We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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This will bring back memories for some of you:
The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell
The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation. Barely documented, rarely acknowledged, and quietly abandoned – but never quite forgotten by those it touched.
I just missed experiencing the delights of the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I knew of it; a few of the Ladybird ITA books, including, if I recall correctly, “Peepl at Wurk: The Poleesman” as illustrated in the article, lingered in cupboards and crannies at my primary school. I remember asking what those funny letters were and being given a fairly good explanation. I was quite old before I realised that most people didn’t know about it.
Looking at the Guardian article to which I link above and at the Wikipedia article on the ITA, the choice of letter forms seems to have been amateurish. Some of them resemble the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but many of characters and pairs of characters used to represent vowels and diphthongs in the ITA contradict the way those same characters are used in the IPA. And what in the name of Paul Passy’s sainted aunt was the point of borrowing the “long S”, ʃ, from the IPA but then not using this character on its own to replace the digraph “sh”, as the IPA does? The ITA spelling of “ship” appears to be “ʃhip”, which is the worst of both worlds – the children had to learn the difficult concept that two letters can represent one sound, but still had to unlearn the funny S before they could read the word as it was written outside school.
The Guardian article, and even more so the comments to it, make much of the fact that the creator of the ITA, Sir James Pitman (the grandson of the man who invented Pitman’s shorthand) was a Conservative MP. In fact he was the sort of Progressive Conservative that socialist charities like to have on the Board of Trustees to prove they are not irredeemably partisan. “As a member of parliament, he championed many notable causes, notably nationalisation, education, and world security.” He was one of a long line of would-be reformers of English spelling and comes across as motivated only by a well-meaning desire to help the children of the English-speaking world cope with our famously odd orthography.
Pity the ITA was a flop. Well, probably a flop – though it certainly disappeared from schools quickly enough, and most of those who remembered it speak of the difficulty of having to learn to read twice, no systematic survey of its results was ever made, so we cannot be sure. A few brave voices in the comments say that it did them no harm and one or two even say it helped them.
However the majority view (which I share) is that it was one of many foolish experiments carried out on schoolchildren by bright-eyed educationalists throughout the 1960s and 70s because parents in those days were far too trusting of authority. Some of the Guardian commenters take a harsher view. Someone calling themselves “karapipiris” thunders,
The elephant in the room is this:
It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand
In any society when power and influence is hereditary what one will get is damage done by trying out ideas of incompetents in the real world. I can imagine that dozens of people dedicated to educating children at the time actually had good ideas on how to do better, but they were not aristocrats.
In vain do other commenters point out that Pitman’s knighthood was not hereditary and that the ITA was actually a cross-party initiative originally proposed by a Labour MP, Montefiore Follick; the upvotes still flow in a mighty river to Mr, Ms, or Mx Karapipiris for saying that the reason that this ill-conceived scheme was so casually inflicted on so many children was that its leading spirit had a knighthood.
Karapipiris is wrong about the aristocracy part, but right about it being remarkable how little discussion or testing there was before an experiment which obviously had the potential to harm the children it was meant to help was launched in thousands of schools.
Someone called “BFEMBis” thinks they have seen through the conspiracy:
Apparently it was never introduced at Eton.
Ditto: Harrow
Ditto: St Paul’s
Ditto: Charterhouse, Winchester, Merchant Taylor’s, Gordenstoun, Benenden,…
Strange, that.
‘Makes yer fink,’ in’nit ?
Like Karapipiris, BFEMBis got plenty of upvotes for this asinine comment, although in fairness to the Guardian commentariat, the person who pointed out that all the posh schools listed start taking pupils at the age of thirteen got more. Once again, however, I must admit that BFEMBis does have the shadow of a point. I don’t know what the use of pseudo-Cockney eye dialect in “Makes yer fink,’ in’nit” was meant to convey, but the relatively low uptake of the ITA by private schools does indeed make yer fink. Despite being infested with at least as high a proportion of kaftan-wearers as the state sector, the private sector does seem to escape the worst of these fads. It introduces mad schemes just as enthusiastically as the state sector does but is quicker to dump them when they don’t work out.*
Why is that then? Why do private schools on average have stronger immunity to fads than state schools do? If BFEMBis and his/her/their upvoters finked a little more deeply about that question they might realise why so many people remain willing to pay double for their child’s education despite all that the current government throws at them.
A private school – or a “public” school in the British meaning of the term – cannot afford consistently bad results. “Bad” is a relative term: a surprising number of the UK’s fee-paying schools are aimed at children with special educational needs who have been failed by the state system. But whether success is measured in Oxbridge admissions or some kid who had been written off unexpectedly scraping a couple of GCSEs, a fee-paying school must be able to convince parents and prospective parents that the service they offer is worth the cost. If it cannot, those fees will dry up faster than you can say nief.
*Very occasionally, they do work out.
I will get to the subject of Hertfordshire Police in 2025 in due course. First, answer me this: “Why didn’t anyone speak out during the Salem witch trials, given how incredibly fake they were?”
I came across this question in a tweet from someone calling themselves “Science Banana”. Mr or Ms Banana goes on to describe how the Salem accusers started off by denouncing easy targets – two women of questionable repute and a slave. But they did not stop there.
Their next choice was very shrewd. The fourth person the “afflicted girls” accused was a highly religious and respectable woman who had publicly expressed skepticism of their ridiculous bullshit. She was immediately arrested and imprisoned.
Genuine belief would do for most; preference falsification would keep the rest quiet.
After the skeptic, the next “witch” accused and imprisoned was an elderly church lady of spotless reputation. And the same day, a four-year-old girl. She went to prison too. At that point, the accusers knew they could get away with anything.
The Salem Witch trials are usually cited “as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process.” The evil consequences of all these things were indeed made clear in the witch hunt, which cost at least twenty-five innocent people their lives. But the affair was also a tale of boiling the frog.
Now I’ll talk about what Hertfordshire Police were up to last week. Frederick Attenborough of the Free Speech Union tells the increasingly odd story of Hertfordshire Police vs two primary school parents:
A story that seemed troubling enough when it emerged over the weekend is turning out to be even worse than it first appeared, with the strange willingness of Hertfordshire Police to intervene in a debate at a primary school proving ever stranger.
On Saturday, the Times reported that in late January six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van had been sent to arrest Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine after their child’s school, Cowley Hill Primary, objected to a series of emails and “disparaging” comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group. As the police carried out a search of the house, the couple were detained in front of their three year-old daughter, before being held in cells for eight hours. And all this for querying the recruitment process for a new headteacher.
Accused of “casting aspersions” on the chair of governors in an “upsetting” way, they were then questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property.
Following a five-week investigation the police concluded there was insufficient evidence and took no further action – although the knock at the door, the squad vehicles and the highly public arrest by half a dozen officers must have felt like quite a punishment already.
No wonder that Mr Allen, a producer at Times Radio, said the couple’s treatment represented “massive overreach” by Hertfordshire Police. He told the Times: “It was absolutely nightmarish. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that a public authority could use the police to close down a legitimate inquiry. Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”
But it now transpires that the force’s intervention wasn’t restricted to Mr Allen and Ms Levine. Hertfordshire Police also warned Michelle Vince, a local county councillor, to stop helping the family by sending emails to the school on their behalf – or risk being investigated herself.
On this occasion, the police attempt at intimidation backfired because Mr Allen is a producer at Times Radio and therefore had instant access to the national press. You can listen to him talk about what happened here. The fact that the police felt confident to proceed as they did strongly suggests that they have done this before to less well-connected people and it worked.
As the article says, it gets worse.
And still there’s more. The email to Ms Vince asked her to forward the warning to anyone she’d cc’ed when contacting the school. This included the local Conservative MP, and former Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Oliver Dowden.
Ms Vince said she felt “uncomfortable” passing on the warning to Sir Oliver. For his part, he was “astonished that a situation could have arisen where any police officer could think it would be remotely acceptable to suggest that an MP should be curtailed in carrying out their democratic duties”.
First a local councillor, then an MP. Note that when the police tried to intimidate a bunch of stroppy parents they did not know that one of them had a job with a national newspaper, but when they tried to frighten Councillor Michelle Vince and Sir Oliver Dowden MP (not just a Knight of the Realm and an MP, but a former Deputy Prime Minister – think about that) into ceasing to represent their constituents, the police knew exactly what these people’s roles were. To stop Councillor Vince and Sir Oliver performing the duties of their elected positions was the point. I rather think that the eminence of Sir Oliver was part of the point, too. They thought they could get away with anything.
The police probably thought of themselves as fearlessly taking on the powerful, a motive which has also been ascribed to those young girls in seventeenth century Salem. But if they really wanted to fearlessly show that no one is above the law, they could have directed the six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van to arrest someone who might fight back.
Today’s Telegraph boasts a ragebait article by William Sitwell called “The loss of Latin from schools is a triumph, not a tragedy”. He did not enjoy Latin at his prep school, so he is glad that the Labour government abruptly withdrew funding for a programme that had supported Latin teaching in state schools, despite the programme being focussed on schools in deprived areas.
The prep school Mr Sitwell attended was called Maidwell Hall. Labour’s imposition of VAT on private school fees has meant that this school will soon close its doors forever. Mr Sitwell seemed sad about that when he wrote this piece: “The death of my old prep school shows Labour is hell-bent on destroying my way of life”. I would have guessed that the teaching of Latin at prep schools was a small but distinct component of that way of life. I do not know what caused the abrupt change of tone. Pragmatism, perhaps. There is probably some Latin proverb about how the man who is heir-presumptive to a baronetcy is wise to make nice to a Labour government.
Mr Sitwell – if he has some other title, he does not use it when writing in the Telegraph – clearly enjoyed enraging most his readers by writing this:
And to this day, I have no regrets. Nothing I do, say, see, observe or experience ever bears any relation to, or could possibly be enhanced by, an appreciation of Latin. It’s never helped me order a beer in Spain, have a sea urchin removed from my foot in Greece nor brought me any closer to understanding the constitutions, cultures or history of the West.
But what those Latin classes did do was fill my childhood with countless hours of pointless education when I should instead have been forced to study the likes of economics, business, entrepreneurialism, spreadsheets and profit and loss. Now that, believe me, I really do regret. Or as Erasmus probably wouldn’t have put it: “Me paenitet.”
Despite never having learned Latin myself, my sympathies lie with the majority of the Telegraph commenters who argue in favour of teaching Latin and other “useless” subjects. I suspect that if Maidwell Hall and Eton had replaced Latin with Economics, Entrepreneurialism & Spreadsheets circa 1980, Mr Sitwell would have written, with equal passion but less eloquence, about how dismal VisiCalc was and how he wishes he could have learned Latin instead.
Is it better to teach children “useful” subjects, which they can see the point of learning but which do nothing to encourage flexible thinking, and which may turn out to be completely useless if the world changes, or to teach “useless” subjects, for which the advertised benefit of “learning to learn” is small recompense for the certain disbenefit of thousands of hours of pointless toil?
I dunno. You sort it out for your own kids, or let them choose for themselves. The point is that of course the Labour government closed the Latin Excellence Programme for political reasons. They are politicians. That’s what they do. That’s what you gave them democratic power to do.
From the Daily Telegraph (£) today:
A quarter of 13 to 17-year-olds recently admitted to the Pew Research Centre that they use ChatGPT to write their homework, double the proportion found a year earlier. Last year, the Higher Education Policy Institute found that one in eight undergraduates – 13 per cent – were using AI to write assessments, and 3 per cent were handing in the chatbot’s output without checking it.
Oh dear. As the article says, there are AI programmes now that screen writing to see if a generative form of AI has written it. So we have a sort of arms race, as it were, between those using these systems to write essays or whatever, and those using it to spot the cheats.
Using AI is not quite the same, necessarily, as using a search engine to check up on sources, or a calculator to do sums rather than by hand. I do think that something is lost if a person has no idea of how to go about how to find things out: what references to check, how to validate such references and how to understand sources, levels of credibility and corroboration, etc. Being able to think through a topic, to structure an essay, marshal facts and figures, and come to a convincing conclusion, is a skill. It is also an important way that we hone our reasoning. And I don’t think there is anything specifically “Luddite” in pointing out that using AI to “write” your homework assignment will lead cause atrophy of our mental faculties. And in this age of social media, “coddling” of kids and all the problems associated with a “fragile generation” , it is easy to see this trend as being malign.
I am definitely not saying the government ought to step into this. I think that schools and places of higher learning ought, as part of the conditions of entry and admission (preferably with the consent of parents/students) to restrict AI’s use to avoid people not developing their own mental muscle and developing ability to truly grasp a subject, rather than simply “phone it in”. If a place of learning has a mission statement, it surely ought to want to develop the learning ability and skills of its students. If AI detracts from it, then it is out of bounds.
It is best, I think, to leave this up to individual schools. This is also another reason why I am a fanatic about school choice, and fear the dangers of state central control of schools.
Technology has its place, in my view. In my childhood, pocket calculators started to be used, but we were not allowed to use them in class until we’d already mastered maths the old-fashioned way. (I used them in doing my physics O-level, for example, so long as I clearly could show my workings if asked.)
Here is an associated article by Gizmondo. On a more optimistic point, venture capital mover and shaker Marc Andreessen has thoughts on the overall positives from AI.
I also have a more financial concern. If students, such as undergraduates, are using AI to write essays, even whole dissertations, etc, then it makes it even more scandalous that they rack up tens of thousands of dollars, euros or whatever in debt to pay for this. Because if they get a degree thanks to ChatGPT (that rhymes!), then what exactly have they got for their money?
“We are seeing anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere – how can doctors like me respond?”, writes Dr Mariam Tokhi in the Guardian. She starts with the heartrending story of an eight year old Australian girl called Elizabeth Struhs who died of diabetic ketoacidosis due to the withdrawal of the insulin she needed to live. Her family belong to a religious sect called “the Saints” that believes that medicine should not be used. Her father, mother and brother, alongside several other members of this sect, have been found guilty of her manslaughter. Dr Tokhi then writes,
I am seeing the rise of anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere. A patient in my clinic tells us that she has stopped her HIV antiviral tablets, because her pastor told her she has been healed by prayer. A parent rejects mental health treatment for his impulsive, suicidal teenager, telling me that ADHD and major depression are made-up, modern conditions. A pregnant mother asks me to sign her Advanced Care Directive, saying she declines blood products in the event of a life-threatening bleed during birth, worried that she could receive “vaccine-contaminated” blood. Another tells me she will “free-birth” without midwifery or medical care.
During the Covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists distributed junk maps of Covid-19 cases connecting them to 5G mobile phone towers. As a result, I spent countless hours doing community outreach, health promotion work and endless individual consultations trying to debunk pseudoscience and explaining (often unsuccessfully) the risk-benefit ratios of vaccines. In the last year, we have seen outbreaks of pertussis, measles, chickenpox, hepatitis and influenza, often linked to pockets of vaccine refusal.
Medical doctors and scientists now face a barrage of anti-science, anti-medicine narratives, and it feels like we are losing the battle. We are no longer trusted instinctively. So how do we engage with people who mistrust us?
It is a heartfelt piece. I don’t doubt her sincerity. My answer to her question is also heartfelt and sincere: start by admitting what you, the doctors and the medical profession as a whole, did to lose so much trust.
Remember how so many of you said that complete social isolation was vital for the duration of the pandemic except for those attending Black Lives Matter protests? Remember how distinguished doctors, epidemiologists and virologists were denounced when they said that, for much of the population, the risk of harm from Covid-19 was less than the risk of harm from lockdown? Remember how you declared the theory that the Covid-19 coronavirus strain came from a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a racist conspiracy theory, and cheered when Facebook deleted posts that discussed it? Remember how you self-censored discussion even among yourselves of the side effects that the Covid vaccines, like all vaccines, have – thus degrading the system of reporting adverse reactions that was once universally understood to be a vital tool to improve the safety of medicines?
For the record, I have taken every vaccine offered to me, including the Pfizer and the Astra Zeneca Covid-19 vaccines, and I am happy with that decision. But the unquestioning faith I once had that I would be given all relevant information before I chose to accept any medical procedure has gone. Some of it departed alongside the faith that I would be given a choice at all. Such faith as I now have in the medical profession as a whole is in its residual ethics. Most doctors were trained in better times, and according to better precepts. I trust old doctors more than young doctors. Lest I offend any young doctors reading this, that’s still quite a lot of trust. It’s not that I think any significant number of doctors set out to harm people. It’s that I do think a significant number of doctors refused to consider many serious and well-founded policy and treatment proposals regarding Covid on no better grounds than that they might have helped Donald Trump’s electoral chances, and an even larger number never even got to hear about such proposals in the first place, except at second hand as the ravings of folk in tinfoil hats. These proposals were not necessarily correct. But excluding them from discussion for political reasons gnawed away at the edifice of trust in medicine.
And the gnawing persists. When termites infest a property, they eat the walls from inside, so that if you tap the walls they sound hollow. If all else is quiet you can even hear the rustle of tiny jaws directly. That is a metaphor for how millions of people feel about the house of medicine now: not that it has fallen down with a crash – it is still their shelter – but that the walls have hollow patches and that sometimes one hears a soft scratching noise . . . and if you tell the owners of the house about it, they say you are imagining things or just trying to make trouble.
The Guardian‘s (pre-moderated) comments burn with outrage at the medical misinformation that comes from religious people and right-wingers. At medical misinformation coming from left-wing New Age practitioners, not so much; and at medical misinformation coming from the medical profession itself and enforced by censorship, none at all. Maybe some comments that pointed out that the medical establishment itself had some responsibility for the loss of public trust in medicine were made, but the Guardian censored them so we’ll never know what they said.
“Oxford and Cambridge to move away from ‘traditional’ exams to boost results of minorities”, the Telegraph reports.
Top universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been given the green light to move away from “traditional” exams in a bid to boost the grades of minority groups and poorer students.
The elite British institutions could move towards more “inclusive assessments” such as open-book tests or take-home papers instead of in-person, unseen exams in an effort to close the grades gap.
However, the plans have been criticised for potentially “dumbing down” university courses for students.
The approach was unveiled under proposals, known as Access and Participation Plans, which universities must release each year as per their registration conditions to show how they are helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As Katharine Birbalsingh – the head teacher of a very successful school most of whose pupils are from ethnic minorities – said, the idea that black and brown people cannot achieve unless we make exams easier is “utterly revolting racism”. For most of a lifetime, the educational establishment in the English-speaking world has been assiduous in keeping pupils from those groups they consider to be oppressed safe from the momentarily unpleasant experience of being corrected. No tests they might fail, no red ink on their work. Even the idea of the existence of objectively correct answers has been denounced, lest someone oppressed get the wrong answer and feel bad. With equal care, they are protected from ever seeing someone less oppressed get a better score than they did. The upshot has that these pupils have been kept safe from education.
Education should be a pleasant experience overall. Human beings, especially young human beings, love to learn. But in their own games, or when learning a subject they truly want to master, children do not flinch from putting themselves in positions where they might fail. They instinctively know that the route to success involves climbing over some jagged rocks. Unfortunately for most of my lifetime kindly teachers across the English-speaking world have striven to keep all children, but especially black and brown children, on the soft grass where nothing can hurt them – forever. Almost the only place in school where these children experience public failure is on the sports ground. Not surprisingly, sport is one of the few areas where disadvantaged children frequently grow up to succeed.
First it was just the kindergartens and the infant schools where the wee ones had to be kept happy all the time. Then it spread to secondary schools. Now the sweet-smelling fog has reached the colleges and the universities, where the students are – chronologically at least – adults.
“Now of course it’s true that the nature of home-schooling will vary family by family. That is precisely the point of it.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph, warning about the move by the UK government to try and severely curtail home-schooling, which he correctly identifies as a way to enforce ideological conformity on the education of the young – something that the Left (and sometimes also on the Right too) has long sought. Frost writers about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The Observer view on Labour’s plans to reform education is that the “government needs to go further on pay and workload if it is to retain high-quality teachers in schools”:
“. . . schools in England have been facing a worsening teacher for over a decade, and pupil to teacher ratios have risen, particularly in secondary schools. Last year, the teaching workforce grew by fewer than 300 teachers. Too few teachers makes it harder for those in the profession to do their jobs well – further adding to workload and behaviour management pressures, and undermining retention even more.”
I was once a teacher. I have been married to a now-retired teacher for decades. I have met a lot of teachers. The view of almost every teacher, and, equally relevantly, every former teacher that I have ever met was that pay and workload scarcely mattered in themselves. The pay is quite good. The uworkload for a conscientious teacher can be heavy during term time, but, as someone rightly points out every time teachers whinge about how long they spend marking homework and planning lessons, the workload is close to zero during school holidays. What really drives teachers out of the profession is the thing that the Observer editorial mentions as an afterthought, “behaviour management pressures”.
The House of Commons report to which the Observer article links says this:
Pupil behaviour
We recognise that teachers feel pupil behaviour has worsened in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic and we are concerned that this is driving teachers away from the profession as well as dissuading prospective teachers. Valuable work is now being done by Behaviour Hubs to help schools and teachers address pupil behaviour and we recommend that the Department expand this programme to increase capacity. The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance
I expect the work of Behaviour Hubs is of some value, like the work of the Behaviour Units, Behaviour Centres, and other Behaviour Things that preceded them over the decades. I truly admire those teachers who choose to deal with the most badly-behaved children, and spreading the word about better techniques can make some difference. But none of these initiatives solved the teacher retention crises of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or 2010s, as these Hubs will not solve the crisis of the 2020s.
As for “The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance”, I think it would be better if the Department reinforced the importance of dissolving ineffective partnerships. End them at the request of any party. If a so-called partnership between school, pupil and parent is not working, let it die. In no other area of life is an association maintained by force on one or more of the parties called a “partnership”.
In an ideal world, I would like that philosophy of voluntary association to apply across the education of all but the youngest children, but even in this world, it would do a hell of a lot of good for it to apply where the so-called partnership between school, parent and pupil is obviously a rotting corpse.
Pupils behave better if they know their schools can expel them for bad behaviour. We used to know this as a society, but the threat of expulsion has been neutered by making the process so difficult that schools instead strive to pass the bad kids around all the local schools like counterfeit money. Teachers behave better if they know their pupils can leave. Private schools still do know this, and self-employed teachers know it very well.
Most humans enjoy helping others to learn. Those who join the teaching profession do so because they want to do this good thing even more than most people do. But there can be no joy in teaching without a willing learner. It doesn’t have to be constant happy-smiley-type willingness for years on end, just a basic willingness to be there.
As a good libertarian, I feel I ought to like the emphasis that the Montessori method of education places on giving children maximum freedom. On the other hand, what I said on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 was – what is that word they used to use? – that’s it, right.
It’s been called discovery learning, experiential learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning and now (heaven help us) “constructivist instructional techniques”.
Whatever you call it, it gives worse results for most people most of the time than just telling them.
It would save you time to take my word for it, but, if you are so inclined, you can click on the link to my old blog to discover my reasons #1, #2, #3a, #3b and #0 for saying that teachers consistently overestimate the effectiveness of discovery learning. The individual links no longer work; you’ll have to scroll down. The process will be good for your soul.
So why am I sitting here wincing as I think about the Montessori method for the first time in decades?
Because of these three tweets that form part of a long thread by Samantha Joy, an advocate of the Montessori system. She writes,
How should we help young children develop positive social skills? The typical answer:
>put children in groups
>enforce norms like sharing
>encourage collaborative play
But this approach *backfires*… often tragically. Montessori saw this, and developed a new approach:
Most people think the focus for ages 0-6 should be socializing.
Learning can wait, they say.
This is the time to meet other children and do things together: play outside, pretend, build things.
There’s just one problem with this strategy …
young children, by and large, aren’t all that interested in one another.
They *prefer* to work and play alone.
True? Or just true for the sort of anti-social little freaks who were destined to still own the set of felt tip pens* they got at the age of ten half a century later?
*Most of which still write. That’s because I put the lids on properly.
“‘He lashed out. He was scared’: the fight to save vulnerable UK children from being kicked out of school”– this Observer report by Anna Fazackerley on how two hundred lawyers “have come together to challenge a wave of discriminatory exclusions” focuses on the “unmet needs” of children who are excluded and the worry felt by their parents. Early on, we are told the story of an eleven year old boy called Sam:
His mother alerted the school that Sam would need support before going into class. But, two hours later, when she returned to check on him, she could hear a child screaming. It was Sam.
“As I went in, he was completely disregulated and surrounded by five adults and he collapsed on the floor. No one had called me,” she said.
The school suspended Sam for five days while they formulated a plan to manage his needs – something she was later told was unlawful. Having tried to push her to accept a move to a pupil referral unit, which caters for children who cannot attend mainstream school, she was then sent the notice of permanent exclusion.
After three months at home, Sam was enrolled at a new school, but it did not review whether he needed any additional support. His grades and class reports were good but, halfway through the year, a girl who had been bullying Sam pushed him and he shoved her back. The school permanently excluded him for assaulting a teacher who then physically restrained him.
“When I got there, he was in floods of tears,” his mother said. “He had lashed out but not in anger. He was scared.”
Maybe he wasn’t the only scared one.
These days one often sees signs displayed in hospitals, in government offices and on public transport that say something like “Assaults on our staff will not be tolerated”. I was tempted to ask rhetorically, “Should not the same apply to teachers?” and end the post there. But there is a complication that will be familiar to libertarians: even the gentlest, most loving childcare inevitably involves adults using force on children. Before Sam assaulted the teacher, the teacher physically restrained Sam. Am I OK with that?
Broadly, yes. I had hoped to quote one or two of Brian Micklethwait’s writings on this paradox but have not been able to find the pieces I was thinking of. Never mind. Brian was the last man to worry about someone else making his argument their own.
For babies and small children, it is inevitable that they spend almost their entire lives being physically moved around by adults. They are fed, dressed, cleaned and generally sustained by beings bigger and stronger than they are, without anyone so much as getting their signature on a consent form. Then, if all goes well, as they grow older children gain more and more independence until they reach adulthood. In a sane world, schools for children of about Sam’s age would be half-way houses to independence where the necessity of rules being enforced by, well, force, was acknowledged but not something one had to think about minute by minute. All but the very worst of workplaces and other places where adults spend their time are like this. A great deal of the unpleasantness of school life derives from the fact that, in contrast, they are places where force is omnipresent. The least bad part of this is that for 90% the time the children cannot choose what they do – after all, much of adult life also involves spending time on tasks one would not do for pleasure. The most bad part of it, the horrifying part of it, is that they cannot choose to leave. They cannot get away from bullies. Some of those bullies are fellow-pupils, some are teachers. Both categories of bullies are often bullied in their turn. They probably became bullies in the first place out of fear. Frightened people lash out, as Sam did. One ought to be able to spare some compassion for Sam and those like him; to acknowledge that in a better environment he might not have turned violent. It remains a hard fact that in this timeline the continued presence of violent pupils like Sam in a school makes life a misery for other pupils and teachers. It remains a fact that state schools are, on average, places of greater misery than private schools because when state schools try to protect their staff and students by expelling violent pupils they are hamstrung by the likes of the two hundred benevolent lawyers in the School Inclusion Project.
You might be wondering, where does all this come from, can we blame those French thinkers? Is Foucault to blame? No, not really.
It’s the American University that has whipped up this dish, and it all really started to take shape and form in the early nineties, so about 40 years ago. The second generation “thinkers” then were building on Neo-Marxist and Post-Modern ideas sourced from the 60s and 70s, but those ideas would not have had the influence they have today without a second and third generation of thinkers and professors in American Universities that have ended up influencing a generation that has then gone out into the world and redesigned that world along those ideas. We are all paying the price today.
The right way to think about the American University as a generator and propagator of these ideas is the way that you already think about The Madras as a potentially indoctrinating breeding ground for Islamic Extremism.
There is no easy way to say this but Yale, Stanford Harvard and a long list of other “prestigious” universities have become (or at the most generous “include”) Madrassas of dangerous indoctrination pumping out brainwashed graduates that are disconnected from what is true and disconnected from reality…they have “their” reality, “their” truth.
Remember, what comes out of the American Madrassa gets exported to the rest of the world, with Australia (America-Lite) being a primary importer.
– Unbekoming
“University of Oxford museum hides African mask that ‘must not be seen by women’”, reports Craig Simpson in the Telegraph:
A University of Oxford museum will not display an African mask because the culture which created it forbids women from seeing it.
The decision by the Pitt Rivers Museum is part of new policies in the interest of “cultural safety”.
The museum has also removed online photos of the mask made by the Igbo people in Nigeria, which would originally have been used in a male-only ritual.
Masks are a central part of Igbo culture, and some masquerade rituals carried out by men wearing the ceremonial objects are entirely male-only and carried out in secret away from female spectators.
The new policy, a first for a major British collection, comes as part of a “decolonisation process” at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is aiming to address a collection “closely tied to British Imperial expansion”.
I am not necessarily against the curators’ decision. Most of us can think of items that are literally or metaphorically sacred to us that we would not wish to see displayed to the crowd. What I do not understand is why the desire of long-dead Igbo men to conduct certain rituals away from the female gaze is to be respected, but the desire of living British men to do the same is to be scorned.
Related post: In defence of all-{insert variable of choice} clubs
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