Tag: education

Trojan hobby horses

Don’t forget: Troy was in Turkey — a Muslim country!

A scandal has been rumbling on in the UK primary and secondary education establishment. A few months ago the UK press splashed around the text of The Protocols of the Elders of Islam the “Trojan Horse” letter, purporting to be a missive from one group of Islamists to another, describing the progress of their nefarious plan to take over and islamise the Birmingham schools, and recommending methods for expanding the process to other cities. The quotes read like uncensored excerpts from Nigel Farage’s fever dream:

We have caused a great amount of organised disruption in Birmingham and as a result now have our own academies and are on the way to getting rid of more headteachers and taking over their schools. Whilst sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things you must remember that this is say ‘jihad’ and as such using all measures possible to win the war is acceptable.

One needs to imagine an Osama bin Laden lookalike twirling the ends of his beard and laughing maniacally as he reads this aloud. Continue reading “Trojan hobby horses”

The overscheduled maths student

… at Imperial College.

Some say that young people today are overscheduled, but I didn’t realise how bad it had gotten until someone showed me the sample student timetable posted by the maths department at Imperial College. Some highlights:

  1. The student spends up to 6 hours on music practice on some days.
  2. Working on problem sheets starts only at 11 pm, and lasts for an hour, and only on Mondays and Tuesdays (and maybe Wednesdays, when “study time” is planned).
  3. Monday and Tuesday are also the only days on which lunch is planned.
  4. Two hours of “self-help” are planned on Thursdays, perhaps a therapy group to cope with the stress and lack of sleep.

On the weekend (schedule available here) she spends hours on French assignments, but again doesn’t get around to doing her problem sheets until 11 pm on Sunday night. Five straight hours of orchestra rehearsals, though.

student timetable

The Tory idea of education

David Cameron and his Bullingdon circle have education policies borrowed from the Wizard of Oz: Like the Scarecrow, the British public doesn’t need brains, it needs diplomas (see below). And why not? No one they know learned anything they needed to know at university except how to run away from trouble. The value of three years in Oxford for them was that they spent three years in Oxford, and that they were there together with other similarly situated scions of privileges. This is why they see nothing but prejudice in top universities’ reticence to admit the products of second-rate British comprehensive schools. They seem genuinely mystified by the notion that there could be any objective preparation that these children are lacking, preventing the top universities from admitting them to the charmed circle to which all good things flow.

Anyway, their new education initiative is to get more children learning about computer programming, dubbed the Year of Code. The director of the programme, one Lottie Dexter, explained in a recent interview, “You can pick up [learning to code] in a day.” Alas, her busy job didn’t leave her a day free to do it herself, so she knows nothing about programming, and she says she’s planning to space out this day of learning over a full year — minus the month that’s already gone. It’s not just that she lacks anything so crass as expertise in either programming or teaching; or that she couldn’t answer a question about what “code” is; or that her main qualification seems to be her excellent connections to the Conservative Party elite. Even for a non-expert her idea of what’s involved in teaching people this complicated skill are laughably vague: All about “getting people thinking about it now” and “by September they’ll be really excited”, and by the end she’s babbling about computer code as an international language fostering understanding between peoples.

Lottie Dexter explaining how to code reminded me of Monty Python explaining how to rid the world of disease.

 

 

“Institutions of Higher Perspiration”

“They don’t want to turn the universities into sweatshops. They’ll be institutions of higher perspiration.”

That was my conclusion about the trajectory to which our managerial overlords aspire, as I was trying to convince a colleague that he should support the UCU, the British academics union, and its escalating strike action. I walked the picket lines for the first time on Thursday, during our two-hour strike. There were about 20 of us there, and only a few were senior academics, which is somewhat disheartening. There were almost as many reporters as strikers, so I got to talk to    all of them. Their questions were interesting:

  1. Why do you think you deserve more pay, in this time of wage restraint? Other workers aren’t getting raises. I think they should join unions and demand higher wages too. It’s not a law of nature that we have “wage restraint” for everyone but the CEOs and fat-cat bankers. It’s a reflection of political decisions and power imbalance, and the effect of words like “time of wage restraint”. Continue reading ““Institutions of Higher Perspiration””

A plan to completely segregate British schools

It’s hard to believe this is not a cynical ploy:

The wealthiest parents should have to pay the same fees to send their children to a top state school as they would to an independent school, a leading headteacher has proposed.

Independent schools should also offer a quarter of their places to children from the poorest of backgrounds, according to Anthony Seldon, the master at Wellington College.

In a report published by the Social Market Foundation (SMF), Seldon calls for a radical wave of reforms to end the divide between state and independent schools, enhance social mobility and offer young people a more rounded education.

Maybe he’s just trying to “bring new money into the state system, as well as incentivise state schools to perform better”, as he says, while being too naive to understand the consequences. Seems unlikely. He also says his plans would “reduce the domination of places at the top state schools by the children of well-off parents”. Indeed it would, since children of well-off parents would be almost completely absent from state schools.

If you think the well-off aren’t paying enough for education, why not just raise their income taxes? Why specifically penalise them for sending their children to state schools? There is already a prejudice — often unfounded — that private schools provide superior education. Forcing out the upper classes — and that’s clearly what would happen, if they were to be charged the same fees for a school that is less exclusive, and thus apparently inferior. The only ones who would benefit would be the independent schools, which would no longer need to compete with the state sector on price. How convenient!

If you want to know what the benefits really are of British independent schools, a colleague made it clear to me a while back, when he said he sends his children to private school so that they learn “self confidence”. I was reminded of this recently when someone spoke to me about having heard about research about “perceived fair wages”. “Someone who’s earning £30,000 a year isn’t going to apply for a job with a £60,000 salary. He knows it’s out of his league, that he doesn’t have the skills for that.” Now, I’ve encountered this notion of “perceived fair wages” in the  analysis of wage inequality: in particular, that women often are paid less because they are conditioned to expect lower wages. (For example here.) But this fellow thought it was simply a matter of everyone having a good sense of their proper place.

So how do you get to be a self confident banker who refuses to roll over and let The Man cut his multi-million pound bonus? Presumably, that’s the job of the independent schools.

On learning to play an instrument

I was intrigued by Mark Oppenheimer’s article in The New Republic “Stop Forcing Your Kids to Learn a Musical Instrument” when it appeared in September, and a reread it now that it has been reposted. Obviously, the “forcing” alluded to in the headline sounds pretty bad, and few people would advocate it. But the article is not about forcing; more like “strongly encouraging”. Oppenheimer is willing to continue financing his daughter’s violin and ballet lessons, but he won’t encourage it. And he does not believe that it is worthwhile, unlike the weekly Hebrew lessons, or more valuable than watching comedies on television. I can accept his feelings on this point, and I wonder myself sometimes what motivates some parents to push their children into certain activities, given attitudes that are little different from Oppenheimer’s.

But if this were merely confessional breastbeating it would have been a 50-word blog post, rather than an article in TNR that helps pay for those useless violin lessons. So Oppenheimer provides a few hundred words of explanation, and chaos ensues. The arguments are so badly tangled that they come out almost as an advocacy of music lessons once you’ve unknotted them. I find it hard to escape the impression that it irks him that his daughter is enjoying something that he doesn’t understand or appreciate.

He has two main arguments:

  1. To they extent that playing an instrument is a useful skill, it is not classical music that children should be learning.
  2. Learning to play an instrument has no value beyond itself. (Ditto for learning to dance.) The claims commonly put forward are spurious.

Let’s look at argument 2 first. Oppenheimer writes

Why are so many children taking ballet, violin, piano? Lately, I have been asking my fellow middle-class urbanite parents that question. About dance, they say things like, “Ballet teaches them poise,” or, “Ballet helps them be graceful.” And about violin or piano they say, “It will give them a lifelong skill,” or, “They’ll always enjoy listening to music more.”

It does not take a rocket scientist, or a Juilliard-trained cellist, to see the flaws in these assertions. First, as to ballet, I propose a test. Imagine we took ten girls (or boys) who had studied ballet from the ages of five to twelve, and then quit, and mixed them in with ten girls (or boys) who had never taken dance. Let’s say that we watched these twenty tweens move around their schools for a day… Does anyone really believe we could spot the ones who had spent seven years in weekly or biweekly ballet class?

Interesting thought experiment. Does anyone really believe…? Obviously the parents who told him this believe that, or something similar. (Maybe “poise” and “grace” aren’t quite so conspicuous, so they wouldn’t quite know what to predict.) Are they right? I don’t know. But it’s weird to present as proof that these other parents are wrong the results of a made-up experiment that no one actually did. Continue reading “On learning to play an instrument”

Compute the interest

Another comment based on Sharon Ann Murphy’s wonderful book on 19th century life insurance in the US: She describes an 1852 case in which the American Mutual Insurance Company tried to renege on a claim, where a preëxisting condition was found in an autopsy.

Not surprisingly, the jury sided with the beneficiaries; they “were out thirteen minutes, just long enough to compute the interest” on the original claim.

Indeed, the verdict is not surprising. What is most surprising, however, is that the jury computed the interest. I wonder how likely it is that a jury of twelve today would include even a single person capable of computing compound interest.

Why are classical music supporters obsessed with symphonies?

I was just reading this New Republic article about the financial crisis in US symphony orchestras, and it reminded me of a question that I’ve had for a very long time: Why do people who enjoy  classical music lavish so much attention on gigantic symphony orchestras? Symphony orchestras have gotten polished to an extraordinary perfection, and suck up vast amounts of public and private subsidy, but chamber music performances are few and far between. There’s nothing in the nature of this musical tradition that requires emphasising the repertoire for huge ensembles. To put it differently, rock music would also be in crisis if it depended on putting together ensembles of around 100 musicians that would play to audiences of several thousand. Of course, there are a few bands that play to stadium crowds, but most of the professional activity in the most popular music genres is in small venues, with a handful of musicians and little or no support staff.

The same might be said of music in the schools. Most high schools manage to organise a school orchestra, but there’s rarely much effort put into chamber music. There, at least, the economics make sense, since dozens of children can be supervised by a single orchestra leader. On the other hand, the learning value is greatly reduced as well.

Incomplete segregation by sex is un-British

There has been a slow-burning scandal around a government-funded Islamic school that seems to be too much Islamic and too little school. The report by the schools inspectorate Ofsted that has just made its way into the press sounds pretty disastrous, if not exactly Lord of the Flies: Inexperienced teachers, overcrowded facilities, low educational attainment. But what I found fascinating was what was considered scandalous, and triggered the inspection:

An Ofsted inspection had been due to take place by the end of the year, but was brought forward by two months after allegations that women teachers were obliged to wear headscarves and that pupils were segregated.

And

the Ofsted report says that boys and girls eat lunch in separate sittings, although it puts this down to the small size of the canteen. Older boys and girls are seated on either side of classrooms although younger children sit together.

It sounds like segregating boys and girls is a terrible thing, perhaps barely justified at lunchtime if there is not enough space in the canteen.

Unless they are segregated into completely separate school. Most independent schools, and hundreds of state schools, are single-sex.

East-west school gap in Germany

I’ll admit it. When I saw the Spiegel headline warning of an “alarming performance gap in maths and science between pupils in East and West”, I assumed this was just another one of those depressing reports on the economic failure of the poor Ossis. But no:

The East has the top pupils: Saxony and Thüringen lead in the national school comparison in maths and science. The losers are the city-states [Bremen, Hamburg, and Berlin] and North-Rhine Westfalia [the largest state, in the West]. Pupils there are as much as 2 years behind.

[Der Osten hat die Musterschüler: Sachsen und Thüringen führen beim bundesweiten Schulvergleich in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften. Schlusslichter sind die Stadtstaaten und NRW. Dort liegen Schüler um bis zu zwei Jahre zurück.]

The five states comprising the former East Germany are the five leaders (out of 16) in biology, chemistry, and physics, and are among the top six on the mathematics test (with only Bavaria sneaking in to third place.

So, nearly 25 years after reunification, can it be that we’re seeing the continuing cultural effect of the positive Russian and East European influence on East German education, in particular their cultivation of and respect for mathematics?