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We have had over thirty years of comprehensives and eight years of Blair's "education, education, education". The result? According to The Guardian:

New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer, professor of applied psychology at King's College, University of London, concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.

"It's a staggering result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. "Before the project started, I rather expected to find that children had improved developmentally. This would have been in line with the Flynn effect on intelligence tests, which shows that children's IQ levels improve at such a steady rate that the norm of 100 has to be recalibrated every 15 years or so. But the figures just don't lie. We had a sample of over 10,000 children and the results have been checked, rechecked and peer reviewed."

Astonishing.

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I have been trying to get myself all worked up about how the UK Education Minister, Ruth Kelly, approved the appointment of a convicted sex offender to a job in a state school. All very terrible, she is obviously an ass, blah-blah. But nearly every commentary on this shabby business seems to be missing a wider point. What on earth is a politician doing approving or blocking the appointment of a teacher in the first place? There are tens of thousands of teachers, supply teachers and assistants. How on earth is a politician, or even a reasonably competent personnel manager, expected to keep track of all these folk?

The centralisation of our state education system has brought this sort of problem to pass. We need to return to the point where individual schools hire and fire teachers, and where parents have the freedom to put their children into a school or pull them out if they are not satisfied. It is not exactly rocket science.

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I am not a great fan of Max Hastings but he does have a rather good article in the Guardian that makes points which should be obvious to everyone except state apparatchiks. He decries educational utilitarianism and Labour's lack of realism about the dominance of western culture and the relevance of British history in view of that undeniable dominance.

However I think he rather misses the point that this attitude has been a significant element for quite some time under governments of both parties. Perhaps what makes this government more alarming is their taste for depreciating any sense of cultural identity for English people and, most importantly, failing to provide any historical context for the modern world. To have a broad grasp of history is to have an understanding of the present and future possibilities and it would appear that is not seen as helpful for the broad masses of people who the state would rather see concentrate on mere technical skills.

I wonder if there are some in Whitehall who really do think that ideally as few British people as possible should know there was not always a socialist 'National Health Service'? If people do not know of a past without something they are perhaps less likely to imagine a future without it either. Perhaps none would really see things in quite such totalitarian terms yet it is not hard to see the attraction of such a view if you do not want people even discussing things which might reduce your power and influence by questioning certain axioms.

It is often my experience that the very notion that most regulatory planning is a quite modern imposition strikes a lot of people as bizarre. They think that without politically driven planning, everything would be chaos, and that must always have been true, right? Yet before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which was the single most destructive abridgement of British liberty ever, people owned property with several rights that are unimaginable today. Civilization would not end if such conditions prevailed again tomorrow (far from it) yet the meta-contextual reality is that in 2005, most people quite literally cannot imagine a world without planning regulations and that makes it rather hard to have a discussion about the issue if you take a radical perspective (i.e. the mainstream perspective of about one hundred years ago).

Perhaps just as Orwell wrote about 'newspeak' and posited a totalitarian state which wanted to abridge the language to make even conceiving of dissent impossible, there may be some amongst the political class who like the idea of most people receiving nothing more than technical training as the less people know of radically different world views that are never the less relevant to western culture, the less likely they are to imagine society functioning just fine without a great many of the state institutions taken for granted today. What would happen if people start imagining a world which works just fine without much of the regulatory statism that the state wants you to accept as inevitable and natural?

Creating a non-statist meta-context in which such things can even be discussed is something I have often banged on about. By this I mean establishing frames of reference within which one develops and expresses opinions that are broader than those generally found in the mainstream media or academia today. This matters because the meta-context within which most discussions and analysis take place tends to define the basic range of views that are likely to emerge: for example, if the only method for effecting changes people can imagine involves force backed democratic political processes, their views will tend to develop with that underpinning assumption in mind.

I would be curious to know if people like education minister Charles Clarke really think about that sort of thing. I am quite willing to believe that rather than an sinister overarching world view designed to make us all technically trained drones monitored with panoptic surveillance and ubiquitous state enforced database monitoring, we are just seeing the results of dreary political hacks looking for ways to eliminate things they are too limited to see a use for themselves. Stupidity rather than malevolence is generally a more reliable explanation of wickedness than conspiracy theories... and yet when you take the broader view of this apparent dislike of non-technical education within the context of widespread abridgement of civil liberties by both main political parties, well, it makes you wonder.

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I keep banging on about this subject since it is, in my eyes, a prime example of how the state is not pulling its share of the deal in coercing the citizenry to pay for schooling and for coercing children to spend the ages of 5 to 16 or more in school. Latest official data suggest that standards of literacy and numeracy among schoolchildren are not up to scratch.

Schools are not doing enough to improve the literacy and numeracy skills of those pupils who start their secondary education with low standards in English and mathematics," a report from Ofsted said.

The findings were released on the same day the National Audit Office, the government's spending watchdog, said more employers need to invest time and money in teaching staff basic skills such as maths and English.

Tony Blair is locked in conflict with his Labour backbench MPs over his education reforms. From a superficial reading, one would get the impression that Blair wanted to drastically open up the amount of choice available to parents as to where their offspring are educated. In practice, nothing so drastic seems to be on the cards and yet the slightest hint of increased choice seems to send socialists into a frenzy.

The other night, the Institute of Economic Affairs held an evening to honour the late, great Arthur Seldon, who among other reforms made the idea of school vouchers one of his pet issues. It is fair to say that we are as yet a million miles from achieving the kind of choice in education that Arthur wanted to bring about.

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A few weeks ago I linked to a speech given by the head of a private schools organisation, in which said individual fretted about the decline in the teaching of certain subjects such as physics and foreign languages. Responses were interesting. One or two commenters thought the system is pretty good. (Yes, seriously). One fellow even claimed to be "genuinely bowled over" by how good it was. More common responses were on the lines that in a free market, if there is a shortage of folk with engineering or linguistic abilities, then sooner or later supply would come through, if not from the UK's own workforce, then from overseas forms of supply. Up to a point I agree. As a free marketeer, it would be perverse for me to bleat about "shortages" or X and Y and then not realise that one person's shortage is another person's entrepreneurial opportunity.

The difficulty, of course, is that we don't have a fully free market system of education in this country, but one in which the incentive impact of price signals and salary levels gets blunted by a predominantly state-run system, with its national programmes, bureaucracies and state-mandated certificates and qualifications. This means that if there is a shortage of say, physics teachers, it may take a while for the shortage to be made up. Learning physics to a high standard can take even the brightest students quite a while. And if the supply of teachers in certain fields drops off, it can take several years to make up the gap easily, though modern technology possibly can help disseminate information more effectively than the chalk-and-blackboard approach of the past.

If, on the other hand, the scarcity of physics teachers changes slowly, then a more market-driven schooling system can react to that more nimbly. People who work in industry but who may want a less stressful life might be interested in teaching science part-time, for example. Among the greying populations of the industrialised world, there might be a potentially big pool of people who might like to teach the young but on a part-time basis.

A story here points to continued worries about what is happening with science education in this country, especially in the field of physics. I am not of course saying that the existing system can be made better by tweaking a few courses here and there. A move towards a genuine market in education is what is required over the long term.

For those who think of schooling in a post-Prussian statist mindset, you can blow out some collectivist cobwebs here and also here

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Something extremely interesting has just been reported on Newsnight.

David Cameron has apparently been saying for some time now (but I missed it until now) that he is against "opposition for opposition's sake" and that the Conservatives may well be voting for the Government's latest education reforms. David Cameron is and has for some time been the Conservative spokesman on education, and he seems to be handling the Conservative response to these proposals.

Yesterday I did a posting concerning Cameron, and the consensus among the Samizdata commentariat was that nobody knew what Cameron stood for, or what any of his ideas might be. But I think what we have here is an idea of great importance. Maybe not an especially original one, and long overdue, but extremely potent mevertheless.

The Conservative Opposition has spent the last decade opposing everything that the Government has done, a process which I particularly associate with William Hague, but which his successors have not fundamentally altered. And since the Government has been relentlessly "triangulating" – i.e. stealing whichever Conservative policies they think are popular or which they think will eventually prove popular because they think that they will in the meantime work – this has meant the Conservatives suffering from a permanent, yet self-imposed, philosophical incoherence.

One moment the Conservatives would be saying that something or other that the Government was talking about should be more market-oriented. A moment later, some other Government initiative that was more market-oriented would be complained about. Complained about, as Cameron has apparently said, for the sake of complaining. One moment the Government was being not tough enough on terrorists, the next moment too tough, for doing pretty much what the Conservatives had just said they should do in another context. This is not opposition, so much as opposition-ism. It says: whatever they do is wrong! Never mind why. Never mind what we would do, or what we really think of it. Denounce it! We just scrape up whatever mud we can find on the floor and chuck it at them. No wonder the Conservatives have won parliamentary battle after parliamentary battle, but have been slaughtered again and again in the electoral war.

What would the Conservatives do, if they were the Government? For the last ten years, they have offered no sort of answer. And for this reason, there has been, in the competitive sense, no opposition, because no alternative Government that it made sense to even consider voting for. All anyone knew about the Conservatives was that they did not like the Government. Big surprise. But that is not a policy; it is a mere emotion. It has condemned the Conservatives to relentless irrelevance and unending public ridicule.

Now, if this "Cameron doctrine" is what it appears to be, and more to the point, if it goes into action right across the board, with David Cameron imposing it across the board in his capacity as Conservative Leader, New Labour will finally face what you might call a New Nightmare.

Take these education reforms. Blair says they are intended to make schools more independent and self-governed, and less controlled by local authorities. This is very Conservative friendly stuff, and not at all Labour friendly. There is a good chance that the massed ranks of Labour MPs will not vote for these reforms in nearly sufficient numbers, but that a more unified Conservative Party will see the reforms through nevertheless. This will split the Labour Party from top to bottom. We are doing Conservative policy! And with Conservative help! And in spite of our core beliefs!

Repeat that procedure every time Blair presents one of his reforms, but oppose ferociously when they resort to old fashioned, Old Labour, collectivism, and suddenly it is a new Parliamentary ball game.

It gets worse for Labour. In the electorate as a whole, the question will start to be asked: if we already have a Government that does Conservative things, despite its own supporters, and if that is what that nice Mr Blair thinks should be done, then does it not make sense to vote for the real thing, and vote in a real Conservative Government?

This is a tactical switch that the Conservatives should, from the purely political and competitive point of view, have done years ago. Finally, they have done it.

Or then again, maybe they have not. Cameron might not win the Conservative Leadership. Davies might go back to crass oppositionism. Cameron may win, but it may turn out that "opposition for opposition's sake" was just a nice sounding phrase to win him the job, and he will then forget about it and carry on with the mud slinging.

But, this might just be a political turning point.

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This may not be the most exciting story of the day, but it caught my eye as an example of how, despite its fine words, the present government has allowed our education system to crumble:

Britain will slide rapidly towards Third World status unless the Government reverses the "unsupportable" decline in maths, science, engineering and modern languages in the state sector, head teachers of leading independent schools warned yesterday.

Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, representing leading boys' and co-educational secondary schools, urged the Government to work more closely with the private sector.

"Despite improvements in state results, the decline in mathematics, engineering and modern languages is unsupportable and has to be reversed," he said. "Otherwise we are heading rapidly towards Third World status."

India and China were turning out tens of thousands of engineers, scientists and mathematicians but in Britain the number of first-year graduates studying chemistry had fallen from 4,000 in 1997 to 2,700 in 2005, he said.

Superficially, it may be a smart move to make it easier for parents to send their children to private schools. My only problem is that if the current Labour government were to embark on such a course, it would demand, as part of such a deal, greater control over what is left of the non-state education system. (That remains a key drawback of education vouchers). Do we really want the half-educated dolts and knaves running this government to get their hands on Eton, Harrow or Winchester?

Update: a commenter disputes whether British state schools are so lousy. Perhaps he should study this OECD report, which contains damning data on illiteracy in Britain. I should also remind readers of the terrific work being done by Professor James Tooley to debunk the shibboleths of statist thinking on education.

Update 2: Here is another link to a site about literacy issues in Britain and other countries. If you scroll down there are dozens of stories, from as recently as September 2005, expressing employers' concerns about the skills of the students they take on. A couple of commenters persist in claiming that our state education system is better than it has ever been. If so, why the company complaints? I presume that CEOs are not making this stuff up.

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Friday's Guardian carried a scary piece, headed:

Extremist groups active inside UK universities, report claims

So? What do you expect? I was getting ready to say. Of course students like to try on new ideas and they suck up stuff from all sorts of weirdos from the Hare Krishna, to the Federation of Conservative Students (RIP), to the Department of Gender Studies. Some of my best friends are "extremists". A university that's a tepid-bed of moderation is scarcely worthy of the name.

Then my eye hit the scary bit. The second paragraph reads:

Yesterday the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, ordered vice-chancellors to clamp down on student extremists in the wake of the July terror attacks in London.

I may have had very little administrative contact with my own universities, but I am fairly sure it wasn't part of the vice-chancellors' job description to tell students what they can say and what they can think. And I knew the current administration had taken the first steps to control by seizing admissions procedures, but I definitely missed the bit where universities ceased to be independent institutions, and Mrs Secretary of State Kelly could order vice-chancellors what to tell the student body what it may say and think.

The excitable self-promoting report by erstwhile history professor Anthony Glees (who seems interestingly close to the security establishment) was picked up in a number of places, but I haven't heard suggestions elsewhere that Kelly is doing any such thing. Let us hope that this is just a mistaken presumption on the part of the journalists involved that all-powerful ministers can order anything... not a PR prelude to the Government "discovering" it does not have such a power and that it is vital it gets it quick "for national security".

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The FT paper edition for 20th/21st August has feature on some of its writers sitting some of this years' A-level exams. Though a stock sort of piece, this much the best of its type I've read and is full of insights, most provided by the examiners they involved in the exercise.

For example, here's Matthew Lumby of the QCA:

A lot of people think that in an essay question you are just judged on content and style when in fact the markers will be looking for a number of specific things.

What else is there?

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American journalist, Cathy Young, wades into the Intelligent Design (ID) versus Darwinian evolution controversy. It is an issue that appears to be causing more of a ruckus in Jefferson's Republic than in Britain, which until recently, was pleasingly unruffled by attempts by religious folk to roll back the achievements of science (I have not a clue what Islamists think of evolution). Champions of ID seem, at any rate in the United States, to be coming from the so-called conservative side of the political divide. As Young points out, though, it is by no means clear why conservatives should take this stance:

In some ways, evolutionary theory is more compatible with conservative ideas than with leftist ones. Indeed, proponents of applying evolutionary theory to human social structures tend to be viewed by the left with suspicion, particularly on biological explanations for sex roles. As several commentators have pointed out, it's conservatives who reject the notion that complex organization requires deliberate central planning -- in economics. Why should biology be different?

Exactly. The Hayekian idea of spontaneous order is similar in some ways. It is arguable that Darwin's appreciation of the emergence of complex systems may have been influenced by the writings of the Scottish Englightenment, such as Adam Smith and his famous idea of the "invisible hand". It is entirely possible to believe in the existence, or indeed entertain the possibility of a Supreme Being and yet still sign up to Darwin's theory and the subsequent development thereof. An atheist would presumably find it very hard to support ID, I would have thought. Here is a link to lots of stuff about this issue here, from a broadly pro-evolution perspective.

Should ID be taught in schools? Well, as a taxpayer, I object to what I think is a bogus theory being taught with money seized from my wallet. If parents want to teach religious ideas to their children, I have few objections. My only caveat is that parents do not have an unfettered right to indoctrinate their offspring, although given the rebellious instincts of most kids, this is pretty hard to do over an extended period of time in a vigorous, pro-science, pro-reason culture.

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Australia is not famous for higher education. Indeed, "Australia" and "Higher education" would strike most people as an oxymoron in the "French Military Victory" class.

Needless to say, the Australian Government has long tried to nudge Australia's university system towards some sort of quality, and has permitted private Universities to be established. In addition, the government has encouraged students from overseas to pay their way through Australian universities, as a way for universities here to raise money.

Recently, the government has also allowed Australians to enter universities by paying their own way.

This move towards a more financially sustainable education system has not been well received by many members of the Australian academic ecosystem. One of whom has put together a rather amusing parody website which takes a humorous potshot at trends in Australian university education.

Underling the parody is the normal assumtion that anything in the private sector must be inferior, and that any private qualification must obviously be worthless as it can be bought.

But the site has caused a bit of a flurry of attention in various educational quarters in Australia, and one consultant has been tracking the progress of this satirical site.

This recalls to me the time, long ago now, when I was studying like a demon in order to obtain the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) qualification, back in the dark days when networking involved lots of wires. As it was, I was dating a university student at the time and she was appalled that I had to acheive an 85% score to pass and obtain the qualification. She was doing sociology or something of that ilk in a Melbourne university and told me smugly that she only needed to score 55% to pass. Easy for her, but who do you think knew their subject better? After all, Cisco had a real stake in me being proficient in knowing how to use their product.

Thanks to Professor John Kersey for alerting us to these sites.

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Harry Phibbs is one of those people who is not nearly as much of an ass as he often pretends to be. In fact, often pretending to be an ass is just about the only assinine thing about him.

Here he is, pictured at that Globalization Institute launch that everyone who was anyone was at, talking about I have no idea who, but almost certainly saying that they ought to be horsewhipped.

But he is and has long been an excellent writer. Here is his excellent description, at the SAU blog, of what it is like being a school governor (while remaining Harry Phibbs of course). I particularly liked this bit of reminiscence:

School governors are entitled, indeed encouraged, to visit the school once a term or so. They also have a chance to report on their visit. I once caused consternation at a primary school in St John's Wood where I was a governor a few years ago. Reporting on a visit I had made to the school, I named a Bosnian child who had recently arrived at the school. He was unable to speak English but was very good at sums. Essentially his entire time at school was being wasted. For most lessons he stared blankly unable to understand what was going on. In the maths lesson however he managed to correctly complete a whole sheet of sums within seconds which kept the rest of the class going for the whole lesson. Of course he should have been given harder sums and special help to learn English. "We are letting him down", I declared. Later it was proposed by one of the teachers that reports of governor's visits should be restricted to general comments as it was "inappropriate" to make comments which should be made by school inspectors.

But I was backed up by the other governors who agreed there was little point in having school visits if specific criticisms could not be made. I never found out if the boy was given harder sums to add up.

Harry also writes about the beneficial effects of Jamie Oliver on school meals, and gives chapter and verse of how much money is spent on each pupil, and who by. (Clue: bureaucracy.)

Read, as we bloggers so often say, the whole thing.

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I am watching a news report on Newsnight, broadcast by the BBC, about private education in Nigeria. The report is the work of Professor James Tooley, who I think is one of the most interesting public intellectuals in the world.

Tooley has been roaming the world in recent years, finding cheap, successful, private schools, which are everywhere outperforming the shoddy state provided schools. Nigeria is no different.

It is one thing to see white blokes in suits saying at some pro free market conference that the private sector is better than the public sector. Watching Nigerian parents explaining the same thing, to a BBC news camera, is something else again.

So why, Tooley is asking, is everyone in denial? There is no global crisis in education. The private sector is supplying higher standards at a fraction of the cost.

Now we are in white blokes discussing it all mode, and Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University is explaining that what Tooley has spent the last decade scrutinising with his own eyes is all a figment of his, Tooley's, imagination.

Tooley has the advantage over Lewin. He has been there. He has seen it. He has found schools which, until he and his colleagues found them, nobody not directly involved with the schools in question knew existed. This is market success, says Tooley, and we should celebrate it.

Tooley's report showed an incandescently eloquent private sector teacher in action. And he also showed a state school teacher in a state school classroom, a classroom filled with state school pupils who were busy trying teaching one another, while he, the state school teacher, was fast asleep at his desk.

Lewin says that this is all a tragedy, because he sees state failure. The state is, or should be, the educator of last resort. Market success is important to Lewin only because as far as he is concerned market success equals state failure, and state failure is bad bad bad. Lewin refers to "his colleagues in Africa", who agree with him and do not agree with Tooley.

Those, I would guess, would be the state education bureaucrats who, time and time again, do not even realise that there is a thriving educational private sector in their own country, pretty much right under their noses. The government bureaucrats whom Lewin (I suspect) spends most of his African research time communing with, have little idea about this ferment of private education. Insofar as they do know of it, they do not want to know of it, because it makes them feel irrelevant. This is because they are irrelevant. And if they are irrelevant then so is the living that Professor Keith Lewin of Sussex University makes helping to prepare all this state bureaucrats for their careers in state education.

Now Lewin is talking gibberish about why Britain nationalised its schools in 1870. What we have just seen, says Lewin, invites the withdrawal of the state from the provision of all public services. Well, yes.

The thing about Tooley is not just what he says. It is also the sincerity and enthusiasm with which he says it. He will never convert the Lewins of this world. But he does seriously contest what they say, and, just like the numerous private schools which he has found the world over – in Africa, in China, in India, in Pakistan, in fact everywhere he looks – he does it with a fraction of the resources that the Lewin side of this debate now commands.

For more about all this, read this Sunday Times article by Tooley, which I would never have found out about had it not been for the BBC.

The BBC, outrageously biased, rampant supplier of last resort of rampantly pro-capitalist propaganda.

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As a general rule, whenever you hear or read that teaching unions are 'angry' then you can pretty much bet all your wordly worth that something good and positive is happening in the education sector.

I have yet to encounter an exception to this rule:

Teachers' unions reacted angrily today after the Government vowed to press ahead with plans for 200 privately-sponsored city academies.

This hardly means that the (long overdue) commodification of education is upon us but then these public sector mafiosi possess bloodhound levels of sensitivty that enable them to pick up on even the faintest whiff of threat to their vested interests.

I wholly expect that even if these academies do start sprouting up around the country, the curriculum will still be politically-mandated and the sponsors will (in common with everyone else in the productive, non-looting sector) have to navigate their way through a miasmic swamp of diktats, edicts and regulations on their way to getting something resembling decent results.

But, for all that, they do seem to me to represent the first few, tottering, tentative, baby steps towards the long-term goal of levering the state out of the education business. Good.

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For me, this was the biggest news yesterday. Synthetic phonics is now thoroughly established as a serious educational policy option.

"Synthetic phonics" is a somewhat jargonic way of saying the sensible teaching of reading, based on the idea that despite all the deviations (in English especially) from the rules, letters stand for noises, and the way to read is to work out what the noise must be from the letters. To say that this is how to learn reading is to miss the point. The point is: this is reading. Seeing the letters "e l e p h a n t" next to a picture of an elephant (which is precisely what I did see this morning when channel hopping – in a TV show supposedly helping children to read) and guessing that therefore this assemblage of baffling squiggles must mean elephant is not reading. Reading means seeing those letters on their own, and knowing that they mean elephant.

A good way to get to grips with the background to this story is to read the latest newsletter from the Reading Reform Foundation, who have been agitating on behalf of synthetic phonics for many years now.

At the heart of this argument is not the value of phonics as such. Even the most diehard look-and-say people now concede that phonics is part of the story. But, say the RRF people, too many teachers – teachers who have only been following or agreeing with the guidance they have been getting from the government – believe in a mixed approach. In other words, says the RRF, they confuse children by urging them to combine reading with guessing. Should some version of phonics merely be included in the government's literacy strategy (it already is), in among picture books, stuff about "word shape", and so on, or should literacy be based entirely on phonics, properly done? The latter, says the RRF. Personally I find the RRF argument thoroughly convincing.

At lot of what is happening here is not really an argument about what works best (synthetic phonics has been proved to work best), so much as an elaborate exercise in giving a whole generation of fools a soft landing. Too sudden a switch from the wrong methods to the right ones would reveal at once how bad the wrong methods were, and make an awful lot of experts look very inexpert indeed. So, although they must surely now know that they are losing, these people are still digging their heals in and fighting every inch of the way.

Kudos to the government, for, better late than never, taking all this on board, to use an unlovely Blairite phrase. For this is classic Blairism. Once again, New Labour (this kind of thing being the New bit) are cherry picking one of the better things that some Conservatives have been saying, and ramming it down the throats of their own natural (Old Labour) supporters, who will put up with anything rather than have too serious a fight with their own front bench and thus let the Conservatives back in.

My favourite moment in all the media reportage yesterday about all this came when a newsreader (I think BBC but am not sure) was reading the phrase "synthetic phonics" out. Exhausted by the effort of reading "synthetic", she then stumbled over "phonics", and had to stop, and try it again. Eventually she got it right. Maybe it would have helped if she had had a picture to help her.

Well, no, it would not. She should simply have read it better.

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I quote at a bit of length because only when you quote at a bit of length do you get the real flavour of stories like this one:

A new anti-yob task force is to be set up to tackle the culture of disrespect and unruly behaviour in schools, ministers have said.

Otherwise known as a committee. This announcement will only add to the culture of disrespect. Disrespect of ministers.

The group, made up of teachers and heads who are experts in school discipline, will advise the Government on how to improve standards of behaviour.

One key part of their work will be to make sure parents take responsibility for the way their children behave, the Department for Education and Skills said.

But "taking responsibility" will not quite do it, will it? This would only work if parents actually changed the way their children behaved. This is a euphemism that communicates the underlying lack of confidence here. These people already know that none of this is going to work. If they thought that parents really could, and really would, make their children behave better, then this is what they would have said.

The group's work will include:

- Considering a new national code of behaviour setting out minimum standards expected from pupils, parents and schools

Expect away. But how will this make any difference? They've already worked out that they want pupils to behave better, and everyone pretty much knows what this means. What will they do when these expectations are unfulfilled?

- Looking at what new powers head teachers may need to tackle violent pupils

People have looked for decades at this one, and the one crucial power that all teachers need is the right to chuck out pupils who are disruptive.

- Writing a detailed report recommending potential new policies by the end of October

Oh goodee. A detailed report. That will really please the teaching profession.

The move follows Tony Blair's pledge to address the growing issue of "disrespect" in society and fears that violence and disruption in schools are on the rise.

Announcing the formation of the group, the new schools minister Jacqui Smith said: "A culture of respect, good behaviour and firm discipline must be the norm in all schools, all of the time.

"The Government has provided schools with powers, training, and support to deal with disruptive behaviour.

Which just might suggest - might it not? – that more of the same is not going to work any better.

"But we know that the real work is done on the front line by heads and teachers.

"We cannot simply legislate bad behaviour out of the classroom.

Well, you could try, I suppose. But legislation would mean sending people who disobeyed the law to prison. But legislation as in "here is what we really really want now everyone please do that" is indeed useless.

"It has to be delivered on the ground by teachers with the full backing of parents."

You can already see the excuses being lined up for when this policy fails. Blame the parents. And, inevitable, blame the teachers.

This is prayer talk, which will lead nowhere. Which might be why they are tackling this Prime Ministerial whim good an early in the electoral cycle, so that when all this nonsense fails ignominiously, there will be plenty of time for this failure to be forgotten about before the next election looms.

At the root of the problem of bad behaviour in schools is the fact that these are institutions which demand compulsory attendance. That is what turns schools into the "front line". If, at work, you behaved one tenth as badly as the more malevolent kind of adolescent at the more unruly sort of state school, you would be out on your ear. To hell with any social duty on anyone else's part to look after you. Until the kind of people who are responsible for stories like the above abandon their self-imposed duty to look after absolutely everyone, and to fine-tune every nuance of everyone's behaviour, by announcing, in absurd detail, what they want that to be and then just hoping it happens, they will never get anything resembling the behaviour they actually want.

I mean, shops who are subjected to customers whom they take against just get a couple of extremely big men in uniforms to escort them to the door. They do not waste their time blaming the parents or setting up committees – sorry, task forces – to make detailed recommendations, or for that matter demanding for themselves any new and draconian powers. They have all the powers they need.

In other words, the way to actually get good behaviour, whatever exactly you reckon that to be, is for you to consort with people who behave as you want them to. If they behave as you do not want them to, then seek other company, either by going somewhere else or, if it is your property, by telling them to go somewhere else.

Property. Key word there. Key concept. Clearly defined property rights are the foundation not just of a thriving economy but of civil order, of civilisation itself. One of the basic troubles with state schools is that it is not clear whose property they are.

Allow everyone, including teachers, and parents, and, I would say, including pupils, to follow these alternative rules, the rules of property and of consent, and an amazing number of now utterly intractable problems associated with education, whatever you think that is, will just melt away. The good stuff – that is say, whatever stuff those directly involved in it consider to be good stuff – will thrive. And the bad stuff – ditto – will vanish. Educational achievement will skyrocket. Costs – if costs are a problem, as they are for many – will plummet.

It really is that simple. The trouble is that to apply such simplicities to education would involve an entire class of meddlers and looker-afterers and minders and advisers and inspectors, to say nothing of detailed-recommendation-mongers and concern-arousers and general wafflers, having to change their whole way of thinking.

I live in hope, but not in expectation.

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One of the regular contributors to the Libertarian Alliance Forum posted this salutary tale concerning his local state school.

I felt that it deserved a wider audience.

Yesterday my wife went to register our oldest child at the local 'gubmint' school here in the Atlanta 'burbs. It will be his first year in the public school system.

To prove that we live in the catchment area, she had with her an electricity bill with our address on it. There was a printed notice posted in the registration area. It listed the only forms of identification that would be accepted. At the bottom of the notice was printed "NO ACCEPTIONS!"

My wife found this illiteracy in a supposed place of learning to be very disconcerting, but carried on with the process.

Next, she was handed a slew of forms to complete and sign. One of the forms was a waiver for field trips. This form explained that "our student's will attend a number of field trips..."

That was it. Glaring spelling mistakes on professionally printed notices, moronic misuse of an apostrophe on a form that must surely have been reviewed by the principal. A sickening feeling came over her and she had to make her excuses and leave, explaining that she would fill in the forms later.

The received wisdom of our day holds that only the state can be relied upon to provide children with a proper education. I wonder how long that canard can hold fast in the face of all the glaring evidence to the contrary?

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It seems a bit odd that the construction industry is going on a spending campaign to persuade smart young graduates to go into the trade. I am surprised that young people really need persuading. In this age of job offshoring, redundancies in the City and suchlike, it actually makes a lot of sense to get a skill in an area that cannot be easily outsourced. Many people in the construction, plumbing and electrical trades seem to be well off, far more so in fact than some young graduate toiling away in an office job. And thanks to new British regulations designed to prevent homeowners from performing any DIY activity more complex than install a shelf or rewire a plug - for their own good! - demand for construction and home maintenance professionals looks set to go on rising into the distance.

Anyone with a supposedly "secure" job ought to think about adding another, non-outsourceable, skill. One thing I always notice about British plumbers, for example, is that they all drive Jaguars or Mercedes. It is not rocket science to figure out why.

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One of the more depressing discoveries I made from my first year or two of education blogging (Brian's Education Blog still not working sorry blah blah) was the inexorable spread of cheating in Britain's schools and colleges. The BBC reported yesterday that a diktat has just been emitted by a committee you will probably not have heard of until now, called JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), saying that this must stop and here is how blah blah:

A rise in the number of students in the UK, including undergraduates from overseas, is likely to mean increased plagiarism, a report has said.

Colleges and universities are being sent guidelines written by experts in the higher education technology organisation, Jisc.

The authors say: "student plagiarism in the UK is common and is probably becoming more so".

JISC makes much of the presence of foreign students in large numbers, but presumably phrases this more delicately than the BBC's report does, in its first paragraph above, with verbiage more like the following:

A "holistic" approach is needed which establishes "underlying cultures and beliefs", "placing academic issues at the centre of the discussions".

When you are saying that foreigners are cheats, words like "holistic" come in very handy, I should imagine.

However, another reasons why academic cheating is on the up-and-up is diktats from national committees, demanding that British schools (where most British students are still incubated despite all those dodgy foreigners) must do better and better, and get better and better marks, and better and better exam results. This is the process I call sovietisation, and the rot afflicts everyone in the entire education system, up to and including the Secretary of State him (now her) self. Simply, the politicians want the educational numbers to look better than they are, and they cheat.

Time was when the teaching profession was pretty much left to its own devices by London, but those days are long gone. And time was when, if you cheated, you had to make sure your teacher did not catch you at it. Nowadays, your teacher is liable to be the one helping you to cheat, so you can get through your exams, and he can tell London that he is doing a good job. And London will believe it, because London wants to believe it. I think the Soviet vibe here is clear enough. Steel production figures anyone?

Sending out yet another instruction saying that you jolly well must not cheat has a distinctly Gorbachevian air. It amounts to begging that our top-down command-and-control education system must please, please, not behave like what it is. There will be quotas, but no quota fiddling. Dream on.

See in particular, this posting, where I noted how continuous assessment encourages cheating, because it involves asking teachers themselves to tell the higher-ups how well they, the teachers (and the higher-ups), are doing. Exams at least get someone else to say how well things are going, and are more likely to be honest. Although of course the politicians put pressure on those to dumb them down too.

David Gillies responded to that posting of mine, with a comment which I copied over to Samizdata. Gillies noted, you may recall, that there is another reason why foreigners equals cheating. Foreigners equals money, and British colleges do not want to lose it by telling said foreigners that they have done badly in their exams. There is a lot of this about just now, and the less corrupt educational exporters must now be very afraid.

Perhaps there will now be yet another Initiative, demanding that each school and college must set in motion an Anti-Cheating Plan. The more obedient ones will comply, as best they can.

Others will say that they have done this, but their Anti-Cheating Plan will only be observable when the inspectors come calling.

They will, that is to say, cheat.

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I am aware of the arguments in favour of home-schooling. The educational standards tend to be higher. Children are usually brought up as reasonable human beings and not part of a pack of savages. In principle, home schooling allows for an upbringing that is tailored to each child. The conscription of children in schools is removed.

And then something like this comes along.

There are two benefits of even the most useless schools. Children meet other children their own age, which is useful if one is not intent on becoming a hermit.

Of course there is plenty of unreported abuse that occurs in full view. In some schools abuse is ignored or even inflicted. But most basically of all, a 12 year-old child turning up weighing 35 pounds with burn marks and bruises in rags might be noticed. So having children turn up somewhere where their disappearance or injury will be noticed is a valuable function of schools. Perhaps they need to open twice a month for roll-call and then let them go home?

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The New Labour administration has provided a worthy example of how governments mess up systems of accreditation, especially those established by themselves. Since these are designed to mirror the political biases and triumphs of their founders, rather than provide an objective appraisal of developments, governments begin to tinker with the tables when they produce the wrong results.

One example of this is the education league tables where the government has recently introduced the recording of vocational qualifications in order to offset the academic predominance of private and grammar schools. This has the additional consequence of downgrading academic performance even amongst state schools which are run on an adequate basis.

Under the new system, a distinction in a certificate in cake decorating is worth 55 points – more than a GCSE grade A in physics.

And a City and Guilds progression award in bakery was worth more than five GCSEs at grade C.

The public sector professionals thought this was a terrific wheeze.

But John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads' Association, said the added complexity gave parents a better picture.

"In the past the tables have been too simplistic.

"The new tables give parents a broader view of the achievements of schools," he said.

The more complex the better. No doubt parents prefer complexity since this makes those important decisions so much easier. Time for the market to provide an alternative.

This government hopes to cut its cake, cook it and eat it. However, although Britain is ending up like Golgafrincham, we cannot offload the cake decorators or the telephone earpiece cleaners, so all of the skilled workers and the professionals are emigrating, leaving the Golgafrinchams behind.

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At Joanne Jacobs I learned about another of these teacher/pupil ruckuses where the teacher would appear to have behaved very stupidly.

17 year old Ahmad Al-Qloushi disagreed with his teacher, Professor Jospeh Woolcock, about America being great. Ahmad Al-Qloushi thinks it is. His teacher, Professor Joseph Woolcock, on the other hand, said to Ahmad Al-Qloushi that he needed therapy for expressing such an obviously bonkers opinion. The story is already bubbling away on the internet and will surely spread. Al-Qloushi has put his version of the story out there, and however much the Professor may curse, he cannot now reverse this. The Professor has filed a grievance, whatever exactly that means, against Al-Qloushi, for putting his, the Professor's, name out there, but out there it is and out there it will now remain.

Whenever I hear about disagreements like this, I always think to myself: well, maybe the guy is a bit crazy. Maybe, in this case, the essay was a bit bonkers. And maybe Al-Qloushi had said and done other crazy things which he is forgetting about, and this essay was just the final straw in a hayrick of craziness that we are not hearing about. So, I am especially interested that in addition to reading Al'Qloushi's complaint, we can also read the offending essay.

Says Joanne Jacobs:

If the student's tale is accurate, it's outrageous. It's one thing to flunk him - I think the essay is not bad for a 17-year-old immigrant - quite another to treat him like a lunatic because he thinks the Founders were good guys and is grateful America liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.

This guy (IA?), on the other hand, is sceptical about Al-Qloushi. Registration may be needed at the other end of that link, so I quote from this mercurynews.com story at length.

Needed: a grain of salt

"Arab Student Pushed to see Therapist'' the headline began. The Foothill College Republicans blasted faxes to reporters this month complaining that a professor had forced a student to see the college therapist merely because the student wrote a pro-American essay.

This, the students fumed, is why the Los Altos Hills campus should adopt an Academic Bill of Rights.

Nationwide, conservatives are pushing the political protection bill, which says that while colleges tolerate different races, sexes and creeds, they only welcome liberal politics.

Ahmad Al-Qloushi seems a poster child for the cause: His political science professor allegedly told him to get psychological help simply because Al-Qloushi wrote a chest-thumping patriotic essay.

But IA was suspicious. Al-Qloushi happens to be president of the Foothill College Republicans - a fact the group's press materials neglected to mention.

What were the odds of a campaign-perfect case happening to the college Republican president?

"It is a coincidence,'' Al-Qloushi said, "but this is the case.''

IA tried to confirm Al-Qloushi's story - and a subsequent release from the group that said the professor had filed a grievance against Al-Qloushi - but campus officials said they couldn't discuss confidential professor-student matters.

The professor wouldn't return calls and e-mails; the therapist simply hung up.

Fair enough. If you criticise someone publicly, you become a target yourself.

My first reaction was that maybe an angry Professorial outburst was being misunderstood, or misinterpreted, as a serious recommendation. But if there is indeed a therapist involved, the Professor presumably meant his recommendation seriously.

And maybe the fact that Al-Qloushi is the college Republican president is all part of what the Professor regards as so crazy about him.

However, I further guess that the combination of a pupil who is also a student politician (and maybe also an aspiring politician period) plus the Internet, faced the Professor with a situation he did not see coming. I guess that this Professor is used to getting away with crap like this, but did not realise that he was dealing with a different sort of pupil to the ones he is used to subjugating. My guess is that this Professor is a lefty who did indeed, despite what the mercurynews.com guy says, do something seriously wrong, but who did not understand that the Internet has changed the rules of these little conflicts.

Maybe he simply underestimated his adversary, regarding him as a confused immigrant without the moxie (as Joanne Jacobs would say) to stand up for himself.

In which case, the Professor is now getting a rapid piece of further education in the subject he is already a Professor of: American government and politics.

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From yesterday's Telegraph comes this amazing story:

A 10-year-old girl saved her family and 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami because she had learnt about the giant waves in a geography lesson, it has emerged.

Tilly Smith, from Oxshott, Surrey, was holidaying with her parents and seven-year-old sister on Maikhao beach in Phuket, Thailand, when the tide rushed out.

As the other tourists watched in amazement, the water began to bubble and the boats on the horizon started to violently bob up and down.

Tilly, who had studied tsunamis in a geography class two weeks earlier, quickly realised they were in danger.

She told her mother they had to get off the beach immediately and warned that it could be a tsunami.

She explained she had just completed a school project on the huge waves and said they were seeing the warning signs that a tsunami was minutes away.

Her parents alerted the other holidaymakers and staff at their hotel, which was quickly evacuated. The wave crashed a few minutes later, but no one on the beach was killed or seriously injured.

I missed this yesterday, but Norm Geras, linked to today by Instapundit because of another posting about Guardian foolishness, caught it, to whom thanks.

I am sure that some time during the last few months I have blogged things which have at least suggested that blogging etc. is capable of replacing the existing media. If so, apologies, and if not, lucky me. This tsunami disaster has made clear what has long been obvious, that the old media and the new media complement and feed into each other, or at any rate they ought to.

Bloggers in the right places at the right times can feed stories not just to other meta-bloggers, but to the mainstream media. A few of them were, after all, actually there. And then other bloggers, as I have just done, can point blog readers towards particularly choice mainstream media stories.

I particularly admire the way that the Guardian, for all that it is easy for the likes of us to criticise it for all kinds of other reasons, has at least learned how blogging can actually help in times like these, not just by telling the terrible story, but by helping to make it less terrible.

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As regulators impose more onerous capital adequacy and reporting requirements on the Western world's banks, investment firms and brokerages, demand surges for increasingly sophisticated computer infrastructure to keep track of all the new systems deemed necessary to make the regulations work. As a result, demand is rising, according to this Financial Times article, for graduates with science degrees, especially in the field of physics. And it does not come as much of a surprise to learn that Britain's mostly state-run education system is not doing a very good job at churning out young physics students. I am shocked, shocked to hear this!

I would greatly prefer it if clever folk with scientific knowledge were engaged in the potentially fruitful areas of nanotechnology, biotech, aviation and civil engineering, all fields likely to see continued rapid growth, than working to make increasingly Byzantine bank regulations work better. It looks like a waste to me. We want our budding Isaac Newtons and Richard Feynmans working on spacecraft, not greasing the wheels of the latest EU banking directive.

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Carol and Peter Williams live in Alton, Hampshire, with their son, also called Peter, who is a chess champion. Which was how the trouble started. The Williams family is now locked in battle with their Local Education Authority (LEA) about whether Peter should be allowed to pursue his education at home, or should instead be forced to attend school.

I heard about this via Daryl Cobranchi (such are the ways of the Internet), and emailed first Daryl, and then Carol Williams, who emailed me thus this morning

I would not say that education (I hate that word) is the subject. It is about freedom of choice and the desire to encourage your children in the subjects they enjoy and/or are good at.

I will now give a potted history so you can see how we got where we are today with the LEA.

Peter started playing chess when he was 5 years old. The rapid progress he made showed us this was way above the expected level of the average 5 year old. When Peter became 6, for a period of around 6 months, he had one day a week off school to study chess more in depth. Every week we had to write a letter to the school asking permission for this, after this period we decided to request that this was made a permanent arrangement, this is where it all started to go wrong. The school granted us a maximum of 15 days per year, stating that Peters' education would suffer otherwise. As he had just taken his SATS tests and achieve above average marks in all bar one subject, this argument did not hold water. We wrote back stating that this was not acceptable to us. We subsequently received a letter from the LEA's Barrister stating that the offer had to be withdrawn as it was illegal to allow children time off from school. This is absolutely incorrect as Hampshire LEA's website states that discretionary leave is entirely at the discretion of the Head . At this point we made the decision to withdraw Peter from state school and teach him at home.

The first letter we received from the LEA regarding Peters' home education, without quoting verbatim went along the following lines:

We understand you wish to educate your son at home.

This is not a wish, it is a right.

What exams will he be taking?

How can you answer this when the child involved is 6? What relevance is it at this age? Furthermore you do not have to take any exams.

What are the qualifications of all those who will be involved in his education?

Home educators do not need to have any formal qualifications.

The whole approach of this letter was very authoritarian .

Further letters followed from the LEA's various departments, advising us that they would be coming to our home.

The culmination of events was the issuing of the Notice of Failure to give an Education by the LEA. At this point we decided enough was enough, the LEA had not responded to any of our questions or complaints satisfactorily, yet continued to pursue us in their dogmatic way. We entered a complaint to the Ombudsman who is currently investigating the situation, it took him 4 months to get a response from them.

Other LEA's appear to be more flexible and helpful when it comes to both flexi-schooling and home education but Hampshire LEA appears to be particularly behind the times. Their website states "school is where children should be for most if not all of the time". Home Education is located in the Welfare Department and there is no help or assistance on their website for home educators.

From our experience there is a lot of ignorance surrounding home education. People seem to think there is something strange about home educators. I sometimes think people expect us to have at least 2 heads. We have spoken with people who were under the impression that LEA's provide tutors, materials, financial assistance etc to home educators, whilst we cannot speak for other LEA's it is certainly not the case with Hampshire. I believe that this assistance should be available to home educators if they wish to make use of it. To date the only response we have had as to why they give no assistance is that's the way it is, yet there is no legal reason why they cannot offer assistance. For each pupil registered a state school receives in the region of £4500 per annum and in the case of special needs children the sum is in the region of £10,000 pa. What happens to this money for a home educated child? Answer: nothing. From this stance it is clear that Hampshire LEA do not believe home education is a suitable learning environment so how can they have the audacity to insist on inspecting the work, surely they would be basing their assessment on a biased opinion. The very people who profess to care so much about our children only do so if on their terms.

It's funny really, until all this blew up as a family we had never thought about home education (like most of the population), now we believe that we have done Peter a great disservice by inflicting the state school system on him at all. Peter now enjoys so much freedom in studying the subjects he enjoys for the length of time he wishes. Some days he will work all day on science a particular favorite of his, another day painting or chess. It is his life and providing no laws are being broken and no-one is being hurt he has the right to make his own choices. Although we made the initial decision to home educate Peter does not want to return to school.

I give below a couple of websites which you may find of interest:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/educate/leaguide.htm

http://www.hants.gov.uk/education/schoolsadmissions

Sorry if I have gone on a bit but this is a subject we are passionate about. Although I have written this email, both Peters have been reading it as I type and added their comments.

If there is anything you can or want to do to help Peter it would be appreciated.

Have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Best Regards

Carol, Peter and Peter

If you want to join in this argument, Daryl Cobranchi has posted a couple of addresses you can write to. I have done another posting about this at my Education Blog, with pictures (of Peter jnr. and of that Notice of Failure that Carol refers to above), and with further linkage and reportage.

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I don't usually much enjoy denunciations of liberal bias, because they so often seem to me to be as tediously and unthinkingly abusive as the liberal consensus that they denounce so often is. But I did enjoy this piece by Mark Bauerlein, entitled Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual (linked to recently by Arts & Letters Daily)

The essence of Bauerlein's description of liberal bias is that it is a social process, and not just a political conspiracy. Quote:

The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate – instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they're stuck with abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren.

Quite so. What I like about Bauerlein's piece is that it addresses how it feels to be a typical academic. And your typical academic does not feel biased, in the sense that he thinks what he thinks through a great and continuous effort of mental will, in full knowledge of several alternatives. On the contrary, he thinks that what he thinks is the most natural thing in the world. So, if you do call him biased you immediately lose him, and prove to him only that you are stupid, about this and about much else.

Unchallenged extremism is one problem. Another is the resulting tedium. Bauerlein takes a J. S. Mill line, to the effect that even if the orthodoxy is right (which he doesn't think it is) it still needs to be kept on its intellectual toes by facing regular in-house challenges.

But he writes about liberal academics more as confused and ignorant barbarians than as fully functioning enemies. His job is not so much to oppose them as to rescue them. He feels sorry for them.

Even as I write the above paragraphs, I know that commenters will probably swarm around this posting, saying that those damned academic liberals are continuously and malevolently biased and that it is all their fault and curse them to hell, blah blah blah. I am not satisfied with this kind of non-dialogue, and I think that people who think approximately as I do can do better, and that Bauerlein (who does think very approximately as I do – given the overlap between what Americans call conservatism and what I call libertarianism) does do better. For him, liberal academic bias is not so much a continuous and conscious decision, as the unthinking outcome of a process, and because of that, the process might just as easily have produced a different kind of bias.

He does not talk about this, but it is my understanding that in the past, it did. In Britain in the nineteenth century, higher education was more independent of state control (although arguably just as much controlled by the social elite who also controlled the state) and groupthink and intellectual degeneration held sway in British universities, then as now. As I understand that story, this often took the form of an obsession not so much with the truth of theology as of an obsession with its obvious importance, compared especially to science, the beyond-the-pale intellectual upstart of those times. Science rode into the twentieth century universities on the back of nineteenth century scientific institutions that were founded and run by enthusiastic amateurs and academic outsiders. But ride in it eventually did.

Which leads me to speculate about another possible reason for the strength of liberal academic bias in the USA. This is: that in the USA, the God versus Science thing is still playing to packed houses. Here in Britain, the only people who really, seriously. believe in God in any numbers, in the sense of believing that the earth is how it is now because of decisions made and still being made by God, in heaven, are the recently arrived Muslims. Britain's Christian theologians – and I for one, as a devout atheist, am very content about this – have, not just academically but intellectually, been utterly routed. (Which means that we atheists are completely out of practice for dealing with the Muslims, but that is another story.) British Christians are content to sing hymns on the TV, worship nature and do good works. But in the USA, the Christians are now doing some serious intellectual regrouping, having never really gone away. Setting aside what you may think about the rights or wrongs, truths or falsehoods, of this national contrast, I surmise that one of the effects of it is to make academics in the USA still think that they are fighting old battles on behalf of scientific enlightenment against Godly primitivism, while in Britain, academia is, from the point of view of the God versus. Science debate, a victorious coalition. And we all know what happens to victorious coalitions. They split. As a result, British academia actually does offer slightly more genuine intellectual debate (about other things beside God) than is offered in many universities in the USA. Say "cut income tax" to a liberal on campus in the USA and he is liable to hear (truly to hear – he is not merely pretending to hear): "God created heaven and earth". Say "cut income tax" in a British university, and you are more likely to be told why you are wrong, and to be genuinely thought wrong, about income tax. But, me not having recently been to a British university, or ever to an American one, that could be all wrong.

By the way, Instapundit did a good Guardian piece last week about the continuing relevance of religion to politics in the USA, on both sides of the political divide. He also said that he did not much care for this fact, which will immediately get him a more polite hearing in Britain than he would get otherwise. This may not be saying much, but it is something. In the USA, his support for Bush is probably felt by many a liberal academic (insofar as they are even aware of it), as 'objectively pro-creationism'. Which puts him beyond the pale.

Well, I do not seem to have proved very much with this posting, just to have rambled for a while. But interestingly, I hope.

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Last night I attended a seminar on education organised by the Social Affairs Unit (there is as yet nothing about this event on their blog), at which the speaker was Francis Gilbert. Gilbert read a bit from his new book, I'm a Teacher, Get Me Out Of Here!, and if this bit was anything to go by, it is a very good book. (See also this posting here earlier this year.)

I will not here recount – and could not hope to recount - everything that was talked about, but I do note with approval that Francis Gilbert, after he had finished reading from his book, invited us to think about how much better education would be if it was run by the man who has recently taken over his local corner shop, and has made a great success of it, and by a few thousand others like him, instead of by the Government.

However, I will focus on one very widespread and wrong clutch of related ideas that cropped up in the course of our discussion. It was said, echoing something that Francis Gilbert himself had said, that education is not "like oil or bread". The most important qualities of education are beyond measurement or quantification. The thing is just too complicated and ... I think that the word ineffable may even have been used. Unlike oil or bread.

The conclusion we were invited to draw from this was that education, unlike oil or bread, cannot be supplied entirely by the free market, as a lot of us, taking our lead from Francis Gilbert, were enthusiastically recommending. It is just too complicated a thing to dole out in easily measurable little packets, like oil or bread.

But it simply does not follow that because something is complicated and immeasurable, even ineffable, that it cannot and should not be supplied by tradesmen.

All products worth bothering with have intangible, ineffable qualities, which are almost impossible to measure. Oil and bread are not "like oil and bread" either. They too have mysteries and intangibles attached to them.

Closely related to the entirely correct claim that education is a very complicated thing was the point, also made, that "people do not know what is good for them", when it comes to education. A complicated service cannot be a mere product, because the consumers will not know what to pick. They need to be told that (in the words of Claire Fox while putting this argument) "Mozart is better than Hip Hop", but will not want to be told this.

The idea that authority (as opposed to raw power) can never flourish in a free market is likewise very widespread, and likewise utterly wrong. I buy all kinds of immensely complicated products, and I am constantly seeking out authoritative guidance about which ones are best. Often I do not understand the reasons why they are best. I am glad merely to have detected a consensus among the authorities that product X is indeed excellent. The very existence of the institution of the specialist periodical press is proof beyond all doubt that authority and the free market go hand in hand.

I did what I could very briefly to challenge these notions. I said the "oil is not oil either" thing, and also waved my little digital camera. (This is hugely complicated object freely available in many competing versions in shops, yet it is clearly not something any government would have come up with. I chose the one I was waving not on the basis of my own non-existent knowledge of such devices, but on the basis of reviews written by people who do understand these things.) I might also have seized hold of one of the many wine bottles on the table we were seated around. Was there ever a trade – and it definitely is a trade – with so complicated and so ineffable a product as the wine trade? Yet this is one of the oldest trades of all.

The wine trade also points us towards another important point. Wine, however ineffable, can, to some extent anyway, be measured – in gallons, in bottles, in costs, in profits and in losses, and the same applies to education. The fact that not everything about education (or oil, or bread, or digital cameras, or wine) can be satisfactorily measured, does not mean that measurement can contribute nothing at all to education. You can still measure numbers of pupils, hours of teaching, pupil satisfaction, parental satisfaction, and exam success, in ways that are way better than just guessing. If a school is a business, you can most definitely measure income, and costs. No business would ever use the impossibility of completely accurate and completely uncontroversial measurement as a reason to abandon all effort to measure at all.

Yes, there is a danger, in any business, that the measurable will be concentrated upon at the expense of things which are beyond measurement but perhaps in the long run more important. But this is a familiar idea in the literature of business management and in the experience of real world business managers.

I would go further, and say that governments are at their worst and most bureaucratic when what they are trying to do is least easy to measure. Tradesmen can always fall back on the notion that their customers are always right, even if they cannot ever be entirely sure of what they are right about. But what is a government to do when the numbers mean nothing? (A few years back, I did a whole Libertarian Alliance piece about the absurdities of government support for that most ineffable and immeasurable of things, Art.) The fact that, as I say, almost nothing can be measured with complete accuracy means that governments tend inexorably tend to screw up everything that they do. Far more than traders, governments depend on their precious statistics. If a trader makes a nice loaf of bread (or a nice school), and people like it, he is in business, provided only that the Government does not stop him. Government itself is not like that at all.

By the way, I do not want to present Francis Gilbert as a pure free marketeer. The excerpt from his book had been all about the waste and incompetence of state provision – inspectors, second-guessers, form-fillers and bureaucrats of all kinds crawling about doing very little – yet his final recommendation was that the state should concentrate on providing very good nurseries for all the badly brought up children who were, he felt, almost beyond getting a good education when they first arrived at school. But a nationalised nursery industry would merely pile bureaucratic miseries on top of current family failures.

To be fair to Gilbert, I felt that the point he was really making was that "we", the concerned classes, need to think and worry most about those very early years, where improving things will do the most good, rather than that the Government would necessarily do this job as well as he would want them to, if they were to tackle it. He is a product of a statist intellectual culture, and is not in the habit if distinguishing between: "we" should do something, and: The Government should do it. In any case, we put him right.

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The University of St Andrews Students' Association has threatened to ban the student newspaper, The Saint, for not complying with an Equal Opportunities Policy. The Saint is an independent newspaper, run by students, but pays rent to the Students' Association (the union) for the use of an office. Unlike student newspapers at many universities, it is not funded by the university/taxpayer. Nevertheless, the tabloid publication has won several prestigious national awards and is regarded as one of the best student newspapers in the country.

Three years ago, a campaign against The Saint was run by a group of anti-capitalist students. They charged that it was too right-wing, and a flat window on College Street was taken up by posters attacking the newspaper.

The student union has repeately tried to compete with The Saint, bringing out a succession of free newspapers and a magazine, but none have enjoyed success - or regularity of production. Union officers have complained over several years that The Saint doesn't give their side of the story.

Now the union has found that the newspaper is in violation of the union's Equal Opportunities Policy on the grounds that it does not respect students' "right to dignity". This seems to refer to a section of the paper called 'Halo' which features pictures from parties and events, generally of students fairly drunk and in strange poses. There is a caption underneath each photo. The issue apparently came to a head after they featured a student union official who objected to the caption used. Some students fear that the Equal Opportunities Policy could be used to censor other types of reports.

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Such as the Department of Trade and Industry, or the Department of Education, for example. Yes, I know it is an old joke but... is it really a joke?

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Christy Davies has an interesting article on the Social Affairs Unit blog which looks critically at one of the educational 'given' of our age:

Science we are told is something that every child should and must study. Most children hate it, fail to master it and never use it or think about it again after they have left school. It is forced upon unwilling and inept pupils because it is supposed to be good for them. Science is the twenty-first century's version of Latin.

Interesting stuff. Read the whole thing.

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This sums up the case for university top-up fees very nicely:

The new higher education minister, Kim Howells, today stormed into the education debate with a warning for universities that top-up fees would create a "cut throat" market.

Wow, a rabid free marketeer telling the universities that they are going to have to get their act together, not because little old he merely says so or else, but because there is now a market out there.

But it turns out that Kim Howells is against this market:

In his first speech since joining the Department for Education and Skills, Mr Howells risked the ire of his boss, Charles Clarke, with a series of negative remarks about the direction education policy had taken since he was last an education minister in 1998.

This is a classic case of something that happens a lot, namely a good idea being spread by someone who vehemently disagrees with it.

And here comes another combination of rightness and wrongness:

He questioned the government's focus on the economic benefits of education and admitted that sending his children to university had left him "broke".

In characteristically colourful language, Mr Howells told an audience at the University of Westminster in London today: "We've become very utilitarian in the department for education. I'm in a lucky position of having returned after six or seven years.

"Learning for learning's sake is something we should criticise very warily. People want to learn simply because learning is wonderful and it's the second best thing I know in the world."

Howells has a point about learning for learning's sake. But just because something is wonderful doesn't mean that other people ought to pay for it. I think that classical music is wonderful, and governments around Europe pay a lot of people to entertain me at way below what it might otherwise cost me. But is this right, just because I get wonderfulness rather than usefulness?

There is also the fact that, I think, classical music would actually be very different and much better if it was not subsidised at all. Ditto education, especially of the "wonderful" sort.

The proportion of "wonderful" education that is now subsidised is now declining rapidly, thanks to the Internet, which is all part of how much more wonderful it has now become.

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Diddy Kirton writes about the grief of trying to get that first job after graduating.

You have had the degree results; you've done the graduation ceremony; you have been welcomed home for a well-deserved holiday; and now, three months later, you are still lying on the sofa, your eyes glued to daytime television. What next?

This is when things can start to get nasty. Parents begin to get restless. Is this person they had thought was launched into the world ever going to get going? When is my son/daughter going to get a job?

Well, three months on the sofa is nothing. Expect 12 months or more. Graduates are finding it increasingly difficult to get work after completing their degrees – not because the job market is shrinking (it isn't) and not necessarily because they don't have the required abilities. Many of them just don't know where to start and are terrified of the future.

I think that young people in this pickle are years behind already, in the sense that successful graduates (i.e. successful people who are also graduates) have, by this stage, for several years, been thinking about what they will be doing next, and have been networking within their future field of conquest, kissing arses and pressing flesh and generally putting themselves about. Indeed, they chose what to study with what they would do with it at the front of their minds.

Yet a lot of schools still peddle the Big Lie: Pass Your Exams and Worry About Life Later. Not because they really believe that, more because teachers tend to be rewarded according to how hard their charges concentrate on the exam work right in front of them, rather than on how well their charges' Lives go later.

There may be a little wisdom in this Big Lie, because, after all, those exam results do hang around, and a degree with no thought of the future is probably better than plain old no thought of the future without even a degree. All Big Lies have to have a grain of truth in them, in order to seem plausible. But if the what-the-hell-now? moment is merely delayed by all that Higher Education, even a degree may do more harm than good, because all it does is postpone Life. A good start at Life is at least as important as your mere exam results, and if you have a good first decade in your career, then your tacky degree won't do you any great harm.

My Dad was very fond of telling me about all the High Court Judges (he was a QC himself and ended up as a sort of specialist Judge) who had ropy old 2:2 degrees or worse from unfashionable Oxbridge colleges, and about some who were never – horror of horrors – at Oxbridge in the first place, or even in some freakish cases at any university at all. What those gents had got right was that they had hit the ground running when Life kicked in.

I like to read the biographies of high achievers. (Sometimes I reproduce bits of them at my Education Blog.) I am struck by how often Life starts extremely early for such people, perhaps because of a family catastrophe or because of a catastrophically hopeless father who dumps all his responsibilities onto our hero, aged ten. By the time they reach the age of those daytime TV watching graduates, they are at least ten years ahead of them, career-wise, and often more like thirty.

Good teaching, it seems to me, includes getting ten-year-olds to think about Life, but without doing it by hurling huge catastrophes at them.

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The dependably readable William Sjostrom takes an article in the Daily Telegraph decrying the fact British students are in debt and turns it on its head:

My central point remains this: why do newspapers, staffed by people who happily go into debt to buy cars and homes, write as if students are clearly worse off going into debt to pay for university education?

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I've done several posts at my Education Blog on the theme of the educational gains to be got from blogging, by the blogger. Of course writing things communicates to others. But it also organises the thoughts of the writer, and makes them more likely to be remembered by the writer. Failing that, it makes it easier for the writer to access his written thoughts later, if only because the writer is likely at least to remember having written on that subject.

I did another such posting yesterday, in connection with something Michael Jennings said to me last week in conversation about how he blogs about computer matters with this benefit in mind.

Rob Fisher commented on this post, in a way that emphasises the point:

I certainly find that the act of writing a blog post forces me to get my thoughts into some kind of order, which is useful. The part of my website that gets the most feedback is a tutorial I wrote about how to use Linux to edit digital video; and I wrote this mainly because I knew I would forget half of it if I didn't write it down - and if I'm going to write it down I might as well publish it.

I think this could explain the presence of a lot of the wide range of useful information available on the web.

I'm currently investigating the possibility of using a Wiki for publishing useful information. Wikis are interesting because they make web pages so easy to change; and even more interesting because they let other people add and amend information.

By the time I understand that last paragraph I will have had to have made some educational progress myself, although I am sure it is straightforward enough once you understand it. Educationally helpful comments, anyone? "Wiki"? I have heard that word, and the presumably related word "wikipedia", but what does this stuff mean?

Blogging, it seems to me, blurs the distinction between the private and the public. It is not that this distinction is now of no importance. But blogging does shift the economics of (what do we call it?) message management? … towards combining the public with the private, wherever that can be done without too much risk. Simply, by doing both private and public communication simultaneously, you can save both time and effort, and that might make it economical to engage in forms of communication with oneself and with others that would previously not have been possible.

I think, as I said in my original posting, that this is one of the big reasons for the success of blogging. Constructing a helpful set of notes as one learns a subject area might be too difficult, and hence beyond you. Writing material good enough to reach a wide readership, ditto. But licking your notes into shape and sticking them on a blog, which obviously can be read by millions, but need not be in order to be an economic proposition, adds up to something that can make a lot of sense.

I did not set out with my Culture Blog with the self-conscious aim of learning about new buildings in London, but that is the way it is turning out. And I definitely did start Brian's Education Blog in order to educate myself, about education, as the ambiguous name, I hope, communicates. Brian's Blog About Education? A Blog About Brian's Education? Both.

These friends of mine are in the business of helping businesses to set up blogs. They emphasise the benefits blogging can bring in the form of communicating with customers, and that must be right. But a company which blogs will be, it seems to me, a company which learns, individually and collectively, more than it would learn otherwise.

But of course there is a further potential benefit to blogging as self-education, I have already tried to illustrate with this posting by asking commenters to explain wiki to me. Commenters can help to educate you. Not all such help is truly helpful, but sometimes it can be very helpful indeed.

I would be delighted to hear about any other bloggers who have used blogging as part of their effort to further their own education. I would not be surprised if a consensus were to emerge here, or to have emerged from a comment-fest somewhere else of interest, along the lines of: this is (partly) what all bloggers are doing.

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It is always refreshing to read an article trashing state intervention only to read in the by-line at the end that the author is a candidate for the State of Massachusetts' Senate.

Going back to look up James D. Miller's bio details, I see that he is 'Assistant Professor of Economics, Smith College'. My ignorance of the American education system is profound. Yet it seems to me that this is not the profile I would expect for a British economics professor. A candidate for political office who publicly calls for less state intervention, and does not even ask for more tax money in education! We used to have one or two or those.

I am especially intrigued by Mr Miller's references (linking to Thomas Sowell) to the two earthquakes in California and Iran during 2003. The reason fewer than 10 people were killed in a Californian earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale, whereas 28,000 were killed by a 6.6 Richter earthquake in Iran? One word: wealth.

I really must read more Sowell. And thank you James D. Miller for an educational article.

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Not that I need to preach to the converted here, but I love the internet. How else could I read every daily edition of my hometown newspaper back in the US if not for the web? I like keeping up on who is engaged and who got married, who got arrested and which baseball coach got sent to prison for selling crack cocaine - it is local gossip news through a global channel, and I can never resist tuning in.

It is also interesting to note the range of opinions that co-exist in my largely conservative hometown. It is a wonderful place to grow up, and a wonderful place to grow old, full of lovely people, but I was somewhat surprised to read an editorial in Monday's edition which stated that taxpayers have to be willing to foot the bill for public schools' physical education classes. What surprised me was not that such an unquestioning, statist line could be uttered in the kind of place that was built on a can-do attitude and pride in one's own ability to do for oneself; what surprised me was how the editorial writer did not even bother to craft an argument in favour of his or her opinion.

So I wrote my first ever letter to the editor. I do not think it will be published, and I would hate to have totally wasted the one minute it took me to read the article and the five minutes it took me to dash off a response, so I reproduce it here.

According to Monday's Gazette editorial on gym classes in public education, "Schools cannot turn their backs on students' health, and the state and taxpayers have to be willing to foot the bill." This is nonsense, at least if you accept the fact that it is up to individuals to decide to be fit or to be unfit. In the case of children, it is parents - not school systems - who must bear that responsibility. It is a scary state of affairs indeed when the notion that parents ought to be the ones taking responsibility for the food their children consume and the activities in which their children participate strikes so many as strange and unthinkable. "But it's the schools' job to teach that!" comes the cry. No, actually, it is not.

The incontestable fact of the matter is that our ability to do things for ourselves - including the ability to think, in some cases - is diminished when the government does those things for us. (Anyone who doubts this should look to those countries where Communism was not so long ago the order of the day, where people who lived under those brutal régimes quite literally struggle to make basic choices for themselves after years of having the government make almost all of life's decisions for them.) This also diminishes us as human beings. The question we must really answer is whether we give priority to a population that may overeat and under-exercise and that consequently does not live as long as it may, or to taking away citizens' autonomy "for the common good". Such collectivist thinking ignores individual rights and responsibilities, and in doing so encourages moral and intellectual passivity. It is also, not coincidentally, the kind of sentiment with which any proud Communist would agree.

As for the question of Medicare and Medicaid, not everyone swallows the statist line that citizens must submit to having our finances looted by the government in order to pay for such services.

On the same note, it is a regrettably radical concept in this day and age, but I do not believe - as the Gazette editorial stated - that I or any other citizen must be willing to foot the bill for any other parent's child's physical education. Our schools have their work cut out for them as it is when it comes to guiding children in academic disciplines. There is no reason to pin the blame on them if Johnny and Susie do not realize that physical activity is a good thing. Of course the fact is that Johnny and Susie and any person with a functioning brain knows this; it is - and must be - up to them to decide whether or not to act on this knowledge. If Johnny and Susie's parents wish to be let off the hook for parenting their children in this area, they need only look to editorials like the one in Monday's Gazette to feel absolved of any such responsibility.

What I did not mention in my letter is that I experienced in two local school districts, as a child and teenager, downright lousy phys ed programs. In high school, it was so bad that your phys ed grade was based solely on whether or not you bothered to bring a change of clothes for the class. The teacher, who also served as athletic director and head basketball coach of the high school, would give you 50 per cent credit just for showing up. Calling that "physical education" was nothing short of a joke, especially as most of us used the period to do the homework we'd neglected to do for the next period's class.

Is this really the reason why some kids are overweight? Hardly. But if I have learned one thing from growing up in an area with very little in the way of fee-paying schools, it is that the parents of kids who attend state (public) schools will always complain about all the things the schools are not teaching their kids that they are entirely capable of teaching their children themselves, be it how not to get pregnant, how not to catch a sexually transmitted disease, or how not to grow obese. It is time someone started making parents feel as crummy as they should for this attitude, so get guilt-tripping today.

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One of the better ways to learn about policy trends, in any policy area, in any country, is to read something by someone who disapproves.

This article, about what its author thinks is wrong with all the various directions which Indian education is heading in, reads to me like a catalogue of all that is right about it.

Two trends in particular struck me as especially encouraging. First this:

A self reliant India needs very different intellectual support from the kind of intellectual labour envisaged by a government that in its enthusiasm for selling out to multinationals could only dream of bringing some outsourced functions of these multinationals into our country. …

"Self reliant" reads to me like "futureless backwater". So, what I take this to mean is that Indian education is now turning out people who are very employable indeed, and on the world market where the real money is to be made and where so much of India's economic future will be created.

And second, there is this:

A self reliant and democratic India also needs its citizens prepared for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel, fulfilling some technical function, but as thinking beings able to defend and safeguard democracy. …

... which the guy put in italics of his own, meaning that this was his biggest point. "Preparing for the globalised world not as cogs in the wheel" sounds to me like preparing them against the globalised world. So what this all says like to me is: "The education system isn't turning out enough political mischief-makers."

There is also much complaint in this article about "para-education", which sounds to me like free enterprise education, rather than the state-provided shambles which most Indians were stuck with until recently.

So, then: India doing really well. This has been one of the decade's great Global Stories. Long may the story continue.

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This looks really interesting. I have just learned about it by reading this:

A right-wing think-tank will this week launch a national chain of cut-price primary schools in a drive to open up private education to middle-income families.

The first New Model School will start work in September, charging less than half the average fees of many independent primary or "pre-prep" schools.

Teachers have already been appointed, and tomorrow the school starts advertising for pupils to join the inaugural class of five-year-olds.

So what are these people trying to accomplish?

The New Model School Company aims to establish a chain of local schools, each subscribing to the same ethos and curriculum. A New Model School can be created wherever there are enough interested parents to start one. Organisational structure and support will be provided by the New Model School Company. Curric­ulum materials will be developed by its sister organisation, the New Model Curriculum Company.

And who are they?

The individuals who have formed the New Model School Company were brought together by the social policy think-tank Civitas (www.civitas.org.uk). Our aim is not just to set up a single successful school, but to provide a model of excellent and affordable schools which will improve the lives of many children and their families.

Our ambitions for the school are far wider than success in exams. The final aim of education is the formation of strong moral character, good manners, and the development of well-informed judgement. Good citizenship is not a subject of the school curriculum, but an aspect of conduct and behaviour that arises from a knowledge of the foundations of the culture, its history, values, and institutions.

If you would like to know more about us, you can telephone Matthew Faulkner on 020 8969 0037.

Because of my continuing interest in such matters, I plan to stay continuously interested in this venture, and will certainly be phoning that number myself in due course. But I think I wlll wait a while before doing that, because something tells me that this guy's phone will be ringing fit to burst for the next few days.

I especially like that it is being set up by a "right wing think tank". The idea of saying that was presumably to discredit the whole venture, as, maybe, is the slightly derogatory expression "cut-price". (like there is something wrong with that). The more likely effect will be to make all "right wing think tanks" look better, if this is the kind of thing they do.

Also, by branding these places "right wing", the Indy will scare lefties away from teaching in these places, and the political tone of them will undoubtedly be more free market in orientation than your average school. When these people talk about "history, values and institutions" that is not merely code for higher taxation and caving in to public sector trade unions.

I love it, and will almost certain have more to say here about this in the future. I really hope it works.

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Every few days, with this in mind, I trawl through whatever google has to offer under the heading of "education". Mostly, it is dreary and depressing stuff about how (a) things are terrible, and (b) it is all the fault of those other bastards, or (if it is Africa) (a) things are terrible, and (b) things are terrible. Only when it comes to Chinese people or Indian people is the education news ever very good by the time national newspapers get hold of it, and of course that only depresses other people.

So, this story made a nice change:

The quality of education and behaviour of pupils at Probus Primary School have been praised by Government inspectors.

Ofsted inspectors highlighted children's good behaviour and attitudes towards learning and the partnership with parents and the local community.

The report notes the improvements made since the last inspection and concludes that achievement is satisfactory overall and standards are rising.

It said: "Probus is providing a sound education for its pupils. There is good teaching through the school. The school is well led and managed and there is a good partnership with parents. There is a good team ethos and members of staff are supportive of each other.

"Pupils are well cared for and those with special educational needs make good progress."

What this really illustrates is probably only that whereas national newspapers like bad news, local newspapers prefer good news. The national newspaper definition of news is: whatever someone does not want printed. Local newspapers are such that whatever someone does not want printed tends not to get printed, because that someone plus all their employees and friends and relatives add up to a significant slice of the readership. Thus, local newspapers are full of sickeningly satisfactory happenings, where everything went according to plan and everyone was happy and satisfied with the outcome. The news, every time is: our readers are good people, successful people, happy people.

There is occasionally bad news, so bad that its occurrence cannot be concealed, in which case the story is how nobly our readers are coping with the situation, but on the whole, there is simply not enough bad news to go round.

Britain as a whole cranks out enough misery, conflict and personal embarrassment per day to satisfy the nationals, and of course the nationals also have a whole world of misery to contemplate beyond their nation's borders.

But Truro and Mid Cornwall, the area reported on by the newspaper that supplied this Probus Primary School story, is just too nice a place for all the news to be bad.

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A battle is brewing in Japan between education authorities and liberal minded teachers over the place of national symbols in the Japanese school system, reports Aussie expat Cameron Weston, for Australian news website Crikey.com.au:

Most countries have no law in place that compels its citizens to stand, put their hands on their hearts or do anything else when the national symbols are displayed. Most people do it because they want to, and this is the way it should be. Patriotism is something felt, not imposed. Forcing such action impinges on the basic tenets of democracy and freedom, and democracies have laws that enshrine this principle.

But what if the symbols of your nation had a deeper historical meaning, if they spoke to a past that some were ashamed of, of policies and deeds which some considered criminal?

And what if you felt strongly enough about this that you refused to stand and sing the anthem or to gaze upon the flag of your nation? In a democracy, you would be allowed to do so.

You might still reasonably be called a patriot by some, a person of conscience by others, ignorant and a traitor by others still but it would all be a matter of opinion, and hopefully then of discussion and debate. In 1999, amid some controversy, the Japanese LDP government passed legislation making the rising sun flag (‘Hinomaru’) and the national anthem (‘Kimigayo’) official, legal symbols of this nation. In a country where voluntary adherence to tradition and fixed social rites underpin the very fabric of society and daily life, it is ironic that the government felt that these forces were insufficient to ensure the flag and anthem remained venerated national symbols – they deemed that a law needed to be passed....

However, in the last few months, as the new school year begins, the debate has been taken to a new level. Teachers across Tokyo have been issued with a directive from the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, compelling them to stand and sing the national anthem and for them to in turn compel their students to do the same. No debate, no discussion; this is a direct order.

If the teacher refuses to do so, he will be open to public censure and criticism from his superiors, further warnings and potential expulsion. So far this year, over 200 teachers have refused to stand and many have received written warnings as a result. Miwako Sato, a music teacher who received one such warning when the law was first enacted in 1999 sums up the problem for many teachers perfectly, "Many people in other Asian countries do not want to look at the flag, the symbol of Japanese occupation of their lands, even 60 years after World War II, and I believe its coercive display at school ceremonies is against our Constitution," she said.

Ah, the Japanese constitution. What I tend to get out of Mr. Weston's article is a feeling that although Japan has lived under that constitution for over 50 years, it has never really embraced the spirit of the document (which is a bizzare mixture of the liberal and the statist).

But the fact that the more reactionary elements in authority in Japan feel the need to legislate nationalism, and to make it compulsary, gives me heart; I doubt they would have felt the need to do it if people were embracing the nationalistic message willingly.

And the resistance of teachers and the media is a good sign too. Anyway, read the whole thing.

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We agonize a lot here about Islamic fundamentalism. But what can be done about it?

There are many reasons why Islamism of the most belligerent sort now stalks the earth, but one of them is that in many parts of the world, if you want an education, your only choice now is often either an education presided over by Islamic fundamentalists, or no education at all.

It is this problem which a group of businessmen in Pakistan have set out to remedy. With financial help from people of Pakistani descent who are living it Britain, they have established The Citizens' Foundation, and there was an article about the work of TCF in the Times Magazine yesterday by Joanna Pitman.

Quote:

The six of them – all highly successful top-level managers – met in August 1995 and began to think seriously about the problems. They addressed poverty, health, intolerance, population, education, water and sanitation, and concluded that the solution to all these issues was education. In Pakistan, education remains desperately, stupidly low on the list of government priorities. The state schooling system, riddled with corruption, has been either non-existent or on the point of collapse for many years. The result is a massive intellectual deficit: out of a total population of 145 million, the country has 28 million children entirely unschooled and 41 per cent of adult men and 70 per cent of adult women illiterate. Ironically, in some areas, the first parents queueing to send their children to TCP schools rum out to be government schoolteachers.

The six businessmen decided to set up a corporate-style charitable organisation to build and run schools offering high-quality education to both girls and boys in the poorest areas of the country. Within four months, the ground had been broken to construct the first five schools, paid for out of the pockets of the founders, and by May 1996 all five were operational. Only once the schools had been running successfully for a year did TCF begin to expand – not through advertising or asking for funds, but simply by taking people to see the reality and letting them spread the word.

Its target is to build 1,000 primary a secondary schools by 2010, which will cater for 350-400,000 children at a time, offering them a high-quality, secular education that is the envy of most government schools and comparable to the country's elite private schools. "We want these children to compete with our own children," says Saleem, whose four teenage children are being educated at the best Pakistani private school and at the American School.

I have been unable to locate this article either here or anywhere else (although if someone can correct that, please do), and so have taken the liberty of scanning it all into my Education Blog, where you can now read the whole thing. If you do that, you will not, I believe, regard your time as having been wasted.

This project strikes me as an example of all kinds of good things, but in particular of the benefits that can come to a poor country when people from it are able to go and live in richer countries, and are then able to do something about the depressing circumstances from which they thought at first only of escaping.

In general, I believe that if Islam ever does get past confrontation and accommodates itself amicably into humanity as a whole, the Islamic diaspora will be an important part of this process.

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On the face of it, this is a story about school truancy, and I have labelled it as "education", because it is indeed in that general vicinity. But I think this is really a story about law. Can it truly be right to send a mother to prison for failing to make her child go to school?

A mother who became the first parent in Britain to be jailed for letting her children play truant was yesterday sent to prison again for the same offence after her youngest daughter repeatedly skipped school.

Patricia Amos, from Banbury, Oxfordshire, was sentenced by Bicester magistrates to 28 days' imprisonment after failing to ensure her 14-year-old daughter, Jacqueline, attended lessons regularly. She had denied the charge, saying she had made "every effort" to get her daughter to go to school.

Amos was jailed for 60 days in May 2002 because Jacqueline and her older sister, Emma, persistently played truant from Banbury school. She was released on appeal after 28 days and vowed to make her daughters attend lessons, but after initial improvement - including a school prize for Emma - Jacqueline's attendance slipped again to 61% last autumn.

One thing I do know, which is that now that the definition of child abuse has thus been widened to include achieving a school attendance rate of only 61% for your child, it will inevitably be widened still further, to include such things as smoking in the vicinity of your children, allowing them to eat sweeties and sticky buns, and no doubt in the decades to come, failing to teach them a foreign language or to give them a solid grounding in how to play computer games.

I agree that it lots of cases, forcing a particular child of a particular parent to attend a particular school rather than roam these particular streets and get into that particular sort of bad company may be a good thing, in this particular case. But the law itself is weakend when it is used to enforce something so controversially virtuous as this. Should everything that our rulers think desirable become compulsory? And everything considered improper and uncouth by our rulers illegal?

There is also the beginnings here of the creepy principle that you are legally responsible for the wrongdoings of another. Surely one of the basic ideas involved in the rule of law is that the individual who commits the crime is the one who should be punished for it, not someone else who might perhaps have influenced the criminal. Holding families legally responsible for individual behaviour sounds very collectivist to me.

File under wedge, thin end of.

And watch out, home educators.

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A relentless and seemingly unstoppable trend in education in Britain is something which I call, at my Education Blog, sovietisation. This means: desperate quota fulfilment frenzies, and, increasingly, statistical measures of educational success which bear no relation to reality. In a word: cheating. Officially encouraged. With the politicians themselves implicated heavily, because they no more want to face the truth about how well they are really doing than anyone else does.

My latest sovietisation posting contained a big slice from this Telegraph article by Frank Furedi about cheating at university, and David Gillies added this comment by way of confirmation of this disturbing trend. The only thing I have cut from his comment was the brief apology at the end of it for going on at such length, which I have assured him was quite unnecessary.

This corresponds exactly to my experiences in academia. As a doctoral student, I would augment my meagre income by acting as a 'demonstrator' (i.e. teaching assistant). I would help guide students in the lab courses through the trickier points of the thing they were studying and give them hints when they got stuck. I also had the responsibility of marking the reports they subsequently prepared.

At the end of one term, I was given the task of marking the results of a fairly major project that one class had undertaken. After about ten of them I noticed an ominous trend. Phrases and in some cases entire paragraphs were copied verbatim between reports. As I proceeded, I started to notice that there were several different, sometimes overlapping variants of the report. I began to be able to discern a sort of taxonomic structure - in the end I was almost able to ascribe a sort of evolutionary tree to the plagiarised reports, rather like philologists do with missing or partial texts of ancient manuscripts.

By now both worried and annoyed, I wrote a detailed memorandum, with copious examples of the suspect work, heavily footnoted and with an explanation of my hypothetical taxonomy (I seem to recall it took me about three days to write). I went to the lecturer who was running the course and said, "we have a serious problem." He looked at my memo and promptly got the Head of Department involved. The Head sent my report over to Admin, along with some thoughts of his own and the lecturer. And then - nothing. The degree of plagiarism varied from student to student. The most egregious example was one in which, as far as I could tell, two students had run off two copies of the same report with simply their names substituted. For these I recommended expulsion. For the remainder, I recommended sanctions ranging from failing that module of the course to failing the course entirely. Most severe sanction actually imposed: loss of marks for that module and a written warning put on file. Most escaped scot-free.

I was sickened. Just a few years earlier, as part of our induction to studying Physics at Imperial College, we were given an afternoon's worth of lectures on integrity, ethics and the scientific method. We were told in no uncertain terms that not only would cheating get us kicked out, it would end our scientific careers. And yet, in the mid '90's, students at a University in the north of England could plagiarise with near impunity.

The reason? Money. Every lost student was a lost grant. So shackled is the University system to the filthy teat of Government (especially post the hare-brained notion that more than a small fraction of a nation's youth is capable of conducting study at degree level) that chasing grants is the primary, secondary and tertiary priority of universities. Teaching and research quality is important only inasmuch as it can be used to garner a tick in the right box in the latest assessment exercise. Only a complete divorce of higher education from government can halt and reverse this trend.

UPDATE: See also this confessional memoir by Natalie Solent.

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I've just done a rather long posting on my Education Blog about a teacher called Francis Gilbert, who has written a book highly critical of government education policies. Put it this way, I classified the post under one of my most frequently used headings: "Sovietisation." The guts of Sovietisation is when the measuring system imposed from the centre completely overwhelms the activity it is supposedly measuring. In the old USSR, people spent all their time fulfilling quotas, by hook or by crook, as opposed to doing useful work. Now, more and more teachers are pushing, and faking, children through exams. And as also happened in the old USSR, everyone knows that this is happening, but nobody except a few very unusual dissidents can afford to go out on a limb and admit it.

While I was linking to articles by and about Gilbert, and to his recent book, Kit Taylor was simultaneously emailing me, twice, about a radio performance that Gilbert did today.

Email one:

Teacher Francis Gilbert was on Radio2's Drive Time programme this evening (wednesday 10th March), promoting his book "I'm a Teacher Get Me Out of Here!"

Though he described himself as being of the left and wanting equality, he delivered a tirade against a crushing bureaucracy he likened to something out of 1984, and said that he was disillusioned by "what the left had done." Notably, as questioned why schools weren't free to devise their own curriculums, something utterly uncontroversial as far as I'm concerned but seemingly unthinkable in today's political climate.

Host Johnnie Walker even chipped in agreeably, pontificating that anything the government tried to run it messed up!

All this on primetime national radio. Cause for optimism?

And then, just as I was going to press (having included email one at the last minute), in comes email two:

Actually, now I think on Francis Gilbert something even more interesting in the interview.

It was along the lines of -

"I can go to the corner shop, and I can buy a good quality jam or a cheaper one. I have that option. But if I want my daughter [aged three] to learn french or classics, the choices aren't available."

If advanced by the Tories, I'd be unsurprised if such a notion were attacked as Thatcherite extremism. What's interesting is that Gilbert's comments were not apparently derived from ideological dogma, but the product of a "man in the street" intuitively questioning why a system that was working well in one aspect of his life wasn't being applied in another that wasn't.

As I think I may already have been quoted here as saying, we do have one rather big advantage over our opponents, which is that reality is on our side.

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This sounds promising:

The Tories' flagship education policy to give parents more freedom to choose their children's schools is to be dramatically expanded, the party has announced.

The "pupils passport" will be rolled out across England and Wales rather than just inner city areas as originally planned.

And so on. Basically it is education vouchers, but not called that.

There is even a good soundbite on offer:

"Under the Conservatives you'll be able to go to the right school even if your family lives in the wrong street."

Nice one. I was going to put this posting on my Education Blog, for obvious reasons. But thinking about it, I think the real significance of this announcement may be more what it says about the general attitude of the Conservatives.

Much as I dislike Tories because of the way they talk, dress, are, etc., this sounds very promising. Their problem for the last decade or so has been that they have simply stood up in the House of Commons and read out all the complaints everyone has had about what the government has done, is doing, or is about to do, regardless of whether the criticisms add up to a coherent alternative attitude to government. This tax increase is bad, but so is that spending cut. This attack on freedom is bad, yet this other attack on freedom is insufficiently ferocious. And their handling of the Iraq war has been a mess, I think. We aren't sure about the war as a whole, but this … (fill in the detail of the week that they happen to be moaning about) … is terrible.

But this education announcement actually suggests a bunch of people who think that they might one day be the government. Three of four more announcements of this substantial sort, and the public might start to think of the Conservatives with a modicum of respect.

This is not what everyone would ideally like for education. That would be for everyone's child to become a genius, with no effort, as a result of an infinitely powerful and infinitely nice Prime Minister with an infinitely nice smile waving an infinitely magic wand over each child's head, causing all children everywhere to get ahead of all the other children everywhere else. But people are starting to get that a wish list is not necessarily a workable policy.

The Conservatives are never going to be liked. But people are starting to despise this government, for announcing rather too many wish lists - each one headed "dramatic new policy", "radical shake-up", etc. So even if people still quite like Tony Blair, they are starting to lose respect for him. If they ever start respecting the Conservatives more, then that will be a new phase of British politics, and a potentially Conservative phase.

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The way to tell what is really happening by reading newspapers – which is not always very easy, is it? – is to look for what both sides in arguments agree about. And in Africa the reports which I read from time to time all seem to agree that educational standards are falling. The only argument is about whose fault that is.

Take this report, which I found on a google hit list from typing in, as is my occasional wont, "education":

Principals in secondary schools in Ebonyi State have been identified as responsible for the falling standard of education in Post-Primary schools as they contribute significantly to examination malpractices in the state.

This was the view of members of State House of Assembly who spoke when the planning committee on the forthcoming Ebonyi State educational summit paid advocacy visit to the House in Abakaliki on Monday.

The House members frowned at the prevailing situation where many principals allegedly collect money from students and aid them during NECO and WASC examinations and even negotiate deals between the students and examination supervisors.

Sounds like Nigerian business as usual is proceeding as usual. I do not know anyone with direct experience of Nigeria who does not regard the place as the world capital of anarcho-capitalism, in a bad way. In London – which is now, like the Internet itself, infested with dishonest Nigerians – our default attitude is: crooks the lot of them, until an individual can prove himself an exception to the rule. Anyone not totally prejudiced against Nigerians, from the trust point of view, is totally ignorant.

At first the link to this report didn't work, and my immediate inclination was to blame a Nigerian somewhere for taking a bribe instead of doing his job, but that may have been somewhat unfair. (And when I checked the link again before posting this, it was back to not working again. Bloody Nigerians!)

Not that those "House members" who "frowned" at all this are going to do anything about it. They are just higher up in the bribery chain.

My solution: make Nigeria anarcho-capitalist in a good way. Stop trying to have a government that does anything, because whatever government there is will be totally corrupt. Make the system that everything is for sale and everything negotiable official, including law and order. Then the place might work semi-reasonably.

But then again it still might not.

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The Office of Fair Trading (the name being a splendid example of British irony in action) has ordered 60 private schools in the UK to hand over documents for an inquiry into alleged fee-fixing in violation of the 1998 Competition Act.

The OFT's move provoked protests from the Independent Schools Council, which said it had "serious concerns about the protracted nature of this investigation and the effect it may have on schools".

However, the ISC appeared to acknowledge that some schools may have fallen foul of a change in the law, but blamed the Government for failing to keep them informed.

Yet again we see that the scope and burden of state regulation is such that it is almost impossible for businesses to avoid breaking some laws unless they employ a ruinously huge staff of lawyers and 'compliance officers'. Of course the very notion that the state, which imposes vast distorting pressures throughout the economy, can be an arbiter of 'Fair Trading' is almost beyond parody. As the Angry Economist said the other day:

Now, I would be the last person to claim that markets always produce good results. Some problems are hard for markets to solve simply because they are hard problems. Pointing to a problem which is hard for markets to solve doesn't automatically mean that solution-by-government will be better. It may turn out to be that government interference will produce a better result (pareto optimal) than peaceful cooperation. I allow that as a possibility at the same time that I doubt it will ever happen, once all costs are accounted for.

The trouble is, as economies are complex networked systems, that it is not always obvious how this law over here buggers up that market over there. The distortions are often not a single causal step away and thus might as well be completely unrelated unless you are willing to take the time to really look at why things happen the way they do... and in most political systems, it is usually easier to just pass another law.

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Yesterday I finally got around to renting the DVD of the documentary ("D – O – C – U – M – E – N – T" um er "A – R – Y") movie Spellbound, which is about a bunch of American kids selected for their variety of ethnic backgound – as well as unity of linguistic ("L – I – N – G" er "U – I – S – TIC") foreground or course – who took part in the 1999 National Spelling Bee Championships in Washington DC. Until now I had not really appreciated what an important piece of Americana the institution of the Spelling Bee is. (And by the way, what does the "Bee" bit mean? Is that bee as in the insect, and if so, how did that come about?)

The spelling of English is notoriously perverse and difficult. Spelling Bees turn what might have been a horrible barrier to becoming an American into a patriotically shared ordeal, and this movie shows this process still to be in rude health. Spelling Bees for other languages would not make nearly so much sense, because other languages are so much easier to spell. Spanish spelling, for instance, is a doddle (doddle? – could you give me the language of origin please? – language unknown) compared to English spelling.

My favourite bit of Spellbound was watching an Indian-American boy who had sailed through hundreds of other words being struck dumb by "Darjeeling" ("DAR" – "D – A – R" pause, etc.). You could really see the American Dream and the American Melting Pot working at full power, melting the various ethnically diverse peoples who still now flood into America into Americans, in the heat of competition, gripped by a shared desire to Get Educated and to Get Ahead, and join in being Americans by competing with other Americans for the Good Life and the Glory of winning the National Spelling Bee Championship. Since competition is such a huge part of American culture, the psychological art of handling it is also central to being a successful American, and you could see them all learning about that also. ("Our daughter was a winner just by getting this far", etc.)

The key quote probably came from the mother of the Indian-American girl who actually won it, in the form of the claim that she now felt that she "belonged". Quite so. Americans, bound together by their shared struggle to spell the American language. Bound by spelling, that being the point of this movie's title.

I know, I know, champion spellers are only a geeky freaky minority. But think how much trouble such intellectuals can make when they have some ethnic differences and resentments to work with. Getting the clever ones stirred really thoroughly into the Melting Pot counts for a lot more than their mere numbers would suggest.

All this was further brought home by my coincidental reading today of an article by Samuel P. Huntington about the retreat of English in the American South West in the face of the advancing Spanish. Huntington's point is that the linguistic unity of the USA is now in the process of being destroyed. The USA is being turned into a bilingual nation. Whatever that "U" in USA used to mean, it is no longer, in the future, going to mean linguistically united. Third and fourth generation immigrants from Mexico and from other parts of Latin America are growing up with no more knowledge of English than their grandparents or great grandparents had when they first arrived in America.

Huntington even alludes to the spelling bee tradition in this article, quoting the late California Republican Senator S. I. Hayakawa:

"Why is it that no Filipinos, no Koreans object to making English the official language? No Japanese have done so. And certainly not the Vietnamese, who are so damn happy to be here. They're learning English as fast as they can and winning spelling bees all across the country. But the Hispanics alone have maintained there is a problem. There [has been] considerable movement to make Spanish the second official language."

One of the kids in Spellboungwas a Mexican American, whose dad came into America as an illegal immigrant. The dad's elderly employers, a couple far too old and grizzled to be bothering with political correctness, were shown opining that this Mexican dad illustrated that not all Mexicans were layabout good-for-nothings, or words to that tactless effect. And you couldn't help wondering if this opinion was all mixed up with the fact that this particular Mexican family was learning English, so much so that one of their sons was proud to be a champion English speller. For they are exceptions, according to Huntington. Most incoming Mexicans are now quite consciously resisting being swept up in American values of competitiveness and educational advancement, and speaking English.

Author Robert Kaplan quotes Alex Villa, a third-generation Mexican American in Tucson, Arizona, as saying that he knows almost no one in the Mexican community of South Tucson who believes in "education and hard work" as the way to material prosperity and is thus willing to "buy into America." Profound cultural differences clearly separate Mexicans and Americans, and the high level of immigration from Mexico sustains and reinforces the prevalence of Mexican values among Mexican Americans.

To put it unkindly: we are layabouts and we are proud of it.

Here in Britain, we have many problems associated with mass immigration, but a contiguous border with a Third World country, speaking one of the great non-English World Languages is not one of them. Our Muslim immigrants are a potential problem because we fear that they will not ever become culturally assimilated. But the biggest linguistic minority in Britain looks, for the foreseeable future, like being, and remaining … the Welsh! But imagine if the Welsh speakers of Britain were only the advance guard of another thirty million Welsh speakers in a separate and much poorer state right next to us, where Ireland actually is for instance, and of another two hundred million Welsh speakers elsewhere in the world. That would certainly change how we Anglos would feel about our Welsh minority, and how they would feel about themselves. It would also make the prospect of serious Anglo-Welsh conflict far more likely.

As it is, Britain looks, and no thanks to all the multi-culturalist in our midst, likely to continue with its ongoing project of linguistic assimilation. There are just no incoming linguistic groups big enough, relative to the rest of the population, to make not learning English a rational educational or economic choice. And indeed, there is something very turn of the century New York about London just now – which is all part of why I am so optimistic and excited about the immediate future of London.

Maybe language will prove more unifying in Britain than Muslim culture threatens to be divisive. And maybe the linguistic disunity of America could spell more trouble for them than we face from our Muslims-versus-the-Rest divide, because that linguistic divide threatens to bring with it cultural differences every bit as profound, but in addition to that, to freeze those cultural differences into a permanent pattern.

Talking of British linguistic unification, why don't we in Britain have Spelling Bees? Because I say that we definitely should. Now would be an excellent time to make a big fuss of such clever kids, and about the art of spelling in general. Maybe we do, in which case, British commenters, please enlighten me about that. But although mention was made in Spellbound of how this Spelling Bee thing has gone global, I'm not aware of it having caught on here. If it hasn't, yet, maybe Spellbound will change that – either by unleashing it from a standing start, or by fanning the flames of whatever Spelling Bee sparks are sputtering away here already, to mix the metaphors ("M E T A" – "PHOR"). I was quite surprised to see Spellbound in Blockbuster, which is not an enterprise given to sentimental, politically correct gestures. They only offer for rent what they reckon people will want to rent. And quite a lot of people besides me did seem to be renting it.

Before anybody else says it, let me say it. It doesn't matter how many British schoolteachers would moan about excessive competition and try to stop the thing. It could all be run by a TV company. All that is needed is for some clever kids willing to participate to be rounded up and quizzed, and then for others to join in, and I reckon plenty would.

We in Britain could certainly use such a tradition. What's the betting that in twenty years time, a British Muslim kid will be the Spelling Bee World Champion?

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You can tell that maths teaching in Britain is in a mess. How do we know? This report in the Guardian:

The report calls on the government to set up a "maths tsar" to help revamp the structure and content of the maths curriculum and also to advise ministers.

As we have said here before, when they appoint a "tsar", it means that they have a problem, but no idea how to solve it.

Our only problem is how we are supposed to spell the damn word.

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Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. For the UK's University lecturers are going on strike. On Wednesday. Put it in your diary. It's a catastrophe.

If anybody notices, of course.

"We've got the support of the students," said one earnest lecturer, on the radio this morning. From what I remember of my own ear-ringed, combat-trousered, drunken oblivion, in academia, I used to just love lecturers going on strike. It was simply great for extending hangover recovery times. And with Wednesday being a traditional sports day, within British Universities, the lecturers, I presume, will only be sacrificing about three hours pay, from their 10am coffee break, which starts the morning, to the 1pm finish time, which ends their arduous half-working day.

So brave of them. Don't ya think?

Now if I was a betting man, and had to guess the contingent of British society which still possessed the highest percentage of Marxoid buffoons, after the disastrous collapse of Marxism in Eastern Europe, I'm sure you wouldn't give me tremendous odds against it being University lecturers.

But what's really amusing is that they still think anyone at all, outside the ivory tower, cares enough about them to quake in their boots, at their threat of a three hour strike. Well, I've got some news for you dear Marxoid professors. The nation ain't going to be paralysed. Indeed, it's barely going to register at 0.001 on the Richter Scale. Worse than that, it's barely going to register at 0.001 on the Newcastle Brown Ale Scale, on your own campuses. Mine's a large one, and a deep-fried Pizza, please, stout yeoman of the bar.

Oh dear, you say, but we work so hard doing the Guardian Quick Crossword every morning, and with double the number of students not handing in their essays, and not turning up at lectures, while they're sleeping off hangovers, the stress levels have become simply unbearable, almost enough to raise a pulse. We're not here to work for a living, you know! And if you take into account increasing pay levels in the private sector, and inflation, and the price of fish, we've taken a ninety per cent pay cut, in the last ten minutes.

Tell you what, then. Go to the politics department, if you can find anyone there this early in the week. Ask them whether we live, yet, in a Marxist police state, where it is compulsory for you to do the job assigned to you by the current Fat Controller, a land most of you Marxoids would like us to live in, or whether you're free to permanently withdraw your labour from your current employer to seek alternative employment elsewhere?

You don't like your job? Good. Leave it. Go and get a job somewhere else. Try to get the same money and the same conditions in the private sector, if you think you can. If you can't, then enjoy the long holidays, the funded trips to the conferences on astronomy, in places like Hawaii, be grateful that you're allowed to do something you love, rather than doing something you don't like to pay the taxes necessary to fund academic ingrates, and get on with your job.

Oh no, you might say, I really want to be an academic in the UK, and I can't think of anything else I could do, never mind would like to do. But there's only employer, the government, and only one rate of pay, nationwide. We're simply forced to go on strike.

No. You're not. You, the Marxoids, are the ones who wanted higher education nationalised. You're the ones who wanted national pay rates, and you're the ones who wanted to be treated collectively, rather than get paid according to your individual merits. And if you can't do anything else, that's your problem, not mine.

Alternatively, campaign for Universities to be privatised. Campaign for University lecturers to be paid according to their worth, as determined by student numbers wishing to attend lectures, rather than incremental Buggin's Turn payscales, and campaign for the complete separation of state and education.

Then, and only then, ask me to put back in my earring, pull back on my combat trousers, and re-lace my Dr Marten boots. For then I will be all too glad to share a barricade with you. Until that glorious futuristic day, don't phone me up. I'm washing my hair.

And if you must keep taking my coerced tax shilling, in the meantime, please take it with a bit more humility. Otherwise, one day I and all the other taxpayers are going to wake up and rumble your game.

No, actually. Can I reverse my appeal? Please go on strike indefinitely. If and when the rest of us notice, we'll be able to abstract you much more easily from the state-free education system of the future. Yes, go on strike. Permanently. I'm sure there's an outdoor gardening centre somewhere near you, today, with a gainful employment task you're capable of carrying out, without subsidy, even if you're a Marxoid sociology lecturer. Think of it as a test that the true free market can make use of anybody, no matter how intrinsically useless they were in their previous state-subsidised position.

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This is quite a little story, and with my libertarian stirrer hat on I say that the more it gets around the better, because the more it will draw attention to the existence of the libertarian journal Liberty, and of the libertarian movement generally. And when a little story gets written about in the New York Times, I guess that makes it not such a little story:

ALPINE, Tex., Feb. 16 — The first indication that Dr. Larry J. Sechrest's neighbors and students had read his article titled "A Strange Little Town in Texas" was when he began receiving death threats and obscene phone calls and his house was vandalized.

The article by Dr. Sechrest, an economics professor at Sul Ross State University, was published in the January issue of Liberty, a small libertarian magazine with a circulation of about 10,000 and only two local subscribers, one of whom is Dr. Sechrest. But it was weeks before people heard about it in remote Alpine, which is three hours from the closest Barnes & Noble, in Midland, Tex.

The article lauded the beauty of West Texas, the pleasant climate, the friendliness and tolerance of the locals. But Dr. Sechrest, who has a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Texas, also contended that "the students at Sul Ross, and more generally, the long-term residents of the entire area, are appallingly ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well, ... just plain stupid."

Well, death threats and obscene phone calls does sound pretty plain stupid to me, so although Sechrest may regret his candour, he has nothing to apologise for.

Sadly, Liberty seems to be one of those paper publications which is reluctant to give all its writings away on the Internet until several years have passed (which you can understand), so the actual article by Larry Secrest that caused all the fuss is not linkable to. But in addition addition to the NYT piece linked to above, there's also this from the Desert-Mountain Times:

Sechrest said he regretted publishing parts of the article that have caused such a strong reaction in the community.

"I thought there were two libertarians in the community," he said. "If that’s true, I thought, ‘Who will ever see it’ – it never crossed my mind it would cause such an uproar. If I knew the reaction it would cause, would I have done it? Of course not."

Ah, but the libertarian movement is bigger and more pervasive than you think!

The New York Times piece ends on a positive note:

Last week Dr. Sechrest said he had begun to receive more positive e-mail and phone calls. He noted in particular an e-mail message from a former student.

"As I read your article I found myself laughing out loud and saying things like 'amen' and 'true,' " the former student wrote. "At the same time I felt somewhat guilty because it really did offend people I really care about. There's no denying these are legitimate concerns. The lack of interest in anything beyond Brewster County lines also baffled me."

The student added, "It is my sincere hope that all involved can extract what is true and good from your article, and get over the rest."

The message was signed, "A former clod."

Maybe getting a not unsympathetic write-up in the New York Times will stir Alpine into being less cloddish, and Sul Ross State University into improving its standards. It certainly sounds as if that could be the longer term outcome. Maybe Sechrest has done the whole area a favour, in other words. If he has, it would not be the first time in human history that criticism was met first with anger, but then with a resolve by the people criticised to do better in the future.

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There was a nice little post yesterday at Daryl Cobranchi's homeschooling blog:

A teacher's union official has said that g-school teachers are incompetent. I'm sure she didn't mean to but it is the only logical conclusion.

1. Teachers are underpaid (according to the union official)

2. "If you don't pay competitive salaries, we're never going to get competent teachers."

Therefore, the current teachers must be incompetent. Q.E.D.

Cruel, but correct.

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Almost everywhere I turn I hear bad news and horror stories about youth and education. Based on that I was quite surprised by this paragraph in a DOD press release:

These reference group scores are called norms. The current ASVAB norms were developed in 1980, and no longer accurately reflect the aptitude of today's youth. Over the past 20 years, aptitude levels in the United States have increased. Scores on educational achievement tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are up; high school and college attendance rates have increased; youth demographics have shifted; and the country has experienced an explosion in technology development and application. Consequently, the 1980 norms are no longer representative of American youth.

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I think it is at least plausible to propose that a vast swathe of bad ideas and damaging policies are borne on the wings not of malevolence or even stupidity, but simply economic illiteracy: a fundamental failure to grasp how money actually works.

If that is the case, then this kind of thing is encouraging:

Personal finance education looks set to become a regular part of school life, following a series of successful pilot schemes across the country.

The charity the Personal Finance Education Group (Pfeg) has been working with teachers to help them provide extra-curricular lessons covering everything from straightforward budgeting to calculating interest and getting a good deal on a mobile phone.

One teacher said: "I think it will broaden their horizons; they will certainly have a better understanding of how to manage money. I think they'll also have a better understanding of the taxation system and why you pay tax."

However, enthusiasm should be tempered by the possibility that the subject is not being taught very well or, worse, that the whole thing is the project of ghastly statists who want to use this as a means of driving home pro-tax propaganda to a new generation.

But, those caveats aside, this could be welcome because even if it transpires that this is really all part of a lefty 'get-them-while-their-young' programme, the effect might be to start prodding young brain cells in directions that their teachers never intended them to go.

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Peter Briffa catches Polly Toynbee talking sense:

… The middle classes, who benefit most, might have preferred an earmarked income tax rise to extra university fees.

The government replies that 80% of taxpayers never went to university, so why should they pay too? Besides, if taxes rose, there are better spending priorities. Why should the 50% with too few opportunities fork out for the lucky ones? That's very nearly a good enough answer - but it raises key questions, too.

For that is not social democratic thinking: on that basis, why should those without children pay for schools? Or those without cars pay for roads? Or the great majority who never use trains pay for the 4% who commute by rail? Or those outside London contribute £1bn a year to the tube? Or southerners pay for the Angel of the North, while ballet-haters pay for Covent Garden? And why should the majority pay for social housing or tax credits they will never use?

Once you start to question who should pay for what, the idea of national collective provision crumbles. Where is the line in the sand? Where does it stop? Is there really something about universities that is clearly, qualitatively different to any of the above? You might just argue that there is a stronger personal financial gain to be had from a degree which justifies a personal contribution. But the same case might be made for why the suburban commuter should pay the full cost of his train, paying for his pleasure at living somewhere salubrious. …

Very good! PT of course intends that all these very good questions should be answered with:yes. Yes, southerners should pay for the northern angel, yes ballet-haters should pay for ballet, etc. And yes, higher education despisers should pay for other people's higher education. But for once, I like the cut of her jib. Asks Briffa mischievously: Is the penny finally dropping for La Toynbee? No of course not. She is incorrigible. But might not some of her readers find their brain cells being prodded into unfamiliar directions by all this flagrant logic.

This spasm of Toybee sanity reminds me of when people say that I should oppose some little government tyranny not for being tyrannical (that being perhaps too difficult or unpopular to do effectively), but for being inconsistent with some other not-so-tyrannical arrangement. Beware of asking for consistency in such circumstances, I reply, you just might get it, in the form of consistent tyranny. Toynbee starts by arguing for consistency and immediately finds herself sounding for the duration of her point like the purest sort of libertarian.

Heh.

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Education experts are apparently flocking to Belfast. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaa humbug.

The pre-report linked to above includes an intriguing titbit:

Prof Brighouse is expected to recommend that schools and parents of pupils who perform worst in tests should receive extra Government money.

In his speech this afternoon, he will propose a financial incentive for schools to take on poorer performing students.

That could have some interesting incentive effects.

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At first it reads like bad news:

China not to pursue profit-oriented education: official

BEIJING, Jan. 6 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinese education minister said here Tuesday that China will not place profit-gaining capability as the primary par for education.

At a press conference organized by the State Council Information Office, Minister Zhou Ji said that education is basically a cause for social benefits.

Governmental encouragement of private investment into education does not mean gaining economic returns is the priority for schools, said Zhou, adding that more private funds could alleviate burdens of the government for financing education.

Meanwhile, China welcomes overseas partners who are able to provide quality education service to the Chinese.

A newly adopted law stipulates that private schools are legally equal to their public counterparts.

Statistics show that by the end of 2002, about 61,200 privately-funded schools enrolled more than 11 million students. A total of 712 programs were jointly carried out by Chinese and overseas educators, nine times that of seven years before.

"Profits pursuit in education might endanger equal rights of education for every Chinese citizen," Zhou said.

What's going on here? My take: the Chinese government knows it has to have great gobs of education if it is to race ahead economically like it wants to. But (just like India) it can't afford to supply this entirely out of its tax revenue. So it is going to encourage private sector, profit-oriented education. But won't encouraging profit-oriented education encourage profit-orientation? No, says the government. We won't be encouraging profit-oriented profit-oriented education, only non-profit-oriented profit-oriented education. So there.

And the shorter version of the above reads: never believe anything until it is officially denied. In China, as in so many places, "official" is another word for "not".

The point here is not the answer, which is contradictory waffle. The point is the question, which is: how about all this private sector education? How about it indeed.

I am increasingly starting to believe – and I seem to recall (quick phone call) our own David Carr hinting here not so long ago at something similar – that the next great challenge to statism and statist economic policies may come not from the likes of us, but from the East.

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My day has been deranged by the discovery, which I made at about 4 pm, that Simon Schama's televised History of Britain has been shown and is still being shown continuously on UK History (one of the free digital channels) throughout the day, from 7 am until 1 am tomorrow morning. I've been dipping into it ever since I found out about this, having only caught bits of it when it was on one of the bigger channels first time around.

Most of the historical personalities mentioned by Schama were reasonably familiar to me. I know who Elizabeth I was, and when. I know who Thomas Cromwell, Tom Paine, William Wordsworth were, approximately speaking. But one name, in the the episode about the Victorian age, was entirely new to me: Mary Seacole:

Mary Seacole, the "black Florence Nightingale" was once one of the best-known women in England. She was a Caribbean doctress who had travelled widely, and was able to put her skills to good use in the Crimean War. Denied the opportunity to work with Nightingale, she travelled there on her own to minister to wounded British soldiers. Thousands of them remembered her with gratitude and affection.

That's her. That's definitely who Schama was talking about. Denied an official nursing position, she simply went out to the Crimea on her own initiative, and got to work, feeding the soldiers before they went into action in the 'hotel' she somehow contrived to have built (I think that's what Schama said), and then prowling the battlefield searching out the wounded and feeding them and caring for them, and even curing them with her West Indian remedies, which, said Schama, saved many a life, as the word "doctress" certainly suggests.

I'm guessing that knowing about Mary Seacole is probably a generation thing. I am of the generation that learned dates and maps and chaps, but which made no great effort to search out worthy people other than White Male worthies for deserved – and I dare say sometimes undeserved – celebration. So I'm guessing that Mary Seacole is now an increasingly well known figure among younger people with any curiosity about Britain's past. But I'd never heard of her. Thanks to Simon Schama and the UK History channel, now I have.

And thank you also to the Internet, and in particular to Google (apparently some are complaining about Google – for its sinfulness in wanting to make money). All I had to go on was how the name sounded, but soon, up came the magic words: "did you mean Mary Seacole?" and the means were in front of my to satisfy any curiosity I might feel about this remarkable woman.

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When I read The Wealth of Nations for the first time, I liked Adam Smith's idea that lecturers would respond better to their students if the students directly paid their lecturers. But I wasn't sure if it could work in the world of modern higher education. Well, it turns out that when Madsen Pirie was a lecturer at Hillsdale College in Michigan, he was indeed - in part - paid according to how well the students thought he did his job. And, as he explains on the ASI Blog, it seemed to work very well.

Of course, the less-radical introduction of tuition fees in Britain is doing wonders. Lecturers who I've spoken to say that students are starting to expect more as it is their money that is being wasted. And universities know that American students - who pay much higher fees - will sue if they don't get what they are paying for. Anyone who cares about the quality of university education should write a thank you note to Tony Blair.

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More news from the Independent concerning the globalisation of education, which is all mixed up with the global mega-success story that is the English language:

A successful Chinese industrialist was boasting proudly that his son was at a British educational institution, one of the best in the country. However, he couldn't remember which. After racking his brains, he decided to call his wife on the mobile phone. But his wife couldn't recall the name of the elite establishment either. In desperation, the entrepreneur had only one choice: he fast-dialled his son in the United Kingdom to ask where the boy was being educated.

This is a true story, illustrating not only the Chinese affection for mobile telephones, but also their enthusiasm for a foreign education. In China, to receive your schooling or your degree at an institution in Britain, or Australia, or the United States automatically puts you into the top league. The name of the university or school is not as important as the fact that you have tasted learning outside the People's Republic. No wonder universities from the United Kingdom are falling over one another to meet this huge demand.

Last year, the number of Chinese students in the UK reached a new record – 25,000. But there are millions of people in China now who aspire to, and receive, a university education and would leap at the chance to get a degree from the UK. In the three years between 1997 and 2000, there was remarkable growth in student numbers within China, according to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. Numbers increased from 3.2 million students to a staggering seven million. (The government target is 15 million.)

Ironically, given China's status as a Communist country, many of the new universities that are being set up to deal with this demand are private. There are 1,300 private institutions now in operation, and alliances between Chinese and foreign organisations are burgeoning.

While English educators fret about whether English people are well enough behaved, Chinese educators worry that the Chinese are too well behaved. Too dutiful, obedient, conformist, uninventive, inflexible.

Seriously, one suspects that the real product here is not just Anglosphere education, but Anglosphere education plus a bit of that Anglosphere attitude, hence the indifference concerning exactly which University their children go to. It could be a winning combination. Although I reckon word will soon get around which universities are the best.

It makes you wonder what Mao would have thought about it all. "I ordered you to have a permanent revolution and challenge all authority, but I didn't mean this!" Attitude!

And quite aside from the impact of all this on China, there is the interesting matter of how it will affect Britain. How long before someone uses the word 'swamped' to describe what is happening to higher education? All those foreigners, taking our children's places. And working too hard.

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So Dianne Abbott's decision to send her son to a private school is indefensible.

Says who? Says Ms Abbott:

On BBC2's This Week, Miss Abbott, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, said: "I've said very little about this because anything you say just sounds self-serving and hypocritical. You can't defend the indefensible.

Since Ms Abbot appears to be lost for words, allow me to assist. Here are a few things Diane Abbott could say:

• "I have realised that education is too important to be left to the state."
• "Perhaps everyone should have as much choice as I do."
• "If I am not prepared to condemn my child to the state system, why should anyone else?"
• "The pursuit of equality for all means everyone gets crap."

But Ms Abbot has not said any of those things. And she never will.

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As luck would have it, there is no category called 'Honking Great Hypocrisies' so I have had to settle for filing this under 'Education' instead.

But that's appropriate too because this story is nothing if not instructive:

Labour leaders backed Diane Abbott, the Left-wing MP, yesterday over her decision to educate her son privately, days after condemning a Tory MP for saying he would do the same.

Ms Abbott has used her wealth, status and privilege to give her child the best, as is befitting the ruling elite. In fact, Ms Abbott is merely following in the best traditions of Britain's socialist politicians who have always had a curious and inexplicable penchant for both private education and healthcare (while publicly denouncing both).

Labour MPs were taken by surprise by the news that she had chosen the £10,000-a-year City of London Boys School for her son, by-passing four comprehensives in Hackney and Stoke Newington, the constituency she represents.

In the past Miss Abbott has criticised the Prime Minister, for rejecting schools in Islington and sending his sons to the London Oratory School in Fulham, and Harriet Harman, the Solicitor General, for choosing a grammar school outside her constituency. She once said of Miss Harman: "She made the Labour Party look as if we do one thing and say another."

Now where would anyone get that crazy, zany idea?

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For a while now I've been noticing something called the No Child Left Behind Act, which Republicans were hugely pleased about when President Bush signed it into law as recently as January 2002, but which has now turned pear shaped, as we say in these parts, with extraordinary speed.

There's more about No Child Left Behind today in the New York Times, because the Democrats now smell blood in the water on this.

The gist of No Child Left Behind is: (a) Education Must Be Better For Everybody, So There, but er … (b) you'll have to pay for this compulsory improvement yourselves.

Here's the start of the New York Times coverage today:

Congressional Republicans are nervous about a G.O.P. poll that shows them losing ground over education. But how could voters not be disappointed by the Bush administration's mishandling of education policy generally, and especially its decision to withhold more than $6 billion from the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, the supposed centerpiece of the administration's domestic policy?

The new law is supposed to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and wipe out the achievement gap between rich and poor children. Schools that fail to make steady progress are labeled deficient and required to provide students with costly tutoring and allow them to transfer to more successful public schools in the same district.

In some districts, more than 40 percent of the schools are called "in need of improvement." The lack of money from Congress has licensed a backlash by states that never wanted to comply with the law anyway, especially the provision that requires ending the achievement gap between rich and poor.

This is classic statism. A bunch of people have a notion about how the world should be which they get all excited about. So, they get the government to say: that's what must happen. Within a few years it becomes clear to all that these 'education reformers' would have done far, far better to have just sat on their porches, drunk liquor, and said howdy to passers-by.

The point is, the everyday language of government, so to speak, is a language of compulsion and suppression. No Child Left Behind was sold as … well, as: no child left behind! What it actually says is: you must supply "better" education, which turns out to mean education done by people with fancier exam results to their names, to everybody, and especially to poor people. If, on the other hand, you have been teaching poor people with great success for the last few years, but without fancy exam results to your name, guess what? Stop it at once you bad bad person!

No Child Left Behind – a textbook example of statism in action – has, because it is statism, made things worse.

I guess it's all education in how the world works, but the people who need to learn their lesson are the idiots who unleashed this shambles. They need to learn how wrong they were. And it's all part of statism that they will do anything rather than learn their lesson.

The Democrats will now make the running in this argument, but sadly, the only lesson they want anyone to learn is that More Money should be spent.

If more money is spent, that'll be yet more education, this time in the folly of stealing money from one bunch of people and spraying it over another bunch.

As Perry de Havilland would say at this point: the state is not your friend. And that applies just as much to education as it does to anything else.

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Here's a strange article, by the Telegraph's education man, John Clare, in today's Telegraph.

It starts with lots of standard issue bad political news, about cuts and the resulting educational damage. Deranged plans for improvement, smashing down all that we've worked for over the last twenty years, blah, blah. The headline - "'Government incompetence' led to schools shedding 21,000 staff" - is all about that bad news. The usual political wreckage in other words.

But this, about one of those reports that journalists so love, is the interesting bit, I think:

The report laid much of the blame for the funding "debacle" on the "patently unfair grant culture" that the Government has imposed on schools.

It led to chronic disparities in funding, much of it allocated on an ad hoc basis to poorly conceived projects. "Schools emerge as winners or losers almost in spite of themselves," the report said. "On the basis of some decision taken in the remoteness of Whitehall, a school can suddenly find itself receiving or being deprived of an extra £100,000 or more."

Or, as one Inner London head put it: "Pots of money suddenly appear and disappear." This year's winners were failing schools, specialist schools, and schools with high proportions of pupils who are entitled to free meals and achieve poor exam results.

Okay, I don't know what's really going on here, but here's my guess. What we see here is government activity done by people who have been pummelled with free market ideology and have accepted that free markets, although politically impossible to actually have, are nevertheless worth learning from. So the responses of consumers are faked by issuing that deluge of directives from London that I spent about a third to a half of my education blog complaining about. These directives give you extra money if you do what London says are good "outcomes", and less if you don't. Like in the free market, right?

Well, not really. These directives don't actually have even the crude rationality of the free market. They aren't actually the same as actual consumer demands, so instead of satisfied or unsatisfied customers giving you more or less money, you just get a kind of permanent government organised lottery. This month, the winning number is: Schools who are crap but considered by London to be getting better! If that's you, you win! But, if your school is good but not considered by London to be getting any better, you lose! Next month, it'll be something different. Next month it'll be: Maths! Or: Languages! Or: The Obesity Directive! Or: Social Inclusion! Or: (Socially?) Excluding bullies, in response to the government's Bullying Directive! And through it all, win or lose, you have to fill in form after form after form, because if you don't even do that much in response to each bullying directive, you definitely lose.

When Tony Blair uses the word "reform" in connection with education, it is this process that he is referring to, and he wants more of it, but done better.

That's what I think may be going, but it's only me guessing really. Anyone with any better ideas?

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Alice Bachini sincerely wants to be rich.

Hello. While I am on light blogging duties, I thought I would set you all some homework. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that my quest to become a hard-nosed international millionaire businesswoman is still pretty much in its pre-foetal stages. I have considered many career paths, and various means of propulsion along them, including the possibility of multiply launching the whole set, yet somehow time still feels short (which, as we all know, is merely a conceptual illusion and not a true insight on anybody's reality), learning still seems really difficult due to the technomoronicism curse, and generally other more urgent things seem to get in the way. You know, things like making toast and gallivanting around London.

Therefore, I am calling upon my readers yet again to offer their suggestions, tips and positive ideas (no need to tell me I'm an idiot doomed to failure, thank you) in a financially-improving direction. Whatever I do has to be extremely flexible, realistic, and clever enough to work for me. And that means clever. But you people are clever, right?

Some calling himself "I'm serious, and I'm too lazy", supplied this really rather intelligent comment:

Interview the twenty richest persons in the UK. Or set your sights higher, and interview the twenty richest people in the world. Write it all down. Find a publisher. Title it, How the twenty richest people in the world became that way and how they keep it. Or just title it, How? and put a big green dollar sign on a yellow background, or pound or euro if you wish. Put your picture on the back in dark glasses (see above). You will make lots if you find a publisher. Even if not all twenty give you an interview, the reasons why they won't will make a book that sells. If none of this works at least you will have had fun gallivanting, and you will made some excellent contacts and some good stories to tell your grandchildren. By all means wear those dark glasses and only remove them once you have the interview booked.

Anyone here got anything to add to that? Read Alice's blog a bit to find out what kind of person she is, and then tell her what to do. (You people are clever, right?)

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One of my favourite films, when I was growing up, was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that strange children’s classic written by James Bond creator, Ian Fleming. Every Christmas it came on the telly some teatime or other, which my memory recalls as being just after that year's screening of The Great Escape, another all-time classic, or just before an omnibus edition of that year’s Doctor Who series.

Anyway, enough of nostalgia. The most disturbing character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the ski-slope nosed Child Catcher. He was nearly as bad as a Sea Devil for pure evil intent, rounding up children on behalf of a child-hating Baroness.

And now, in this wonderful sceptred isle of Tony Blair’s modern Britain, we have an equivalent, the school truancy protection officer. Not content with taking over private charity schools and ideologically convincing the majority of the docile British population that the one-size-fits-all state propaganda farms, also known as comprehensive schools, are far better than any alternative, the do-gooders just can’t rest.

Because, God forbid, children aren’t willingly attending these educational swamps, despite being able to get an A-grade Mathematics exam pass for knowing how many beans there are in a ten-bean bag. And what’s worse, their parents are often 'colluding' with them, by helping them with their truancy. Those nasty people! And apparently this is not good enough for 'Society', so we're going to have slap £100 pound on-the-spot fines onto these sadistic child-destructive malcontents.

Comprehensive schools have been a complete disaster for this country. Their rise has entirely overlapped with the rise of violent criminality, graffiti-ridden vandalism, and the collapse of the tolerant society. I wonder if this is any coincidence? As poor ersatz copies of academic private schools, filled with Guardian-reading statist shock troops, laughingly known as educationists, they've also failed to provide most of the children with what they want.

They're either too academic for most of them, or not academic enough for those few who do actually like academia. So what happens? To be an academic child in one of these places is like being a dissident in the Soviet Union. You are a hunted species, constantly derided, and gathering in isolated streamed packs to avoid the taunts of the majority. And what's it like to be in the majority? Bored rigid every day by the acres of politically correct information you rightfully regard as total nonsense, which scoot over your head every day leaving absolutely zero impression. No wonder you start bullying the academics. It's the only thing that makes the prison tolerable.

And that's what these places are. Prisons. With all the authoritarian statist mentality that goes with it. But these are special prisons, because not only do you have to endure five years of this torture, you're pushed unwillingly onto a constant treadmill of tests, examinations, and continuous assessment, with no end in sight, except perhaps the non-compulsory two years in sixth form college where you can smoke dope, drink cheap beer, and text your friends all day, to your heart's content. A tempting prospect! And if you fancy it, you can then do more of the same on your media studies course at University! At least it keeps you off the government's employment register for five years, when you could be doing something useful.

You're also told that if you don't keep padding around this constant treadmill, you are finished in life, a dreadful failure, and a worthless individual; so on you go. Though very few of you are really interested or motivated, except through fear, to achieve this freedom through work. So in response the system has had to dumb down the exams, to appear as if it is in some way actually improving your life. So the inmates have won, I suppose. At least those who can stomach this irksome insanity.

And then the do-gooders dare to wonder why some of these inmates are truanting. Have none of them ever seen The Great Escape? It's a wonder anybody stays at all, except for the constant carrot of a 'better life' being hung over them, and the stick of punishment being threatened if they fail to attend.

For don't they realise that the state needs tax-serfs, people to go out there to make money for the government, to allow it to continue in its rightful position as our benevolent ruler? Sorry, benevolent servant.

So who are the schools actually for then? Are they for these truanting children? Obviously not, for they're voting with their feet and heading down the shopping mall. So are they for the parents? Well, you'd have thought that if anyone had 'ownership' rights over these children, or had withdrawal rights as the school's true client, at least until some vague grey line in teenage, it would be the parents. But obviously not, for when they accompany their children to something they consider more useful, such as a cheap afternoon watching discount-price movies, they're now to be handed £100 pound on-the-spot fines for daring to do so. So we ask again, who are the schools for? Who is the customer? And further to that, who owns the children? And the only answers I can think of are the schools are for the state, because it pays for them, and the children are now owned by the state, rather than the parents, or the children themselves, because they are destined to be its future milch-cows.

Out of the goodness of its heart the state has provided these rotten propaganda farms, so these disobedient truanting children WILL attend. Because 'Society' (a.k.a. the government) needs them there, so it can brainwash them, and turn them into passive Labour-voting tax cows. It's for their own good. Don't they realise that?

But if it really was in their personal interest to attend, do you think the children wouldn't realise this? Or if you think 14-year old children are incapable of deciding such weighty matters, do you think the children's parents wouldn't realise this? No, it is to the state's good that these children attend. And that's it. They've got to be able to read, at the very least, or they won't even be able to fill in their tax returns. God forbid. Or learn how to obey.

And the really laughable thing is that the moronic do-gooders who are applauding this move think it will actually make any difference. First of all it won't be applied much, because school truanting officers just want a cushy parasitic life as state drones, and approaching potentially aggressive parents in the street, who nine-times-out-of-ten will have a perfectly 'valid' state-approved reason as to why they are with their children in school hours, is not part of the bureaucratic deal they signed up to.

And even if the parents really are just taking their children shopping, so perhaps an older one can look after a younger one, are the courts going to be able to cope with the endless consequences of appeals, non-payments, and the ultimate sentencing of parents to terms in jail?

Who'll look after the children then? Maybe the other parent, if they have one in this welfare-dependent age, will stop working, go onto state benefits, and cope in the meantime. This is a good lesson for life, don't you think? And if it's a single parent, the children will have to go into state childcare. Will this be in their interest? Or if the welfare-dependent single-parent does pay the fine, they won't be able to afford to buy their children new shoes. Well done, do-gooders. No doubt a special shoe grants department, manned a whole new cohort of properly rewarded do-gooders, will sort this one out.

Government by gimmick. It's not a nice place to be.

And even supposing the children can be 'made' to attend their lovely 'world-class' comprehensives? Will they actually knuckle down to their textbooks, say mea culpa, and turn out to be future professors of physics? Well, Fettes College boy Tony, you've obviously never seen the inside of a real comprehensive school, other than as a man surrounded by press cameras and flunkies. For what they'll do is either fade into a sullen daily trance, running out of the school gates at 3pm every day to whoops of joy, or they'll become disruptive or violent pains in the neck, ruining the lives of everyone else around them who is trying to schlep their way through the dumbed-down treadmill.

Or possibly, just whisper it, they might truant again. And hide out this time in other truants' houses. Who'd a thunk it? How could they be so devious?

So I suppose the state will then require the right to break into Englishmen's homes to track down these miscreants? You bet. Society can leave no stone unturned in its bid to do good to everyone.

Would someone please stop the world? I want to get off.

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The latest social engineering proposals from the government are out on University education.

If I wanted my son to get into Britain's ruling class, this is what I would now have to do, according to these plans. First, I would get him into the most expensive private school I could possibly afford. Then at sixteen I would have an arranged divorce with my wife, and I would move with him to the worst sink estate I could possibly imagine. Somewhere grim and remote would do the trick, perhaps the Belle Vue South estate in Carlisle?

And now comes the tricky bit. Once ensconced in Carlisle, we would track down the very worst comprehensive school or sixth form college in North Cumbria, and bung him right in there on the register. But what we wouldn't do, of course, is actually send him there, oh no.

We'd do lots of private tutoring during the week, instead, and send him in late to the 'official' college, one or two days a week, and encourage him while there to complain about girlfriends, spend hours on a mobile phone, and generally look surly around the campus, wearing various disgusting grunge clothes. That would be stage one. Stage two would be to get him predicted A-level grades of two 'E' grades, from the pinko lecturers. It would be a bonus if said pinko lecturers could be persuaded to try to interview him privately about his failure to attend. After missing two appointments we'd send him in on the third while stinking of Carlsberg lager and Drum tobacco mixed with cannabis, and get him to moan about the pressure of work, and the whole essay he had to do every term. Stage three would be to attain grades 'BBC' in his A-level finals (not too high, you'll notice.)

At his subsequent Oxbridge University entrance interview, using my ancient medical knowledge I would try to give him lots of hypodermic scars on his forearms, and get him to wear a grubby bandanna and a FCUK T-shirt with holes in it. He would turn up late for said interview and spend his time in the waiting lobby beforehand 'reading' a jazz mag. Even better, he would keep glancing down at the jazz mag while the interview took place. Splendid!

And then, Bob's your Uncle, he'd get a place at Balliol studying law, and then subsequently a place in the ruling elite feasting upon the tax revenues of the serfs, perhaps starting out as a state-franchised barrister. Why, you might ask? Because we'd be following the new government social engineering policy of rigging places at Universities to cover up the failures of the state comprehensive system. Just think, he'd be from a terrible school, he'd come from a sink council estate, a broken home, have drugs problems, difficulty focussing on work, girlfriend difficulties, he would smell, smoke, drink, and swear routinely, but despite having terrible A-level predictions, he would have 'worked hard' to achieve 'BBC' respectability, although without getting anywhere near the 'AAA' grades that people from good private schools would have had to attain to get the same University place. Marvellous!

Even better, the parents of those people from the good private schools would be forced to pay for my son's University fees, and with a bit of luck, even be forced to buy his student drinks via a large maintenance grant. £xcellent!

Obviously, once he'd graduated my wife and I would re-marry, and we'd burn the FCUK T-shirts.

Welcome to the wild and wacky world of socialised education. I just hope house prices don't go up too much in council sink estates, when the above pattern of educational achievement becomes the norm amongst the middle classes trying to get round the latest insane set of education regulations. I wish they'd rise up and revolt, to throw off their shackles of socialism, but they won't. (Though I'd love to see them prove me wrong.) What they'll do is adopt mad schemes like that suggested above. You see, to live in modern Britain is to adopt the mantra, 'Mustn't grumble'.

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Posting looks as if it may be thin here today, so a quick comment on the economics of the internet.

The usual story is that the big, bad, old organisations could be in trouble now as the internet whistles into existence a million new nimble players to run rings around the big, bad, etc. … blah blah.

But how about this for a train of thought?

Selling text on the internet is working, okay, sort of, but it hasn't really taken off. There's too much free stuff, and anyway, people don't want to pay. Maybe they're scared that if they start surrendering £30 here and £30 there, it will never stop and they'll be bankrupt. Maybe they just reckon the prices will come down, and they're waiting.

But what if you are a huge, globally celebrated organisation which wants to be able to swank even more than you do now about how much beneficial impact you are having on the world, to your donors, charitable or political, and would actually quite welcome the simplicity of not having to be too businesslike about it all, and to have to chase every last cent for every bit of virtual stuff that you part with?

What if you are the BBC? Despite all that our bit of the blogosphere may say, the BBC still counts for a hell of a lot in the world; that's why our bit of the blogosphere complains about it so much.

Or what if you are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

I finally took a look a long overdue look at the MIT OCW site (OCW = OpenCourseWare) today as a result of my Education Blog activities, but it seems to me that the give-away principle is far broader than merely educational – and incidentally that education itself will gain from many other institutions besides straight-up educators giving their stuff away. (Like the BBC.)

I still don't think it's right that the BBC should be paid for by me, in the form of a tax on my television viewing of over £100 per annum, and I hope they lose this privileged economic position no matter how generous they now say they want to be to the world. Nevertheless, as a matter of fact (whether business or political) rather than of morals, it seems to me that we may see a lot more of this kind of reputation-building giving-it-away stuff.

I reckon that for the right kind of global institution, basically an already globally leading operator which is eager to stay out in front of the pack, and which has a big archive the selling of which is not (as it would be in the case of, say, a big record company) central to its economic success, a huge give-away could be the smartest possible move.

The BBC is fighting for the current version of its life, and their give-away may only be talk, as part of that fight.

But MIT have, I reckon, taken a huge leap into the educational twenty first century with their great, global give-away, in a way that can only secure their position as global brand leaders in higher education.

There must be big organisations whom it would suit to do the same. There must be others who are doing the same.

The blogosphere is going to love it.

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"Academic cheating is a major problem and has negative results on everyone involved."

So goes the first sentence of a recently composed essay on cheating in academia. To get the whole essay, though, you'll need to pay for a membership at DirectEssays.com, an Internet operation that promises access to "over 101,000 high-quality term papers and essays." For $19.95 a month, you can see the anticheating tract in toto, and a lot more besides. DirectEssays is one of several Internet operations selling term papers that students hand in as their own work, and business is booming.

Cheating, especially Internet cheating, is becoming more and more the way of the academic world. A recent study found that 38 percent of the students polled had committed "cut and paste" plagiarism – that is, copying sentences or even several paragraphs from the Internet and implanting them in their own work. Forty percent of respondents admitted to copying without attribution from written sources – books, journals and the like – in the past year.

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Suppose you met someone who argued that there is a moral right to sex. He said that it is unfair that some people don't have sex at all, particularly those who are less well endowed physically. Thus the government should make sexually successful people have sex with those who are missing out.

You would probably think the argument used is outrageous. It would be an act of violation. It uses compulsion. It treats people as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself.

Now let's look at schooling. Some people argue that there should only be comprehensive schools. Grammar and private schools should be abolished. They point out that if less academically gifted children spend time with people who are high academic achievers, it raises their ambitions and helps them to be successful in life. But this right to have bright people at your school, is just like the right to have sex without the other party's consent. It is violation of the child. It treats the child's life as a means to an end, rather than as an end in and of itself. It is based on the principle of slavery.

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Who do you reckon wrote this?

But the truth is that a university degree is not the best educational attainment for the majority of people. Most jobs do not require such a level of education, although I firmly believe that education should not just be about what job you get. But for many, a university education provides little in terms of other personal development. Joining the job market earlier, or learning vocational skills, could be much more beneficial to the individual and society as a whole. Becoming a plumber or a butcher, rather than a teacher, is now a job with real security.

Some ghastly Conservative, talking sense of a sort, but doing it in that voice that we all hate and the memory of which still keeps the Conservatives in the bucket market unelectable, the one that goes: "Thanks to my hard-work and all-round merit I have reached the pinnacle of human achievement and am now a smarmy back-bench Conservative MP with ministerial ambitions." Right? Certainly right as in not left.

Let us read on:

I know this is a case that many may find unpalatable, but we must recognise that the striving for equality should not blind us to the fact that we are different. We cannot all be a concert pianist, or a David Beckham. In the same way, a university education does not suit everyone.

Well, you ghastly little creep, you may be right, but could you please be just a little less patronising about it? How good are you at playing the piano? (Don't answer that.)

If the Government could just recognise this simple point, then it could return to its job of improving the standards of university education to those who go there. …

Quack quack quack.

… It could also, just as importantly, make sure that those who should go to university, regardless of their backgrounds, actually get there, and are not penalised for their efforts by having a large level of debt hanging round their necks.

Ah, maybe this is an older sort of Conservative, the sort that has university age children and is feeling the pinch, now that those ministerial ambitions have collapsed in a New Labour heap.

… The present policy is ripping the Labour Party apart, and not helping our young people or the country.

The Labour Party? Ripping the Labour Party apart is good, surely.

… We are victims of woolly thought from both sides of the argument. We need to spend more public money on each individual student. But the point is, we don't need so many going to university.

We are victims … We need to spend more public money … we don't need so many going to university … It's confusing isn't it.

And that's the end of the piece, at which point it says:

The author was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1997-9

Yes it's … Mo Mowlam, in yesterday's Independent. Adding fire to the flames of a Labour back-bench revolt on the subject of top-up fees for university students. Better to cut university education and keep it free, says Mo, than expand it and make it worse and charge for it.

The parliamentary debate about financing higher education has divided into those who say that the winner class should damn well have to pay for it, and those who say that the loser class shouldn't. Neither policy is the complete answer.

Here's my complete answer: denationalise the entire thing, and get the government right out of it. Then let the rich and concerned give scholarships to all those who they think deserve them, and let the poor who are left out work their way through university, if they are that desperate for a university education. It wouldn't be perfect, and certainly not perfectly fair, but what would? University education, because denationalised, would be a lot better, and in particular, for those who most need that, a lot cheaper.

And here's another argument for total denationalisation. If university education boosts your future income and productivity, then surely those who get the income should pay for the education which yields it, not everybody else. If university education does not boost your future income and productivity, then why the hell would everybody else want to pay for it? What use is it to all of them?

If those arguments fail because of being too intellectual and logical and everything, try this, which just says that students are disgusting parasites and to hell with them. (Except for the foreigners, who are paying for what they are getting and are quite nice.)

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I've already linked to this amazing Guardian article from my Education Blog, but it deserves wider blog-reader notice than that.

Sandra Thompson was used to her son's weekend rhythm - the immediate relaxation and laughter of Friday afternoons, the dark mood that descended every Sunday as another week loomed. "With the first mention of school, Thomas must have had the same thoughts - are they going to be at the bus stop, are they going to get me today, do I have enough money on me to cover what they take?

He should have been out of there.

Mother and grandmother offer a picture of a boy whose main problem seems to have been his inability to behave like a child. "He loved being one-to-one with adults," says Sandra. "He loved to have conversations, but you couldn't talk about something silly. He always wanted to know adult stuff, and sometimes I didn't have the answers. He was constantly asking about the war with Iraq, and wanting to know the ins and outs of what countries had been attacked in the past. He always wanted to know what it was like to be older. He couldn't wait to learn to drive, get his own place, go to college, make his fortune."

So why the hell did he have to wait? Okay, I will give you the driving, but why not his own fortune, his own place, his own life?

While waiting about to make his fortune and start his life, he filled in time by going to anti-Iraq-war demos. He was pretty good at that apparently.

This is the bit that made me most angry about being a member of this pathetic dim-witted species of ours.

In his final report, the headteacher of his primary school described Thomas as one of the most courageous boys he'd ever met because of the years of bullying he'd survived.

What is so depressing is the sense you get from all the adults who presided over this disaster that there was simply nothing they could do about it. "He couldn't crack it in school." And I couldn't crack it when I tried to make it in the building trade half a lifetime ago. As soon as I realised I was hopeless at doing building I stopped doing it, and did something else. It really wasn't a difficult decision to make.

Here's this teacher, the Head of his School no less, and he is well aware that this poor kid is being driven crazy, but what could he do? Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. And boys gotta go to school, no matter how completely horrible it is for them.

No.

More than 200 mourners packed St Paul's Church, Wirral, to say goodbye to Thomas Thompson, many of them children. By the day after the funeral, Sandra had received so many cards that she had to display some of them on the floor around the mantelpiece. "He was a lovely lad," says his grandmother, "and he touched a lot of people's hearts."

So why the hell didn't they do something to help the poor kid while he was still alive?

I have to force myself to be sympathetic to mother, because frankly, it doesn't come very naturally to me.

Her eyes get wet. "It's hard. You're empty. There are no words to describe it. You start asking yourself all sorts of questions. Were you a good parent? Did you do everything you possibly could have done? Should you have bypassed his decision and gone up to the school? But how would you ever have let him grow up if you'd done that? You go round in a circle – if only, what if? You do live through but the one thing that you can never get over is that you'll never see him again in this life."

You were a bad parent. You didn't do anything like all that was possible. You shouldn't just have "gone up to the school", you should have yanked him out of there. And any world which didn' t tell you that loud and clear is crazy.

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A little boy called Arran Fernandez that's who. This lad is clever enough to have caught the attention of the UK Times [No link - you know the drill]:

A BOY of eight has become the youngest person to receive an A at GCSE.

'A' is the top grade and the GCSE is a national examination paper for pupils of age sixteen.

As pupils across the country received their results, Arran Fernandez, from Surrey, celebrated the grade awarded for a mathematics paper that he took when he was 7 years and 11 months. Only 32 per cent of candidates - most considerably older - reach the same standard.

So little Arran must be the brainiest kid in his school, right? Wrong. Because little Arran doesn't go to 'school' at all:

Arran, who is also the youngest person to pass a GCSE at any grade - a D in the subject when he was five - is educated at home by his parents, Neil and Hilde.

Another successful product of Britain's small, but growing, home-school movement, I'd say.

His father, Neil, a political economist who achieved a grade A at O level maths when he was 13, is evangelical about the benefits of home tutoring.

"I believe that every child could do this, given the right encouragement," he said. "Why are children held back in their earliest years? And why are parents, who are their best educators, discouraged from realising and exercising their ability to teach?"

Because so many generations of parents assigned those abilities over to the state, doubtless believing that the state would do a better job of it. That same state is likely to respond to the increasingly successful reclamation by trying to put a stop to it.

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Following on from Mr Carr's education piece, earlier in the week, comes further 'pragmatic' news from the UK's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

In a bid to make the UK's A-level mathematics courses more 'accessible', this august and incorruptible State body has announced it will be making the subject even 'easier'. Is this possible? And please don't laugh at the next bit, it's really not funny. To study it, you won't even need to have studied elementary algebra, beforehand. Yep, you heard that right.

No doubt the honest government which rules us won't then take the increased grades, which they hope will result from this heavyweight dumbing-down operation, and use them to promote how effective their education policies have been? Yeah, right.

Is the UK the only country in the world in which even Homer Simpson could get an A* grade, in a higher education mathematics qualification? Maybe, not this year. But give them a chance. I'm sure they'll get there eventually. Everyone must have prizes.

In the meantime, the poisoned A-level gold standard is going the same way as the Pound Sterling gold standard, i.e. straight down the pan to get the UK government off the hook of its own continuing failure. Expect all private schools to abandon A-levels, entirely, within the next few years, to replace them with the International Baccalaureate. A-levels will then become purely the concern of the State system, which will suit the State admirably, as they'll be able to inflate their achievements to levels of magnificence previously undreamed of, without any reference required to any kind of external reality. What a banana.

So as I gaze lovingly at my A-level certificate, up there on the wall, I wonder if now is not the time to replace it with a small poster of Kylie Minogue, in the hope that when she visits she'll be much more impressed. I should be so lucky.

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We all know the old saying: there's lies, then there's damnable lies and and there's government education statistics:

Leading independent schools are preparing to abandon GCSE, one of the central props of the Government's tottering exam system.

Pupils at leading schools commonly take 12 subjects, many of them a year early, and up to 90 per cent of the papers are graded A* or A.

"It's like Boy Scouts collecting badges," said Tony Little, who has just completed his first year as head of Eton. "One has to ask what the educational value of it is."

Methinks that Mr.Little is being polite. I suspect that what he really wants to say is that an exam system that is so 'dumbed-down' as to ensure that virtually nobody fails is about as much practical use as a chocolate teapot. Handing every schoolchild lots of certificates to wave around doesn't mean that they have actually been educated.

The elite schools' decision to break ranks without waiting to see the details of the Government's plan to replace GCSE and A-levels with a national diploma will alarm Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary.

It suggests the schools have no faith in the Government's claim that academic standards will be protected from further debasement.

And they are right not to have any faith because the government is not concerned about education it is merely anxious to present lots of impressive statistics in order to convince everyone (including themselves) that children are being educated instead of merely processed. This isn't education it's a puppet show.

However, it is difficult to hide the sordid truth from the people whose business it is to actually help young people learn lots of things and it is gratifying to witness some of them breaking rank. Hopefully this is the start of a trend as people who truly value education begin to realise that it is far too important and precious to be left to the government.

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In Does Education Matter? Alison Wolf attacks, tin the words of the book's subtitle, "myths about education and economic growth". Here are a few paragraphs from the Introduction:

From the premise that a full-blown 'knowledge economy' is arriving now on our doorsteps, it is easy to slip into prescribing more and more of the raw material which apparently makes this possible: education. And of course it would be stupid to deny that education is central to any modern economy. Imagine the UK today – or the USA, or Greece, japan, Brazil – being run by a population. which is more than go per cent illiterate - the level of eleventh-century England.' Imagine Microsoft or British Aerospace research and development in the hands of people all of whom had left school after only a primary-school education, or a drug industry dependent on people whose academic training was the intermingled science and alchemy of Newton's day. Who could doubt that education matters?

But what doesn't follow is that vast amounts of public. spending on education have been the key determinant of how rich we are today. Nor is it obvious that they will decide how much richer, or poorer, we will be tomorrow. The simple one-way relationship which so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn't exist. Moreover, the larger and more complex the education sector, the less obvious any links to productivity become. Developed countries have now moved well beyond providing basic education. for all, and instead spend more and more on higher education, technical provision, vocational programmes, and adult training.

These are my main subject matter, for they are also the main recent targets of government policies inspired by ambitions for growth. Unfortunately, while an overwhelmingly strong case can be made for the state's responsibilities in basic education – and, indeed, for the latter's economic importance – not one of these newer enthusiasms deserves any such.accolade.

Alison Wolf

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I did a posting yesterday at my Education Blog about a suggestion for a more "free market" approach to Britain's examination system. It is of course not a suggestion for a real free market, merely for a centrally licensed franchise system.

Anyway, this comment appeared today about this, which gives an excellent if anecdotal feel for the state of education in Britain now:

A friend of mine (source protection here) was asked to mark double the usual amount of scripts this year because that particular exam did not have enough markers. That's 400 scripts in about 4 weeks.

Reasons for the lack of recruits: a) the markers are paid peanuts b) it's just at the beginning of the summer holidays, and most teachers would rather have a rest than do even more marking c) teaching is such a depressing business to be in at the moment that many of the sparkiest - who would make competent examiners - are getting the hell out.

Exam board solutions:
This year they offered to pay schools for supply cover so that instead of teaching, examiner-teachers could spend school time marking scripts. Not surprisingly, the take-up was small.

Gossip from my anonymous friend: exam boards are considering making a deal with schools whereby if the school wants to sit that board's exams, they'll have to supply n teachers to mark them.

I can't wait to see it all implode, necessitating some market solutions rather than this government-sponsored-shoe-string job.

My worry is that the "market solutions" they resort to will, like that proposed "free market" exam franchising system, not be real market solutions. The government will stay totally in command of the curriculum, and the "free market" will just be another more complicated way to pay state hirelings.

A real free market in exams would mean competing curricula, competing exams to examine mastery of said curricula, and teachers, parents, pupils and employers organising, advising and choosing at will, to suit themselves and their various ambitions and purposes. The government's job would be to stay out of it all, while every so often making the occasional discouraging remark about how education is over-rated and that it prefers ignorance, especially for children, thereby giving the adults who are organising everything the confidence that the government would continue to stay out of everything, and thereby getting the kids all excited about it.

Dream on Brian. Which is what I am for, I suppose.

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What with termination of the Iraqi regime, George Bush in the Whitehouse, Bersluconi bestriding Europe and internecine war between the Labour government and the BBC, the editors of the Guardian must be scratching around urgently for some news they can celebrate.

They have finally found some: the emergence of the next generation of guardianistas:

The public sector is now the most popular choice of employer for graduates, new research revealed today.

In a Mori poll, 32% of students said they would like to work for a public sector organisation - ahead of blue chip companies and small to medium enterprises.

On the face of it, the revelation that nearly a third of graduates want to devote their lives to consuming taxes and finding ever-more bizarre ways to spend other people's money, should be somewhat alarming. But maybe it is simply a doleful recognition that the private sector has little use for people who have spent three or four years immersed in 'Gay Studies' or the 'History of Yoghurt'.

I suspect the real culprit here is the addle-brained article of faith for our political elites that lack of personal achievement is inextricably linked to feelings of self-esteem, especially the self-esteem that grows from having 'qualifications' regardless of how bogus they might actually be. It was this conviction that led to an explosion of state-backed 'universities' which tossed out potemkin qualifications like Palestinian candy.

The result, however, is no an upgrading of people but rather a downgrading of education to the point where image of a 'graduate' as a steely-witted young go-getter has been reduced to a laughable myth.

Graduate Prospects' chief executive, Mike Hill, said: "The public sector has a great deal to offer young graduates looking for their first job, not least working conditions that often mean a better balanced life. This can include flexible hours, home-working, job-share and better holidays.

And that, for me, is the 'money' quote. Isn't the term 'better balanced life' really a polite euphamsim for 'easy ride'? Perhaps these prospective graduates have lost none of the survival instincts they were born with and are unwilling to undergo the rigours of the private sector that they know will shred their fragile intellects. Hence, find me a sinecure and find it quick.

"In addition, many graduates want to feel they are doing something good for society in their work. Research by the audit commission found that wanting to have a positive effect on people's lives was the main reason why staff chose the public sector. That makes it an attractive option for graduates."

As if we need a bigger army of Diversity Development Outreach Co-ordinators in order to set off the harmful effects on society of all those greedy people who devote their lives to the selfish pursuits of trade, innovation and enterprise.

I am willing to wager that it is the highly selfish pursuit of soft options and not sham altruism which is lying at the root of this new trend. But, let's face it, the alleged desire to 'do good for society' sounds a lot more like the kind of thing that the paladins of the education establishment want to hear. But that is still a problem because clearly the education establishment is committed to pushing this message to its charges and, for as long as that is still happening, then the assembled forced of reason have a long march ahead of them.

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Steve Sailer is a name I hear now and again, every few weeks, but I know very little about the guy. Someone commented on this, which I wrote last night (about men wearing their shirts outside their trousers), to the effect that Sailer had something to say about this, about a week ago, that was relevant. I couldn't find it, but I did find this 1995 piece about the nuances of why race relations in the US army are so much better than race relations in US colleges.

It's no surprise to me that treating people in a totally meritocratic way, regardless of race, makes for better inter-ethnic relations, or that armies can't allow inter-ethnic rivalries to build up in the ranks, so they don't. So it was another less than completely obvious idea that I found striking in this piece, which is that the way for an unpopular racial or ethnic group to make an admired impact on the wider society is for it to concentrate and conquer niches rather than disperse and try to do well across the board. Sailer's point is that academic racial preference policies undermine (to name but one of their many drawbacks) this benign process, by over-dispersing the group supposedly being helped.

The US armed forces have been following the niche achievement model based on focussing totally on what each individual is best at contributing and letting the coloured faces concentrate or disperse at will, while the colleges of America, especially the elite colleges, have been applying the help-and-disperse model, with racially toxic results. The US army has enabled black men to impress white men – and black people to impress people generally – far more impressively than colleges have done. What's more, this process has only become the more pronounced during the time since Sailer wrote his piece. (To drive home the point about what individuals can and can't do, Sailer notes that although black Americans have excelled as Generals, they have as yet scarcely even flickered as Admirals.)

This fits my own experience, in non-military London. After my first few years as a Londoner I was seriously worried that I was turning into a racist. The last six black people I'd encountered were all blaring black music from their car stereos too loudly for my comfort, and I was starting to blame blackness, and to believe that there was a Black Musical Bad Manners gene. You don't say things like this to strangers, but I was seriously starting to think it. (And I dare say that in a complicated genes-interacting-with-environment way this is actually true.)

Then I went to work, in a part-time and very menial capacity, in a totally meritocratic (and absolutely free of all racial quotas) financial services business, where clutches of black (and also black Muslim) guys were niche conquering, and doing fantastically impressively and well. The rule was simple. Are nine of the top dozen high-earning achievers nationwide in the business black guys with strange foreign names? So? What is your problem? You want white racial preferences do you? The rules are the rules! There is no problem! The rules are working and we are making money by the ton. Handshakes and rounds of applause all round. End of story.

I was graciously, and I do mean graciously, permitted to converse with a few of these mighty personages and all suggestion that such people were in any way genetically – or for that matter culturally – incapable of making anything impressive of themselves was expunged from my mind. And need I add that the manners of these impressive people (to someone of no likely importance or advantage to them – me) were impeccable? I felt immense relief. I didn't want to become a racist, thank you very much. But I had become scared that the facts might oblige me to.

In other words, a potential white racist was cured not by the race I might have despised being helped (this would only have added resentment to my existing suspicions of inferiority), but by it finding a niche where (for reasons which I still don't really understand) it had an advantage and where it was therefore concentrating, and was being allowed and encouraged to concentrate, and being handsomely and deservedly rewarded for what it was concentrating on.

(I have here dodged the whole argument about what exactly being "a racist" means. Here's what I think about that. According to some definitions of racism, I still am a racist and this is a racist article, because it says that different groups are better at different

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My boredom with eating sandwiches or salad for lunch encouraged me to visit the ready-meal section of Tesco today. The result was lasagne. As it cooked at work, one of my colleages commented on how good it smelt. I realised there was a positive externality created by cooking the meal, so I suggested to the office that they should pay me for the pleasure they were receiving.

I had no takers. Had I pushed them, they might have argued that, while the smell was enjoyable, they had not consented to it and therefore had no obligation to pay for it. They might also have pointed out that although the smell was nice, I would be getting the real benefit (the eating part).

In this example, it can be seen that charging people to receive a positive externality is unfair and absurd. Yet this is exactly the argument many people use in favour of taxpayer-funded university courses. This argument, out of all the arguments for scrapping tuition fees, is the worst.

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Two comments have appeared on a long ago posting of mine here about the menace to Western Civilisation posed by people dropping chewing gum all over the damn place.

Comment 1:

i like chewing on gum^^ It should have neva been banned!!! I feel sooooo sorry for the singaporeans....owell beta get on wiv my english assignment nowz...byebye :)

Lana

Comment 2:

Hi its me again (Lana) if anyone noes any interesting facts about Singapore then can u plz email me qt_mashi@hotmail.com, bcuz this is for my english assignment and its very important THANK YOU :)

Lana

You know what? Lana likes chewing gum, and I like her. She has her own individual take on English spelling, although maybe it's her whole generation and they all spell because bcuz. But, she seems to be able to spell in the regular manner when she wants to ("any interesting facts about Singapore") or when she is forgetting not to, plus she has a nice ingratiating manner and understands the value of a smile. I think she should be encouraged.

So, if anyone has any interesting facts about Singapore, please email them to her.

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Loony-left Labour backbenchers will no doubt be overjoyed that the Office of Fair Trading is investigating Britain's top private schools. The idea that private schools could get punitive fines will make the saliva drip from their statist mouths. Yet fines, if issued, would be worse for parents than the alleged crime.

The crime is that the top private schools run a cartel which conspires to raise the price of tuition. But since there is more demand for places as these schools than supply, meaning the price is below the market-clearing price, the allegation is quite obvious nonsense. As last week's Economist pointed out:

Some of them think they could raise their fees by 50% and still fill all their places with the children of the super-rich. Headteachers don't want to do that because it would weaken their claim to charitable status and limit their ability to select the cleverest children and thus get the best results. So if they have been colluding, it may be to keep the fees down, not up.

But even if private schools have been colluding to raise prices, a fine would not be justified. Private schools are non-profit distributing charities, and if they have more money, they employ more teachers and build better sports facilities. How does taking a school's cash and giving it to HM Treasury benefit the parents?

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Iain Duncan-Smith relaunched the Conservative Party yesterday, announcing that a future Conservative government would abolish tuition fees. Of course, political parties have to reach out to those outside their traditional supporters. But IDS is going about it the wrong way.

Margaret Thatcher got lots of people living on council estates to vote for her. It was not by being left-wing, but by applying her free-market principles to make their lifes better. By giving them the option to buy their houses from the state, she helped them to rise up the ladder of economic prosperity. By allowing parents to have a say in which state school their children could go to, power was taken away from government bureaucrats, enabling parents to take their children to away from failing schools. Her strategy for getting non-Conservatives to vote Conservative was entirely consistent with her principles. Voters believed her policies because they saw their consistency.

By simply adopting socialist policies - and moving the Tories to the left of Labour - IDS is alienating his core support. But worse, he is unlikely to gain the votes of those who support his policies anyway. There aren't many Old Labour opponents of tuition fees that are going to jump ship and vote Tory. They are much more likely to vote Lib Dem, a rather more convincing party of socialism.

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A wondrous row has erupted between two fat, middle-aged, uncouth, bearded geazers, one of them the British Minister of Education, and the other the Chairman of Chelsea Football Club. Mr Clarke is plugging a scheme to get sports clubs to help out with teaching the 3Rs to recalcitrant youth, and Mr Bates' Chelsea are the only football club not to be cooperating. Mr Clarke slagged off Bates, and now Bates has been slagging off Clarke, pointing out that the British state education system is appalling and getting worse and he, Mr Clarke, should see to it instead of attacking defenceless football clubs.

I have dealt with some of the boring educational angles of this story in another place, but the interesting aspect is that Mr Clarke has now said that he wants West Ham to beat Chelsea in their forthcoming and crucial Premiership clash tomorrow. Or, to put it another way, he wants Liverpool and Newcastle (rather than Chelsea) to qualify for the European Champion's League next year, and even more controversially, Mr Clarke supports West Ham in their desperate effort to avoid relegation, and accordingly he must favour the idea of one of the clubs above West Ham, such as Bolton, Leeds, or Fulham, getting relegated from the Premier League instead. Bolton, did you get that? I can't remember a Cabinet Minister wading into sport like this. Supporting your own team in a new-laddish, post-modern sort of way is one thing, but to mix this kind of thing with serious politics is new, surely, and frankly rather unsavoury.

Since Ken Bates is making trouble for a politician, we here presumably all now support Chelsea against the abominable West Hamsters and the even more abominable West Ham support Clarke. And that's quite aside from the Samizdata HQ being in Chelsea, and David Carr already being a Chelsea season ticket holder. I'm a Spurs man myself, that is to say, for the benefit of Americans, a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. But Spurs are never involved either in trying to get into Europe or in being relegated because they come eleventh in the Premiership every year. Very dull. So by now I don't care what they do tomorrow and am happy to swing into line behind Chelsea also. I'll be keeping a close eye on the Chelsea game tomorrow and keep everyone posted. Go you … Chels?

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I've recently been writing at my Education Blog about the noted educator and educational theorist Maria Montessori.

Montessori recommended what for her time must have been a most unusual kind of object for young children to play with. She disapproved, it would seem, of the kind of complicated toys and dolls which, then as now, many parents get for their children. Instead she recommended abstract objects. What she had in mind was that children should not be overwhelmed with excessive amounts of information. Too little information, and children get bored. But too much causes them to switch off, in sensory self defence. That was her attitude. So, instead of dolls and train sets and woolly animals, she prescribed plain geometrical objects and matching sets of things like rods all the same size but of different colours, or rods all of the same colour but of different lengths. Or Montessori children may be presented with a set of identical sized blocks which different textures on their surfaces, like the different surfaces of different grades of sandpaper.

Whether by coincidence or by cause and effect, the Montessorian view of childhood objects has in recent decades made remarkable headway. Look into a child's nursery or playpen now, and you will see all manner of geometrical shapes and blocks and wheels and surfaces. Felt covered cubes. Wooden zig-zaggy things to put in zig-zaggy shaped holes. Lots of different colours and consistencies of plastic. And so on.

The point I want to make here has nothing to do with the educational wisdom or otherwise of surrounding small children with such objects. No, I want to offer a theory about Modern Art, or rather, a theory about the (to many) extraordinary popularity of Modern Art. By "Modern Art" I of course mean abstract art – art that is not "of" anything, but is merely itself.

When I was a child, most of my toys were "representational". I didn't own any actual cows, bears, soldiers, cars, trains, airplanes, ships or houses. But I owned all sorts of "models" or "representations" of such things. Insofar as I also owned small abstract objects of the sort favoured by Montessori, these too were used to represent things, like farm buildings for my small plastic livestock, or the boundaries of roads for my cars and lorries to progress along. Everything, therefore, was representational. I don't recall ever having been subjected to any "abstract" phase.

Well, you can see where I'm going, can't you? What if the popularity not just of Modern or Abstract Art, but of all kinds of art, is profoundly influenced by the very first objects by which our parents and our culture chooses to surround us? What if one of the key "functions" of pictorial and sculptural art is to push aesthetic buttons, so to speak, that were established during the first few months of active consciousness? One of the things art does for us, I surmise, is to evoke in us the recollection of our very first sense experiences, and thereby to comfort us, at a very deep psychological level.

If that's right, then a change in fashion concerning what it is appropriate for young children to be given to play with would lead directly to profound artistic changes a couple of decades later.

I don't know how true this really is, and I don't for a moment say that this is the only reason why people like this sort of pictorial or sculptural art rather than that. Clearly, other influences are also at work. After all, representational art is now making something of a comeback. But I still think it makes a lot of sense. When I last visited Tate Modern, the place had the air of a giant nursery, with objects as big compared to me as smaller toys are to a small child. And when asked why they do abstract art the way they do, artists often sound like Maria Montessori herself, saying that they are "about" shape, colour, texture, and so on. Adults surely don't need any more instruction about such things, but maybe they like to be reminded of the time when they did.

This also explains the often noticed - and much puzzled obout - fact that whereas Modern Art (i.e. modern visual art) seems now to have genuine mass appeal, "modern" classical music still registers as near as dammit zero on the mass popularity scale. Simply, almost no small children have ever spent any time listening to anything resembling the "music" (the sneer quotes tell you what I think of it) of Stockhausen, Boulez etc. Accordingly this modern music remains the enthusiasm only of a tiny coterie of musicians and of their tiny few fans, and continues to fail utterly at the box office. (Similar considerations apply to the very brief vogue for "modern" - i.e. non-grammatical - writing.)

Had Maria Montessori, or perhaps a subsequent generation of influential education theorists, had views about auditory stimuli similar to her views on the look and feel of physical objects, the story of "modern" classical music might have unfolded very differently.

This theory might also explain something else about the largely inter-generational arguments that rage about the virtue or lack of it of Modern Art, which is the extraordinary ferocity of the criticisms of Modern Art expressed by those who don't like it, and the extraordinary glee expressed in response to these criticisms by those who do. Don't think: argument between adults. Think: crazy squabble in a nursery, complete with tantrums and bullying and all manner of shouting and carrying-on. Modern art connects to the inner child, in good ways and in bad ways.

I cannot believe that I'm the first person to have thought of this. Comments connecting me to others who have speculated about, or perhaps even proved, a connection such as I offer would be very welcome.

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Since Samizdata, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, seems to be in us-Brits-great-or-what? mode today, please permit me to mention here that over on my Education Blog, I did a piece about the British Army as a teaching organisation, based on a conversation with a friend who is a captain in it. If what you're now thinking is: "Wow, those Brits, how do they do it?", well, I think this little piece goes some way towards answering that question.

At the centre of the piece is an accronym: EDIP. This stands for: Explain, Demonstrate, Immitate, Practice.

The other key principle "embedded" – to use this month's mot du jour – in British Army practice is that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Quite junior officers start the "high powered" bit of their army careers by instructing at Sandhurst, and Sergeants and Corporals do most of the day-to-day training of the soldiers. At the end of it the soldiers may not be completely in command of what they're doing, but the men who've been teaching them have it ingrained into them. Soldiering can be taught, and so can leadership, and this is how.

The thing I remember most vividly about that conversation was, well, how vivid it was. The question "Education – How about that then? – How does the army go about doing that?" is just about the best way for a civilian like me to get inside the head of a soldier that I could possibly have picked. "So, what's it like killing people?" is useless by comparison. (a) It's insulting. It makes it sound like that's the thing they most like doing. (b) Half of them don't know. (c) Those that do have no way of really telling you. And above all (d) they don't want to talk about it. But asking them about how they teach is, as I said in my original piece, like taking the cork out of a shaken champagne bottle.

I want to do a lot more pieces like this one, about actual teachers and how they set about it, for my Education Blog, but so far have only done one more, about my friend Sean Gabb. So if any Samizdata readers are doing any teaching, of any sort, in the London area or near offer, and of a sort they wouldn't mind me sitting in on and/or writing about (I promise to accentuate the positive – almost all teachers are doing some good things), please get in touch.

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What do you think these are?

feg – jes – vok – gop – ruch – dez – thob – cag – shug – wiss – miff – sleck

Words that used to exist, but which have fallen out of use? Words that ought to exist, to describe things that exist, but now have no word attached to them so that we can talk about them? Douglas Adams produced a little book called The Meaning of Liffe, or something similar, full of such concepts, with suggested words to describe them. "Pimlico – the pool of stale beer into which the barman deposits your change" etc. etc. Ruch – to vomit or cough violently, while still trying to rush for a bus or appointment. Sleck – to refrain so ostentatiously from performing one's duties that even very, very posh people, who hardly do any work themselves, notice. And miff? Well, isn't that a word already? Are we not "miffed" if things don't happen as we wish? So miff must be the verb of that, surely. And "gop" is the Republicans, isn't it?

sprell – creld – splind – fland – blim – flut – smez – shrid – sprund – shrong – brost – flamp

Still don't know? Clue: it's to do with learning to read. These "words" are to be found on page 17 of the latest Newsletter, No. 50, from the Reading Reform Foundation.

spow – clirt – throrn – scight – droy – scray – troud – drair – weeg – grort – ploon – frarp

I support the Reading Research Foundation, in the sense that I pay to get these newsletters and agree, for whatever that may be worth, with what they are trying to do. And what they are trying to do is beat some sense into all the senseless fools who now, still, preside over the teaching – or non-teaching – of literacy in the schools of Britain, indeed of the entire Anglo Saxon world.

The trouble with the RRF's literature is that most of us can only concentrate on it for so long. This is because the argument is changing only with glacial slowness. The RRF explains that the best way to teach reading is to teach "synthetic phonics". This means – warning: I may get this somewhat wrong – first learning what sounds are made by which letters and letter combinations, and then spelling out the entire word by spelling out each letter or letter combination. Something like that. The Satanic Tendency, for these purposes, are the Morons From Hell who believe that the way to read words is to guess them by looking only at the first letter or two, or by looking at accompanying pictures, or by looking at the shape made by all the letters together. "Whole word" and "look and say" are the phrases to watch out for if you want to catch a (il)literacy Satanist at work and drown him in your village pond.

The RRF people, although very determined and hardworking, are by their nature rather earnest and systematic people, who have got hold of the right way to teach reading and writing, and don't really know what else to do except repeat themselves until enlightenment finally erupts. What they are not so good at is spicing up their stuff to make it catch the attention of civilians. Partly, of course, this is because they are absolutely sure that "spicing up" the material is absolutely how you should not teach reading and writing itself. Pictures and irrelevant joking and general side-issues are to be avoided like the mental plague that they are. Thus, RRF type people tend to have a puritanical devotion to their truth, and positively to dislike – to be exceedingly miffed by, you might say – all the trivia and silliness (as well as deadly seriousness) that an operation like samizdata.net brings to the business of spreading good ideas.

cleab – scrule – gurt – hoint – splafe – scry – chie – floke – grooring – shrawed – scurnly – slared

Ho ho ho, or if you prefer it, hoe hoe hoe. (I don't like "Heh", for some reason. Don't know why.)

Okay I'll tell you what it is. It's Ruth Miskin's Nonsense Word Test. Ruth Miskin is one of the bigger names of the Synthetically Phonic world, and this test is to see if those subjected to it actually spell out the words they "read", or merely guess.

I've kept the best ones until last, as does Ruth Miskin, the best ones being, of course, the most elaborate and complicated ones.

phantrite – strowble – frubehabe – doilible – snoiggal – wacespink – disclorping – thription – illarptacture – naightentance – stobosaurous – feanlissable

Are you spelling out these "words" in their entirety? Congratulations. You can read.

Here's how the page ends.

Letters should be read as sounds, not names. (Note: When the test is used as an rml entry assessment, allow 4 seconds a word. Stop when 2/3 errors are made in one box.) Complete test as far as is possible to ascertain breadth of phonic knowledge and blending ability. Tester has separate copy to record reader’s response for detailed assessment. This test should be given in conjunction with a real word and comprehension test to ascertain reader’s full skills in and out of context.

So now you know.

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Natalie Solent links to a typical education story from education.guardian.co.uk.

A six-year-old boy has become one of the youngest children to be permanently excluded from school, following an 18-month reign of terror that left some of his classmates psychologically traumatised.

The boy was thrown out of Ashton Vale primary school in Ashton, Bristol, after worried parents wrote a letter to governors demanding his removal. They reported him urinating on fellow pupils, stamping on children's heads and scratching classmates' faces. One parent claims he bullied her son to such an extent he needed speech therapy, while another victim began wetting the bed through fear. However, his father, a BBC technician, yesterday blamed the school for exacerbating his son's bad behaviour and not acting quickly enough. "I think they've gone the wrong way about it," he said. "At home he's as good as gold."

What's this? The Guardian making a BBC employee look like an idiot?

He did, however, admit that his son had been given "more than enough chances" and had "taken it too far" at the school. "He's always been naughty. He fights everyone all the time but doesn't know when to stop - he just carries on."

The boy was known as a trouble-maker at nursery, but the frequency of violent incidents has risen steadily and he has been suspended numerous times.

His father fears his unusual domestic environment may have had an effect on Troy's behaviour. He has split from boy's mother, but they still share the same home, despite the fact she is now expecting a baby with her new boyfriend, who lives in the Birmingham area.

Yes, that doesn't sound good.

But to get more serious, here's what Natalie says about this boy's expulsion.

This sort of thing is ineradicable from state education. It comes from the obligation to pretend to educate every child, whatever the real harm done to other children such as the rest of the class in this disturbing story. Some children should be abandoned by the education system.

I take a certain angry pleasure from writing things like that. What usually happens is that people make hesitant criticisms of the cult of "inclusivity" or of "no fault" programmes that purport to deal with bullying and then a representative of The Blob lashes out and says, "Ooooh, riiiight, you are willing to just abandon children, are you, just do nothing for the most vulnerable members of society?" and the wimps backtrack. So I might as well short-circuit the outrage. Yup. Abandon them. You think that's unethical? You educate them, then: I'm not stopping you.

I have a rule about putting something, however lame, up on my Education Blog every calendar (clock?) week day, Monday to Friday, week in week out (weekends optional). Sometimes that has meant doing something at 12.05 am and then the next something at 11.50 pm nearly two real days later, but I have so far stuck to this rule, even when abroad.

Because of this rule I have often gone trawling through "national" education stories such as the one Natalie linked to, the way I wouldn't have done in the normal, Education Blogless course of my life. (Which was part of why I do an Education Blog, and why I do it the way I do it.)

What I'm getting round to saying is, I have recently, despite finding the subject pretty boring, been paying quite close and regular attention to what passes in Britain for education policy. And I can confirm that Natalie has identified one of the absolute central idiocies of our present government's education policy.

The state can either include every child in its education system, or it can, in its crude and insufficient way, educate most children but not all. It cannot do both. It simply cannot. It doesn't matter if every single MP in the House of Commons is New Labour and agrees with Education Minister Charles Clarke about everything he and his assistants ever say or ever do. Reality remains reality. If a boy like Troy is in a class and can neither be removed from that class nor beaten in to submission, then that class will be about begging Troy to behave and Troy not behaving. It cannot also be about teaching any of the other children anything except about the idiocy of their school's policy, and their government's policy, with regard to Troy.

Our present government does have an education policy, after a fashion. This policy is completely ridiculous, but here it is. It is to command this week that Troy shall be included, but, next week, that Troy shall be excluded. This is called government by initiative, and it is driving the teaching profession to premature senile dementia. It is making it literally impossible to be a state employed teacher. Yes, the government is recruiting record numbers of teachers. But ask yourself why? This is because record numbers of teachers are also saying to hell with it, often within a few days of joining, and going off to become financial advisers, or ditch diggers, or unemployed wrecks.

My, we're in a cheerful mood here this weekend, aren't we? Thank goodness for the Ireland/England rugger game, which kicks off in about three hours. If England lose, I don't know what I'll do. War, and economic meltdown, and plague, and this, and then, on top of all that, that. Doesn't bear thinking about.

I think I just wrote a Brian's Bleat.