Education Archives

Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Just who is being protected here? Just what benefit is being bestowed upon our society? What good can possibly be derived from a ruling like this?

"A mother-of-two has been jailed for failing to prevent her daughters from playing truant from school.

The Brighton woman was sentenced to seven days in prison and is only the second parent in the country to be jailed because her children skipped lessons."

Why incarcerate this woman for the 'refusenik' behaviour of her children? I presume it's because the state takes the view that threatening the liberty of parents will oblige them to become more coercive and bullying towards their own offspring in order that they may toe the educational establishment line. How degraded and immoral is that? I am reminded of the late Philip Larkin's injunction:

"Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out, as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself"

The once misanthropically gloomy Larkin begins to sound more and more like a pragmatist.

This woman has been sent to jail because education for children is compulsory and the state is the monopoly provider. Sadly, this paradigm is now a fixture of just about all Western societies but has anybody thought to ask the children themselves if this process is something that they either want or need? Clearly, the two little girls in question were fed up with being forced to traipse day after day to a draughty, municipal building and sat at a desk while a low-grade public servant with halitosis and a short temper drones at them about the French Revolution. Or Algorithms. Or something.

I am at a loss to understand how these two children, or the society of which they are a part, have anything to gain from being forced back into a situation where they are likely to be nothing except sullen and resentful prisoners? Very few people take the view that forcing human beings to work in state-owned factories on government-mandated projects will be in any way beneficial yet nearly everybody is entrenched in the dogmatic belief that doing the very same thing to human beings under the age of 18 will be nothing but beneficial.

This is an orthodoxy to which I once held myself: education is good, but children don't realise this. Therefore prescribed and generally agreed packages of learning must be forced on them for their own good. Is this true? I must confess that I have no ready alternatives available nor any glib answers on what parents should do instead. But I do know that I am increasingly unsettled by noxious enforcements of the kind reported above and by the quiet, persuasive ideas of people like Alice Bachini.

Compulsory education is about compulsion not education. It is a received wisdom to which I am finding it increasingly difficult to subscribe and which I believe should be revisited and re-examined at a systemic level.

Sunday, December 15, 2002

The following posting was written with my education blog in mind. However, although in general this enterprise is rattling along fine, it is for the time being ungettatable. I'm hoping that this is (a) because this is now Sunday afternoon and every internetter in the world is internetting and my blog empire's hardware can't cope, or even better (b) because Atlas (he knows who he is) has unshrugged and is finally getting Brian's Culture Blog going, but in a way that has interrupted normal service. Alternatively, (c) one of Richard Branson's slaves read what I put about his Lord and Master on Transport Blog the other day and has turned the Virgin army of hackers loose on my life, in which case it was nice knowing you all.

Anyway, I read what follows through again and found that it will do okay also for samizdata.net so here it is:

Joanne Jacobs links to the following piece of dialogue, originally posted on Notes From The Ghetto Teacher on October 29th.

Today, we were discussing 15th century literature and the invention of the Gutenburg Press. I asked them to write a short essay on what they'd learned from the chapter and lecture. One of my students tentatively raised his hand:

Student: Miss?

Me: Yeah, baby?

Student: When was the 15th century?

Me: Between the 14th and 16th, baby. Do you mean what years are in the 15th century?

Student: Aww ... dawg ... naw ... I'm sayin' ... what century was the 15th century in?

Me: [pause] Write it down a piece of paper then read it back out loud.

Student: [writes it down slowly] Fif-teenth century.

Me: Right. So, what century is that?

Student: That's what I be aksin' you.

Some days, I just want to throw my chalk.

Now I have far less experience of teaching in a ghetto than does the Ghetto Teacher (she presumably has quite a lot and I have none), but what I want to know is: what would have been the problem with just giving the answer, along the lines of: "The fifteenth century means the one hundred years between the year 1400 and the year 1500"?

Okay, maybe confusion would still have reigned in the mind of the student, in which case the teacher might have had to try something else, and maybe that would have been difficult if two dozen or more other students were also demanding the teacher's attention.

A reasonable answer in the circumstances might also have been: "This is an exercise to find out what you already know, so for now I won't answer. Later, I'll tell you. Please ask me again afterwards."

But to give the answer "between the 14th and the 16th century" borders on the facetious.

Here is one of those wonderful students that teachers all say they love, a student who wants to learn. In this case, he wanted to learn when the fifteenth century was. And it's not a stupid question. I'm not a moron, but I had to pause to make sure I got the answer right? How many of us have not assumed, at some point in our lives, that the fifteenth century must be the century from 1500 onwards? No wonder the boy was asking. Sensible fellow. If the teacher has the knowledge, and the student wants it and is ready to receive it, then hand it over. What is the problem about that?

If we were being told about this conversation as an illustration of how frazzled and snitty teachers can sometimes get down there in the school trenches, fair enough, we could all sympathise. But this woman seems to think, on mature reflection, that she was being entirely reasonable, and that the bizarre behaviour was entirely on the student's side. And Joanne Jacobs, to whom thanks for the link despite everything, agrees. I guess that's teachers for you. They all stick together no matter how annoying one of them is being.

But I mean, if you were working in a shop, would you talk to a customer like this? Would you turn a simple question into a Kafkaesque guessing game? Would you expect him to write his question down on a bit of paper? And if all that didn't work, would you then be tempted to throw things at him? And would you then write the whole thing up that evening on ihatemystupidcustomers.blogspot.com? This is Basil Fawlty territory.

Maybe it's an exam thing. Teachers spend so much of their time coaching their students to pass exams that they forget about simply imparting information. Instead they focus obsessively on dinning into their pupils the habit of deducing what they want to know only from what they already know, because that's what they'll have to be able to do in the exam room. As a result, one of the basic techniques of good teaching - simply answering the questions of one's pupils, as patiently and as accurately as one can manage (and as often as necessary to get the information truly received and understood) – gets forgotten.

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
- Frederic Bastiat

Thousands of British students have gathered in London today in order to protest against a Government proposal to introduce university top-up fees. Coming from across the UK, they started marching at noon today (I am pleased to report it is pissing down with rain) in protest against a Government plan to require students to pay for at least some of their own university education. The protestors are backed by trade unionist and assorted socialist groups, who are claiming 20,000 students are marching. Police have said there are closer to 10,000 present.

Mandy Telford, president of the National Union of Students (NUS), said: "Education should be based on your ability not your ability to pay. Going down that road is putting a price tag on degrees and that's not positive for society."

Society? It is not 'society' which takes money from one group of people by force and gives it to another, only the state (or organised crime) can do that to whole sections of the population by force. If students are entitled to take other people's money in order to educate themselves, and the object of this education being to benefit themselves, why not also for food? For housing? For petrol? For clothing? In fact, why should they need to pay for anything from which they benefit? It seems they do indeed want that invidious form of outright theft called progressive taxation to fund the priorities of others and of course students are just the thin end of the paleo-socialist wedge being offered up here.

Ms Telford [of the National Union of Students] said students were converging on London from across the country. She said: "The march will send a very clear message to ministers. Students are angry and their families are angry.

Well I am bloody angry too! These 'protestors' are nothing more than parasites calling for the state to continue to engage in theft on their behalf. What makes their needs and priorities so much more important than mine that they feel they have the right to take my money for their benefit? Well up your, you scruffy leeches... you will get very little from me. Any future business of mine will be off-shore benefiting someone else's economy, and 10,000 of the reasons are marching through London today.

Monday, December 02, 2002

Because of the vagaries of the internet, comments are occasionally attached to Samizdata pieces that were posted many weeks ago. Such comments are liable not to be noticed. Well, my email this morning contained the text of a most helpful and interesting comment from Lisa Wylde on my piece about dog expert Jan Fennell. Here's what Lisa said:

I was fortunate to get a place on one of Jan Fennell's two day foundation courses. This was spent in her home, and to see how content and relaxed her own dogs were was an absolute inspiration. I have been interested in canine behaviour for many years, and it is interesting to see that many of the "experts" do not own dogs themselves - or indeed some of them own ones with "problems". Of course there are some behaviourists, such as the late John Fisher who have a lot to teach us, unfortunately not all of them are as dedicated to the canine mind and spirit as he was.

You state that you should "ignore them all the time" this is not actually the case, simply that when YOU want to play and fuss your dog - YOU call them. Assuming they respond to your call, you can play, cuddle, fuss, whatever you want to do. But if you are sitting on the settee watching the tv, for example, and the dog comes to you uninvited, and plonks his head (or body!!) on your lap – you would quietly push them away, because you had not instigated contact. This is why some people believe it is cruel, "ignoring your dog all the time" but this is not actually what you do – just simply when you are relaxed and want to play with the dog you do so, and you would both enjoy it more, but if the dog was demanding to play, barking, jumping up etc. although you may accept his behaviour in the park when you are appropriately dressed, you may not appreciate the same "request" by your dog when you are dressed up ready to go out! Consistency is the key, if the dog knows that you will only play with it when you want to, and therefore learns manners, both of you will really relish that quality time together!

Lisa, thank you very much for this. This was the aspect of Fennellism that had been most bothering me, and you have answered my bother perfectly. After all, if you are supposed to ignore your dog all the time, then quite aside from the cruelty to your dog aspect, what, for you, is the point of having a dog? I knew there was an answer that I hadn't assimilated, and I sort of knew what it was, in fact I must have read this answer myself in Jan Fennell's book. But, I hadn't absorbed it properly. Thanks for your explanation, and for your general confirmation of what I have believed of Jan Fennell ever since my sister and brother-in-law first told me about her, which is that she is definitely on the right track – the right dog track, you might say.

Alpha dog Brian with two pack members

Friday, November 29, 2002

In my previous posting here, about Gordon Brown's plans to wreck the British economy, I said that all that was one reason I was happy. Here's another: Brian's EDUCATION Blog. It's not for me to be saying how good this is, but I can say that so far I am managing to keep on doing whatever it is I'm doing. I'm not running out of things to say.

For example, I'm already thinking about a post I hope to do soon concerning the vital importance to the development of Silicon Valley not just in a general way of Stanford University, but in particular of just one academic at Stanford University, a man called Frederick Terman. I've semi-known about this man for almost as long as I've known about Silicon Valley, but there's nothing like having to write regularly for a specialist blog to make you learn the outlines of a story like this properly, by the simple procedure of writing it out. Quite aside from what others may be learning from it, think what Brian's Education Blog is doing for Brian's Education. The ambiguity of the title is entirely deliberate.

And what about the writings of others that I might otherwise have missed?

My favourite new writing discovery this week is Colby Cosh. He's done two pieces this week on educational themes, both excellent. This is a take on one of the minor weaknesses (slightly weird parentally implanted beliefs) that sometimes goes with a kid being home-schooled, and on the major strength, ditto (very good education).

And this is an essentially economic critique of the whole idea of schools as we now know them which I think is right on the money, money being one of the things Cosh talks about. I've already quoted from this over at BEdBlog. Here's another bit:

… If you were designing an education method from scratch you'd never dream of having hundreds of kids in one giant building like a workhouse or a Panopticon prison, would you? You'd probably get together with ten or twelve of your neighbours, people who have kids roughly your child's age, and you'd hire one person to handle their education. Think of the background checks you could do on your candidates, the multi-tier interview process you could organize. Worried about paying the salary of a tutor? Well, I don't know about where you live, but my provincial government spends about $5,000 a year educating a child, according to a back-of-envelope calculation. That's not an unreasonable amount, but if you were given that money and allowed to spend it as you please, do you think you could do better?

That's more or less what I see happening... increasingly radical forms of "school choice", the creation of a free market for tutor labour, innovative community arrangements. Flatter educational structures without all the paperwork. An outflow of schoolwork from the factories to - well, I don't know; it seems to me, just for starters, that there are a whole lot of old people rattling around big houses who would almost be willing to pay to have the place full of children during the day. Or you could simply let a parent with a large house host the class, and allow their child to join for free. A finished basement would be more than large enough, really, for the kind of classes I'm imagining. …

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I've got into the habit of typing "education" into google and seeing what floats to the top. Usually it's some ghastly governmental, er, item, and last night was no different. But honestly, what is there to say about some piece of politico-educational chair re-arranging like this? One lot of politicians think that someone in charge of some schools in Ottawa (a Mr Beckstead) should be fired. Another lot of politicians think he shouldn't. Money is mentioned a lot, education hardly at all. Something to do with how quickly inner city schools are being shut down and how quickly new schools are being erected in the suburbs. By the government. As they say in parts of the USA, well whoop-de-do. Maybe I ought to be interested, but all I can really think to say is that in Colby-Cosh-Brian-Micklethwait world, these things would take care of themselves. I'm afraid Mr Beckstead is not going to get any mentions on BEdBlog, and this is definitely the last you'll be reading about him here, unless some Canadians surprise us with some comments about why we should care about him.

In general, I find that all the interesting action in education is taking place underneath the politics, so to speak, in the form of local initiatives that make sense for the people directly involved. The nearest thing to a political-type news story that I have found seriously interesting is the so-called Teach First scheme, which although it is aimed at making some very bad state schools (of exactly the sort that Colby Cosh criticises) somewhat less bad still makes a lot of sense to me. Basically it's sticking posh young men from posh universities in crap schools for a couple of years before they duly get their posh jobs in the City. Good idea, at both ends. More about this, and about how I heard about it, here.

Although I have to struggle to stay awake when confronted with nationalised education policy, "Globalised" education policy, that is to say, the ongoing attempt to create a global Ministry of Education, is, on the other hand, extremely interesting, and also of course extremely sinister. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on that story as it unfolds. Very slowly, I hope and pray. With luck, by the time the damned machine is in place, real education of the Colby Cosh sort (which is now spreading like wildfire throughout the Third World) will be up, up and away.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

More stuff from my Brian's EDUCATION Blog beat that deserves the Samizdata treatment.

Daryl Cobranchi picks up on a "state repression of home-schoolers" story. Here are the first two paragraphs of it:

A public school superintendent has sent police in squad cars to the houses of homeschooling families to deliver his demand that they appear for a "pre-trial hearing" to prove they are in compliance with the law.

Bruce Dennison, regional superintendent of schools in Bureau, Stark, and Henry counties in Northeastern Illinois, has contacted more than 22 families, insisting that they need his approval to conduct education at home.

Dennison is, legally speaking, quite wrong, or so something called the Home School Legal Defense Association argues (see their Nov 13 2002 story). Sadly, these days, something can be wrong, legally speaking, but still be true, factually speaking.

Nevertheless, for what it's worth (and I hope it helps the home-schoolers of Illinois), Regional Superintendent of Schools Bruce Dennison, you are now also being denounced on the other side of the Atlantic.

Monday, November 18, 2002

Daryl Cobranchi blots out "The Kingdom" (i.e. Saudi Arabia) from the story he's quoting from and says: Guess where this is? The quote he copies and pastes says all the usual things about how private sector education in these parts works better and costs less than the government's efforts. I guessed India, through having already done a piece about Indian education for my new education blog.

I was also going to hide this posting away in the same place, but then I thought Saudi Arabia? That's definitely Samizdata territory. That's of a lot more than merely educational interest. So here I am here with it, and here's the paragraph that follows the ones that Daryl recycled, from Arab News:

Essentially I am not an enthusiast for the privatization of the education system on a wider scale. However, the experience makes us appreciate the private sector’s quality and apparent superiority. The quality of government schools s not because of a shortage of funds. At the same time, it is the sheer size of the government bureaucracy and machinery that weighs it down and renders it ineffective.

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid's use of the word "essentially" reminds me of how Kingsley (novelist father of novelist Martin) Amis used to say that "essentially" is another word for "not". The grammar doesn't quite work out with the above quote, but that aside, if this man is not an enthusiast for the privatization of education, it makes you wonder what a Saudi Arabian who is an enthusiast for the privatization of education would be like.

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

Alice Bachini observes that many want to penalize success. Nothing unusual there!

I don't exactly know what the Centre For Analysis Of Social Exclusion is, but it doesn't sound good to me. So its suggestion that our crumbling state-funded universities should be allowed to charge students top-up fees might seem at first very sensible and welcome.

However, what this frighteningly-named body actually wants is for state-educated pupils to be exempt from those fees. In other words, it wants people who fund not only their own children's education but also those of other people's children, through their taxes, to continue doing so at university level, only much much more heavily. To the tune of up to ten and a half thousand smackers a year, in fact. Because this is "fair". Of course.

"Parents of students from independent schools have signalled their ability to pay for education and research shows that these students earn significantly more in the labour market,"Abigail McKnight, a research fellow at the Economic and Social Research Council's centre, said at the weekend.

Quite so. Independent schools produce pupils better equipped to do well in life and earn more money. Success breeds success... and it seems that to many this is an outrage: how dare they! They must be made to pay!

So, the redistribution of wealth, in advance of the event of actually earning it, on the basis that one's parent's did so first; what do we call that idea, I wonder?

I doubt that these proposals will get through, but the fact that they can get taken even slightly seriously for a second demonstrates, in my view, both the latent socialism in New Labour institutions, and the acceptability of socialism in Education circles. Well, socialism isn't going to help British universities one little bit. Until they get free from the state and allowed to charge money where they want, their towers will keep crumbling and they will continue to leak their best people across the Atlantic.

Oh bother, I should start saving up for those Harvard fees right now.

Alice Bachini

Sunday, November 03, 2002

To me, a blog, Brian's EDUCATION Blog, me and blog both doing well.

Well I hope we're doing well. "Up and running" is the usual kind of expression used for such events as this. Up and staggering around bumping into furniture but mostly lying in pram and sleeping would be more accurate. After vital initial help from expert Movable Typist Alex Singleton (of Liberty Log) my blogynaecologist is now Patrick Crozier (UK Transport and Croziervision), but it still looks an ugly brute despite their best efforts. I know, what must it have been like before?

But the text is starting to roll. Yesterday I did a ramble about what BEB stands for, blah blah blah but necessary. And today, Patrick has just posted a piece about a Maths textbook entrepreneur, whose website he saw on the side of a van.

Saturday, October 12, 2002

I think one of the biggest mistakes made by Classical Liberals in Britain was to allow (and, indeed, encourage) the government to start funding education in the 19th Century. He who pays the piper calls the tune and it was only a matter of time before the government took over education and began to run it as the state monopoly we are still lumbered with today.

As with all these monolithic government services they are indifferent to the needs of their customers, exisitng primarily as fiefdoms of a professional education establishment. Well-to-do families can afford to escape the system but not so modest income and poor families whose children are left victimised by the shambolic sausage factories through which they are processed.

To date, there has been insufficient challenge to this state monopoly but that could all be about to change. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting James Stansfield at the October 'Putney Debate' hosted by Tim Evans. James works with the famous James Tooley, a former socialist who has seen the light and now campaigns for a free market in education. Together they have established the EG West Centre at the University of Newcastle; an academic research body dedicated to spreading radical ideas about the provision of education by means other than the state.

The man after whom the project is named, EG West, was a British-born academic who did most of his work in Canada in the 1950's and 1960's. Swimming completely against the tide of the received wisdom of that era, this man who concluded, from his meticulously documented research, that state education was a disaster. Unsurprisingly, he was pilloried by the rest of academia and the education establishment as some kind of dangerous madman before being proved absolutely correct.

West's legacy is a comprehensive set of ideological and analytical tools which are now being wielded by the likes of Messrs Stansfield and Tooley with a view to revolutionising public policy. James Stansfield is clearly passionate about his mission which he described in detail at last night's meeting.

It seems there is both good news and bad news.

The good news is that governments all over the world are getting so exasperated at their own failure to deliver that they are willing to consider any other alternatives on offer from the private sector. This is particularly the case with developing countries like India where the government is so desperate to get their people educated that they have entirely jettisoned all the old ideological baggage and are happy for the free market to let rip. James was also very enthusiastic about the widespread Home-Schooling movement in the USA and the burgeoning movement in the UK.

The bad news is that there appears to be very little chance in the immediate future of any headway being made in Britain where the government still clings tenaciously to the old ideal of centralised control despite its increasingly apparent failings. James was of the opinion that the government is still very much in thrall to the left on this issue. Elsewhere, organisations such as The World Bank and UNESCO are vigourously lobbying Third World governments to establish universal, compulsory state education i.e. to make the same mistake we have made in the West. [James kept referring to these people, sarcastically, as 'Charming purveyors of love' so I took the liberty of introducting him to the term 'Tranzi']

But the very fact that there is both good and bad news means that battle is being enjoined and that victory is out there to be won. With the EG West Centre we have the equivalent of a mechanised infantry division on our side.

This is not just a British issue, it is a universal issue and, if you have any interest at all in education, then I strongly recommend that you take a look at the highly informative EG West Centre website linked to above and spread to the word.

Saturday, October 05, 2002

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective.

In both the United States and Britain home education is on the increase. Roland Meighan, formerly special professor of education at Nottingham university estimates that at least 1% of school aged children are home educated in Britain. In the United States the figure is 5% with a growth rate of 20% each year and rising. In both the United States and Britain home education is increasingly a step taken by families disillusioned by the provision of mainstream education.

However, the content of this disillusionment seems to vary enormously. In the States, despite a growing number of secular home educators, the religious reason continues to dominate. In a society that separates religion and state, religious parents, especially those on the fundamentalist right are likely to withdraw their children from schooling. In contrast, Britain has no such separation of religion and state. Religious education and a daily act of worship are mandatory in state schools and the government is set to forge ahead with plans to increase the number of state funded schools with an explicitly religious foundation despite the protests of the National Secular Society. Of course, for some religious families this weak inoculation of school based religion is insufficient, especially when evolution is taught routinely in biology classes, but those who withdraw their children for religious reasons are very much in the minority of British home educators.

In the United States, Ronald Presitto¹ tells us that the right of parents to raise their children according to their religious convictions is at the heart of the divergence between 'home schooling' and the educational establishment. In contrast, most British home educators begin with pragmatic concerns - children are withdrawn when severe bullying incidents fail to be resolved, when they are too bored to tolerate the standardised national curriculum, when their special needs are not taken into account or when the only school place offered is at some dismal, failing institution where you wouldn't leave a dog. Some do start out with convictions about individualised education or religion, but these are the minority.

What American home schoolers and British home educators have in common is the reaction of their 'authorities' to their presence. From local officials to policy makers to government ministers there is a swathe of opinion that believes that parents are not to be trusted with their children and that the State, whether it is secular, socialist or broadly Judaeo-Christian, represents safer hands and inculcates more objective values. Recently in Britain the host of a prestigious legal radio programme (Radio 4 'Law in Action') opined exactly that in his weekly Guardian column - teachers are trained, accredited and hand down the official package to children, but heaven (or not) only knows what parents might be doing to their children.

In America, Presitto traces these attitudes to modern American liberalism, to progressives who rated common enterprise above the interests of the individual, giving rise to increased state powers and justifying this expansion as being in the people's best interests - secular and scientific. Parents, on the other hand, were suspect - they might infect and instill their young with dogma. In Britain education was first provided by the church and continues to be apparently 'Christian', but it is a mild, perhaps peculiarly British, strain of Christianity that goes hand in hand with socialist fears that parents might exploit or abuse children or that individualism might run rampant against the idol of communitarianism. In both countries, Marx's scorn for "the bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child" is alive and well in educational and political arenas near you right now.

Despite Britain's recent adoption of the convention on human rights, which protects a right to a family life, this scorn is made all too evident in recent British politics. The Blairite government has introduced Connexions an iniquitous Orwellian electronic card issued to young people to enable them to access educational and other services, but only after they have gone through detailed interviews revealing every scrap of their own and their parents private lives. More recently a Bill which makes compulsory the drugging of children deemed to have 'ADHD' and which will criminalise parents who try to stand in the state's way has been introduced.

In Britain, despite having stepped out of the state provision of education, many home educators come from left wing backgrounds and have a great deal of sympathy with the view that if they have nothing to hide then they should be willing to let the authorities into their homes or produce their children on request - often in the name of saving other children from supposed exploitation or abuse. In Britain it often takes a first hand encounter with an intrusive and bullying local education authority inspector to make people reconsider their stance and ideology is usually something that develops along the way. Without the lobbying numbers of their American counterparts, many British home educators are fearful of putting their heads over the political parapet at all and though there are an increasing number of activists and signs of mature political thinking, there is also a great deal of suspicion of making any kind of stand. Behind the scenes in British home education there is certainly disillusionment with state provision, but the fight is not a religious one and, for many, not even an ideological one. Instead there is a confused picture - astute thinking and activism jostle alongside the concerns of down shifters, eco-worriers and socialists who just can't quite stomach the system when it comes to their own children.

In the States parents have won battles to protect the 'traditional interests of parents'. In Britain, home educators are holding their breath - they have watched French and Irish home educators loose rights and, within their own community, are witnessing an ongoing and protracted attack on the rights of Scottish home educators (where a separate law to that of England and Wales operates). British home educators have the advantage of being broad based, largely secular, not easily dismissed as wild dogmatists, but for all that they are living in interesting times in the face of Blairite infractions into liberty and need to galvanise before the fence they are sitting on is bulldozed for
their own good.

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood

¹ = What's Behind Home Schooling? by Ronald J. Pestritto in 2002 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune,Thursday, October 3. This
article is archived at The Claremont Institute.

Monday, September 30, 2002

For some years now, sister Daphne and brother-in-law Denis, with whom I had a most happy stay last weekend, have been telling me interesting things about dogs. I promised to do a posting about this earlier, and here it is. ("Education" is an odd way to categorise it, but this was the best I could find.)

D&D; have two dogs themselves, but more to the point they've also been reading a particularly interesting book about dogs, The Dog Listener by Jan Fennell. Denis did a very positive customer review of this book for Amazon. However, these customer reviews apparently come and go, and Denis' one, which was there a week ago, seems now to have gone. Luckily I had already copied and pasted some of what he had said:

Her suggestions are so simple that, as a dog owner for many years, I thought they could not possibly work. I was so wrong that I was amazed. Within days my two labradors were so much more relaxed and better behaved that I experienced a fresh delight in keeping dogs. … Over the years I have read many books on dog training and this is the best.

Jan Fennell's wisdom is based on the observation of dogs and dog packs in the wild, including wolf packs, dogs being the domesticated descendants of wolves. In this respect Fennell's work resembles that of Monty Roberts, the famous "man who listens to horses" alluded to in the title of Fennell's own book, and the writer of the forward for it.

I read through The Dog Listener while staying with Daphne and Denis, and I can't say that I grasped all of its subtleties. But a few core notions I do now understand.

Dogs are pack animals, and the key to knowing how to relate to them means knowing how dogs relate to other pack members. Your dog, if you have one, thinks of you as a member of its pack.

And here's the most surprising thing. There is every chance that your dog thinks that it is the leader of your pack, and that you are its subordinate.

I had always imagined that dogs are like human infants only with about a hundred times more energy. That they might be worrying about their "owners" in the way that a parent worries about its child never entered my head. Yet when an "owner" abandons a dog, for example by leaving the dog at home, and the dog gets into a frazzle and bites the furniture and messes up the carpets, the dog isn't reacting like an abandoned child. The dog is reacting like a distracted parent who has lost its child. Don't think: neurotic dog, well, that's dogs for you, neurotic by nature. No. Think: pack leader who is failing in his basic responsibilities. Think: captain of ship who is out of his depth and who knows it. This is where the "neurotic dog" cliché comes from. Crazy, uncontrolled, obsessive behaviour is only natural for a dog in the sense that it is natural for me to piss in my trousers if someone holds a knife to my throat. That there are so many neurotic dogs out there is because there are so many owners who don't know how to take charge of their dogs. Such owners don't know how to relieve their dogs of overwhelming and impossible responsibilities.

Other boss dog ("alpha dog") habits: barking at strangers, on account of it being their job to guard the den against strangers; tugging at the leash, on account of it being their job to decide where the hunt goes; simply ignoring requests to come or sit or just calm down, on account of top dogs not obeying bottom dogs.

So how do you place yourself above your fellow pack member in the pack pecking order? How do you put a dog in its place?

The essence of the answer is: by ignoring it. When I arrived at the D&D; household for the first time, I did exactly as Denisinstructed: ignore them, go where you're going, don't go towards them, don't make eye contact, don't pat them, don't smack them on the body, don't, don't, don't - and I soon had the dogs behaving as if I was the boss. This after a lifetime of greeting dogs in the human style, like long lost but low IQ friends – or like small children. Shouting enthusiastic greetings at them, smothering them in affection and body contact and generally making a huge drama out of how glad I am to see them - followed by them not giving me the time of day from then on. That's because if you do all that stuff, so natural to a human, the dog then reckons it outranks you. Everything you do to change that - more shouting, more you approaching them, more drama, more physical affection – only confirms their superior status to you in their eyes.

On the other hand, do to a dog what if done to another human would be called "cutting them dead", and the dog is yours to command. And perfectly happy about it. It works. If I can do it, anyone can.

After that it got more confusing. If a duly subjugated dog then approaches you and you pat it on the head and tickle its ears, are you confirming your superior status, or undermining it? More seriously, what's the point of owning a dog if, for its own good, you have to ignore it all the time? So far as I got from my first reading of The Dog Listener the answer is that you can play with your dog, but that you must do it at a time and with toys of your choosing, not his. And you keep these toys hidden away. But I could have got that wrong. If you want to explore the subtleties of all this, you'll have to read the book yourself.

On all other matters canine I defer to Denis's superior knowledge and far greater experience (to say nothing of Jan Fennell's of course), but one thing Denis said to me that I do severely doubt. I think he may have been rather exaggerating my expertise in saying, as he did, that I now know more about dogs and how to handle dogs than 99% of people (and he may even have said dog-owners). To put it another way, I think he underestimates how well Jan Fennell has been doing, with her television appearances, her books (there's now another), her public demonstrations and now her voluminous e-mail correspondence.

Not all those customer reviews are as positive as Denis's was. One says, for example, that Fennell's stuff is either well known already, out of date (whatever that may mean), or else over-dependent upon the idea of the canine hierarchy. The review I'm quoting now has also gone, unless I'm doing something wrong.

Although this book may help many people because Jan's techniques may work by accident, she hasn't got the faintest idea why they are. She tries to compare dogs to wolves, but appears to have learnt about wolves by reading the back of a cereal packet.

This isunfair. I distinctly remember a long description in The Dog Listener of a televised confrontation between a wolf pack and a new alpha-wolf who was offering himself as their new leader, their old one having died. You don't see TV shows on cereal packets.

Ignoring her dogs in the morning calmed them down because 'they accepted her as the pack leader'. Rubbish. She was no longer rewarding their excited behaviour with attention and that's why it worked.

Most dog trainers and behaviourists in the UK are holding their heads in their hands with despair that such a misinformed book is now the bible for the average dog owner looking to understand their pet.

As I say, Jan Fennell's stuff has definitely been getting around, certainly among the dog-people. I think I smell a turf battle here between the different dog-persons, with the old alpha-experts barking like hell at the upstart Fennell. I further suspect that these anti-Fennellists dislike the idea of canine hierarchy not because it's not a reality, but because it's a reality that they don't like. Egalitarianism among the animal trainers!

But what do I know? Take your pick. Or, use the comments section to tell me what's really going on here.

Friday, September 20, 2002

A 'Bear Of Very Little Brain' such as I does not quite follow every twist and turn of the A-Level scandal, but the story goes something like this: the government wants more students in higher education for good reasons and bad. So the government puts direct and indirect pressure on the exam boards to make the exams easier by changing their mark schemes and structures. This manouevre is kept secret; they would like us to think that they have made students cleverer by good magic. The ruse does not work. As grades go up and up people start to talk about "dumbing down." Finally the jump in the number of A grades is so embarrassing that the exam board start secretly moving the goalposts. This is a betrayal of trust: even if the level of achievement necessary for a good grade is objectively set too low, once the board has publicly stated the criteria it is bound to stick to them as part of its contract. To secretly mark students down is close to libel.

What a mess, hey? What's a poor Education Minister to do? In an article called Estelle, here is your way out of this mess the Telegraph's John Clare puts forward his advice to the beleaguered Estelle Morris.

But I've got some even better advice. I know a breathtakingly simple way for Estelle to get out of this mess entirely. It's this: Get out of this mess entirely, Estelle! Yes! It's that easy! Kick over your ministerial desk, make a barbecue of all your papers, hurl your dispatch box over the balustrade of the magnificent interior balcony of Sanctuary Buildings, and be gone and free within the hour. I don't just mean resign. I mean make your last act the complete and inalienable renunciation of government interference in A Levels, AS Levels, right through to X, Y and Z Levels, with every record so much as touching upon the subject shredded or electronically wiped to make sure your courageous decision sticks. Because government interference is the only cause of all this mess and government butting out is the only cure.

Wednesday, September 04, 2002

The comedian Alexei Sayle once said very wisely that he objected to the use of the word "workshop" in any connection other than light engineering. I now feel similarly about the phrase "limited edition", which should, I believe, be confined to publishing. Sadly, this phrase is now applied to cars, clothes, portable telephones, in fact to any manufactured product where they have to decide beforehand how many they're going to make in each little burst of manufacturing. In other words to all manufactured products.

The latest manifestation I have observed of limited edition feaver is: limited edition potato crisps. That's right, Walkers Crisps have just produced a six-pack "limited edition" bag, containing two Heinz Tomato Ketchup flavoured crisp packets, two Branston Pickle flavoured crisp packets, and two Marmite flavoured.

In my opinion the Marmite crisps are very nice (as are the crisps flavoured with Marmite's deadly rival, Bovril, which have long been available), the Tomato Ketchup crisps are okay, and the Branston Pickle crisps are disgusting.

Talk of limited editions raises the question: are there potato crisp collectors? If so, do they collect their crisp packets unopened, or do they merely preserve the wrappings? If they do collect the crisps unopened how do they ensure that the crisps do not get broken inside the packet, even as the packet remains unopened, and if the crisps are preserved in mint condition, how can the crisp collector tell?

It was with questions like these in mind that I consulted the
Walkers SHOWCASE website mentioned on all the crisp packets.

At this point my posting takes a sudden lurch away from harmless frivolity and towards seriousness, because this is what I found:

Welcome to Walkers SHOWCASE!

Walkers has invited every school in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Eire to post their students' best work on the Walkers SHOWCASE online gallery. What better way to show off the children's talents - not only across the school, but to children's friends and relatives - and to everyone with an interest in education around the world?

If you have been chosen as your school's SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, your first step is to register your school. This takes just a few moments - but one part of it is your agreement to keep to the SHOWCASE Charter. You can review the Charter before proceeding with registration by clicking on the SHOWCASE safety button on the left. As soon as you have registered you can start uploading exhibits - everything from collages created in Reception to interactive games devised in a sixth form project.

Have fun!

I hate this. These people take no pride in their product. I expected – well, I was looking for – testimonials from satisfied crisp eaters, discussions of the relative merits of Marmite and Bovril crisps, intricate analysis of just why it is that the Branston Pickle crisps are so horrible, news of other Walkers products. Instead we observe what is now called a Public-Private Partnership, and of the most vomit-inducing kind. If I was a teacher and they made me the school's SHOWCASE Co-ordinator, I'd feel like a whore.

I realise that as a good little libertarian, I ought to be willing to defend everything that capitalism does however tasteless (including whores, of course), but when it comes to capitalists stalking the wastes of the public sector in search of captive juvenile audiences for junk food adverts, I'm sorry, I just can't do it. I wouldn't want a law against it, but surely no self-respecting school would do this.

Perhaps I should overcome my dislike of such things. I don't know, I really don't. I would especially welcome comments on this.

Saturday, August 31, 2002

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator to four children aged 8-15. She is a supporter of 'Taking Children Seriously' and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective.

All kinds of disparate and quiet groups become politicised when they are attacked by the state, scapegoated and weakened. That's what Brian Micklethwait pointed out in an article on August 26th on Samizdata. He cites as an example Britain's gun owners, who were made to take the blame for the actions of evil people and who as a result "suddenly started to care about things like libertarianism also."

It's a point well made, but when he goes on to say that another group who may be about to experience a similar process are 'home schoolers' (the British term he was struggling to find is actually 'home educators' or 'home based educators') he is several years behind the movement. Micklethwait is quite right that across the English-speaking world there are various efforts of "professional state educators" trying to erode the rights of home educators on the grounds that it is "a strange and scandalous legal anomaly." However, what he has not realised is that we home educators have been on to them for some time and politicisation is well and truly underway, even maturing in certain sectors.

The home education movement in Britain is at least twenty five years old in its established form and the last ten years have seen a massive rise in politicisation, much of it associated with the communication benefits afforded by the Internet. One home education support group (Education Otherwise) was instrumental in getting a change in the law so that parents can now automatically de-register their children from school without the old legal loophole of needing to establish and prove their educational provision before de-registration could take place.

Britain has perhaps the most liberal home education law in the world, but far from inducing complacency, there is a constant watch on the actions of over zealous local education authorities (LEAs) and the services of a brilliant home educating lawyer available to families who are mistreated by LEAs. Five years ago I was part of small collective that ignited a huge discussion across the home education community concerning our rights not to have home visits nor to allow local education authorities automatic access to out children. This resulted in a set of legal guidelines being written and distributed to every LEA in the country - they know that we know our rights even when they would like to pretend otherwise. On another occasion I took part in an organised lobby to make amendments to the guidelines to the Crime and Disorder Act, successfully ensuring that there are provisions that prevent home educators from being harassed on the speculated grounds of truancy. LEA officers cannot ask for our names and addresses during truancy sweeps. Many home educated young people now carry 'truancy cards' (which are not identity cards in any form) which outline the law and demand that they be allowed to go on their way, a scheme organised by another support group, 'Choice in Education'.

The news is not all good, but wherever home education is under attack its practitioners are fighting back. In France an appalling piece of legislation ostensibly aimed at curbing so called educational abuse by religious sects has recently made life more difficult for all home educators, but Enfants D'Abord, the national support group in France, are not giving up and going home. In Ireland, new legislation also looks set to make life worse, increasing state intervention into private family life, but once again Irish home educators, united by the Home Education Network and other support groups, are making stands and enlisting the support of home educators across Europe. In Scotland new legislation drafted by the executive two years ago is indeed Draconian, but it is also on hold. The foremost home education group in Scotland - Schoolhouse - has been vociferous in its opposition to the document, which is not even congruent with Scottish education law, and has enlisted the aid of Brian Montreith, MSP, who is introducing a private members bill counteracting the draft guidance.

Brian Micklethwait is quite right to be wary of the push against home education from the European Union. Home Education is illegal in some European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Cyprus and Spain (though the law is not regularly enforced in Spain) and is under pressure in other places such as France and Ireland. There is, however, no blanket ban and even in the countries where home education is illegal there are ways of making exceptions and people engaged in not only exploiting, but enlarging these exceptions. There are currently challenges in both Dutch and German courts (in Germany the situation is not monolithic, but varies across regions) and European home educators are working together to make sure that the liberal laws of Britain become the model for Europe.

Two years ago at the worlds largest home education gathering, which meets annually in Dorset, a group of home educators got together to begin formulating responses to political pressure. One home educator (Mike Fortune-Wood, who owns the largest UK home education support site) set up a European website as a result to begin to chart the position of home educations across Europe. This year the group adopted the site and a new campaigning identity; 'learning unlimited' was formed with the remit of putting an end to routine government intervention in the lives of home educators across Europe. It's true to say that this remit caused some debate amongst home educators themselves; this is not a homogeneously libertarian group and some argued for the role of the state in family life, but the remit was nonetheless carried and remains.

"Harmonisation" may be causing continental politicians to "want to ban British home schooling, if only to prevent any possibility of the British contagion spreading to the continent." but the truth is that the genie is already out of the bottle. People in the Netherlands and Germany are finding ways to take control of the educational provision for their own children, they have support networks across Europe and the world and the phenomena of demanding a right to privacy and family life in the arena of education is growing despite the fears of political control freaks.

Sadly, some British home educators don't want to know - they are content with a system that is on their side for the moment and don't want to contemplate having to become involved in the messy business of politics. Many also come from strong socialist backgrounds and there is a mixed pull on their loyalties between the rights of privacy and self direction on the one hand as against giving up some of their rights and their children's rights for the supposed sake of others. Many of us, however, do not share this complacency or naivety and are engaged in acting before we are attacked. We have attuned our antenna to the winds of legal and political change and are not in the business of paying Danegeld or making ourselves easy prey.

Some of us are already libertarians, particularly those also involved in the 'Taking Children Seriously' movement, an educational theory which supports consent based, autonomy respecting interaction with children. I number myself in this growing international group and have written three books on its parenting and education theory and another attacking the whole notion of "free" state education. "Bound to Be Free" challenges the idea that freedom can flourish in any state system and charts the costs to individuals of state educational institutions - costs in social, educational, psychological and emotional damage as well as in the obvious theft by tax that is needed to support the state educational system.

Some of us are already working on those libertarian education memes and if the socialist home educators are suspicious of our ideas they at least know what are our arguments are. Home educators are not just good with the talk - some of us are good with the politics too. Politicisation of home education is certainly not complete or homogenous, but neither is it unheard of. Home education is a choice that infiltrates every part of your lifestyle and ideology and causes you to ask continual questions even when there is not pressure from political controllers; I've moved from being a socialist vicar to a rationalist libertarian without any threats from government. When the threats come, undoubtedly the movement will be even more galvanised, but the groundwork and networks of communication are well laid and there are more and more libertarians who will hopefully be willing to add their voices, including some of those gun-owners and maybe even some of the farmers and fishermen.

Jan Fortune-Wood, North Wales

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Russ Lemley sees trouble ahead regarding California's attack on home schoolers

I share Brian's sense of unease about the reasons about why the Libertarian movement may pick up steam. It's because the state has decided to harangue certain people who just don't see the reason why they're being bothered. It upsets their lives, causing a great deal of grief and consternation about what to do next. To avoid possible punishment, some parents may decide to send their kids to public schools, albeit not because they think it's the right thing to do.

The general reaction to the Education Department's 'guidance' in California has been one of derision. Private (especially Catholic) schools don't require teachers to have a credential, and their students simply perform better. My wife went through the accreditation process. I attended a couple of classes with her, and they were a joke. They were basically PC bullshit sessions that had nothing to do with how to be a good teacher.

I am hoping that many home-schooling parents will simply ignore the Education Department's 'guidance' and continue to keep their kids where they are. Still, all you need is one idiotic bureaucrat to 'enforce' this crap. When that happens, though, I'm not sure how home-schoolers will react. It could get ugly, in a non-violent sort of way. There's been a movement among Christians, mostly, to pull their kids out of public schools because of their concerns about the moral environment. If the state decided to clamp down on home schooling, they could be in for a nasty surprise.

Will this help build support for the Libertarian cause? Maybe. But I sure don't feel happy about it.

Russ Lemley, Torrance, California

Monday, August 26, 2002

It is a sad fact that one of the things that causes the libertarian movement to get stronger is other groups in society getting weaker.

Consider Britain's gun owners. Until recently they were very content, using their guns to attack targets, animals, and even the occasional bad human being. Most of their intellectual effort went into discussing amongst themselves which guns were the best, how to hit targets even more accurately, how to make sure that the only other creatures they shot were creatures they were trying to shoot, and so forth.

Then suddenly the government (worse, almost the entire country) held the gunners responsible for a couple of gun massacres of good human beings and decided to take their guns away from them. Somebody had to take the blame, and the actual perpetrators were already dead.

Suddenly a sublimely apolitical group got politicised. Suddenly they found themselves trying to persuade others of the wisdom and rightness of them being allowed to go on using their guns, which you can't do only by talking about the technicalities of guns, although God knows they tried that. They found, far too late, that they would have to learn about politics, and in particular about whatever political principles might allow them to keep on owning their guns, or failing that, might one day allow them to own guns again. Thus many persons who formerly cared only about guns, suddenly started to care about things like libertarianism also.

I believe that another group which is about to be policised are the home schoolers, and not just of Britain but of the entire Anglosphere. Everywhere you look, in Britain and in the USA certainly, and I'm sure everywhere else where "education otherwise" is still allowed, efforts are being made to end what appears to professional state educators as a strange and scandalous legal anomaly.

On the Libertarian Alliance Forum Chris Tame recently posted a couple of reports (including this one) about a home schooling ruckus in California, which is what got me thinking about this. And a few weeks back there was a little flurry concerning the attempt to smuggle some kind of home schooling prohibition through the Scottish Parliament when no one was looking. (Apologies: I can't recall where I saw this. It may have been in the Times or Sunday Times, so no links to freely available text would in that case be available.)

Unlike the British gun argument, this one may be semi-winnable. There could be a quite big public row, involving both home schoolers and libertarians, in which the public's sympathies will be much more evenly divided, and perhaps even rather favourable to the home schoolers. State education is already much criticised, not just because of educational awfulness but because of the sheer physical brutality that so many children are now forced to endure.

In the USA, as I understand things, this debate is already quite far advanced, on account of the USA's education unions being so rapacious and so bone-headedly unaware of – or unconcerned by – how widely and deeply they are despised (and hence willing to have a public debate that may seriously harm them).

In Britain the push, as with everything else of importance now happening in British politics, is coming from – you've guessed it – the European Union. In mainland Europe, home schooling is already pretty much illegal (although comments about and contradictions of that from continentals would be very welcome). For now the "harmonisation" process is causing the continentals also to want to ban British home schooling, if only to prevent any possibility of the British contagion spreading to the continent.

I get the strong feeling that the British home schoolers mostly don't know what is about to hit them. They still talk about how British law now protects them, which it now does. What I fear they don't realise is that the legal wind could be about to change sharply against them. (In other words the home schoolers are behaving exactly as the gun people did.)

Alan Forrester of Taking Children Seriously is giving my next Last Friday talk on Aug 30. Maybe he'll have something to say about all this. (By the way, I've been using the phrase "home schooling" here to allude to all opponents of regular schooling. TCS people don't like any kind of "schooling".)

If things do take a turn for the worse for the home schoolers (and anti-schoolers), a whole new clutch of libertarian memes will suddenly be flying around furiously, and the homies will be paying these a lot more attention than hitherto.

Fishermen and farmers and butchers and bakers are fine at fishing, farming, butching and baking, but not very good with the chat, not given to reading books. So when the EU messes up their lives or closes down their businesses, they don't know what to say. The homies are different. Talk – about everything, not just home schooling – they can do.

Win or lose, this row will definitely strengthen the libertarian movement. My bit of it anyway, the bit that does the intellectual stuff.

I'm not especially pleased about all this, just trying understand it.

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

Remember my July 10 post, "Tell me about special reading"? Well, you can all stop thinking I'm just another middle class mama boasting about my wonderful offspring. I am and I do, but not today. The purpose of this post is to downplay my kid and up-play, if the term is allowable, the system that taught him to read so quickly. Evidence that this might be a group rather than an individual effect was provided by a little sign posted up on his classroom door at the end of term. It said that 95% of the children in his year were ahead of the national average in literacy, and 54% of them were more than a year ahead. In case you are wondering, the school is an ordinary state school in an area that is mostly middle and respectable working class but includes some children from welfare enclaves.

So what's this post doing on Samizdata? Early Reading Research (ERR) certainly is not a system designed to appeal to libertarians. The teacher is boss. The kids listen and participate as a group, in unison. Scientific it may be, but in spirit it is a throwback to systems the Victorians would have recognized.

But that doesn't matter. The libertarian morals to be drawn are (a) it's taken thirty freaking years or more to overthrow the fraudulent orthodoxy that monolithic state education enthroned, and the job ain't done yet; (b) that when you next hear statists moan on about how horrifically complicated, interconnected and hard to solve social problems are, mentally add the words "so long as you refuse to admit that you were wrong"; (c) watch the buggers in the educational establishment. Watch them with the eyes of a hawk. Sure, they are by now in their heart of hearts convinced that phonics is the system that works. But a little matter like the interests of actual children won't override the fact that the last thing the Special Needs "community" want is sudden, clear improvement in children's literacy. It would make them look bad. Worse, it would make them look unecessary. Expect them to obfuscate, distort and delay reform in every way imaginable. They'll tell themselves that gradual change and a "mixed approach" are the best thing all round, which is true when the best thing is defined as covering their tails.

One final point. I can talk "mixed approach" too. I'm not saying ERR is the best and only system for all time, just that it knocks the National Literacy Strategy into a cocked hat. I'm not saying that there are no children with real special needs, just that there are much fewer of them than will keep all today's legion of special needs teachers in their jobs. And I have no idea of what Jonathan Solity's political opinions are. If he ever reads this and finds himself agreeing with me, I suggest that he keep very, very quiet about it.

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Following on from Brian's post on synthetic phonics, here are some words from a guest blogger:

It is great! I don't even do it because I do my sunshine work. (I am not going to tell you my name) You spell out words and stuff and do synthesis and segmantatean.

That was written by my son. Some of it he typed himself, some of it I typed at his letter-by-letter dictation. He was taught reading at his state school by means of a scheme called Early Reading Research, which is being piloted in several schools in Essex. He says "I don't even do it" because he has completed the scheme at the age of six years and three weeks. "Sunshine work" is presumably the next scheme on. As you can see, although not yet a giant of literature he is competent to write down in a comprehensible fashion any idea that he can express verbally. He gave up on spelling the word "synthesis", but so might many adults.

This rather misleading BBC News 24 story discusses the scheme. The article is better than the headline; I bet you 95% of readers saw the words "real books" and either applauded or condemned without reading further. ERR has little to do with the discredited system whereby children had books thrown in their direction and were told to get on with it. Rather it consists of tightly structured sessions of about twelve minutes, three times a day, where they do "c-a-t spells cat" (synthesis) and "dog is spelt d-o-g" (segmentation). Then they finish with some exemplary reading from real books.

The scheme is popular with his classmates and with the teachers. I gather the same is true wherever it has been tried. So why isn't it famous? Guess.

Sunday, July 07, 2002

I'm getting good feedback about Brian's Education Blog, which is encouraging considering that it doesn't yet exist. (I'm waiting to see which software to use.) Patrick Crozier gave it an anticipatory mention last Tuesday, in his non-transport blog, which I missed at the time.

And Kevin Marks (no relation of Paul) emailed in response to my piece about synthetic phonics:

Good to see you picking up on this. Some more links:

Read America are a leading synthetic phonics organisation, whose Phono-graphix programme is excellent - they did the research to optimise it for speed of teaching, and it avoids learning complex and fragile rules by rote, which are the downfall of most phonics schemes.

The textbook for parents is great.

Sign me up for an education blog, BTW. I'll try and persuade Dad to join in too.

Dad would be John Marks, who is an education expert and not anything to do with the John Marks who is a drugs treatment expert. I expect to be supplying lots of links to John (education) Marks' various campaignings and muck-rakings, about such things as phoney exam results.

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

Not a phrase to grab you by the heartstrings, is it? But these are the words to listen out for if you want your child to learn to read properly. "Synthetic phonics" tells you that this is probably being done properly. If, on the other hand, they tell you that they're using "eclectic" or "a mixture of" methods, watch out. "Dyslexia" looms.

I also put "dyslexia" in inverted commas, because what we have here is that very common modern phenomenon, a damaged brain diagnosed as caused by its own inherent damagedness when actually it is a brain that has been damaged by having damaging signals thrown at it from outside. The mental radar screen registers muddle not because it is muddled, but because it has been muddled.

The situation is actually a little more complicated than that, or the problem would probably not have got as bad as it has. There is just enough physical basis for the notion of "dyslexia" for the false claim to persist that dyslexia and dyslexia alone causes all reading difficulties, and for a multi-billion pound industry to spring up to fail to solve the problem. The reality is that good teaching automatically gets around almost any inherent, genetic predisposition towards reading difficulty, and teaches virtually all children to read successfully. Bad teaching, on the other hand, is something that the majority of children can hack their way past. They do it with difficulty, but they do it. The become literate despiteall the muddle they are subjected to. But not so the "dyslexics". They don't "crack" reading. They don't get its inherent nature, because they have not been explicitly taught it.

And the explicit nature of reading that is not taught to an appallingly huge number of children these days is that each letter has a name and makes a sound or sounds (the name and the sound(s) not being the same! – obvious point but frequently overlooked), and that when you are confronted with a word, that is to say with a string of letters, the way to spell it out is to spell it out, one letter (or letter group like "ch") at a time. Don't guess. Don't read only the first letter and then guess. Don't look for the pattern of the "whole word". Read. That's synthetic phonics. Dee Oh Gee spells duh- o- guh- DOG.

Why don’t they teach that in all schools? Because they are ess tee you pee eye dee? Because they are mostly parts of a N-A-T-I-O-N-A-L-I-S-E-D I-N-D-U-S-T-R-Y? Both, and much more that's far too complicated to explain in a posting that would keep anyone's attention.

So what brought all this on? Partly of course, I'm getting into the swing of having arguments that will eventually find their proper home in 'Brian's Education Blog'. But the particular provocation was a really good article in last Sunday's Observer (Review Section, cover story).

You can also chase up the synthetic phonics story in more detail by going to the website of the Reading Reform Foundation.

Tuesday, July 02, 2002

A British news story today concerns the constant and presently insoluble problem of violence in schools. Pupils attack teachers. Parents now attack teachers. Some teachers have always been hateful to some pupils. Pupil-to-pupil violence has long been so routine as to be regarded as an intrinsic feature of juvenile human nature. What is to be done?

Are you a free(ish) adult? If so, ask yourself what you do about unwelcome violence in your life. Answer: if the violence occurs in places you don't have to frequent and have no control over, then you stay away in future. If the violence invades your turf, you ask it to leave, and if it doesn't you call the police. Mostly this works. It's called freedom of association. Unwelcome violence is mostly dealt with, by the same methods used to solve the problem of unwelcome rock music emerging from unwelcome loudspeakers, unwelcome propositions from street traders, unwelcome programs invading your television. You keep clear of it. You withdraw your consent. You switch it off. You concentrate on the things that everyone directly involved thinks are okay.

But most schools, and especially most state schools, don't work by these rules. There the assumption is that badness won't be walked away from. Teachers must teach everyone, however appalling and unwelcome and uninterested in what is being taught. Parents are entitled to education for even their most grotesque brats. Bad or even sadistic teaching has to be complained about and negotiated with. Bullying requires a national help line and a national policy in order that it may fail to be eradicated. Badness (which just means something that those involved vehemently disagree about) must be corrected, reformed, improved, and when all that fails, punished, agonised over, fussed over, Ministerially taken charge of and, finally, tolerated.

It is inevitable that a parallel but alternative universe of educational niceness will arise, and it is. Nothing in this educational free market is taking place without the consent of all those directly concerned. Pupils who refuse to follow the rules which the teachers insist upon have to leave. Teachers whose teaching seems pointless or nasty or educationally worthless have to find others to teach, or other things to teach, or something else to do. Parents who don't like what they're getting keep looking. It's called freedom.

I have in mind that some time during this new century I will start a specialist blog devoted to education issues, very roughly along the lines of Patrick Crozier's UK Transport, although less expert about education "policy" than he is about transport policy, and in general rather more chatty and personal. If I do get this going, stories from and advertisements for this alternative and expanding voluntary universe of educational excellence will be especially welcome.

If you have such stories now, don't wait for Brian's Education Blog... send them to Samizdata!

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Of course, some libertarian parents don't pay twenty grand a year to avoid state schools; they keep their kids out of school altogether. Which arguably costs more, as it can mean the loss of an income, although the older they get, the easier it is to do other things than run circles around them all day. And if you work out how many minutes of teacher-time a child in a class of thirty actually gets to himself (something like ten minutes) the prospect of home educating is less overwhelming. It's mostly a matter of setting them up, and then letting them get on with it.

Advocates of the Taking Children Seriously school of libertarian parenting believe in letting their kids decide for themselves whether they want to spend all day in a classroom doing rote spelling followed by long evenings sweating over homework assignments. The impressive results of independent schools like the one where I taught for seven years don't just come from their less violent and drug-crazed atmospheres; those kids are made to work like...well, I can't think of any adult job where you do a seven hour day in a compulsory unpaid job not of your choosing followed by two or three hours of homework, plus regular testing. For, oh, eleven years.

What I remember most about attending school is its mind-blowing tediousness. This is not an experience I could honestly recommend to an innocent small person, and it always amazes me how so many people who patently hate school when they are actually there, suddenly decide it's just wonderful fun when their kids get to the age of five, or four, or two months, or whatever the school starting age is in the UK these days. I personally think they learn more from "Spiderman" (narrative structure, characterization, moral theories) than from any number of weirdly patronising and contrived government tests.

However, as a home educating adult, I do vastly appreciate the ability of schools to keep huge numbers of noisy unruly children out of the places I want to go in the daytime with my flawless well-behaved angelic ones (ahem). Except that, the ones who have guns probably aren't too bothered about whether or not their parents are jailed when they truant.

Alice Bachini

Sunday, June 09, 2002

I'm thinking of starting a specialist blog of my own, dedicated to educational issues ("Brian's Education Blog"?), and the following is the kind of story I have in mind to be featuring, along with things about government education reports and such like. In this case, however, The Times (paper version, yesterday, June 8, news section, page 12) got there ahead of me:

Lorraine Crusham decided to go private after her daughter was assaulted by 20 pupils at the local state school (Glen Own writes).

Nicole, 15, was a few weeks into her first term at Bridgemary Community School, in Gosport, Hampshire, last year when the attack occurred.

"I'd only just dropped her off at school when I received a call saying she had been hurt by a group of boys and girls," Mrs Crusham said. "She had a massive bruise on her faced and had been kicked up and down her body. Two teachers were also assaulted.

"The school swept it under the carpet, claiming that she had instigated it by insulting someone the day before. But she had been off the previous day. I immediately took her and my 13-year-old son James out of the school.

"James was bullied for having red hair and being Scottish. One teacher suggested he could avoid it by dyeing his hair a different colour. I asked what else they thought I should change - his accent?"

Both children are now boarding at Shebbear College, Devon, where fees cost more than 12,000 GBP a year.

This story illustrates a more general report next to it, headlined "Parents go private as order collapses in state schools."

On the subject of things Scottish, Freedom and Whisky linked recently to another story about school unpleasantness, and tentatively suggested that it might be something to do with compulsory school attendance laws. I agree, although the young people mentioned in this story were older than the current school leaving age of 16. I believe that almost all seriously nasty and bullying behaviour perpetrated by people who are not career criminals is the result of circumstances that both the perpetrators and their victims can't (or feel that they can't) escape from. Nicole Crusham was lucky. She could escape. Millions of others aren't so lucky.

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

A free market in education talked about in London and Newcastle – and being done in India

On Saturday (March 16, 2002) I attended a day-long meeting ("Private education: the poor's best chance") at the Institute of Economic Affairs. This was one of two meetings (the other being in Newcastle) marking the launch of the E.G.West Centre For Market Solutions in Education, the Director of which is Professor James Tooley.

Professor James Tooley

James Tooley is one of my favourite people. He has discovered a whole world of private sector educational success being achieved by the world's poor, in places like India and South Africa, and is busily telling this story back to the world, hence the E.G.West Centre.

The final speaker in the morning was Fazalur Khurrum, President of something called the Federation of Private Schools Management, India, which is based in Hyderabad. The story he told was of a hubbub of small private schools in the Indian city of Hyderabad.

Before him was Dr Sugata Mitra, the Director of Research for the Indian free-market-education giant NIIT. He was the star performer of the day. NIIT can see the day fast approaching when it will have gone as far as it can in educating the kind of Indians who are easy to reach and can afford to pay individually serious money. What about the massed millions of India's (and for that matter the world's) seriously poor?

Dr Mitra talked about a fascinating project, in which he stuck an internet-connected PC in a wall, protected by see-through armour plating, in various Indian versions of the back of beyond, and awaited results.

A smart and adventurous poor kid sees the computer. He starts pushing buttons. Other kids assemble and join in. Their poor fathers and uncles watch from behind. Their poor mothers and aunts watch from a distance. (He showed some film of all this, and it was like watching a wildlife documentary, with different humans behaving in different, yet classically human ways.) Within a few days there were a cluster of computer literate children helping each other to have fun and find out about the world, and learning about computers. All this was done by the machine and by the juvenile punters. No "staff" were involved. Dr Mitra watched it all from his office in New Delhi, through a video camera, and by eavesdreopping on the computer. He calls this his "hole in the wall" project.

Dr Sugata Mitra

I could go on. On Sunday I did, at unbloggable length, partly provoked by the embarrassingly boring British people who talked after lunch. The lunch only seemed free; they were the price. What they said wasn't even fluorescent idiocy - that would have been interesting. It was just generic brand idiocy. For that you'll have to wait until the Libertarian Alliance (by which I mean me) gets around to toning the insults down and publishing it all as an Educational Note.

A final point. A big reason why even very poor people prefer paying for private education in India is that this way their kids get a good start learning English. In Indian government schools, teaching English to children under ten - even teaching in English - is forbidden.

Sunday, March 03, 2002

I have been labouring under the impression that the growth of Home-Schooling is a purely US phenomenon.

Not so. A refreshingly illuminating documentary programme was shown last night on UK's Channel 4 about the rapidly growing popularity of Home-Schooling here in Britain. Sorry, it was a TV show so no link.

Actually, this should not come as a surprise given the current educational choices faces parents in Britain. Whilst private schools are widely available in Britain they are ferociously expensive so people of modest means have no choice but to process their precious charges through the state meat-grinders that HM government so kindly provides. The repute of the latter plumbs lower depths with each passing year.

The Home-schooling parents were all interviewed at length and, unanimously, they declared that their motivation was entirely due to the way they felt their children were being harmed or hindered by being sent to school in the 'traditional' manner so they just upped and decided to take matters into their own hands. Judging from the kids they were gloriously right; without exception these children were articulate, bright, curious, well-behaved, ambitious and highly-motivated. Furthermore, the time-worn prediction that Home-schooled children would grow up shy and withdrawn was proven to be egregious nonsense.

Now it might be said that the documentary-makers wanted to put a positive slant on things but programme-makers and TV producers in this country are notoriously hostile to free market ideas so if there was any bias it would most certainly tend towards the opposite.

Watching this show was a revelatory joy for someone like me but I almost had to be peeled off the ceiling when I heard some of the things these parents were saying. One mother said:

"I wouldn't want any money from the government because I wouldn't them involved in any way in what I am doing. That's what's so nice about what we're doing; the government has no juristiction over me....They have no involvement in what I do and I'd like to keep it that way"

And another mother said:

"What tends to happen is that when parents grow more confident they question not just the type of schooling we're given but also the type of health care we're given and how Councils are run. It leads to you saying, hang on, if I can take this large amount of responsibility back into my own life, why can't I live in a different way?"

Why indeed?

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Warning: explaining free markets and freedom is too trite and too simple! Yep, that is right...or at least according to an "unbiased" teacher of mine.

Last week we had to write an essay fro class answering the question, "The 20th century showed us the problems of freedom, as seen in WWI, WWII, and Sept. 11. Please explain the future implications of this problem of freedom, specifically in the policy realm." In explaining the question for us, the teacher clearly (and wrongly) explained how freedom caused WWI and WWII and Sept. 11. He also said that from this we can learn that freedom causes societal chaos...we need government or a level of control to prevent freedom from causing this chaos.

Any reader of Libertarian Samizdata knows how many lies this statement contains. Is this teacher actually going to tell me that Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Mussolini or FDR and the results of their administrations were a result of freedom when the logical answer clearly would dictate the exact opposite?

Anyway, I wrote a very lengthy essay debating his premise about freedom causing problems. And today, I got my essay back, and his one and only comment on my paper was: "While I do not mind the fact that your essay debates my premise, and indeed I am glad to see it does, your argument is too simple and results in simple rhetoric about free markets equaling freedom, C+". My twenty-six page essay that raised twenty separate questions weighing the costs and benefits of free markets vs. collectivist states in a clearly detailed manner was too simple for his liking.

My friend, who, in one sentence accepted the premise and explained the question in one and a half pages, was told that his essay reached the appropriate level of depth and understanding. Now while I am the first to admit page numbers do not attest to a paper’s level of logic (Marx wrote a lot, but did that make him logical? Short answer: no!), my paper was well reasoned and well documented. In fact, I took it to three of my other professors and asked them to read it for logic only. The verdict reached by each was that I had great logical writing in this piece.

The remark about my paper being too simple is merely a cover for his real thought: you are wrong in your belief of free markets. Is it any wonder why we foster such lack of thought in today's younger generation?

Wednesday, January 23, 2002

When I was a teacher I would sometimes, not often but sometimes, convince a yob* to do some work. When this happened I would do my best to welcome him back to favour but also tried to avoid giving said yob an easier ride than those who had always been working. I felt that giving him an easier ride would send the wrong messages to both yob and good kids. Correction, stuff the "wrong messages" bit, it would be radically unfair to both yob and good kids.

If I could work this out within weeks of first facing a class, why can't Tony Blair? I say all this to illustrate why I heartily support David Carr's recent post "A warning to George W. Bush" while opposing, in gnomic fashion, his post a little further down where he appears to lament the partial reform of terrorists.

* Editor's translation for our American cousins: yob = English slang for a disorderly young man

Saturday, January 12, 2002

In a nauseating opinion piece by authoritarian paleo-socialist Dea Birkett, writing in The Guardian (naturally), the state is urged to use force to abolish private education altogether in Britain. Birkett wants people to be deprived of even having the possibility of privately educating their children. We are told society must have a common purpose and once private education is made illegal, presumably socialist education police will start locking up people who dare to set up underground schools or educate at home. Birkett urges nothing less than universal forced backed nationally planned state education for all, regardless of what a family actually wants, in order to further national socialist goals.

But such a tiny minority holding on to such an outdated view on the right to exclusivity would increasingly appear absurd, as redundant as the royal family. Once private schools were reduced to such insignificant numbers, they could be easily, quietly closed down. The benefits would be enormous.

[...]

Education would become something we all shared, equal stakeholders in its quality and worth. Education could be effectively and efficiently planned on a national basis, in the knowledge that every child would go to a local school.

[...]

It's no longer any good just offering carrots. It's time to reach for the stick.

Will someone please remind me which side won the Cold War? Natalie Solent has described the equality and sense of common purpose Birkett demands as the equality and common purpose of galley slaves. If that ever comes to pass, Birkett and her ilk need to be shown that they are not the only ones who can reach for the stick.

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