RE: [Futurework] Foul-up in education (was The Politics of Foodbanks (or lack thereof) (was Re: Slightly extended)

[Harry Pollard]

Keith,

 

When I was studying British education some years ago, I noticed that an urban school amid a crop of failures stood out as a tremendous success. I remember thinking that it should be studied to find out what they were doing right.

 

You suggest the head teachers are most important, so my thought then would be to fire some and hire others. That couldn't be done here because of the union, so I suspect it would be true also in Britain.

 

The head of each school does indeed seem to be important to the effectiveness of the school. Some right wingers were elected to the School Board in a Southern California desert community - and took aim at my junior high course. This, though the parents liked it, the students loved it, and the teachers were enthusiastic. A battle erupted between teachers and Board.

 

I saw a letter from the Principal to the Board, in which he pointed out that my course had been extremely successful for two years with no complaints and much acceptance, Then he added "However, if you want me to pull it, I will."

 

They did and he did - and it led to a court case with the teachers' union joining in.

 

What a brouhaha!

 

What was significant was that the Principal did not support his teachers. He joined with the bureaucracy against them. Needless to say, his effectiveness as a principal went downhill. I believe that, pretty soon, he was "promoted" elsewhere.

 

Perhaps the principal, or head, who could properly lead his troops would be a major part of the solution to bad schools. But, the "educators" would have to stay away!

 

Harry

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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 1:04 PM
To: Ed Weick
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Foul-up in education (was The Politics of Foodbanks (or lack thereof) (was Re: Slightly extended)

Ed,

At 10:58 08/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:

Keith:

Take care Canada! Take care Australia! America and England are far ahead of you in many cultural ways -- but we're also leading the way into disastrous state education. Really and truly. Ideologically, I get the impression that you're where we were in the 1950/60s -- full of hope about the quality of education -- new ideas -- new subjects-- new theories -- developing the "versatile" pupil for tomorrow's world able to turn on a sixpensce and all that (but not teaching any worthwhile skills and making aliens, even enemies, of many of our young teenagers.). It's going bad at a rate of knots. It's as though there's collusion going on between Americans and teachers/educationists in this country: "How can we make our education system worse and worse .... and worse .... and worse .... let's do it together ....).

As usual, just a few comments, Keith.  As a Canadian, it's nice to know how my country ranks against Britain and the US "in many cultural ways".  In my several visits to Britain and the US, I never got the impression that we were that far behind and even permitted myself to think that we were well ahead in some respects.  Ah well, it's nice to know one's place in the Empire.

Yes, I'm glad you know your place. I'm an aristocrat, of course -- though I had rather strange and parsimonious parents. I had to scrub the floor of the front door step, the hall, the kitchen and the outside lavatory every morning before I went to school. I never had new school clothes -- all second-hand -- until I left home and went to work at 15. I had to darn holes in my socks. Couldn't afford underpants. I could only afford to buy piano music by going without school meals at lunch time. No such things as bus fares -- had to walk everywhere. My father earned about one third to one half of  the average wage in Coventry. My mother couldn't work. And do you know what? England is still ahead of you culturally (and by this I mean that we went through the industrial revolution and have been shaped by this long before most countries). You and your family had a bad time, and so did I and mine -- but culturally we also had a century of dispossession from the countryside behind us and then a century of factories following it. I may not claim to lead you and your ancestors in a classically cultural sense, and I don't, but England leads Canada in all sorts of ways educationally right from our first Church schools of 900AD. And we're now leading you into total breakdown of anything that can be called a comprehensive state school system for all degrees and varieties of children's abilities.
 

And I must add that our education system is not in much better shape than yours.  We have some very good primary schools in our neighbourhood, and a very good secondary school.  In the case of the latter, my wife was on council while our daughter was moving through.  In my wife's view - and here I trust her judgement completely because she knew what was going on - the teachers were good and dedicated people who worked very hard with the kids.  Daughter's brain is wired so that she had trouble with math and teachers spent a lot of time with her to make sure she got it.

I doubt that your daughter's brain is wrongly wired. She probably had a teacher who was not good at maths at a very critical ("imprinting") period in your daughter's schooling.

  If there a problem with our provincially run education system, and I believe there is, it's underfunding.  Sometimes you got the impression that our neo-con politicians were deliberatly starving the public system in order to promote private schools - e.g. parents sending kids to private schools, including religious schools, got tax breaks.  The new provincial government favours the public system but has to its horror "discovered" that it has inherited a large deficit from the previous government, so many of the promises it made about fixing things up before it was elected will remain promises, not become commitments.

It's little to do with funding as such. It's the enthusiasm and calibre of the teachers. We have instances in this country where there are (very occasionally) absolutely outstanding inner city schools side by side with many more examples of complete hopelessness, despair and uncontrollable pupils. What's the difference? Usually because the headmaster or headmistress has the right sort of charisma and attracts the right calibre of teachers (very difficult, because the general standard is now so low). I know a teacher in Bath who travels every Monday to London to teach in such a school (with 17 different nationalities in her class) and returns on Friday. What with lodgings and with enormous travel costs on the train she is as poor herself as the poorest parents of some of the children she teaches. But that's one school in 50. Or should I say, she works for one headmistress in 50. But there would be plenty more headmistresses of that calibre in private schooling. There arfe few who can be both good headmistresses and can keep their heads when they're daily assaulted by dicta from the Education Department in London.
 

Anyhow, Keith, I'm sure that by now you know that I favour public education.

And I think you're misguided. Why doesn't your government (and ours) offer vouchers so that private schools can have the same funds? Then if some state schools are good enough they can survive. I've no objection to that. Don't tell me the old excuse that the private schools would select the best students. There'd be enough examples of good teachers in a state school who could attract good students from discerning parents if they could be released from the control of London. But the educationists have been afraid to try this so far because they know in the heart of hearts that there'd be an overall improvement. It'll happen one day -- perhaps still quite a long way off for you because Canada is not so highly centralised as England. Our breakdown of state education is happening at quite a fast pace now. Vouchers can't be more than five years away now.

  I'm the product of public education and can claim to have done reasonably well.

So am I a product of public (state) schooling. I got an 11+ scholarship when 9 years of age and into a grammar school, and then proceeded to hate it because it was so bloody slow. And I left at 15 still hating it. So I know what so many  children today feel -- 'cos I was there 30 years ago before them and felt then as they do now. Except for history (where I never came top) and for art (where I was never less than top or second) I made it my business to show my contempt for school by coming either top or bottom of every subject depending on my mood that term. I once even decided to go for the final class prize. Instead of the book prizes on Greek literature and classics and so forth, kept in a special Prize Room at school for this purpose, I decided on Sherlock Holmes' "Valley of Fear" as my prize, much to the annoyance of the headmaster. It had to be bought specially from a shop in town. It had a chap with a blindfold on the cover and holding a dagger. Lurid! It was hilarious -- such a book sitting among all those elegant leather-clad tomes of the others on the prize-giving platform! The speaker that year was Lord Butler (the chap who introduced the 1944 Education Act in England). He called me back to the platform after giving me my prize and whispered to me ("that's the best book of the lot"). I laughed, the school laughed and clapped again. The headmaster wanted to know what Butler had said to me, but I wouldn't say. It was a secret between Butler and me. Subsequently, I've always got on well with Lords of the Realm. In later years one of them helped me to get an Act of Parliament through. But on that occasion I thereby earned even more black marks from the headmaster.

  The three children of my first marriage were products of that system and all went on to university, including post graduate work.  My youngest kid, now eighteen, is attending university.

My eldest went to university to take an honours degree. When my other children saw how miserable he was there, they decided not to go -- though they were just as bright. My daughter started selling cheap jewelry in a big store at 16, and by the time she was 21 she was Personnel Manager of Owen Owens in Coventry --200 staff -- and hiring university graduates of 24 or 25 for her own department among all the other new recruits for other departments. My youngest son went to South Africa, bought a wreck of a plane with a friend to fly tourists around (quite illegally!). The engine failed one day (thankfully when they were not flying tourists) and he had to crash-land in a peach orchard. The plane was a total wreck of course. And that was the end of that little chapter in his life. After that sort of life for a few years he was tempted back to England by a job from me. Then, to show his gratitude, he cleared off to Australia a couple of years later. So I've dispossessed him now.

  My view of education is that it is a responsibility of society as a whole.  The continuity of society depends on it.  Perhaps, if I came from a more stratified society, I would make distinctions among elite, ordinary and mediocre schools and universities, but I don't feel I come from that kind of society.  I've worked with people who had credentials from places like Oxford and Harvard and didn't feel cowed by them in the least.

What opened my eyes was, when I'd taken my degree in chemistry (while raising a family and working night shifts in a factory order to attend classes), I compared my exam with that of my brother-in-law who had taken his MA at Oxford in chemistry a year or two previously. Do you know which exam was harder? You guess. One of my best friends in Coventry was also an Oxford graduate. An amazing fellow. His father had a small engineering company but Paul got very bored with this so, every now and again, he would take off for East Germany (that is, in Communist times) and bring out people in the boot of his car. Talk about dangerous! He could have been imprisoned for years -- or shot. He did this several times. One of them became his wife. Anyway the thing about Paul was that he was a natural linguist and took his degree in German at Oxford. In all his time there he didn't have to speak a word of German with his tutors! For his Finals he had one German-to-English translation to do and another vice versa. Unbelievable! That's all that he did for his MA. Things are different now, I guess. But Oxford and Cambridge are still snooty places and some Colleges will often turn down very bright working class students with a string of A levels 'cos they have an accent something like mine (Midland). But even though some of the Oxbridge colleges were richly endowed from medieval benefactors, they started to become dependent on the government 50 years ago, and now they are almost completely tied up in the state system and the government are starting to tell them what students they may or may not accept. That may be an appropriate punishment for their snobbery in the past (and now!), but it has also meant that they have little independence now, and they are both steadily losing their cachet as world-class universities which they once used to be. They (and ten other of the best univesities in England) deeply wish to be independent but they are trapped through lack of sufficient endowments.

That's enough.

Keith

 
 
Ed

----- Original Message -----

From: Keith Hudson

To: Harry Pollard

Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 9:24 AM

Subject: [Futurework] Foul-up in education (was The Politics of Foodbanks (or lack thereof) (was Re: Slightly extended)

Harry,

At 01:28 08/12/2003 -0800, you wrote:

Arthur,

When I read it, I agreed with Chris' remarks. Except of course

his aside on protectionism.

There are probably areas almost the size of Switzerland in the US

where there is little crime and living is good.

There are other areas that aren't like that,

However, unless thought is given to the basics such as education,

we will get nowhere with our slapped on social poultices.

Talking with a friend last night who teaches Junior College kids.

When they find he wants written work, they flee to other classes.

He's left with those who can't find another class. He says he

should fail 75% of them but veteran teachers tell him to pass

them through.

The same here!

I first came across the poor state of education 20-odd years ago when I was at Massey-Ferguson interviewing an engineer straight from university with, apparently, a good second class degree. He proudly showed me his final thesis. He had spelled "Globa's salt" (used in his project as a heat reservoir in a central heating system) all the way through! Repeatedly! He had obviously never seen "Glauber's salt" in print! Nor had his thesis supervisor noticed the repeated mistake. I couldn't believe. Needless to say, he didn't get the job.

Today, 25% of 14 year-olds can't find "plumber" in the Yellow Pages, and can't do simple fractions or decimals. 40% of boys hate secondary school and badly want to leave. 40% of 21 year-olds admit to difficulties with writing and spelling (official survey -- Central Statistical Office 1995). 1,500,000 retired people in this country are not claiming government benefits because they have to wade through a 47-page booklet* and are too proud to confess that they can't understand it and too proud to go for help to Citizens' Advice Bureau. (*I've read it. It's complicated for me! I mean, do the civil servants do this on purpose? They were told it was too complicated before it was published, but it still had to go ahead because the system itself had become too complex to be simplified! All the different tax systems are, literally, becoming too complicated for the civil service itself to understand at a top level. In our agricultural department there are over 40 different government schemes for those who live and work in the countryside. A recent official enquiry revealed that few civil serants who were in charge of some of them in various departments were aware of the existence of most of the others -- sometimes [in the case of canny farmers and landowners] they were giving grants for the same things under different schemes! But much the same applies to the Department of Industry, the Home Office, etc. All this is madness and will have to be reformed or it will collapse of its own accord one day. It's the Byzantine Empire all over again.)

Our only hope in the US in many places is to make education

voluntary. Teachers should teach only those who want to learn -

or whose parents want them to learn. Also, teachers should be

allowed tax money to run their own schools. I suggested the

economics of this a week or two ago. (The State could save money

and the teachers would get a hefty raise.

Yes, yes! We've all become totally indoctrinated that only the state is capable of teaching children. The fairly newly re-established Church coming over with the Saxons, Thules, etc, to England in 900AD was producing a higher level of literacy than today in the places where the churches has been built! (The early Church, Bismark's Germany, England at the turn of the last century all wanted to get into the teaching of young children for the same purpose of indoctirnating them -- us into little imperialists. But surely we've grown beyond that motivation now. The reason why it continues is that there are so many jobs for the bureacrats and so that teacher's unions can control the system. 

The mixture of various fee-paying schools and church schools of the 1820s (to which 90% of parents in the cities voluntarily paid for their children to attend) also produced a higher standard of literacy -- about 90%. How on earth could the novel have taken off? How on earth could Dickens and the Victorian writers have been so popular among the chambermaids reading below stairs without more widespread reading than today? (Dickens did a very bad job [as false as Engels and Marx at roughly the same time -- they falsified the statistics] in giving a quite unrealistic picture of Victorian England -- it was a renaissance for most working people! The standard of living went up at least four times in the last 50 years of the 19th century. How myths do stick because too many ideologists and politicians want them to!) The state stepped in to "fill the gaps" at around 1870 onwards. Then some politicians and the senior civil servants decided to take the whole lot over by offering no fee-state schools -- thus obviously bankrupting the private system. Why, why are parents allowed to buy clothes or food for their children but not education? The state gets dumb children (and increasingly dumb teachers in this country*) because it has treated the parents as dumb during the last century.

*50% of newly-qualified state junior school teachers can't pass the standard maths exams taken by 16-year olds (that is, almost all of them 50 years ago, a minority today).

The bright kids still get through despite all this but the rest come out with almost worthless qualifications. 40% of those going to the lower band of universities (that is, except the top 15 or so) drop out because they can't manage it. Reality has finally caught up with them and they're not capable of responding because the education system has hoodwinked them. They have never known what work is. But it's not their fault! They've been caught in a state-induced education trap which is quite as insidious  as the state-induced poverty trap. Young people don't know what work and responsibility are from their school experience. The local shop can't get paper delivery boys these days. Those that do the job decide to turn up or not in the mornings as they please. If I were not receiving two pensions already (by far the best one which I've earned for myself in the last 15 years) plus the state pension, I would do two or three paper rounds myself at my age (68) despite emphysema, and would earn an amount equivalent most of a state pension. Now that China and India are taking all the relatively unskilled jobs away from us, then it's about time we de-dumbed our school systems -- otherwise it is going to be disaster for at least 30% (probably more) of our 'working' population in 10/20 years' time or so (and in America and in Canada). Many of the responsible politicians in charge of education policy of today will have a lot to answer for -- but most will be dead by then and all will be forgotten.

The Department of Education in this country is getting increasingly desperate from year to year -- real, real desparation -- for which their only answer is to repeatedly make the system dumber still from year to year in order to show apparently good results. For God's sake why doesn't the DoE get out of it altogether!  If they gave it up completely there would be chaos for 12 months -- but, by crikey, there'd be the beginning of a decent education system well within two to five years (with the same level of spending per pupil, the providers would be falling over themselves in equipment and books), within ten years a totally new standard of young people would be feeding through to the universities and we'd have the beginning of a decent university system (to which alumni would start giving endowments for scholarships for poor students -- which they don't do now becaue "the state takes care of everything")  and within 15 we'd have enough skilled people for tomorrow's world. If we had higher standards of skills then we could start sharing jobs --  but there's no possibility of that given present educational and skills poverty.

Take care Canada! Take care Australia! America and England are far ahead of you in many cultural ways -- but we're also leading the way into disastrous state education. Really and truly. Ideologically, I get the impression that you're where we were in the 1950/60s -- full of hope about the quality of education -- new ideas -- new subjects-- new theories -- developing the "versatile" pupil for tomorrow's world able to turn on a sixpensce and all that (but not teaching any worthwhile skills and making aliens, even enemies, of many of our young teenagers.). It's going bad at a rate of knots. It's as though there's collusion going on between Americans and teachers/educationists in this country: "How can we make our education system worse and worse .... and worse .... and worse .... let's do it together ....).

 

Despite all this, the really big foul-up in state education doesn't start until after puberty. That's when the tragedy starts. Puberty is a vastly important change point in life -- in brain development and in bodily hormones and the education system takes absolutely no notice of it. Just sails on regardless, dumbing down exam standards all the time. I'm going to try and deal with this in a longer posting today. (When I've recovered -- I've become very angry about all this fantastic ineptitude and an old man like me had better lie down and have a lunch-time nap.)

The state has made dependents of almost everybody and even now is trying to extend it. In this country, even parents earning about US$100,000 a year (that is, about twice the national average for two working parents) qualify for some family credits (unlike the old they get these automatically in order to make sure they are fully bribed to vote for this government next election).

It's all got to end -- and it will do. It's madness. And education is the worst disaster of them all, because our grandchildren will have no future unless radical changes are made. And I mean radical in the true sense of the word.

Keith
 

 

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