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you name the problem and i will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame or at least implicated the truth is of course that the most important factor in educational outcomes is the intelligence of the pupils being educated apart from effectively teaching the majority of schoolchildren to read write and add up and enforcing discipline if only by allowing the majority of pupils to leave once this aim is achieved there is nothing more even the best school can hope for that would at least allow the minority of children with above average intelligence to pursue an academic career unmolested by those of a more prosaic outlook the idea that education can be used to pursue some form of social engineering is arrant nonsense and dangerous to boot as murray says that says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability i am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of iq in living a good life is vastly overrated my point is just this it is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst posted by saltburn subversives at 20 05 8 comments 26 july 2008 an anecdote for the holidays scottish schools broke up at the end of june but i m just back from sunny buckinghamshire where my niece has just finished her first year at the local grammar i appreciate the sort of people who support this blog are unlikely to agree with this but as far as i m concerned the crucial benefit of grammars as with private schools is that not everyone goes to them in comps we take the lot have to take the lot a melancholy thought that sometimes floats through my brain is that tomorrow s rapists and murderers have to go to school somewhere and i think i ve seen a few of them anyway since it s been in the news recently i thought i d share a wee tale from glasgow east where i was teaching last session it s not that i don t think conditions like adht or dyslexia don t exist it s just that they tend to be over diagnosed there are two reasons for this in my view one is that ordinary mechanisms for social control have been progressively delegitimized by people often described as um progressives hence the tendency towards the medicalization of mundane social problems lbs lazy bastard syndrome the other reason is there are incentives involved those diagnosed with such conditions get learning support extra time in exams general excuses made for them and so on so when you re told that a pupil has adht i have to confess my initial response is to say yeah right not always though when i was informed that a particularly challenging pupil of mine had this condition i said are you sure that s all that s wrong with him because he was i m sure through no fault of his own mental and i mean totally completely unteachable almost uncontrollable took tantrums the works he was for example chucked out of the final exam in my subject after about ten minutes it takes a special kind of loon to achieve that anyway towards the sunny end of term a couple of us were doing a little al fresco smoking as is our want obligation when we noticed our friend let s call him kevin mcdiddy wondering into school after the exams since he s over sixteen and has hitherto done a very good impression of someone who loathes school with every fragment of his dna we wondered what the hell he was doing there buying a senior school tie is what he was doing he thinks he s staying on it s not that pupils like him don t hate school they just hate the idea of leaving and having to organise something else to do like working even more i hope his pastoral care teacher has disabused him of this whole staying on plan of his although these days you can never tell anyway you ll have guessed already the point i m going to make imagine a situation where the school was obliged to take him for another two years but if you teach in an english school you won t have to merely imagine much longer two more years of compulsory education what a mental idea as mental as kevin mcdiddy as a matter of fact posted by shuggy at 14 40 2 comments 25 july 2008 barack s big idea our new messiah s education policy is here more tedious detail here for those with the stomach for it a particularly nauseating bit is this i think zero to five plan obama s comprehensive zero to five plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents unlike other early childhood education plans obama s plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten obama will create early learning challenge grants to promote state zero to five efforts and help states move toward voluntary universal pre school now i know that the word voluntary is used but seriously how long do you think it would remain so with all that nice federal money available not to mention all those government jobs and power power over other people s children remind you of anything this perhaps teachers are directed to instruct their pupils and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation no then possibly this the education of all children from the moment that they can get along without a mother s care shall be in state institutions at state expense or this we must create out of the younger generation a generation of democrats we must turn children who can be shaped like wax into real good democrats we must remove the children from the crude influence of their families we must take them over and to speak frankly nationalize them from the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of democrat children s nurseries and schools there they will grow up to be real democrats nationalization of education is exactly what obama is talking about central government control of education presumably a national curriculum set text books teachers employed by the federal government rather than local school boards targets and political interference yeah that should work it works in britain after all it all goes to show that nothing can fail so badly that some idiot politician can t make it worse bernhard rust nazi minister of education from racial instruction and the national community 1935 karl marx the communist manifesto communist party education workers congress 1918 obviously i ve changed communists to democrats posted by saltburn subversives at 09 46 0 comments 16 july 2008 back to school there is a posting over at samizdata by johnathan pierce on the topic of school holidays child labour and youth crime the weekend just gone i spent much of saturday visiting my old school that is shortly to be demolished due to a move into a new pfi school next door i spent much of the time chatting to teachers about then versus now with a couple of them i shared my own experiences of getting bored during my 6th form and coasting towards failure i was reassured that this would be recognised and handled properly these days through various means such as gifted talented schemes mentoring or behaviour support of course it was recognised and handled in my time through a combination of carrot stick the stick being a leather strap one application of the latter for persistently failing to hand in homework was sufficient to ensure i avoided getting another leathering on reflection though it was and remains a cure for symptoms not the actual problem that i didn t actually want to be there at the time even though it seemed a good idea the year before posted by shades at 17 49 1 comments 9 may 2008 educational romanticism some of the real reasons for educational conscription and why it is an expensive failure here h t david thompson posted by saltburn subversives at 20 38 0 comments 27 april 2008 full time adult coercion the virus spreads googling raising of school leaving age leads me to discover that bermuda has just decided to imitate the uk government s plan to force young adults to spend an additional two years at school clearly inspired by the example of our own labour party bermuda s ruling progressive labour party seems to think that improvement of a coercive state system which is creaking under the weight of existing unmet targets is best achieved by expanding the aims and powers of that system still further education minister randy horton announced yesterday the dates of a series of meetings he plans to have with parents students principals teachers and ministry of education officials mr horton said those attending would be told of a number of amendments planned for the education act including raising the mandatory school leaving age from 16 to 18 and giving the education board more power the minister was asked if the idea was to reduce youth crime by keeping youngsters occupied he said certainly we hope that that will help in that way the important thing is improving the quality of teaching and learning at schools government pledged to bring about improvements after uk professor david hopkins and his team carried out a review of public schools early last year and concluded that the system was on the brink of meltdown mr horton also spoke about claims from the bermuda union of teachers that classes were being left uncovered due to staff absences union leader mike charles shared internal memos with the royal gazette as reported yesterday showing how one school had three classes uncovered on two consecutive days this month perhaps bermuda will implement their rosla scheme before we do giving us a chance to back out once we see what the initial effects are posted by fabe tassano at 16 00 2 comments 26 march 2008 perpetuating poor standards the danger of making school attendance compulsory up to the age of 18 is not simply the infringement of the rights of the individual involved it is also the associated disadvantages for those at school who do actually want to be there teachers have often said to me that it s not until you get to a level that you can be certain that the majority of the class will have any desire to work at all by compelling everyone to be there you remove even that small relief to see how this might look read this from an inner city london teacher frustrated starts to cry i just can t take it anymore miss it isn t fair they shout and scream at the teacher all of the time and i can t hear myself think i frown who shouts when whose lesson have you come out of as frustrated sobs quietly bolder explains that in all three of their science lessons biology chemistry and physics there are 3 boys who cause havoc in their lessons she explains that they are so loud that poor frustrated cannot learn somehow bolder manages to block them out they shout at all three of their teachers and they laugh at and mock the rest of the class frustrated shouts i ve asked if i can work in the library but they say that isn t allowed i m not going back there miss i just can t we have our gcse exams only weeks away and they act like we re in primary school they don t care what they get but i do why do i have to put up with this at the moment at least frustrated will get some chance to concentrate for her a levels by timj posted by tim j at 09 47 2 comments 5 march 2008 another shambles in the making some consortia suggested they were finding it especially difficult to get employers involved while the content of the diplomas was not known as partnerships were themselves unclear about employers potential contribution employers understandably want to know precisely what is being asked of them and when however only the level 3 diploma requires sector specific work experience at levels 1 and 2 work related learning is focused on employability and need not be work experience related to a particular sector partnerships therefore have some flexibility in setting up a sufficient amount and range of work related learning and work experience para 79 from this h t wat tyler posted by saltburn subversives at 20 43 0 comments 6 february 2008 at pmqs the topic of educational conscription in pmqs do you believe in education till 18 the pm responded do you want a levels in the long term asked cameron do you believe in education till 18 said the pm why won t you give me a straight answer from dc all very dignified not but at least the subject this group blog has now moved to the very top table of politics posted by thunderdragon at 22 53 2 comments 5 february 2008 research and experience was it orwell who said the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know you could say the same about research and experience it s always nice when the former confirms the latter chris dillow has some here posted by shuggy at 21 12 0 comments 4 february 2008 parlance musing leaving aside for the moment the morality of forcing young people to attend courses or training they neither want nor need does educational coercion actually exist and if so why no one would argue that the law says your children have to go to school until the age of sixteen in practice the chances of a parent falling foul of the law are extremely low a law which is not enforced is no law at all never having thought about this issue very much until recently i had always presumed educational coercion was originally aimed at that minority of parents who do not value education and would not force their children to attend there are a number of problems with this of course the law is aimed at all parents and yet the majority would send their children to school anyway what s the point of threatening people who are only too happy to do what you want anyway secondly the minority who do not value education are probably members of the poor and therefore as far as our political masters are concerned not responsible for their own actions hence the ineffective enforcement i know of only one person in my area who was ever imprisoned for failing to send her kids to school and this was after literally years of warnings visits from officials and threats she knew she was unlikely to be held responsible for her children s truancy and frankly did not expect to be thirdly you can force a child to attend but you can t make it learn all that will happen is that it will disrupt education for those who do wish to do well so not only is educational coercion a bad idea on the whole but in practice it only applies to those who already do send their kids to school if coercion doesn t help the children of the poor what is it really for utilitarian arguments appear to be being used to justify the present proposals equipping our young people with the right skills etc this argument needs turning on its head there is no evidence that coercion makes any difference at all in fact it is probably counter productive the absence of disruptive ...