, but Balls cannot admit that because socialism is more important than good education to him, the schools minister.

In fact Sweden has more evidence, in that many planned voucher schools never open because state schools have improved in response to the perceived threat.

So Balls is opposing the voucher scheme, but his stated reasons are nonsense. I have already suggested dogmatic socialism as one of his reasons. This article’s title suggests that pure politics, opposing Conservatives, is another. Of course the unions would hate it, for pure socialism and their members would have to compete, so the Labour paymasters are another reason. It seems the final reason is just power for Mr Balls. This government has concentrated power at every turn, and the article openly opposes any move of decisions from Whitehall even to councils, let alone parents.

The final condemnation of Balls is that objectively education is not improving as he claims. I know from close friend who is an academic, so instinctively left-wing. He interviews and selects students for one of the best universities in the world, has the choice of the very cream of what comes out of our education system. Every year he despairs more than the last, because not only do the students know less (which is a deliberate aim of socialist education, and means his university has already added a year to science degrees) but they are less, rather than more, capable of independent thought and deduction. The supposed aim of new educational structure is to improve those areas.

The Left Don’t Want to Know

Or ‘Better Left than right’.

Sorry for the hiatus in blogging. Have had a busy week working and visiting family.

However I did catch Glen Reynolds’s link to this clip of a television debate in America about the proposed changes to the healthcare system. In the clip a chap called Paul Krugman, a self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ New York Times blogger, asks the few Canadian members of the audience if they think their government-run health system is terrible, and although the proportion is not given, all or nearly all of them said they thought it was terrible.

What I found really telling was not that this was a great argument against Obama’s plans (which it is of course) but Mr Krugman’s response, which was “Bad move on my part!”.

So what Mr Krugman is saying is that it is more important to win a TV debate than to learn something (that there might be a lot of people who have a bad impression or a bad experience of government-run healthcare) or that the debate comes to the best answer it can. Left-wing ideology seems, by extension, to be more important to Mr Krugman than good healthcare.

Often I get the same impression from the current UK government and the British left in general, on the subject of the NHS but even more on education, where the ideology of ‘equality’ is more important than the actual welfare of young people. Comprehensive education is important enough to ignore its failings, equal access is more important than maintaining the quality of education at our world-class universities, and instead of dumping ideologically-driven teaching methods and curriculums in schools which have damaged state education the universities are told to bias their selection against privately-schooled applicants.

There are more examples, certainly in the welfare system, in defence, on the EU, where winning the argument is more important than finding the best course, but it is more dangerous in education and health, where the results will last for decades or are often fatal.

I also think this theme fits in well with my previous post on the intended consequences of legislation being to keep power; the intentions might also be to keep ideological purity.

Update: Obama and the British Labour Party have the same dislike of the concept of education vouchers (despite Obama saying that he would consider the issue on merit). This looks more like left-wing dogmatism than rational objection with more evidence. Yet more evidence here, but still Ed Balls, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama would rather be Left than right.

Update: It appears that Paul Krugman holds a Nobel Prize for economics. It also appears that he has no desire to get the correct answer to a problem, and that he knows nothing at all about people’s response to incentive (which is core to economics and econometrics), since he fails to understand the limitations of government-run healthcare. Are they giving away Nobel Prizes with Cornflakes now?

Another Pretty Picture

This one could not have been taken with a camera phone!

The Police State Advances

In a police state one of the less obvious restrictions is the monopoly the police have on law enforcement and civil protection. At the moment we are supposed to be able to protect ourselves, our property and other people from violence and even effect a citizen’s arrest under some circumstances.

In another advance on the police state that right is increasingly being challenged. It appears on the surface as if the police had no reason to arrest Mr Philpott for stabbing a youth who with his friends vandalised Mr Philpott’s property and threatened violence against his son and his wife. He has an obvious prima facie case for self defence.

The police cannot possibly assume that Mr Philpott set out to injure innocent youths. The incident happened on or near his property, the youths were drunk. Mrs Philpott called the police, Mrs Philpott had been collecting evidence, neither likely if Mr Philpott was at fault. Mr Philpotthad no apparent motive for attacking them if they were innocent.

So why did the police arrest Mr Philpott? Had evidence later suggested some unusual events had led to Mr Philpott attacking passing innocents, then he could have been arrested. He is a respectable business owner, he is not going to be hard to find.

Incidentally the young man stabbed in this incident went to the school I was lucky enough to avoid. My parents moved house to avoid it. It was not a good school 25 years ago, might not have improved under our Great Leader's care. As for the parents, either they did not know their 16-year-old son claimed on Facebook he was "[happiest] when with mates getting drunk" or they did not care. They hold a great deal of responsibility for this.

Update: Advancing police state in the USA. In a police state the police have arbitrary authority; they just tell people what to do, whether they are breaking any law or not. In a police state the police often respond to political organisations, and often those organisations are involved in organised criminal activity. Talking of Acorn, what on Earth is "resisting"? Resisting arrest maybe, but you can't really do that if you are not being arrested!

Doubts About The Educational Establishment

I hesitate to hat-tip a site which goes regularly off the deep end, particularly in my first meaningful post. Moonbattery is rather extreme in attacks on the American left and its advocacy of fundamentalist religious doctrine, in fact it is written by someone who is not at all socially libertarian and far from having any self-doubt.

However that brutality can occasionally manifest as a refreshing approach to issues seen as taboo, and sometimes the site comes up with a story that I would not see anywhere else but that is relevant to my libertarian and sceptical philosophy.

One such story is on the subject of education, and pulled from the LA Times. It appears that charter schools in California can be run independently of government control while being funded by the government. The article, in the staunchly Democrat-supporting LA Times, takes the case of a school that refuses to follow the blind, unmtested policies of the educational establishment, left-wing, "inclusive" and multi-cultural. In fact their advert for teaching staff could not be more plain, "We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply".

It is worth reading the whole article, but in summary the school is run on strict and traditional lines with strong discipline, with poor teachers being fired, with no sympathy for laziness, drug taking or the concerns of unions. In other words it is run on the lines that many European Socialists and US Liberals would condemn as being authoritarian.

Of course the school is one of the best in the district, despite having an intake of mostly poor children, many from ethnic backgrounds which tend to do poorly in other state schools. Not only are pupils' achievements vastly higher than they would expect elsewhere but those ethnic variations in achievement disappear when the same is expected of everyone.

So what is my point? Does this not show my proclaimed libertarian politics to be flawed?

I would disagree. School pupils are children. They are not old enough to make all their own decisions. Their freedom will come from the ability to make their own decisions, and that will come from experience and knowledge. As they get older experience and knowledge increase and they can gradually take their birthright of freedom. Refusing to give a child discipline and learning is not liberating, it is a dreadful way of restricting their futures.

Of course the success of the school casts doubt on almost every educational trend of the last 40 years, and suggests that "diversity" and multi-culturalism damages the people it claims to help, in this case those black and hispanic children under performing in normal US state schools. It gives evidence to support the British Conservative Party education policy, and to suggest that Barack Obama is going to do terrible damage with his policies for education in Washington DC.