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Bishop Hill Apr 8, 2015 Children Climate: solar To paraphrase Ignatius Loyola: Give me child while he is still at school and I can make him think the way I think he should.
TM [LInk repaired]
Update 8.40am 12 April 2015
It is alarming to see that the Australians schools are at it too, in what appears to be a more organised way
See the article from Quadrant on GWPF
Bishop Hill Apr 1, 2010 Children Climate: other Journals Nature is launching a new cross-disciplinary climate change journal.
Nature Climate Change will publish original research across the physical and social sciences on a monthly basis and will strive to forge and synthesize interdisciplinary research. As such, it will be the first Nature branded journal to publish peer-review content from the social sciences community.
I've left a comment asking if they are going to require authors to submit data and code with their manuscripts.
Bishop Hill Aug 11, 2009 Children Education Home education The exodus of home-educating families from England seems to have begun, with Scotland apparently the favoured destination. The Guardian today carries a report about one family who have decided to head for Ayrshire without waiting for Ed Balls to put the Badman proposals into law. This is of course just one family, but from the tone of the article it does seem as if this does represent the tip of an iceberg.
An influx of free-minded people into Scotland could be an important opportunity. It is quite possible that the majority will end up in the central belt, simply because this is where the jobs and housing are. Families will also want to maintain their links to England and travel is obviously much easier if you can get to Edibburgh or Glasgow. If a concentration of home-ed families does develop in the central belt it could have some rather profound consequences.
For a start, HE would become much more likely to be something that ordinary people came across in day-to-day life. It would become much more normal. People would be much more likely to consider it as an option for their own families. Normalisation would remove a huge barriet to the HE movement and numbers could swell accordingly. This growth would then feed back on itself and boost numbers still further. The effects of this movement on the idea of schooling would also be interesting. Several people around the blogosphere have discussed the idea of denormalising the whole concept of schooling and a growth in HE could cause just this.
Another impact would be that a concentration of HE parents would have much more influence on local authorities. Having fled government intrusion in England they would presumably be vigorous in protecting their rights once safely installed north of the border. And this would not only apply in the education sphere. An influx of people who cared about civil liberties and the right to be left alone might also have an important influence on the wider political landscape. Many readers here will know of the Free State Project, a plan to "invade" the American state of New Hampshire with large numbers of libertarian-inclined people. It would be rather exciting if Ed Balls inadvertently diverted Scotland from its socialist path through a piece of socialist legislation.
Clouds do have silver linings.
Bishop Hill Apr 16, 2009 Children Education Home education Once upon a time, there was a Baroness. When surveying her kingdom of schools and teachers, she came across a small community of parents who had legally opted to retain their independence...
Bishop Hill Apr 10, 2009 Children Education Libertarianism Further to the previous posting, there's a story in the Times today of a mother who lost the plot and struck her child with a hairbrush. The boy, who is only 8, has now been taken into care. Without knowing the full details it's hard to be certain, but it sounds, well, mad.
And there does seem to be a bit of a dilemma for the mother here. If the boy doesn't get to school she's jailed for allowing him to truant. But if she uses physical force to make him go, she gets her child taken into care. I suppose there must be something short of hitting him that she could have tried, but at the end of the day it's still physical coercion.
Bishop Hill Apr 10, 2009 Children Education Libertarianism There's a brilliant post at renegade parent on the subject of violence and children in which Lisa takes libertarians to task for advocating traditional approaches to child-rearing (enforced schooling, traditional subjects, corporal punishment and so on) which are, on the face of it, not exactly in accordance with libertarian ideals of self-ownership and non-initiation of violence.
I'm sympathetic to many of Lisa's points. For example, she says that children should follow their own interests and we have certainly found that putting educational materials in the way of the kids has been an easy way to get them to learn things - they simply pick them up and absorb them when they are ready, with Spanish, Geography and History proving very popular. I agree that children are not inherently stupid, untrustworthy or lazy - they are highly intelligent on the whole. I think they just don't know very much. (See the difference?).
It's also worth pointing out, however, that just because someone advocates schools run along certain lines, doesn't mean that they support schooling per se. The decision to school children is effectively made for us by government when they tax us to support school-based education. Those who can afford to HE regardless (or are willing to make the personal financial sacrifice to do so, or who can bring themselves to live off benefits while doing so) are a minority. So if we are effectively forced into having schools, the question then becomes "how do we best get them to work", to which the answer might well be "traditional subjects, rote learning" and so on. I've written before about how coercion breeds coercion and this is another example of the same thing.
But Lisa's objection to corporal punishment is a mistake. There is nothing in libertarianism that says that harsh punishments are not permitted. Libertarians are against initiation of violence, but are quite comfortable with "giving as good as one gets", and then some. Corporal punishment in fact is probably the most liberal approach to retributive justice there is. So when it comes to child rearing, I would have thought that "physical chastisement" is quite appropriate in certain circumstances. For example, when little Jonny bashes little Jane, and particularly if the social niceties of bashing have already been explained to little him, it would convey an important lesson about the real world. After all if we accept that children are intelligent human beings (which we do) then surely we have to accept that they have to take responsibility for their actions?
That said, use of corporal punishment for non-violent transgressions such as "answering back" is probably wrong. Once though, I applied my hand to bottom of one of the offspring for running across a road without looking. Did I do wrong? There's a question here of legitimate authority and its transgression that I need to get my head around. In the meantime, there's plenty to talk about.
Bishop Hill Apr 1, 2009 Children Liberalism Libertarianism There's an interesting post and a good comments thread over at Letters from a Tory. It will be of interest to my home educating readers.
Bishop Hill I wonder what the kids learned in school today?
According to one of my readers (to whom I'm grateful for the tip) some of them (and I'm relieved to say none of mine) have been learning about...the same thing they learn about all the rest of the time - yes folks you've guessed it - environmentalism.
There's a toe-tapping new musical for primary kids to put on for their parents - it's called Eddie the Penguin Saves The World and it's about (yes, you guessed right again) global warming! (Tada!)
(Actually that's a bit of a surprise - I could have sworn it was Al Gore that saved the world). Anyway, let's find out about Eddie...
Eddie the penguin discovers that the world he lives in is changing and that the ice is melting. He decides to take his family to find a new home at the North Pole, where he meets Peggy the polar bear and discovers that human beings are causing the ice to melt. Eddie goes on a mission to save the planet and let the world know how they can change things for the better.
This fantastic new musical from Niki Davies is a must for any school investigating ecological and environmental issues. Songs can be used in conjunction with the script or stand alone.
Science education has certainly moved on since my day.
At the bottom of this post you should be able to find a sample from the show, helpfully provided by the publishers, Out of the Ark Music. The jaunty number I've picked for your delight is "The Melting Song"
The icebergs where we like to play are melting, melting away
Drip, drop, drip, drop, drip, drop.
and although I haven't copied it over, you might also enjoy "The Recycling Song"
Don't put your cardboard in the trash
Put it in a box, you can do it in a flash
Those of you who want more can visit Out of the Ark yourselves and enjoy more samples from the show, including the smash hits "Trees" and "One World" together with the bonus tracks "Use it again" and "Turn off the tap".
I bet you can hardly wait.
Bishop Hill Mar 2, 2009 Children Civil liberties The government is lying.
That's not news, of course. Babies puke, teenagers mope, and politicians tell you any old cack they think they can get away with.
So what are they up to this time? According to a report by ARCH (Action on Rights for Children), the government has been telling local authorities that children from "around the age of 12" can usually give their consent to the sharing of personal information across government departments. Some local authorities have responded by telling their staff that from the age of 12, it is lawful for children to disclose information about themselves, their parents and their families without their parents' knowledge.
It turns out however that this advice is not actually a reflection of the law. It's more like wishful thinking, both on the part of politicians and civil servants. There is one minor upside to all this deceit, and that is that individual civil servants could apparently be held personally responsible if they follow up on the government's advice and start sharing data with only the children's consent. It's rare to find anyone in the public sector being held responsible for anything (it's called "democratic accountability") and a few penpushers being flung in the clink would be sure to encourager les autres.
Is it just me, or is this just a bit uncomfortably reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, with children encouraged to inform on their parents by an overweening state?
Bishop Hill Feb 22, 2009 Children Civil liberties In the brave new world of [Every Child Matters] parents are almost superfluous and completely interchangeable. They do feature on the pictoral explanation of a child's life, but they appear to have equal status to the 'third sector' and are placed further away from the child than:
- Maternity and Primary Health;
- Children's Centres;
- Extended Schools;
- Integrated Youth Services;
- Lead Professionals;
- Specialist Services;
- Multi-agency Locality Teams;
- The Team Around the Child;
- The Common Assessment Framework [opens pdf]; and
- ContactPoint.
Bishop Hill Jan 29, 2009 Children Civil liberties Home education The Hitchens piece posted just before this one highlights the role of the NSPCC in supporting the government's attack on the right to home educate. (In passing I should mention that the NSPCC gets about £14m a year from government, making it clearly a fake charity. Their directors also appear to be overpaid).
The organisation's head of policy, one Diana Sutton, is quoted as saying
We welcome the Government’s decision to review the guidance on home education. We believe the existing legislation and guidance on elective home education is outdated. We support the view set out by the London (LA) Children’s Safeguarding Leads network that the government should review the legislation to balance the parents’ rights to home educate their children, the local authorities’ duty to safeguard children and the child’s right to protection. We welcome the fact that this review will look at where local authorities have concerns about the safety and welfare, or education, of a home educated child and what systems are in place to deal with those concerns.
I don't think there can be any doubt where they think the balance lies. In the realm of home education the NSPCC's aims cannot be met without crushing a fundamental civil liberty -- that of being left alone to bring children up how one wishes. They cannot become involved with this kind of decision without becoming overtly political and becoming a threat to our freedoms. In fact, the aims of the NSPCC are probably wholly incompatible with civil liberties. Let me explain.
Sean Gabb wrote an interesting article about the perils of trying to prevent crime - what he calls "prior restraint" some years ago. The particular case that he highlighted was that of drink driving, and how efforts to prevent it had undermined the liberal traditions of this country: suddenly people who had previously been able to go about their business unmolested were subject to random searches - breath tests - without even the excuse of probable cause. Overwhelmingly breath tests are negative - 87% according to Gabb, a fact that demonstrates clearly the indiscriminate nature of the searches. Looking back it's hard not to see the criminalisation of drink driving as the start of the decline of British liberties although gun owners might point to the Firearms Act of 1902.
Looking around us, it's easy to see a general pattern. Crime prevention has an unpleasant tendency to lead to authoritarianism. We can see it in the database state, in data snooping and in a myriad of other facets of life in modern Britain. This is a difficult concept for people to grasp, but if there is to be a general campaign for civil liberties in the UK then it is a question that is going to have to be addressed. Liberarians of the right will tend to have an instinctive grasp of these issues, but those on the left are going to find it much harder to reconcile themselves to the idea that the costs of prior restraint may in fact be outweighing the benefits. Will will have to wait and see whether they can do it.
Meanwhile, the NSPCC, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, has to ask itself how it can acheive its aims without destroying any more civil liberties. As I've hinted above, I'm not entirely sure that there is very much they can do. They can help children whose parents are abusive - by providing helplines and rehabilitating children who have been removed from their parents and so on. But this is not prevention - rather it is dealing with children who are already victims of cruelty. Once the NSPCC starts getting involved with actual prevention then they cross the line into becoming Big Brother, or at least of encouraging facilitating the creation of a Big Brother state. At this point they start to become a danger to a liberal society.
I'm not sure that anyone at the NSPCC actually understands this. Until they make it clear that they do, and that their role is nothing to do with prevention, I think you should send your money elsewhere.
Bishop Hill Jan 9, 2008 Children Donald Clark points out to a short video at the TED site which is well worth a look. Donald summarises the ideas behind the lecture from Gever Tulley entitled "Five dangerous things you should let your kids do":
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2007 Children There's a small park, just over the road from the episcopal palace. We use it as a kind of extension to the garden whenever we can, since our own back yard is a bit small for the kids now.
Mostly it's fine, but on all too many weekends the ground around one or more of the pieces of play apparatus are a sea of broken glass, the result of some of the local yoof relieving their boredom. Strangely enough I sympathise with them in some ways. This is a rural village, and there's literally nothing for teenagers to do on a Saturday night. Even town, which is a half-hour walk away, has nothing. Living in the country is great for small children, but for disaffected teens it is probably a nightmare that they can't wait to end.
My own childhood was in suburbia, but in many ways we had the same problems; no money, and precious few facilities. It only got better at around the age of sixteen when I was taken aback when my father suggested, in response to my regular whine about being bored, that I get myself down to the pub for a drink.
And how right he was. Suddenly we were able to join the adult world, and once you knew which pubs wouldn't ask too many questions you could be pretty sure of a night's fun whenever you wanted it. It's a way of doing things which just doesn't exist any longer, now that the police are in and out of the pubs checking for underage drinkers. Back in my day, teenagers went off to grown-up pubs and had a few pints and nobody batted an eyelid. The bars were full of adults, and if you were misbehaving you would be thrown out. Essentially you were an adult until you stepped out of line, at which point you suddenly became an child under adult supervision. It was a civil society way of dealing with the problem. You soon learned that keeping your head down and drinking quietly was the best way not to attract attention - you were taught to drink in a (relatively) civilised fashion, .
I don't mean to suggest that it was a perfect arrangement - some people are always going to step out of line - but I sometimes wonder if it was better than the current arrangement, where teenagers sup buckfast on the park benches and end the evening by smashing the bottles against the baby swings.
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2007 Children This weekend, Mrs Bishop escaped to England for a girly shopping weekend, leaving Mr Bishop with three baby bishops. Since Granny Bishop was on holiday too, this could have been a struggle, but the possibility of having to entertain the nippers single-handed was averted by dint of inviting lots of schoolfriends and their parents round.
Amazing fact though - both of the families invited were surprised, nay shocked, that Mr and Mrs Bishop allowed their children to climb trees, and freely admitted that they were far too fearful to allow such dangerous behaviour. I wasn't aware of any other uses for trees, myself. I didn't tempt fate by letting on that one of the baby Bishops rides his bicycle without a helmet, and once managed to ride at high speed into a brick wall in the process. I will probably be reported to social services any day now.
On a similar theme, Instapundit has been blogging regularly about the Dangerous Book for Boys, which looks set to be a bestseller over on that side of the pond, and if Glenn Reynolds has it right, the start of a pardigm shift in the way boys are raised.
