Rob's Blog

On Comment is Free, Ben Goldacre has a good article about children’s ability to spot bullshit. It starts with an example.

Brain Gym is a schools programme I’ve been writing on since 2003. It’s a series of elaborate physical movements with silly pseudoscientific justifications: you wiggle your head back and forth because that gets more blood into your frontal lobes for clearer thinking; you contort your fingers together to improve some unnamed “energy flow”; they are keen on drinking water, because “processed foods” – I’m quoting the Brain Gym Teacher’s Manual – “do not contain water.” You pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for Brain Gym, and it’s still done in hundreds of state schools across the UK.

This week I got an email from a science teacher about a 13-year-old pupil. Both have to remain anonymous. This pupil wrote an article about Brain Gym for her school paper, explaining why it’s nonsense: the essay is respectful, straightforward, and factual. But the school decided they couldn’t print it, because it would offend teachers in the junior school who use Brain Gym.

First of all, wow. That’s the exact opposite of education. It’s often said that schools take bright students and beat the curiosity out of them. This is a concrete example of that happening.

Goldacre cites more examples of children working things out for themselves and adults attempting to suppress them. (It’s one reason I love the sitcom Outnumbered: the seven-year-old character Karen is always beautifully picking apart the illogicality of the adults’ explanations.)

Then this:

If every school taught the basics – randomised trials, blinding, cohort studies, and why systematic reviews are better than cherrypicking your evidence – it would help everyone navigate the world, and learn some of the most important ideas in the whole of science.

I’d go much further. Children deserve the gifts of the Enlightenment: to be taught how to think. Schools will never do this.

We are moving house. I often confound my friends who ask me whether I have researched the schools in the area we are moving to, by answering that I think the kids outside them don’t look too feral so I’m not that worried. What about league tables and Ofsted reports? Who cares? If schools in Britain are failing to teach children how to think, and these measures don’t capture this fact, then they are useless.

I see school as daycare: a place for socialising and having fun, and maybe picking up some interesting bits of trivia. My son will be taught how to think, which is all that is really needed, but not by his school.

I’m starting to collect articles along these lines, either for him to read when he is older or to keep these ideas fresh in my mind. The Goldacre article will be included, as will this Eric Raymond article about fitting lines to data.

Via Bishop Hill, an exasperated father doesn’t know how to deal with his son’s questions about a school exam.

21. Which of the following three do you think will actually happen? Write a paragraph to explain your answer.

a) We’ll worry and blame ourselves for climate change for thousands of years.

b) Fossil fuels will run out and renewable energy will save us.

c) The oceans will evaporate as the Earth heats up and humans will die.

The question is from a text book from the AQA GCSE Science Core course. None of the possible answers make any sense. And the dilemma: explain to the son the real answer, or help him do what is needed to pass the test?

The father explains further in comments:

As any parent of a teen knows, there are a bunch of issues swirling here, from how they ‘look’ to their mates and to their teachers, to what ‘works’ to ‘pass’ now.

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At the very minimum, I now see my already stretched kids having to carry two sets of competing information in their brimming brains: that which ‘the establishment’ demands to ‘pass’, and that which I now feel obliged to share to encourage them to also think.

I think his problem might be that he’s left things a little late. His kids already think this stupid exam is important. But it’s only really important in that they are playing a game about how to get the right bits of paper to make it easier to impress other people who hold such bits of paper in too much esteem. That can be helpful, but you might as well be honest with your kids about the game from the start.

The other thing is to teach critical thinking and a healthy disrespect for authority from an early age. I mean, you have to be careful about it because you want your kids to respect authority that’s worth respecting (don’t run across the road without looking) and they might find it hard to tell the difference. But don’t underestimate them, especially when that means hiding from them such important information as that teachers (or anyone) can be wrong.

They’re not idiots, they’ll figure it out anyway. But if their parents insist that school is vitally Important and Teachers are to be Respected and you must Be Good and Pay Attention, then they’re likely to be all conflicted and confused when faced with contradictory evidence that the teacher is stupid and the exam doesn’t make any sense.

Far better to say, right from the outset, “look, you have to go to school because your mother and I have to go to work so we can’t look after you all day. You’ll learn some interesting things and make friends and it is supposed to be fun. You have to obey the rules while you’re there because you’re in someone else’s building and they get to set the rules, even if they are stupid rules. But don’t believe everything you are taught on face value. You have to think about things for yourself, because people who run schools are not necessarily the cleverest people and are not always right. At times you might find that the answer the examiner is looking for and the right answer are not always the same thing. Don’t worry about it; the world is like that. We’ll figure it out as we go along.”

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.