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Radio 4 - Today
"New research published by Downing Street suggests that Labour policies may be narrowing Britain's class divide. The study, from academics at Bristol University and the London School of Economics, finds that family background appears to have less influence on educational attainment than it once did. Shadow work and pensions secretary Chris Grayling discusses the report with Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne. "
So how, exactly, are these ‘policies’ narrowing the ‘class divide’? Here we go again - educational attainment - GCSEs and SATs. The conflation of academic attainment and social mobility? That must be it. Such a pity the Beeb puts such rubbish on its website.
Messrs Grayling and Byrne, aided and abetted by the man from Today, waffled on about whether there’s now a less well-defined correlation between family background and doing well in tests and exams, all of them unquestioningly going along with the ‘common sense’ assumption that academic success is the key determiner of success in life - meaning material success, of course.
So who really believes that child poverty (and its related afflictions - stress, ill-health, etc,) isn’t the key issue when it comes to doing well in school, by whatever measures we might use, and also doing well in life?
Well then, enough of this nonsense and let us focus on something more worthy of attention. Which is - why do these discussions NEVER consider the real factors that determine whether someone will live an authentic, creative and worthwhile life - these factors being the extent to which young people:
1) Become life-long learners who enjoy learning for its own sake
2) Are creative and imaginative
3) Are high in social, emotional and spiritual intelligence.
4) Have high self-confidence and self-esteem.
Assuming that they move on from school possessing high levels of the above then they will always have the option of doing further studies, either part-time or full-time, and moving up the academic ladder towards whatever qualifications they need to pursue their ambitions.
Without these qualities and achievements then it won’t matter that they have 5 A-C grades, or whatever - they will never achieve self-actualisation or achieve fulfillment, or indeed reach their full potential.
So why don’t these pundits address the real issues in education and the development of human potential? Who bothers to track how well schools and pupils are progressing in these four key areas?
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Failure to address the real issues in the economy and world-wide financial systems have put us in the current crisis, and as I’ve been saying, Will Hutton’s masterwork, The State We’re In, set out all the real issues back in the mid-90’s. It’s pathetic and shameful that New Labour has failed to address any of them, being totally sucked into the neo-conservative ideology and mindset.
In last weekend’s Observer Mr Hutton posted his usual excellent column, focusing on the need to pursue ‘real’ Keynesian policies in order to deal with the crisis and the recession.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/02/economics-economy-john-keynes
“The great economist is back in fashion, but it will be a disaster if his brilliant theories are now misapplied.
For Keynes, the interaction of the financial system with the real economy is capitalism's existential problem.
The job of finance is to recycle savings back into investment and so sustain overall levels of demand, production and employment at a balanced rate.
Intervention in the financial markets - regulatory, institutional, via monetary policy and in collaboration with other governments - is vital. The socialisation of the financial system may, paradoxically, be an imperative to save capitalism. Contra-cyclical government borrowing in recessions may be helpful. But the big game is to do everything you can to stimulate private sector credit flows.
Keynes would be completely unsurprised by today's events; he would have spent the previous decade warning of the existential danger posed by the mania for financial deregulation.
Keynes was the economist who put it all together, the liberal who understood why free [deregulated] finance is capitalism's greatest enemy.
The State We're In was my attempt to devise a Keynesianism for our own times. I will stand by the heart of the book - deregulate financial markets and create a financial system that dominates business at your peril - to my last. But there was no constituency for reform 10 years ago. Keynesians of my ilk were seen as irrelevant and wrong.
But now, with Keynes back in fashion, if we don't do Keynesianism right, we risk a very nasty recession indeed.
There are only weeks left before the downward vortex becomes irretrievably deep.
These are very scary times. Let’s hope someone in government is finally paying attention to Mr Hutton.
More quotes from The State We’re In to follow.
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Tomorrow’s D-Day for Barak Obama. The latest news bulletin says he has a lead of between 8 and 11 points. Let’s hope all goes well.
His grandmother died today.
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“This is not just an economic crisis, it is a crisis of democracy”, say Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford in last Saturday’s Guardian.
“New Labour thrived on good times and bull markets. The culture of easy credit and consumerism disguised its evasions of class and power. Now the markets are in freefall, and its ideological failings are brutally exposed. In the manors and town houses of the super-rich those who have brought about the calamity harbour their wealth. They are untouchable and unaccountable. Their tax havens are sacrosanct. Corfu reveals how our political elites, seduced by their opulence and power, do business with them. This is not just an economic crisis, it is a crisis of democracy.
Collective political action and the power of citizenship have been traded in for the ownership society.
The stakes are high. Who will pay for this recession - capital or labour? The Labour party must reinvent itself for this battle.
There are no easy solutions, but the goal is simple: a fundamental transfer of wealth and power back to the people. This will help stop the deflationary spiral and lay the foundations for a more just, sustainable and equal society in the future.
We need urgent action to address the housing crisis, which is replicating that in banking.
This is market failure on a grand scale.
The state must step in with an emergency public-sector housebuilding strategy, and if necessary, take a stake in some housebuilders to revive the sector. Local government must be re-empowered to fill the space vacated by the private sector.
The relationship between market and state is being redrawn. Nowhere is this more needed than in housing. This is where the battle lines are being drawn up. The left must create a democratic and accountable state capable of strategic intervention in the domestic economy and creating global alliances. A new settlement means a progressive tax system, a restructured financial economy and a Green New Deal. Ahead lie the perils of global warming and peak oil. But now let us give homes to people, and with them the hope of a better life.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/01/labour-housing
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On a lighter note, I had another look at last week’s episode of Brand’s Ponderland. You must try to catch it on the C4 website before Thursday. Hilarious.
Also good for a chuckle - Martin Kelner’s column on the back of the Guardian’s sport section: “Even wrestling honeys can't stir my libido”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2008/nov/03/1
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Showing posts with label achievement.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label achievement.. Show all posts
Monday, November 3, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Layer 78 Education, Regulation, and the Rights of the Child
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It’s enough to make you despair when you come across pieces of crap in The Guardian like the one its ex-editor Peter Preston had published in the Opinion pages on Monday this week. Thank goodness so many readers took the trouble to lambast him for it in Comment Is Free - the good old Guardian’s brilliant facility for allowing readers to post an instant response on its website. Modern digital technology can be truly wonderful when it’s used imaginatively - in this case creating a community of interactive writers and readers-who-also-write. Oxzen also posted a response.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/20/commentanddebate-sats-banking-regulation
It’s not the first time Preston has written appalling reactionary nonsense in the Guardian - not by any means. It was this exact week last year, almost to the day, that he wrote a piece called A Molehill of Mange, taking to task the authors of a report into children’s unhappiness with schools and teachers. Preston ludicrously claimed that these poor little ‘blank slates’ had been grafitti-ed and scribbled on by their unscrupulous teachers and thereby made to believe that modern force-feeding teaching methods aimed solely at raising SATs and GCSE scores were making their lives in school tremendously dull, tedious, boring and frustrating. As if millions of kids up and down the country needed to be told that. As if they were actually enjoying school but preferred to claim the opposite. As if they’d been brainwashed by their lazy leftie teachers into believing something that was clearly untrue.
This sad old ignoramus is literally beyond help. I remember last year emailing him some gentle admonishment which patiently and politely explained the errors in his beliefs. Did I get even a brief courteous acknowledgement for my trouble? No. Did he bother to read what I wrote and allow alternative thoughts to enter his closed and fetid mind? It seems highly unlikely. Oh well - no doubt he’s an extremely busy man in his retirement. Wikipedia seems to suggest as much.
Though I have an image in my head of the kind of retired country-dwelling reactionary who hangs out every day in his local saloon bar with a copy of the Mail or the Telegraph open on his table, sounding off his trite, ignorant opinions to anyone within earshot, people who in any case already think the same way as he does because they’ve already read the same sort of nonsense in the same newspapers.
There’s a whole gang of media whores like Preston who think the same way as he does because they have broadly similar backgrounds - grammar or public/private schools followed by Oxford or Cambridge. We’re talking here about people like the lovely Mel P (Melanie Phillips), David Blunkett and Andrew Adonis. All of them journalist/politician/self-publicists. Big mouths in the media. Big egos. Presumably they have their own club somewhere. I’d guess they all wine and dine together regularly, in and out of one another’s lives and homes. Chris Woodhead is one of them, and though I’m not sure he actually made it to Oxbridge as an undergraduate he did lecture at Oxford for a while. Tony Blair is their patron saint - public school and Oxbridge background, naturally.
What they have in common is a penchant for claiming they’re on the side of the masses in their wish to have every working class kid in the country raised above their station in life by cramming them for academic tests and exams, regardless of their aptitudes or preferences (because PP and his ilk know best), enabling them all to gain straight A Stars at A level, and giving them entry to the university of their choice, preferably Oxford or Cambridge, but maybe Imperial College if they have a working class bent for using spanners and welding equipment. After all, the country needs its inventors and scientists.
I have the feeling that Preston’s column this week was written mainly as a response and an admonishment to Jenni Russell, who’s written so many brilliant columns on education in the Guardian and last week was at it again - celebrating the fact that the government has quietly abandoned its apparent determination to keep SATs at KS3.
What Preston and co also hate is the thought that by pandering to (i.e. providing an appropriate and creative education for) the less academically able (i.e. less crammable) kids, our schools might be paying less attention to and actually holding back the vast bulk of middle class kids who naturally want and need to go to university in order to follow the life pattern wished upon them by their affluenza-infected parents, who, of course, will always be mortified if their little darlings score less than three or four A stars.
And this is the system we inflict upon our kids - academic success at any price, even if it makes them extremely unhappy and uptight in its process, and even if it turns them into raving egomaniacs with a snobbish distain for the benighted masses. That’s assuming they do ‘well’ out of the system. Pity the poor fucks who don’t make it, in spite of all the cramming. But as good old Dave Bluntit always says, there’s no excuse for failure, and the failures had better not excuse themselves either. If The Blunk can make it, then anybody can. Provided they have their special needs properly provided for, of course.
Preston’s current article makes a very foolish attempt to draw parallels between the worlds of finance and education. His very simple and very stupid thought (and he really only has one) is that if Guardian readers, including teachers, believe that it’s necessary to have our failing financial system much more tightly regulated then they shouldn’t be rejoicing that the government has decided to get rid of KS3 SATs in our supposedly failing education system.
He bangs on about hundreds of thousands of illiterate kids passing out of our schools as if it was a fact, as if he knows what he’s talking about. He rails on about the fact that so many kids fail to achieve five A - C grades at GCSE as if this so-called benchmark has any real meaning, and as if it’s in any case all the fault of the bloody teachers, as if those kids are now doomed to a life of failure and misery.
Because Pete and his mates can’t conceive of anyone being happy or fulfilled unless they’ve been to Oxbridge, or at least have an honours degree from somewhere. Because the only possible way for working class people to have a decent life is to get a degree and thereby get a highly paid job and a career that will enable them to escape from their appalling inner city and council estate ‘communities’. Isn’t that right, Pete? Mel? Anyone?
And here’s another thought for you Peter, old pal. Maybe - just maybe - those so-called illiterate kids would have left school as avid readers and far more capable writers and learners if their teachers had been allowed and encouraged to foster in them a love of literature and an ability to express themselves in writing, in their own ‘voice’, instead of wasting hours, days, weeks and years cramming them for academic tests and exams using the methodology of the so-called National Literacy Strategy.
The real irony is that it’s far more likely that this generation of kids would have achieved higher scores at GCSE if they had been properly taught by methodology that fosters a love of literature and writing, and a love of learning for its own sake, instead of being force-fed on the methodology of those who maintain a Victorian belief that children are empty vessels ready and waiting to be filled with Imperial gallons of facts, or those like Peter Preston who maintain a belief that children are merely blank slates just waiting to be written on by their teachers.
At heart, of course, these neo-conservatives are just fascists and elitists, and they can’t conceive of any system that isn’t top-down and imposed on the rest of us by the Special Ones like themselves who’ve been to Oxbridge or some other university and therefore have proven superiority of mind and spirit. Some of them may pay lip service to the concept of equality of opportunity, but that’s as far as it goes. There’s no way that common people could actually be their equal.
Some further reading for Peter and friends might be a little known Ofsted publication - ‘Schools Where Boys Write Well’ - little known because it goes against the grain of the disastrous National Literacy Strategy mentality and methodology. It’s even rooted in actual classroom practice, and some might say common sense, which is more than you can say for the untested, untrialled NLS. This booklet actually makes sense, which is more than you can say for Peter and his pals, who get their opinions from ‘data’ and from fellow ignoramuses, since they have no experience of the reality of life in ‘normal’ communities and ‘normal’ schools.
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/765289/
STOP PRESS
News headlines this morning - why are so many more Primary pupils refusing to attend school regularly? Now let’s see . . .
Presumably they’ve been brainwashed by their teachers into believing they really, really dislike school.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/22/comment.comment1 Molehill of Mange. The original classic.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/16/sats-schools Jenni Russell
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/22/sats-schools From today’s paper - an article by Dr Mary Bousted in response to Peter Preston’s piece.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7039966.stm The original report that inspired Preston’s Molehill of Mange
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/29/homework.ban Article on homework
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1563753/Boring-lessons-blamed-for-rise-in-truancy.html Telegraph article from last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7681666.stm Yesterday’s BBC report on a big increase in the numbers of Primary pupils absent from school. Either more kids are falling sick in some way, in which case we need to ask why they’re less physically and mentally healthy, or they’re more disaffected by school, in which case we definitely need to know why. Either way I blame central Government, local government, the DCFS, Ofsted and their media cheerleaders, as well as the people in schools who sold their souls in order to carry out the orders of their overlords.
PS Oxzen holds no brief at all for all the teachers and senior managers in schools who actually are crap, and there are indeed quite a few of them. However, the majority of these schmucks have been badly trained, brainwashed and bullied for so long it’s hardly fair to blame them entirely for their own inadequacies, or to demand their instant dismissal. Hopefully there will, sooner or later, be a more enlightened regime which can offer retraining of a very high quality, that will enable these people to see the errors of their ways and enable them to become high-functioning, ethically-driven and enlightened professionals who don’t abuse children’s rights to a real education (amongst other things) in the name of raising ‘standards’.
http://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf See Articles 29, 31 and 36 in particular.
.
It’s enough to make you despair when you come across pieces of crap in The Guardian like the one its ex-editor Peter Preston had published in the Opinion pages on Monday this week. Thank goodness so many readers took the trouble to lambast him for it in Comment Is Free - the good old Guardian’s brilliant facility for allowing readers to post an instant response on its website. Modern digital technology can be truly wonderful when it’s used imaginatively - in this case creating a community of interactive writers and readers-who-also-write. Oxzen also posted a response.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/20/commentanddebate-sats-banking-regulation
It’s not the first time Preston has written appalling reactionary nonsense in the Guardian - not by any means. It was this exact week last year, almost to the day, that he wrote a piece called A Molehill of Mange, taking to task the authors of a report into children’s unhappiness with schools and teachers. Preston ludicrously claimed that these poor little ‘blank slates’ had been grafitti-ed and scribbled on by their unscrupulous teachers and thereby made to believe that modern force-feeding teaching methods aimed solely at raising SATs and GCSE scores were making their lives in school tremendously dull, tedious, boring and frustrating. As if millions of kids up and down the country needed to be told that. As if they were actually enjoying school but preferred to claim the opposite. As if they’d been brainwashed by their lazy leftie teachers into believing something that was clearly untrue.
This sad old ignoramus is literally beyond help. I remember last year emailing him some gentle admonishment which patiently and politely explained the errors in his beliefs. Did I get even a brief courteous acknowledgement for my trouble? No. Did he bother to read what I wrote and allow alternative thoughts to enter his closed and fetid mind? It seems highly unlikely. Oh well - no doubt he’s an extremely busy man in his retirement. Wikipedia seems to suggest as much.
Though I have an image in my head of the kind of retired country-dwelling reactionary who hangs out every day in his local saloon bar with a copy of the Mail or the Telegraph open on his table, sounding off his trite, ignorant opinions to anyone within earshot, people who in any case already think the same way as he does because they’ve already read the same sort of nonsense in the same newspapers.
There’s a whole gang of media whores like Preston who think the same way as he does because they have broadly similar backgrounds - grammar or public/private schools followed by Oxford or Cambridge. We’re talking here about people like the lovely Mel P (Melanie Phillips), David Blunkett and Andrew Adonis. All of them journalist/politician/self-publicists. Big mouths in the media. Big egos. Presumably they have their own club somewhere. I’d guess they all wine and dine together regularly, in and out of one another’s lives and homes. Chris Woodhead is one of them, and though I’m not sure he actually made it to Oxbridge as an undergraduate he did lecture at Oxford for a while. Tony Blair is their patron saint - public school and Oxbridge background, naturally.
What they have in common is a penchant for claiming they’re on the side of the masses in their wish to have every working class kid in the country raised above their station in life by cramming them for academic tests and exams, regardless of their aptitudes or preferences (because PP and his ilk know best), enabling them all to gain straight A Stars at A level, and giving them entry to the university of their choice, preferably Oxford or Cambridge, but maybe Imperial College if they have a working class bent for using spanners and welding equipment. After all, the country needs its inventors and scientists.
I have the feeling that Preston’s column this week was written mainly as a response and an admonishment to Jenni Russell, who’s written so many brilliant columns on education in the Guardian and last week was at it again - celebrating the fact that the government has quietly abandoned its apparent determination to keep SATs at KS3.
What Preston and co also hate is the thought that by pandering to (i.e. providing an appropriate and creative education for) the less academically able (i.e. less crammable) kids, our schools might be paying less attention to and actually holding back the vast bulk of middle class kids who naturally want and need to go to university in order to follow the life pattern wished upon them by their affluenza-infected parents, who, of course, will always be mortified if their little darlings score less than three or four A stars.
And this is the system we inflict upon our kids - academic success at any price, even if it makes them extremely unhappy and uptight in its process, and even if it turns them into raving egomaniacs with a snobbish distain for the benighted masses. That’s assuming they do ‘well’ out of the system. Pity the poor fucks who don’t make it, in spite of all the cramming. But as good old Dave Bluntit always says, there’s no excuse for failure, and the failures had better not excuse themselves either. If The Blunk can make it, then anybody can. Provided they have their special needs properly provided for, of course.
Preston’s current article makes a very foolish attempt to draw parallels between the worlds of finance and education. His very simple and very stupid thought (and he really only has one) is that if Guardian readers, including teachers, believe that it’s necessary to have our failing financial system much more tightly regulated then they shouldn’t be rejoicing that the government has decided to get rid of KS3 SATs in our supposedly failing education system.
He bangs on about hundreds of thousands of illiterate kids passing out of our schools as if it was a fact, as if he knows what he’s talking about. He rails on about the fact that so many kids fail to achieve five A - C grades at GCSE as if this so-called benchmark has any real meaning, and as if it’s in any case all the fault of the bloody teachers, as if those kids are now doomed to a life of failure and misery.
Because Pete and his mates can’t conceive of anyone being happy or fulfilled unless they’ve been to Oxbridge, or at least have an honours degree from somewhere. Because the only possible way for working class people to have a decent life is to get a degree and thereby get a highly paid job and a career that will enable them to escape from their appalling inner city and council estate ‘communities’. Isn’t that right, Pete? Mel? Anyone?
And here’s another thought for you Peter, old pal. Maybe - just maybe - those so-called illiterate kids would have left school as avid readers and far more capable writers and learners if their teachers had been allowed and encouraged to foster in them a love of literature and an ability to express themselves in writing, in their own ‘voice’, instead of wasting hours, days, weeks and years cramming them for academic tests and exams using the methodology of the so-called National Literacy Strategy.
The real irony is that it’s far more likely that this generation of kids would have achieved higher scores at GCSE if they had been properly taught by methodology that fosters a love of literature and writing, and a love of learning for its own sake, instead of being force-fed on the methodology of those who maintain a Victorian belief that children are empty vessels ready and waiting to be filled with Imperial gallons of facts, or those like Peter Preston who maintain a belief that children are merely blank slates just waiting to be written on by their teachers.
At heart, of course, these neo-conservatives are just fascists and elitists, and they can’t conceive of any system that isn’t top-down and imposed on the rest of us by the Special Ones like themselves who’ve been to Oxbridge or some other university and therefore have proven superiority of mind and spirit. Some of them may pay lip service to the concept of equality of opportunity, but that’s as far as it goes. There’s no way that common people could actually be their equal.
Some further reading for Peter and friends might be a little known Ofsted publication - ‘Schools Where Boys Write Well’ - little known because it goes against the grain of the disastrous National Literacy Strategy mentality and methodology. It’s even rooted in actual classroom practice, and some might say common sense, which is more than you can say for the untested, untrialled NLS. This booklet actually makes sense, which is more than you can say for Peter and his pals, who get their opinions from ‘data’ and from fellow ignoramuses, since they have no experience of the reality of life in ‘normal’ communities and ‘normal’ schools.
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/literacy/765289/
STOP PRESS
News headlines this morning - why are so many more Primary pupils refusing to attend school regularly? Now let’s see . . .
Presumably they’ve been brainwashed by their teachers into believing they really, really dislike school.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/oct/22/comment.comment1 Molehill of Mange. The original classic.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/16/sats-schools Jenni Russell
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/22/sats-schools From today’s paper - an article by Dr Mary Bousted in response to Peter Preston’s piece.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7039966.stm The original report that inspired Preston’s Molehill of Mange
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/29/homework.ban Article on homework
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1563753/Boring-lessons-blamed-for-rise-in-truancy.html Telegraph article from last year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7681666.stm Yesterday’s BBC report on a big increase in the numbers of Primary pupils absent from school. Either more kids are falling sick in some way, in which case we need to ask why they’re less physically and mentally healthy, or they’re more disaffected by school, in which case we definitely need to know why. Either way I blame central Government, local government, the DCFS, Ofsted and their media cheerleaders, as well as the people in schools who sold their souls in order to carry out the orders of their overlords.
PS Oxzen holds no brief at all for all the teachers and senior managers in schools who actually are crap, and there are indeed quite a few of them. However, the majority of these schmucks have been badly trained, brainwashed and bullied for so long it’s hardly fair to blame them entirely for their own inadequacies, or to demand their instant dismissal. Hopefully there will, sooner or later, be a more enlightened regime which can offer retraining of a very high quality, that will enable these people to see the errors of their ways and enable them to become high-functioning, ethically-driven and enlightened professionals who don’t abuse children’s rights to a real education (amongst other things) in the name of raising ‘standards’.
http://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf See Articles 29, 31 and 36 in particular.
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