We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day “In Soviet Russia, tractor production figures were always on the rise. In modern Britain we have our own equivalent: the annual increase in exam passes and improvement in grades, celebrated just as enthusiastically by the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as by those of New Labour. It is all built on a lie.”
Stephen Pollard.
I agree with some of Mr Pollard’s analysis, although I do not detect any support by him for the idea that the problem is more profound than whether schools adopt “progressive” or “traditional” methods. The whole notion that compulsory education might itself be a problem is not even addressed, nor does he touch on the idea of home schooling. And Stephen P. just takes it as read that however crap schooling may be, that the model of sending children to these places between the age of X and Y is broadly okay, it is just that the structure is a bit wonky and the teachers are all ideologues, etc. The problem goes a bit deeper than that.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Jonathan: But even if we take all those status quo based starting assumptions as a given, then the school system is doing far worse than it could be.
Those assumptions have all been in place for over a hundred years and over that time span the quality of education delivered by this model of education has varied dramatically over time.
I want to make a distinction for a moment between the value of education and grades. The value of the former is absolute. The personal value of being exposed to information and ideas can’t be diminished by other people being exposed to them. Quite the opposite in fact; conversations between ‘educated people’ in the informal sense of the word are synergistic. When a group of people is talking from a higher shared base of knowledge and understanding there is a net gain for everyone in the group. Compare the quality of debate on Samizdata with that in your local pub if you doubt this. However as many people have pointed out, education has nothing to do with grades.
The only purpose of a grading system is to enable third parties such as Universities and employers comparisons between student A and student B. A grade has no value in and of itself but only relative to and in comparison with other grades. In this is is just like money.
This should be a statement of the bleeding obvious, but given the education systems determination to print A grades the way bank of Zimbabwe prints bank notes it obviously isn’t.
The media obsesses about grade inflation every year but as usual it asks entirely the wrong questions. Are the A Levels easier than they were ten or fifteen years ago?
While the answer is obviously yes its also a pretty pointless question.
Generally speaking graduates at whatever level compete for jobs and university places with others of the same age cohort as themselves. Therefore the question we want to ask is not. “Is an A grade in 2008 the same as an A grade in 1988?” This is no more important than obsessing about what a pound today is worth today compared to twenty years ago. As long as it remains useful measure of value, whether the currency system has base units of 1 100 or 1000 is of little importance.
The real purpose of grade inflation in my view is a political tool to obscure the vast differences in quality between a state education and a private one.
If they set the Grade ceiling low enough that anyone reasonably bright and industrious can hit the highest grades they can mask the gulf.
It also means that they can determine who fills the places in the higher education by social engineering and egalitarian ideology rather than by academic merit. After all if every applicant to Oxbridge has maxed out grades we can use any criteria we want to distinguish between them .
Damn, I hate these people.
Never thought of your points Jay. Well said!
I have seen recent GCSE & A-Level papers in science and math and they are box-ticking recall exercises. They are therefore poor discriminators because very little figuring out or thought is needed. Of course for the universities and employers this means they get kids with really “good” grades which have tested the wrong thing. In something like physics (my erstwhile field) what matters are things like being able to follow complicated mathematical arguments rather than knowing stuff.
They have also of course hi-jacked all of this to PC & Green ends.
There are interesting developments in the U.S.
The expansion of Charter Schools and other “elective” forms of education are begiining to erode the “public school systems.” Complaints are arising from the entrenched interests that have captured those systems.
The desire of individuals in organized communities to provide for education of the young is quite distinct from the collectivist concept of compulsory schooling within a system determined by political objectives and actions.
Pollard doesn’t ask the questions Jonathon mentions because, in all probability, he can’t.
Even if they occur to him, which is unlikely, he would lose any influence and credibility he might have with the “powers that be” if he dared to raise such fundamental issues.
Better to nibble at the edges than take a big bite that one might choke on.
There is a fine, but very distinct, line between stability and rigor mortis, culturally speaking. Stability says, “Show me some very good reasons for changing and I’ll consider it.” Rigor says, very simply, “There is nothing good called change. I can’t even imagine it.”
All societies resist major changes, for very good reasons, and sometimes very poor ones. But some cultures cannot even conceive of the possibility of fundamental alterations in the way they do things.
Perhaps Japan, at one time, was the primary example of this utterly closed mind, resulting in a closed society.
Many Native American tribes, much to their detriment, also clung to the idea that there was only one way to do things, only one way to live.
And, in many ways, this is the form of closed tribalism we are dealing with when we attempt to propose fundamental changes in the very form of education, instead of just marginal adjustments within the accepted structure.
Flexibility and openness to new ways of thinking are aspects of a confident frame of mind. The refusal to even consider some ideas is a symptom of a fearful, worried outlook.
It is not surprising that the mavens of statist policy are among the latter.
Schooling is so industrial age. Unschool!
Compulsory schooling is good enough for the proles.
Completely agree. Not all kids are equal, some would even be better if they work for a period instead of being dumped in a one size fits all system. I think i would.
Or should that be ‘quota of the day’?
It is true that not all state education is equally bad – for example state education in Bavaria is vastly better than in Britain (or in the United States – one of the depressing things about American government education is how little structural difference there is between the various States).
However, the assumption (made by so many Conservatives) that “well then we can make eduation in England and Wales (or Scotland) like Bavarian education” is a false one.
It is far more likely that Bavarian education will become more like Britain.
Remember such things as “national curriculums” were introduced by Conservative governments as part of an effort to counter leftist actions – but were captured by the left (from the start) to push their agenda still further.
And this should be expected – after all the government operates via an administrative structure (how can it operate in another way?) and such a government administrative structure is going to be controlled by the left.
To demand “state education but not leftist education” is similar to demanding “a cat – as long as it barks”.