education – Common Infirmities

Socialist maths

The recent decision by the state of Florida to ban a slew of mathematics textbooks from its schools because of their links to banned concepts has attracted much attention. The website Popular Information has pored through the banned texts to try and suss out what the verboten ideological content might be. Some books seem to have impermissably encouraged students to work together and treat each other with respect. Another may have set off alarms because it included, among its capsule biographies of mathematicians, some non-white individuals.

I’ve always wondered, though, why it’s not considered problematic that books persistently teach the concept of division with problems that require that a fixed amount of wealth — 10 cookies, say — be allocated equally among a group of children. No consideration of whether some of the children might be smarter, or work harder, or just be closer to the cookie jar, and thus be entitled to a larger share. Pretty much the definition of socialism!

(More generally, it always fascinated me, in my years spent as an observer on the playground, that it was taken for granted that toddlers were always being pressured to share their toys, and learning to share was seen as a developmental milestone, where we do not expect adults to be willing or able to share anything at any time.)

Vaccine probabilities

From an article on the vaccine being developed by Robin Shattock’s group at Imperial College:

The success rate of vaccines at this stage of development is 10%, Shattock says, and there are already probably 10 vaccines in clinical trials, “so that means we will definitely have one”

It could be an exercise for a probability course:

Suppose there are exactly 10 vaccines in this stage of development. What is the probability that one will succeed?
Interpret “probably 10 vaccines” to mean that the number of vaccines in clinical trials is Poisson distributed with parameter 10. What is the probability that one will succeed?

Lecturing is obsolete — and always has been

Pretty much since I became a professional academic two decades ago there has been constant agitation against lecturing as a technology for teaching. Either new research has proven it, or new technology has rendered it, obsolete. Thus I was amused to read this comment in Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

We talked of the difference between the mode of education at Oxford, and that in those Colleges where instruction is chiefly conveyed by lectures. JOHNSON: ‘Lectures were once useful; but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary. If your attention fails, and you miss a part of a lecture, it is lost; you cannot go back as you do upon a book.’ Dr. Scott agreed with him. ‘But yet (said I), Dr. Scott, you yourself gave lectures at Oxford.’ He smiled. ‘You laughed (then said I) at those who came to you.’

Magic and class struggle

I just started reading the book Magic for Liars by Sarah Galley. I’d purchased it because of a short review, but by the time I got to read it I’d completely forgotten anything about it, so I was bemused to discover that it is sort of a hard-boiled detective murder mystery set in a boarding school for young magicians. It struck me then how odd it is that “boarding school for young magicians” has turned into a whole genre, spanning a range of works for young people and adults, and now starting to colonise completely different genres, like detective fiction.

So far as I can tell this is largely an Anglo-American literary phenomenon (though Harry Potter is certainly very popular throughout the world), and I suspect that it reflects a natural response to the class system and the power that is accrues to elite education. Surely an uneducated Briton, seeing how a mediocrity like Boris Johnson can be elevated to a position of power on the basis of pairing his hail-fellow-well-met demeanour with the Eton-Oxford training can’t really imagine what they’re learning there, but supposes it must be some sort of deep magic. That’s why the spells in Harry Potter are all Dog Latin: Unexceptional people go to these weird schools, learn these dead languages, and end up ruling the world.

Update: I have deleted a comment asserting a common etymology of magic spell and spelling (learning to write). The words (as Maria Christodoulou pointed out) in fact have completely different roots. (I’m not sure where I got this false etymology from. I would have sworn it was Mary Daly, but while Gyn/Ecology has lots of (sometimes dubious) wordplay on spell and glamour, the association spell-witchcraft-learning is not there.

From the archives: Charitable giving to universities

With The Guardian portraying the magnitude of Oxford and Cambridge college endowments on the front page as a major scandal — though taken all together they don’t reach even half of the endowment of Harvard — it seems like a good time to repost this comment I made five years ago, when the government was being attacked by Oxford’s chancellor for considering limiting the tax deduction for charitable donations to educational institutions. The post begins:

Let’s think this through:

The government wants philanthropic funding of universities to replace public funding.

Under current law, contributions to universities (and other charities) are matched by a 40% tax rebate for higher-earning taxpayers, so 2/5 of the costs of nominally “private” contributions are actually paid by the taxpayers. The government proposes to cap this subsidy at 15% of income or £20,000.

Do you see the contradiction? Neither do I. In a time when the government is cutting funding for all manner of worthy projects, it seems pretty undemocratic to effectively allow wealthy citizens nearly unlimited access to the treasury to support their own favourite causes. The £560 million in charitable gifts last year presumably included more than £200 million in “gift” from the government. Whether or not this is a good thing, it seems troubling, as a point of democratic principle, that control over these £200 million has been passed from the citizenry at large (in the person of their elected representatives) to the infamous “one percent”.

For the rest, see here.

I think everyone would agree that if the wealthy elite want to spend their money on providing luxury education in medieval buildings to particularly talented young people, many but not all of whom come from privileged backgrounds, that’s probably not the most useless or antisocial thing that they’re free to do with their money. (And I can confirm, from personal experience, that Oxford colleges spend insane sums of money on maintenance for their buildings.) But as long as they’re leveraging public funds, which the current government has decided to withhold from educational institutions that serve a broader public far more efficiently, it’s no longer a simple matter of private choice.

Brush up your Plato, start quoting him now

… at least, if you want to get recognised as religiously persecuted for your humanism.

This looks like a parody of English pseudo-education mixed with English xenophobia:

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

My guess is that he wanted to say he was an atheist, but recognised that that would subject him to discrimination here as well as in Pakistan, so he resorted to the more erudite-sounding term “humanist”, only to run into the buzzsaw of a classicist manqué.

Slippery slope

At the Kepier School, a secondary school in North England, it is reported that children were being sent home on the first day of school if their trousers were not purchased (at inflated prices) from a particular supplier. The teachers walked around with colour swatches, checking that they were exactly the right shade of grey. Lest you think this was merely an irrelevant distraction from education — if not actually evidence of a corrupt kickback — there was this explanation from the headteacher:

If you have different types of trousers it leads on to different types of shoes, different types of shirts, etc.

“Etc.” indeed. Once they have different shirts, it’s just a short step to different thoughts, and then it’s straight downhill to heroin addiction and human sacrifice in the parking lot.

Perhaps this is why the school inspectorate Ofsted wrote in their report on the school in October 2013

leaders and managers do not always focus their actions where they are most needed and do not check the impact on students’ achievement.

“Getting a bit of extra assistance is never cheating”

If I were a philosophy student with a looming deadline for an essay on casuistry, I know I’d turn to BuyEssay for expert help. The Guardian has reported on government moves to crack down on essay mills, that sell individually crafted essays for students who need “extra help” –anything from a 2-page essay to a PhD dissertation (for just £6750!) The article reprints some of the advertising text that these websites offer to soothe tender consciences.

“Is Buying Essays Online Cheating?” it asks, in bold type. You’d think this would be an easy question, hardly something you could spin a 300-word essay out of. But they start with a counterintuitive answer: “We can assure you it is NOT cheating”. The core of the argument is this:

What is essential when you are in college or university is to focus on scoring high grades and to get ready for your career ahead. In the long run, your success will be all that matters. Trivial things like ordering an essay will seem too distant to even be considered cheating.

Given that high grades are so essential, it seems almost perverse that universities make it so difficult to obtain them. Why do they put all these essays and other hurdles in the way — “unreasonable demands from unrelenting tutors in expecting extensive research in a short time”, as the essay puts it? It’s shitty customer service, that’s what it is.

The only critique I might make is that the essay is a bit generic. I’d worry that when I submitted it for the assignment “Is Buying Essays Online Cheating”, that the marker might notice that someone else bought almost the same essay for the assignment “Is Murder Wrong?” In the long run, your success will be all that matters. Wasn’t this the plot of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors?

Government intervention

It seems Theresa May has found her strategy for rescuing the British economy from the political damage the Tories are planning to inflict:

The prime minister will publish the strategy at a cabinet meeting in the north-west of England, setting out five sectors that could receive special government support: life sciences, low-carbon-emission vehicles, industrial digitalisation, creative industries and nuclear.

She will say the government would be prepared to deregulate, help with trade deals or create new institutions to boost skills or research if any sector can show this would address specific problems.

Great idea! As one of the people working on developing “skills and research”, I’d like to suggest that it might be a good idea to arrange an agreement to share students, workers, and researchers with our neighbours, who are similarly technologically-developed and share common scientific and educational traditions. We could call it the Anglo-European Union, or something like that.

But no, that would help “old institutions” like my own. The Westminster Pharaoh is only interested in boosting skills or research if it can create “new institutions” as a monument to her greatness.