Quote of the day

Schools have not necessarily much to do with education....they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."

Winston Churchill

News from the front

Johann Hari has dared to cross the monstrous regiment of home educators in his article in the Independent today. In a carefully ambiguous article, he manages to imply that there are lots of home educated children who are simply not learning anything at all, and insinuates that HE parents are little better than child abusers.

Having bad-mouthed the HE community, Hari manages to compound his error by a bit of blatant misrepresentation. He quotes research by someone called Rob Blackhurst, who apparently found that children in HE families, as old as twelve, couldn't read and write. Now if you look up Rob Blackhurst and home education on Google, you will find that Mr Blackhurst is a journalist rather than an academic, and that he wrote a very sympathetic piece about HomeEd in the FT some months back. In it, he does indeed talk of children who didn't learn to read until very late...

One of our children didn't read until he was nine or 10...

says the quoted home educator. Full marks to Mr Hari then? Not exactly. The rest of the quote is

and he's just completed an MA in creative writing.

Not exactly what Mr Hari would have you believe that Blackhurst found, I would say.

There has been a great swathe of media comment about HE in the last week or so, presumably timed to coincide with the return of the English schools. The unions and the left wing commentators have been attacking really quite hard, with vague insinuations of child abuse, and heart-rending tales of children shut up inside for months at a time, deprived of the alleged benefits of a state education and the national curriculum.Reading between the lines though, there are two factors driving them. Firstly they are frightened that the trickle of children out of the state system and into HE will become a flood. If this happens then the state education system will be put under enormous strain and enormous pressure to change. And of course, change is the last thing that the teaching unions want. But most of all, they want access to people's homes. If you read Hari's article, he wants all children to go to school, but most of all he wants education and welfare officers to be able to turn up to check that home educating parents are not abusing their children. He is really that much of a fascist. And rest assured that once education and welfare officers have access to HE homes to check up on children there, the same outraged voices that question why nobody can check up on HE children now, will be raised again to demand why HE homes can be inspected, but not the homes of other children.

HE families are the front line in the fight against the big brother society. They may not realise it, but their fight is the fight of all of us. They deserve our support.

Pooter in a hole in a wall

I'm grateful to Carlotta for this link to a story about Sugata Mitra's famous computer in a hole in a wall experiment. He and his colleagues set up a PC with a mouse and stuck it in a hole in a wall in a slum in Delhi so that passers-by could have a go. Then they sat back to watch what happened.

The story is quite well-known, but for those who haven't heard it, what happened was that the slum children taught themselves to use the PC, and then set about teaching each other. Adults seemed to approve of their kids educating themselves in this way, but they didn't actually get involved in trying to teach the children, not did they try to learn themselves.

The story is a wonderful tribute to the innate ability of children to learn and discover things on their own, and it raises all sorts of interesting questions about why we try to educate children the way we do, or in fact, if we are actually educating them at all. Do children really need so much formal learning as they get now?

I wonder if, back in the days before state education, those who fell outside the system of private schools and tutors and dame schools and ragged schools that were the backbone of the education system in those days, ended up passing their discoveries between each other like the slum children of Delhi today. One can imagine a battered copy of Dickens being passed round the urchins, with the little ones desperate to learn their ABCs so they could share in the excitement.

There's a research project for somebody in there somewhere.

Duty of care

There was a story in the Herald the other day about a father whose daughter had not received any English tuition in the run up to her exams. Dad, a toolmaker, had employed a private tutor and having had to part with his hard-earned cash through no fault of his own had sued the council for compensation.

Rather than pay him off, as is normal in these kinds of thing, the council had turned up at the Sheriff Court and argued, apparently with a straight face, that they had no duty of care to the child.

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened. Connoisseurs may remember the attempts made by the Health & Safety Executive to argue that they had no duty of care to rail passengers. Likewise, the Inland Revenue have tried to absolve themselves for any responsibility for advice they give to taxpayers.

You have to just stand back in admiration at the sheer brazenness of the way in which the state can on the one hand bang you up in jail if you fail to send your children to school, while at the same time arguing that they don't actually have to do anything as menial as actually educating the little buggers once they're there.

Really, truly, the state is not your friend.

Liberal Democrat may be liberal.

There's a very good posting at LibDem Voice by someone called Christopher Leslie (wasn't he on Blue Peter once?).

Both Clegg and Cameron are right to support free schools: they offer a great chance to increase civil society, to provide better education in Britain, a greater level of plurality, and parents and children having increased choice and control in their education.

By declaring that the Conservatives will not allow firms to make a profit from the free school system, however, Cameron is failing to fully utilise the opportunities free schools could offer, and which can only be accessed by allowing profit-making into the system. This might be the tokenistic suspicion of any institution making profit from state money; a refusal to take that idea to a public he fears won’t accept it; or that he’d rather see free schools be the sole domain of NGOs - which reveals a scary amount of paternalism. Whichever is the case, Clegg should not make the same mistake.

So while the Tories are saying no to profit-making, here we have a LibDem saying that the profit motive is what will make our schools work properly. Funny times we're living in, funny times.

One of the concerns that people have over free schools is that too many of them will be run by religious extremists who will set about filling the children's heads with all sorts of dangerous nonsense (and that's different to state schools how?) My solution to this is to only allow schools that are profit-making - privatise the lot of them. When the money-making impulse comes up against the religious one, it's Mammon that will win. Bye-bye religious extremists.

It wasn't like this in my day

In my day, English Lit exams were strictly about dead white males. O' Level consisted of Shakespeare, Chaucer and GBS, and very dull it was too. Still, it gave you backbone, as well as teaching you the valuable life skill of being able to sleep with your eyes open while maintaining an expression of rapt attention. Not a bit like today's dumbed down stuff, where some of the authors are actually not men, and what is worse, some of them are still alive too! The impudence of it!

Still, say one thing for it, if you got stuck with the meaning of part of the Miller's Tale, you couldn't drop a question to Geoffrey Chaucer on his blog to find out exactly what he meant.

Brainwashing in schools

While doing a Google search, I chanced upon this site, which belongs to the Geography department at Bishop Challoner School. The school is independent, so it's up to them what they teach, but my goodness, if this is the standard of thinking they develop in their children, they wouldn't get a penny of my money.

Homework for 29/1/07 ...Produce a powerpoint presentation on what Bromley Council is doing to try and be sustainable. [...]

What must be included:

The reason why sustainability is required in Bromley.

Why we should recycle.

[...]

Not if we should recycle, or when we should recycle, but why we should recycle. The person who wrote this is clearly intellectually challenged. Do they really believe that it is always best to recycle? No matter what level of resources is required? Who would want their children taught by someone who believed such nonsense?

If you scroll down a little more you come to this:

Create a poster on Global Warming based on the movie inconvenient truth. 

(Dodgy capitalisation in original)

Or how about this:

The greatest wonder of the sea is that it's still alive.

(That's from a Greenpeace poster which is being used as a teaching aid, it seems)

I remember James Bartholemew saying that he was taking his daughter out of school because the independents were becoming infected with the shoddy standards of the state sector. It looks to me as if he was right - if I were a Bishop Challoner parent, I'd be asking for a refund.

My human right to an education voucher

The Human Rights Act says of education:

No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

Personally, I have a deep philosophical conviction that the state should play no part in the education system - standard liberal stuff, per JS Mill. Unfortunately, because the state takes lots of money from me to pay for the education system that I oppose, I am unable to send my children to private school. So it looks to me as if the state is not only not respecting my right to ensure an education in conformity with my convictions, it is actively preventing me from doing so.

The remedy is simple though. I want my money back. Cash or voucher, I care not.

A "close them down" week

Last week it was "failing schools will be taken over". This week, it's "failing schools will be closed".

Almost one in five secondary schools in England are to be given a warning to improve exam results or face closure.

Just keep alternating the headlines Mr Brown, nobody will notice that you're not actually doing either. 

Next week: Failing schools will be taken over

W/C 16 June: Failing schools will be closed

W/C 23 June:  Failing schools will be taken over

W/C 30 June: Failing schools will be closed

...repeat to fade.... 

Turgid bilge

The lady in charge of education in the Numptocracy^TM, Fiona Hyslop, is trumpeting her latest endless outpouring of pointless waffle in a press release posted on the Numptocracy Webpage.

Parents have a crucial role to play in supporting children's learning and the successful implementation of Curriculum for Excellence, Cabinet Secretary for Education Fiona Hyslop said today. 

I've written before about the refusal of my children's school to allow parents to see the curriculum that's being taught, so Ms Hyslop's turgid meanderings ring pretty hollow in these 'ere parts. Having refused me, the school informed the school council (that's the board of governors to you) that a summary of the curriculum would be prepared and released to parents. This was just after Christmas. Now, they have "changed their minds" and we are told to wait until the new term starts in the autumn.

And if you believe that you'll believe anything.

So if you'll excuse me, Ms Hyslop, I think you're not actually telling the truth. I think you don't want parents playing any role in their children's education at all.