Harry,
At 16:06 02/08/00 -0700, you wrote:
A few comments:
>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?
One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at this sort of situation. There
are similar cash registers in some pubs in England with a large keypad of,
maybe, 40 or 50 standard drinks -- but they also have a cash entry
facility. Sometimes on a summer's day I like a bitter shandy (half bitter
beer, half lemonade) which is so old-fashioned that it's not on the keypad.
In these situations I have to watch proceedings very carefully!
> 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.
One of the propaganda points that the (central) Department of Education in
England makes is that we need the highest possible percentage of degree
holders because that is what employers are demanding. Well, of course, many
employers don't need graduates at all but they'll have them if they're
available in large numbers. It's just a lazy way of selecting staff for
many middling categories of jobs.
>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.
If we went the whole way and ended compulsory education and government
grants to university students at a stroke then I think that attendees at
school would, in fact, fall pretty drastically -- say, to about 70% of the
whole. But this is hypothetical because this could never be attempted
politically. What is happening in England (and in the US from what I
gather) is that the public education is edging inexorably towards
privatisation. Or, rather, it is edging towards privatisation because it is
also heading disaster at the same time at a slightly faster rate. What has
hit the headlines recently is that five so-called "super headteachers"
(exceptional headteachers who are in charge of more than one school) on
relatively large salaries have resigned. One is going to be a lorry driver
and another a barman. In America there are charter schools and subcontracts
to private firms. I believe there are many hundreds of these. In England
much the same thing is happening, although the number of experiments is
relatively small so far. But it's interesting that even a Labour government
feels impelled to go down this policy route.
>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.
No, this is exactly what's happening here. If I remember correctly from the
news about a week ago there are about 30,000 children who are now excluded
from school. However, there are about two or three times that number whom
teachers would like to exclude but are prevented from doing so by various
appeal boards which over-rule the schools and force unruly children back
into the school even though they have a disruptive effect on the other
children. This has become so serious that the government have recently
announced that schools will have more say and has drawn up a list of
excludable behaviours. There is a row going on now between teachers and
the government as to what precise behaviours should be on that list. At the
same time, for "political correctness" reasons, the government has said
that they are setting a target of reducing the number of excluded children
in the next two years by 30%. So the government want it both ways! They
are giving in to the realities of the hellish classrooms in which many
teachers find themselves (often at high personal injury risk) but are also
trying to maintain that they have a reformist agenda.
As I've already written below, state education as a whole is in a
disastrous state. There are still thousands of excellent state schools in
the leafy suburbs, but there are now thousands of hellholes in inner city
areas and socially-assisted housing areas where they can only operate by
recruiting idealistic young teachers (who can't cope and soon leave) or
supply teachers (experienced retired teachers topping up their pensions)
who come in for a few days at a time without any long-term commitment to
the children.
The whole educational culture has gone badly wrong since the civil service
grabbed hold of it by dubious means a century ago. Education is now seen by
about 30% of parents as a right that their children should receive
automatically without effort -- that it can somehow be poured from on high
into the open mouths of children -- not as something that needs personal
motivation by the child, strongly suppported by parents at home.
The idea of voucher education is now spreading strongly in America I
understand. I'm in little doubt that it will soon start to happen over
there to a significant extent and then we won't be far behind. Very
gradually sanity is returning to the disastrous state experiment of the
past century.
Keith
>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
