Toeing the line

Booker's column today tells the story of an A' Level student who dared to question the AGW consensus in his exam. He received a grade E. As Booker explains:

His mother then paid £60 for his paper to be re-marked. It was judged to be “articulate, well-structured” and clearly well-informed, but again he was marked down with “E” for fail.

The UK education system is designed to produce not educated young people, but people who are willing to pay lip-service to the socialist shibboleth du jour.

Biodiversity and the education system

My daughter started at high school a few weeks back and the prospect of doing proper lessons in specialised subjects has been a welcome prospect for her. However, her introduction to science has been interesting to say the least.

The Scottish curriculum is now entirely project-based so, where my first high-school science lesson took in atomic theory and the periodic table, first-years at our local high school will be learning about biodiversity.

This will be the focus for the whole of the first term.

The idea of the project-based curriculum is that different skills and techniques can be hung off the topic - so far they have made a trap for creepy-crawlies and they look as if they are going to look at sampling techniques in coming days. But from my admittedly somewhat distant perspective it looks as if systematic knowledge is going to be largely absent from the school day. Children will learn skills but will have less of a grasp of the science. It is perhaps a curriculum that will produce laboratory technicians rather than scientists.

What do readers here think?

Climate lessons on Scotland

The Climate Lessons blog, run by BH regular John Shade, has republished an article from the Scottish Mail on Sunday, looking at how climate change is being taught in Scottish schools.

It's scary stuff.

The Education Secretary and s77

This is interesting. Left foot forward is reporting that the education secretary Michael Gove is being investigated for possible breaches of the FOI Act.

Presumably, even if Gove has been breaching the Act, no prosecution will be possible because of the six-month statute of limitations that readers here know applies to such cases.

So I guess Gove, like everyone at CRU, will carry right on as if nothing had happened.

Glyndebourne's turbine

The opera house at Glyndebourne has installed a new wind turbine, a story covered in gratuitous detail by the Guardian.

"That is just so beautiful," sighed Brenda Sherrard, as Sir David Attenborough and Verity Cannings, deputy head girl at Ringmer community college, wrestled with the green ribbon wrapped around the 44-metre mast of the first wind turbine to power a major UK arts institution.

I was struck by this quote from the aforementioned deputy head girl at the local college.

I don't get how anyone can object to it. In a few years' time they won't even notice it. In another few years, if we don't do something about climate change, this view won't be here anyway because we'll all be under water.

It would be inappropriate, I think, to criticise Ms Cannings, who is, after all, rather young. But what do her extraordinary ideas tell us about the education system in this country? And should we be concerned that the Guardian reports this nonsense?

A new climate science player

There has been a certain amount of excitement on upholder blogs this week - the cause being the news that the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has decided to involve itself in the climate change wars in the USA. NCSE has been at the forefront of efforts to keep intelligent design out of the classroom so this latest move represents a broadening of its focus.

Their website incorporates a shiny new climate change section, including a Climate Change 101 page. From there comes this paragraph on detection and attribution:

To ensure the accuracy of the models at projecting future climate trends, the models are often run backwards in time to “retrodict” past climate changes, and then compared with paleoclimate observations. The models through this process have become remarkably accurate and give the climate research community confidence that the future projections are robust.

Remarkably accurate? Is that right? And do we think they have portrayed the uncertainties in a reasonable fashion? Or in any fashion at all?

Smaller world

In the last post, we noted that the odd coincidence that one of the BBC TV shows that was illicitly funded by green groups was fronted by a journalist who later on illicitly accepted a story from the Outside Organisation, thus helping out the University of East Anglia over its Climategate problem.

Here's another odd coincidence.

Click to read more ...

Ways of thinking

There is a petition doing the rounds to have children learn programming skills at school. John Graham-Cumming is discussing it with his readers here.

I've pondered in the past the different ways of thinking about the world and approaching problems and wondered if these might be the basis for a curriculum fit for the twenty-first century. (The learning-free curriculum that is being introduced here in Scotland is certainly not doing the job).

For example, I think that economics is a tool for understanding the world that gives important insights into the way the world works. Indeed in one of the Baltic states (Estonia, if I remember rightly) economics is a compulsory subject at high school. Formal logic is another area that I think is important.

In the same way, I think that programming is a way of approaching problems that has a more general application than simply writing computer code. So I reckon the petition is a Good Thing.

Birbalsingh

Today I was in Edinburgh for a talk by the education reformer Katharine Birbalsingh. This was one very passionate lady - there was an intensity to her that at times verged on the frightening. But there was no doubt that she had the measure of the problems in the education system. I was struck by the point she repeatedly made that good ideas were being rejected by middle class liberals and the education establishment simply because they were ideas being pushed by conservatives. As she seemed to be saying "I hate the Tories" is a slogan that comes with a heavy price tag attached, and it is a price that is largely being borne by poor people in the inner cities.

The solution, in the Birbalsingh view, is free schools - independently run state schools operating free from local government control. She may be right, but I have my doubts as to whether this is going to be enough. 

How's that new AGW communication strategy working out for you?

A snippet from Damian Thompson's blog at the Telegraph:

This week, I met a 17‑year-old pupil from a girls’ public school that, in the past, has been more famous for turning out Sloaney husband-hunters than for filling its pupils with useless scientific facts. But the stereotype is out of date, it seems. The GCSE syllabus ranges far and wide, taking in the physics, chemistry, biology, geopolitics, economics and ethics of climate change. In English lessons, girls “debate” (ie, heartily endorse) the proposition that global warming will kill us all. And guess what topic has been chosen for French conversation?

But parents shouldn’t worry that their girls will turn into eco-loons. “Honestly,” says my informant, “we’re all, like, sooo bored with climate change. I can’t wait to leave school to escape.”

Climate change removed from curriculum

Apparently climate change is to be removed from the UK's national curriculum, with it being left up to schools as to whether they teach anything about it or not.

Tim Oates, whose wide-ranging review of the curriculum for five- to 16-year-olds will be published later this year, said it should be up to schools to decide whether – and how – to teach climate change, and other topics about the effect scientific processes have on our lives.

In an interview with the Guardian, Oates called for the national curriculum "to get back to the science in science". "We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don't date," he said. "We are not taking it back 100 years; we are taking it back to the core stuff. The curriculum has become narrowly instrumentalist."

This is undoubtedly correct, although those who see schools as an opportunity to indoctrinate children with their own views are undoubtedly going to squeal a great deal. Mind you, as someone who finds the whole idea of a national curriculum rather Orwellian, I can't get too excited about the news.

Circular funding

Times Higher Ed reports the raising of university eyebrows at the decision by Imperial College to stop paying subscriptions to CASE - the Campaign for Science and Engineering.

Times Higher Education understands that Imperial College London previously paid an annual subscription of about £3,000 to the lobby group, which was widely credited with helping to secure a ring-fenced, flat-cash research budget in last October's Comprehensive Spending Review.

Click to read more ...

Bureaucrats demand more bureaucracy

It's a surprise, isn't it?

A think tank called the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has issued a report calling for regulation of private universities. According to the BBC:

Anthony McClaran, head of the Quality Assurance Agency - the UK's higher education standards watchdog - welcomed the report.

If you take a look at the HEPI site it's largely run by university people (although some outsiders, including Lord Oxburgh, are involved). If you look at its accounts you discover that much of its funding comes from the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) - it is a fake charity in other words.

So what you see here is the Higher Education bureaucracy attempting to burden private sector providers with as much regulation as possible in order to prevent them from competing. The regulators who will benefit from all the extra work then pipe up and say what a good idea it is. It's naked self-interest and there is not even a hint of the truth on the BBC article.

Public self-servants eh?

(If I had time I'd take a closer look at HEPI - it appears that its chief excutive went from being head of policy at HEFCE to being head of HEPI (on £130k per annum), a body which we have seen derives much of its funding from HEFCE. )

Echoes of Oxburgh

Nick Cohen in the Guardian writes about the scandal of the London School of Economics' acceptance of funding from the Gaddafi regime and the questions that are being asked over its awarding of a degree to the Libyan leader's son. There is an interesting twist though:

The university has appointed Lord Woolf – a retired lord chief justice, no less – to investigate Giddens, Brahimi and their colleagues. He will find out what happened to the hundreds of thousands of pounds the university took from Gaddafi's son, Saif, and whether it was in return for a Phd and academic support for his crime family's rule of Libya. The "independent inquiry" will establish the "full facts", the university says, as it drops heavy hints that it is time to "move on".

Willing though the amnesiac media always are to jump to the next scandal, this story isn't over yet. No one outside the LSE has noticed that Lord Woolf may face a conflict of interest. Some would argue that if he were still a judge in a court of law, he would have to tell the parties to a case that they had the right to ask him to stand down.

Somebody remind me how the Guardian dealt with the appointment of Oxburgh to deal with the UEA inquiry...

School brainwashing works

The BBC has just published the results of an opinion poll of schoolchildren. Asked to rank the biggest risks facing the world today, children seemed impressed by arguments for catastrophic global warming, placing it second behind terrorism, with 49% suitably scared.

I guess the relentless propaganda pumped out by schools and the BBC has had some effect.