Pooter in a hole in a wall

I'm grateful to Carlotta for this link to a story about Sugata Mitra's famous computer in a hole in a wall experiment. He and his colleagues set up a PC with a mouse and stuck it in a hole in a wall in a slum in Delhi so that passers-by could have a go. Then they sat back to watch what happened.

The story is quite well-known, but for those who haven't heard it, what happened was that the slum children taught themselves to use the PC, and then set about teaching each other. Adults seemed to approve of their kids educating themselves in this way, but they didn't actually get involved in trying to teach the children, not did they try to learn themselves.

The story is a wonderful tribute to the innate ability of children to learn and discover things on their own, and it raises all sorts of interesting questions about why we try to educate children the way we do, or in fact, if we are actually educating them at all. Do children really need so much formal learning as they get now?

I wonder if, back in the days before state education, those who fell outside the system of private schools and tutors and dame schools and ragged schools that were the backbone of the education system in those days, ended up passing their discoveries between each other like the slum children of Delhi today. One can imagine a battered copy of Dickens being passed round the urchins, with the little ones desperate to learn their ABCs so they could share in the excitement.

There's a research project for somebody in there somewhere.

Duty of care

There was a story in the Herald the other day about a father whose daughter had not received any English tuition in the run up to her exams. Dad, a toolmaker, had employed a private tutor and having had to part with his hard-earned cash through no fault of his own had sued the council for compensation.

Rather than pay him off, as is normal in these kinds of thing, the council had turned up at the Sheriff Court and argued, apparently with a straight face, that they had no duty of care to the child.

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Connoisseurs may remember the attempts made by the Health & Safety Executive to argue that they had no duty of care to rail passengers. Likewise, the Inland Revenue have tried to absolve themselves for any responsibility for advice they give to taxpayers.

You have to just stand back in admiration at the sheer brazenness of the way in which the state can on the one hand bang you up in jail if you fail to send your children to school, while at the same time arguing that they don't actually have to do anything as menial as actually educating the little buggers once they're there.

Really, truly, the state is not your friend.

Liberal Democrat may be liberal.

There's a very good posting at LibDem Voice by someone called Christopher Leslie (wasn't he on Blue Peter once?).

Both Clegg and Cameron are right to support free schools: they offer a great chance to increase civil society, to provide better education in Britain, a greater level of plurality, and parents and children having increased choice and control in their education.

By declaring that the Conservatives will not allow firms to make a profit from the free school system, however, Cameron is failing to fully utilise the opportunities free schools could offer, and which can only be accessed by allowing profit-making into the system. This might be the tokenistic suspicion of any institution making profit from state money; a refusal to take that idea to a public he fears won’t accept it; or that he’d rather see free schools be the sole domain of NGOs - which reveals a scary amount of paternalism. Whichever is the case, Clegg should not make the same mistake.

So while the Tories are saying no to profit-making, here we have a LibDem saying that the profit motive is what will make our schools work properly. Funny times we're living in, funny times.

One of the concerns that people have over free schools is that too many of them will be run by religious extremists who will set about filling the children's heads with all sorts of dangerous nonsense (and that's different to state schools how?) My solution to this is to only allow schools that are profit-making - privatise the lot of them. When the money-making impulse comes up against the religious one, it's Mammon that will win. Bye-bye religious extremists.

It wasn't like this in my day

In my day, English Lit exams were strictly about dead white males. O' Level consisted of Shakespeare, Chaucer and GBS, and very dull it was too. Still, it gave you backbone, as well as teaching you the valuable life skill of being able to sleep with your eyes open while maintaining an expression of rapt attention. Not a bit like today's dumbed down stuff, where some of the authors are actually not men, and what is worse, some of them are still alive too! The impudence of it!

Still, say one thing for it, if you got stuck with the meaning of part of the Miller's Tale, you couldn't drop a question to Geoffrey Chaucer on his blog to find out exactly what he meant.

Brainwashing in schools

While doing a Google search, I chanced upon this site, which belongs to the Geography department at Bishop Challoner School. The school is independent, so it's up to them what they teach, but my goodness, if this is the standard of thinking they develop in their children, they wouldn't get a penny of my money.

Homework for 29/1/07 ...Produce a powerpoint presentation on what Bromley Council is doing to try and be sustainable. [...]

What must be included:

The reason why sustainability is required in Bromley.

Why we should recycle.

[...]

Not if we should recycle, or when we should recycle, but why we should recycle. The person who wrote this is clearly intellectually challenged. Do they really believe that it is always best to recycle? No matter what level of resources is required? Who would want their children taught by someone who believed such nonsense?

If you scroll down a little more you come to this:

Create a poster on Global Warming based on the movie inconvenient truth. 

(Dodgy capitalisation in original)

Or how about this:

The greatest wonder of the sea is that it's still alive.

(That's from a Greenpeace poster which is being used as a teaching aid, it seems)

I remember James Bartholemew saying that he was taking his daughter out of school because the independents were becoming infected with the shoddy standards of the state sector. It looks to me as if he was right - if I were a Bishop Challoner parent, I'd be asking for a refund.

My human right to an education voucher

The Human Rights Act says of education:

No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Personally, I have a deep philosophical conviction that the state should play no part in the education system - standard liberal stuff, per JS Mill. Unfortunately, because the state takes lots of money from me to pay for the education system that I oppose, I am unable to send my children to private school. So it looks to me as if the state is not only not respecting my right to ensure an education in conformity with my convictions, it is actively preventing me from doing so.

The remedy is simple though. I want my money back. Cash or voucher, I care not.

A "close them down" week

Last week it was "failing schools will be taken over". This week, it's "failing schools will be closed".

Almost one in five secondary schools in England are to be given a warning to improve exam results or face closure.

Just keep alternating the headlines Mr Brown, nobody will notice that you're not actually doing either. 

Next week: Failing schools will be taken over

W/C 16 June: Failing schools will be closed

W/C 23 June:  Failing schools will be taken over

W/C 30 June: Failing schools will be closed

...repeat to fade.... 

Turgid bilge

The lady in charge of education in the Numptocracy^TM, Fiona Hyslop, is trumpeting her latest endless outpouring of pointless waffle in a press release posted on the Numptocracy Webpage.

Parents have a crucial role to play in supporting children's learning and the successful implementation of Curriculum for Excellence, Cabinet Secretary for Education Fiona Hyslop said today. 

I've written before about the refusal of my children's school to allow parents to see the curriculum that's being taught, so Ms Hyslop's turgid meanderings ring pretty hollow in these 'ere parts. Having refused me, the school informed the school council (that's the board of governors to you) that a summary of the curriculum would be prepared and released to parents. This was just after Christmas. Now, they have "changed their minds" and we are told to wait until the new term starts in the autumn.

And if you believe that you'll believe anything.

So if you'll excuse me, Ms Hyslop, I think you're not actually telling the truth. I think you don't want parents playing any role in their children's education at all. 

Management by spin

The Times republishes a government press release about failing schools.

Headteachers from grammar schools are to take over the management of failing schools in their area under plans for reform in England.

The author of the piece, Alexandra Frean, who rejoices in the title of education editor, doesn't see fit to ask any questions about this announcement at all, which is surprising because the government has been saying for some time that its intention is to close down failing schools altogether. Reasonable people might wonder whether this is a change in policy or spin, or something else altogether. Ms Frean however is happy just to parrot the government line.

She goes on: 

There are 638 such [failing] schools in the country and the Government hopes to team up a significant proportion of them with grammar and other successful types of state school.

Again, this is a bit strange because there are only around 160 grammar schools in the country, so even if every grammar school head was put in charge of a failing school, the majority of failing schools would still have to be run by the head of another non-failing bog-standard comp. In other words, the headline would be more representative if it said that failing schools are to be taken over by their successful colleagues. Unfortunately, this is a headline which has already been issued umpteen times already.

That's the problem with government by spin doctor: eventually you run out of new things to say. Perhaps they might actually try, you know, doing something about the problems in the education system? 

I've been censored

The Department for Schools, Children and Indoctrination has been spending freely on an ideas tree - a website where people can submit their ideas for how to help support parents in bringing up their children. My contribution was this:

Remove the state completely from any involvement with children or their education. Privatise all schools, and endow them with the proceeds so that they can provide education for the needy. Fire all educational bureaucrats, inspectors, and assorted busybodies and burn down the DSCF.

It's odd but I can't find it on the list of submitted ideas.

Lefty think-tank in sensible suggestion shocker

This actually looks like a semi-sensible idea. The Institute for Public Policy Research is calling for the long school summer holidays to be done away with, and replaced with more frequent, but shorter, holidays.

Ms Sodha told BBC Radio 5 Live that the current structure of the school year was a relic from the time when children were needed to help out on family farms during the summer fruit-picking season.

She said there were two strong arguments for making a change.

"The first is that children regress with respect to their academic skills. Their reading and maths skills tend to decline when they're away from school and this is particularly true for children from poorer backgrounds.

"And that actually brings us on to the second reason. Not all children have the same access to out of school activities during the summer holidays and kids from more advantaged backgrounds are the ones who are most likely to get to go to these activities.

Of course, in a sane world, school holidays would be set by headteachers in response to parental demand. The IPPR report shows that its authors are still stuck in a 1940s top-down mindset and assume that a one-size-fits-all solution imposed from the centre will be successful. This is a pity as Ms Sodha looks as though she's not long out of university, and one might have hoped that someone so young might have some ideas more in keeping with the 21st century - decentralised decision-making, consumer power and so on.

However, gut feel suggests that there are probably more parents who will be for this change than against it, and there are obvious economic advantages to the tourism industry from having demand spread more evenly through the year rather than having everyone going at the same time. Given that all the main political parties seem to be set on continuing the madness of state education, a small sensible step is probably as much as we can hope for.  

Wait for it...

Carlotta wonders about the impact of the Birmingham starved child case on home education. Word has started to get around that the poor child had been taken out of school ten weeks ago following a campaign of bullying. I heard the family's MP on the radio this morning saying that parents weren't allowed to take their children out of school in this way. This will have been a surprise to the thousands of families who have done just that, and demonstrates once again the traditional talent of MPs to sound off at considerable length on subjects about which they are entirely ignorant - the law is quite clear that if you want to educate your children yourself, you can.

Since the news broke, there has been some relief for home educators with the news that the family had received a visit from the local authority home-ed inspectors, who had noted nothing out of the ordinary. This rather undermines the arguments, which are surely coming soon, that home educators should be obliged to accept regular inspections from local authorities to ensure that they're not abusing their kids - at the moment they are free to tell the local authority to take a running jump. People will say that in order to avoid tragedies like this there is no alternative to change. "It's for the children!", will be the refrain - an arugment that, for most people in the UK, seems to trump all others .

Let's hope that the political tide of change that seems to be strengthening at the moment, brings with it a realisation that civil liberties are just a bit too important to be thrown away on irrational, emotional argument like this. The idea that you cannot live your life with your family, without officers of the state coming to check that you haven't committed some heinous crime against them, is dangerous and is frankly untenable in a free society.

If we are still a free society, that is. 

Sensitittivy training

Is that how you spell it? (via Donald Clark) 

On this day...

Well, not on this day exactly, but roughly five years ago on 14th April 2003, David Milliband launched an all-out attack on red tape in schools:

The Government will continue its concerted attack on teacher workloads today, by launching the first-ever independent scrutiny unit made up of frontline teachers, to cut red tape and free schools of bureaucracy.

The Implementation Review Unit (IRU) is a key component of implementing the national workforce agreement and will tackle unnecessary paper work, assess workload implications and reduce bureaucratic processes. It shows the continued progress and delivery by signatories to reduce workloads and help teachers focus on improving pupil learning.

I wonder what they've been up to in the last five years? Let's take a peek at their website shall we? 

Oh look, there's a news section! That will tell us.

And the news is:

"No news items have been posted yet".

I wonder when they're going to actually, you know, do something useful? 

Eye-catching initiatives in education

Brian Micklethwait has a post about Tesco offering degrees in retail management.

Presumably they know what they're doing. Providing they don't try to make the courses too academic and theoretical it's probably a reasonable thing to do, although whether it's a degree in the generally accepted meaning of the term is another question.

Meanwhile the Scottish Council Parliament Government has issued guidelines on the teaching of computer games design in schools. A few schools have been teaching games design for a while now, and this announcement looks very much like the standard politician's "eye-catching initiative" - intended to drive the news agenda rather than herald anything new. That said, funky subjects like this may well attract the attention of some children who might otherwise be turned off by school, so it can do little harm.