Keith.
I like the Kentucky Chicken's hot wings (peppery chicken wings). As you may
know, the cash register keys in these fast food places don't have numbers
on them - they have pictures. If someone buys a piece of chicken, the kid
behind the counter presses the picture of a chicken.
I ordered 6 hot wings for about $3. The kid put them in a bag and rang them
up (pressed the '6 hot wings' key). Then I noticed that 20 wings went for
about $6.50. That looked like a better deal to me, so I told the kid I'd
take 20. This was a problem for the kid (which, at first, I didn't realize).
There was no key to press to change the order to 20 from 6. The kid finally
counted out 20 wings and gave them to me but didn't charge me. How could he?
This revealed a procedure that is used often to get things done when
there is a shortage of properly educated people. You'll recall that during
wartime, housewives were recruited to build aircraft. The job was broken
down into bite-sized chunks, with each girl doing her part. Then the parts
were put together by engineers, until voila - a Spitfire.
They are doing the same thing with our uneducated youth. Changing the job
to suit the available personnel.
Perhaps the only way to break through the situation here is to end
compulsory education. I doubt whether the number of attendees would fall
drastically. Parents rather the law will make sure the kids get to school.
But, here at least, teachers must have the ability to throw unruly kids out
of the classroom. At the moment, they can be sent to a counsellor, who
sends them right back to the class. It's said that an American teacher
spends a quarter to a third of classroom time in discipline. A television
news show showed a teacher who admitted she was scared to fail some of the
kids in her classes.
I hope it is better in England.
Harry
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Keith wrote:
>At 14:39 21/07/00 -0400, Victor Milne wrote:
>
> >[snip]
>(KH)
> >> (*Having said that, I am becoming increasingly worried that, in this
> >modern
> >> informational age, the state educational systems of advanced countries are
> >> falling down badly on the teaching the necessary skills required for jobs.
> >> Even basic skills are less well taught than they were in Victorian times.
> >> In the UK, one person in five cannot use the Yellow Pages or can do simple
> >> arithmetic. Illiteracy and innumeracy are growing steadily. For the first
> >> time in history there appears to be a situation where increasing numbers
> >of
> >> people are unable to progress upwards because their motivations and
> >> intellectual skills have become permanently blunted early in life. I hope
> >> I'm wrong about this.)
>
>(VM)
> >I think people have been saying this since Christ was a cowboy. When I was a
> >young junior university instructor 30-35 years ago, my contemporaries and I
> >were always decrying the way standards had slipped--presumably in the 5 or 6
> >years since we had graduated! My wife is a Grade 3 teacher, and looking at
> >the curriculum for the elementary grades, I think it much better than when I
> >was there in the late 40's and early 50's.
>
>The curriculum may indeed be richer than it ever was (or at least it
>appears so on paper), but quite what this means for jobs is another matter.
>However, the point I was making concerned basic skills -- the three R's --
>the skills on which most other intellectual (and now, increasingly, job)
>skills are based. Victor has quoted anecdotal evidence so I will, too. This
>evening I have telephoned a dozen experienced recently-retired teachers of
>my acquaintance about basic educational standards today compared with those
>of 30 or 40 years ago when they started teaching. They were all uniformly
>of these opinions:
>
>reading is worse than it was,
>writing is far worse and is now deteriorating rapidly,
>arithmetic is calamitous
>
>(VM)
> >The notion that people were better educated in the Victorian era seems
> >inherently improbable to me. Remember many people never even got through
> >elementary school back then. There were illiterate masses in Dickensian
> >England. While the public (private) schools in England turned out many
> >brilliant people like Matthew Arnold, they were also part of the old boys
> >network. If your father had got through Eton or Rugby, then you did, and you
> >got a job (if you actually needed one) and probably didn't get turfed out of
> >it over a minor matter such as incompetence or semi-literacy.
>
>Some three years ago in an Institute for Economic Affairs pamphlet, James
>Tooley showed that in 1870, 99% of children in England attended school.
>Why? Because parents knew that they needed to give their children a good
>start in life. They were motivated to send their children to school and the
>children were similarly motivated to attend and to learn. And this was at a
>time when every school, even those run by the Church of England and
>philanthropic societies, charged fees. Of course, the very poorest parents
>didn't pay fees and were subsidised by parents who could afford them.
>
>True, the school-leaving age for the vast majority of children was only 11.
> But, by then, they were well educated by modern standards -- better in the
>basic skills than 15 or 16 year olds are now. According to specimen test
>papers of Victorian times, their arithmetical skills far exceeded those of
>15 or 16 year old children today and was probably similar similar to the
>standard of the newly-qualified teacher of today -- a quarter of whom in
>recent government tests failed to meet the standards of the normal GCSE
>mathematics exam taken by 16 year-olds.
>
>Sorry, Victor, you don't convince me. The fact is that, bit by bit, State
>education systems in almost all advanced countries has been sliding
>inexorably towards disaster over the last 50 years. They have taken over
>far more than they can chew. They are run by centralised bureaucracies and
>have no realistic idea of what skills are needed. They have been chasing so
>many theoretical hares in the last half century that the basic subjects
>that were well taught a century ago are now falling through the net. This
>has now been going on for long enough that part of a badly deficient
>generation of schoolchildren have now become "qualified" teachers themselves.
>
>But I'd like to return to my reason for raising this matter. Despite what I
>wrote in opposition to John McLaren's assumption of a "perpetually
>disadvantaged" class we may, for the first time in history, be at the
>beginning of one. By this I mean the class of people now living in the
>1,300 'sink' housing estates around this country (and the equivalents in
>other developed countries) who have no motivation and no means of acquiring
>the minimal skills to get into the economic network. However downtrodden
>poor people have been in the past, however manipulated by the
>establishment, however exploited by their employers, they have had the
>motivation and sufficient skills to struggle through sooner or later and to
>share the fruits of economic development. It is possible that this is no
>longer the case for a steadily growing minority of poor people today. There
>are now something like 300,000-400,000 young men in England without any
>educational qualifications whatsoever, who have been totally alienated by
>the educational system and who refuse to take part in the government's
>attempts at New Deal skill training because they consider it (probably
>correctly) as a waste of time. Because of this they have thus lost
>unemployment benefits and have now disappeared from official statistics --
>not even being counted as unemployed. So maybe John is right after all. We
>could be at the beginnings of a permanent underclass.
>
>Keith Hudson
>
>
>
>________________________________________________________________________
>
>Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
>6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
>Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>________________________________________________________________________
