David Mitchell further expounds about the reluctance of children’s TV makers to include cultural references that their target audience might not get. He points out that this is a failure to educate, and further that children (and people in general) enjoy learning new stuff. And these days, a cultural reference you don’t get is an opportunity to google it.
I’m also rather fond of his rant about getting your hair cut, which I also hate.
A man on the BBC suggests cutting benefits and starving people into going to work. I’m impressed.
It’s Lord Digby Jones, a “plain speaking captain of industry”, talking to a group of “NEETs” — young people not in employment, education or training. The whole episode of Panorama is on iPlayer.
Or on your local airwaves:
An opening clip is of Digby Jones asking the NEETs, “what do I as a taxpayer pay you every week?”
Having watched the programme which features four young lads, it seems fairly clear to me that the two who really want to work are now working, and the two who don’t seem so sure about the idea are not. I think the former would be working anyway without the government “new deal” scheme, and the latter are only discouraged by job-seekers allowance and, in one case, incapacity benefit for being depressed.
I wonder if it is a coincidence that the two out of work are posh, and the other two are not. The programme also features a young Polish man who came to the UK to work for minimum wage and now owns the business that he used to work in. He says he finds it hard to employ British people, in part because their expectations are too high.
The programme concludes with one of the posh, out of work boys’ parents arguing that the government should force their son to work for his benefits. At least then he’d be forced to get out of bed and his life would have structure. This is what in the USA is called workfare. Lord Digby Jones seems to think this is a good idea, too. I doubt it would do any good. The work would either be useless or it would displace real workers. The unmotivated son would not be motivated by doing useless work he didn’t see the point of. He’s far more likely to be motivated by the family that would have to look after him if he didn’t get welfare payments at all.
I’m also left with the impression that the notion of “employers”, “employees” and “jobs” is part of the problem. You must get a job. If I don’t have a job I have no self esteem. And so on. In a society with more petty capitalism, where you didn’t need a degree in red tape to start a small business, there might be more places for people to fit in, and more small businesses able to employ young, inexperienced workers as apprentices. Not just to “get a job”, but to be able to start out on their own.
It’s not about getting a job, it’s about making your way in the world by doing things for people so that they do things for you, like cogs in a machine. Minimum wages, welfare and employment law are just glue that gunks up the mechanism.
Bill Gates went on vacation with a friend and visited a university library where they discovered Richard Feynman’s Messenger lectures on the laws of nature. They thought that everyone should see the lectures. Twenty years later, Gates has bought the rights and put the lectures on the Internet. This is Project Tuva.
It’s worth watching the introductory video in which Bill Gates enthuses about what makes Feynman such a good lecturer. The video player requires Silverlight, and has various extras such as pictures, links and text notes relating to various points in the lectures.
Thanks to zapopaul on YouTube who left a comment pointing to the project. Either I have been asleep or this should have been publicised more.
Frank Furedi, the professor of sociology at University of Kent, is great. He’s written some great stuff about academic freedom, risk averseness, bureaucracy, distrust of parents, and even climate change.
But his latest essay, about why throwing money at education won’t make it better, doesn’t quite join things up.
He’s right that fancy buildings and facilities don’t make education better. He’s right that government meddling in education removes the education in favour of politics. He’s right that the Conservatives will be just as dismal as Labour. But…
Those who support the Conservative Party’s policy of educational choice point to various successful schools that are run by groups of parents or private educators. There is no doubt that schools freed from centralised control and run by highly motivated parents or educators can achieve impressive results. Over the past century, numerous experimental projects have shown that committed parents and teachers can succeed in outperforming the mainstream school sector. However, their achievements are not testament to the virtues of ‘choice’ or the workings of the educational market, but rather to the enthusiasm and involvement of a self-selected group of concerned individuals.
[...]
In principle there is nothing wrong with private education. Many of the institutions in the UK’s independent education sector (though not all of them) provide a high standard of education. In part, their achievements are a result of their ability to insulate themselves from the worst impacts of government intervention. But it is not their private status that guarantees their success.
[...]
The antidote to the centralised state control of education is not to privatise education, but to establish a public school system freed from bureaucratic influence.
It is the very private nature of private schools that frees them from centralised control and bureaucratic influence. I don’t believe you can ever get that as long as the money comes from the government because it will always give them an excuse to meddle. So yes, private education doesn’t guarantee anything because it can theoretically be poor if it’s not done by the right people, but it works the other way too. Really motivated groups of parents can achieve anything. Marginally motivated groups of parents will be scuppered by rules and regulations and meddling. Being good at educating doesn’t guarantee anything as long as the government gets a say in what you do.
The problem is too deep to be fixed by some new educational policy that gives schools more freedom. We need to get the government out of the education business completely.
On a Samizdata post about the Tories’ failure to capitalise on the recent loss of faith in climate science, Nick Davis comments:
At school, my 9 year old and his classmates are learning all about ranforests.
Part of his homework for the weekend is research: “Find as many reasons for the destruction of the rainforests as you can. Record them in an informative way“.
What an interesting question? What an open-minded teacher!
I have given him a handful of pointers: to raise a country out of poverty by export led growth; to clear land for industrialisation or habitation; to provide building materials; to clear land for farming.
His reply is that I have misunderstood the teacher’s instruction. He is supposed to be finding out why it has happened/is happening, not why it may be a Good Thing (TM).
He’s either too clever for me, or too indoctrinated! My explanation about eco-imperialism (why should we deny them the ability to enjoy western comforts?) was met with “if they all start to use computers and the internet, that’ll use lots of energy which will destroy the planet“.
Following our discussion he has therefore written this: “There is no reason for destroying the rainforests”.
I think I need to dig up Alvin Rabushka’s book (which I have lent out or lost or both) or Peter Bauer for some inspiration. Anyone any other ideas?
UPDATE: Just remembered that Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist has a discussion on this issue. And my well-thumbed copy is in easy reach…
William H Stoddard makes this valid snipe about “[I]f they all start to use computers and the internet, that’ll use lots of energy which will destroy the planet.”:
That kid’s mastered the green agenda, all right: We have to keep Them poor. It’s for their own good, of course.
Manuel II Paleologos chips in with:
Nick – I was revising GCSE RE with my eldest last week and came across a statement categorically stating that “poverty” has got worse in the world since the Brandt report in 1980.
What can they mean? Bring back Carter and Callaghan!
It’s hard to know where to start deconstructing this argument, but I struggled to think of any measure at all where this was true.
My eldest is a bit autistic so I tried not to confuse him too much, but Parents’ Evening is going to be fun.
Ages ago, the englishman was complaining about his son’s homework being set by Christian Aid, and being all about how climate change is making life hard for poor people.
All of this is of much interest to me, as I’m expecting to be sending a child of my own to school in, ooh, about five years or so. Nick Davis’s comment in particular is interesting because his son argues back. Now, Nick Davis’s son presumably lives with Nick Davis who is the sort of person who leaves comments on Samizdata. I’m kind of hoping that it should be possible to teach children about critical thinking; and that teachers are not necessarily the ultimate authority on things; and that in any case authority is not to be trusted all the time; and even that at school there are sometimes forces at work that mean you may be taught some distortion of the truth. They may not understand everything at once, but I would hope that someone with an interest in the world and armed with some concept of critical thinking should be able to escape even a state education unscathed.
But there is Nick Davis’s son. And there are people who tell me that children are very much influenced by their (not necessarily so critically thinking) peers.
“If they all start to use computers and the internet, that’ll use lots of energy which will destroy the planet.”
I would like to think that no child of mine could say such a thing. Of course, it could be that the boy was just winding his dad up. No doubt my children are going to rebel by becoming vegetarians and I will have to watch them starve (or cook their own food); and they will certainly learn very quickly how to wind me up I am sure.
But it makes me wonder.
When I was about 15 or 16, a guest speaker came into our science class and talked about the exponential nature of growth and how it wasn’t sustainable. He talked about how ever n years the amount of oil extracted doubled and at some point we’d run out of oil. He equated this with economic growth and concluded that in our lifetimes we would have to work towards an economy that didn’t grow any more.
It was propaganda or indoctrination right there in the classroom and I still get angry about it when I think about it. I wish I could find out who he was. I imagine he worked for some “charity” or other and managed to worm his way into schools on some educational pretense.
Anyway, I wish that way back then I’d had to hand these comments from Dishman on Brian’s Samizdata post about greens and technology:
It seems to me that over time, our wealth has become less and less physical.
Consider a wafer of polycarbonate. I’ve paid anywhere from 3 cents to $4k for a single wafer. Clearly the difference is not justified by the raw material differences between the wafers. It’s the non-physical differences that matter.
Many of us have spent hours in worlds like Norrath or Azeroth, which lack any physical existence, yet their economies are (or have been) larger than some countries.
My car was a significant expenditure for me. Of the purchase cost, less than 10% paid for raw materials. The rest was things like direct labor and even Intellectual Property.
The further we move from subsistence, the less of our economy is physical, and the more we have in non-physical. We call this shift “innovation” and “technology”.
Non-physical wealth does not pollute. Only the physical forms required to manifest it do.
By seeking to stifle innovation and technology, the greens are actually making environmental problems worse.
I think their stated objectives would be better served by seeking to maximize the ratio of non-physical to physical wealth.
Continuing the educational theme, I was intrigued by this review of a music CD for kids about science.
For Here Comes Science contains a broad, inclusive and thought-provoking tour through science in all its facets. Songs like “Science is Real” (which explains how scientific beliefs are different from beliefs in unicorns and other beliefs formed without rigorous testing) and “Put It To the Test” (possibly the best kids’ song ever written about falsifiablity in hypothesis formation) cover the basics, the big Philosophy of Science questions.
It sounds like it’s quite meaningful. And to think, last I heard of They Might Be Giants they were singing about canaries in lighthouses and bees in bodies.
Bishop Hill links to an article about how school is prison. This is a fairly obvious idea, when you think about it. All the more so with ever tougher truancy laws. Paul Graham pointed it out years ago. IanB has all sorts of problems with the idea of mass schooling.
The idea that schools as we know them might not be the best way is certainly a trending topic among blogs I read — which probably says more about the kinds of blog I read than anything else, but still.
What are the alternatives? There is homeschooling. RenegadeParent does it, and defends it against the predations of government, lately in the form of a man called Badman who wants to regulate and interfere with homeschoolers for The Sake Of The Children.
There is unschooling, which is a particular method used by some homeschoolers. This boils down to letting children do whatever they want. It turns out they like learning and all you have to do is support them and provide them with what they need.
Sudbury Valley is a school that unschools. It seems to emphasize democracy more than I would, but basically it’s a school that provides books, space, equipment and staff to help the pupils teach themselves. They run their own projects and organise their own courses, or just read or do whatever they find interesting.
I like the idea. I think it would have worked for me. I always had my own projects, like technical drawings or programming my Amstrad CPC in Basic. I would have loved to be left alone to do that stuff without having to be distracted by boring RE and PE lessons and annoying, unruly other children. And these days I’d have almost unlimited resources at my disposal, in the form of stuff I can get from the Internet (a blogger I read regularly recently made this point but I can’t for the life of me remember who or where).
There are objections I can think of, and most of them I can answer myself. What about kids who don’t want to learn? They don’t exist. If they don’t want to learn it’s because school has taught them that learning is unpleasant. What about getting a well rounded education? It’s overrated. Yeah, so I would have programmed computers all day. So what? I probably would have achieved something, like writing a half decent computer game instead of wasting time on French I’ve forgotten and pointless geography lessons about acid rain and dormitory towns. The stuff I am interested in, like tectonic plates and geology and volcanoes, I would have learnt anyway. The stuff I’m not interested in I don’t need, and to be frank I didn’t learn in school anyway because it didn’t hold my attention. I ended up becoming a computer programmer anyway. I don’t need French and PE. Maybe I’m more rounded, having absorbed a tiny amount of boring subjects, but is that more important than what I’ve lost?
What about careers? Will an unschooled child grow up to find they can’t get a job because they don’t have the right paperwork? Perhaps, but there will be employers who will hire based on skills; there is self-employment; there are venture capitalists. Who wants to work for someone who only cares about a bit of paper, anyway?
What if your child just wants to play Grand Theft Auto all day? This one is tougher. I can imagine I might have fallen into this sort of trap. I’ve had my times of just wanting to play Elite or Civilization. But then again, I was never *that* obsessive, and would eventually get bored and want to do something else. I imagine this sort of problem either rarely happens, or there are ways of dealing with it.
In any case, unschooling sounds much better than forcing children to endure tedium. No good can come of that.
Postscript: It’s everywhere; there is even a recent Slashdot article about unschooling. The discussion there rapidly turns to how schools fail the smartest kids. But it occurs to me that even the less intelligent kids will do better with unschooling because they can learn what seems more relevant to them at their own pace and will likely turn out to be not so dumb after all because they won’t be bored and just give up.
There’s also a comment from someone who was unschooled.
I’m honestly not sure how much merit this argument has:
I think those 6 hours [at school], even if the hard academia is lacking at times, are not wasted. At the very least children learn how to keep a schedule, deal with people outside their familiarity zone, and process mundane tasks. It’s not very sexy, but these skills are are very large part of even the egalitarian [sic?] among us. I have personally known homeschooled adults that were completely unprepared to do things like deal with workplace bullies, keeping track of their time for work, or see the value in something that wasn’t ‘fun’ for them.
Update: BishopHill points out that Sudbury Valley is modeled on a school in the UK called Summerhill, answering my question about whether such a school would be possible in the UK.
IanB has a couple of great articles about education. First up, what starts out as a complaint about bias in the BBCs GCSE revision guide on religious education, ends up pointing out the shoddy, patronising writing therein:
Many people think that the Christian Church is sexist. It does not treat men and women equally.Many people? How many? Who? Are they right? Well, the second sentence sorts it out for us. Yes, yes they are right. But the “many people†is jammed in there as a disclaimer. When you’re perpetrating writing so bad that it wouldn’t be tolerated on wikipedia, you’re in trouble as a writer. This is crap.
And what really bugs me to be honest (other than that the BBC are spending the TV poll tax on this shit) is the childish level of the writing in general. These articles are for GCSE students. They’re written for fifteen and sixteen year olds; young adults. Yes, I know that the GCSE replaced the GCE and CSE so that one exam could be taken by everyone from a young Einstein to the borderline retarded, but look at it. Look at it. Short sentences, no big words. Young people of this age are on the cusp of embarking on adult life. They should have a normal adult command of the english language.
Indeed. Expectations of the capabilities of sixteen-year-olds seem to be pretty low in general; it can’t be doing them any good. I hope IanB gets around to blogging his thoughts about the infantilisation of teenagers — it should be good.
But the tour de force is his article about the problem with schools, which I find very little to disagree with. He argues that schools are inefficient at teaching; that they take a students who want to learn and beat it out of them; and that the regimented and authoritarian nature of schools churns out people who submit to authority.
It’s my anecdotal experience that many people of a libertarian, or at least non-conformist, attitude, are people who never quite fell for the myth of schooling. People who were sceptical at the time, and who were self-educators who read books other than the ones set for them by their tutors. The schooling system is designed- intended- to stamp out dissent and inviduality, but however hard they try to do that some proportion of the victims will smell the rat, and not be completely beaten.
I always felt a bit like I did well in spite of school. I certainly read stuff I was interested in that wasn’t anything to do with school work. I felt like lessons I was interested in went to slowly, and that lessons I wasn’t interested in were a waste of time. I think student directed learning would have worked well on me. You could argue that I wouldn’t have had as well rounded an education, but honestly, the stuff I wasn’t interested in was, in restrospect, rubbish. I loved learning about techtonic plates and geology in geography class; hated the rubbish about the ozone layer.
We must set our sights on a future society that will consider schooling in the horrified way that people today consider child labour, a society in which people describe their forebears being forced into schools in the same tones as we describe infants despatched up chimneys or down coalmines.
It’s radical. It goes further than Brian Micklethwait has argued, I think. And I can’t find fault with it, except possibly that it neglects to address the other true purpose of schools: to keep kids out of the way.
