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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Human beings are a strange lot. Despite being blessed (theoretically at least) with the powers of critical analysis they are nonetheless wont to form an unquestioning consensus around an idea that makes little sense and produces consistently awful outcomes. In fact, the awfulness of the outcomes seems to be directly proportionate to the dogmatic insistence that there cannot possibly be any other way of doing things.
I can think of no clearer example of this than compulsory education: a bad idea which is (by and large) badly implemented by the state in the form of day-prisons which act as a factory for producing unacceptably large numbers of witless, traumatised, ignorant, semi-literate teenagers and not an insignificant number of violent, anti-social thugs.
Nor is this a secret shame. Indeed, it is the subject of much national hand-wringing about ‘what to do’. And yet, if I dare to suggest that the whole idea of incarcerating children for at least 10 years and then indoctrinating them with the things that politicians think they should know about is both counterproductive and immoral and bound to produce very little except awful outcomes, the reaction I get is rather similar to the one I imagine I would get if I were to demand that all pregnant women be injected with rabies.
Still, the best way to deal with a ‘truth-that-dare-not-speak-its-name’ is to speak it; often and boldly. That is why we need press releases like this one from the Libertarian Alliance:
“State schooling is an instrument of ruling class control. It is a means by which ideologies of obedience are imposed on the young.
State schools have always encouraged intellectual passivity and trust in the authorities. In the past generation, they have begun also to celebrate illiteracy, innumeracy and a general ignorance of the world. Add to this endemic bullying and temptations to unwise experimenting with sex and recreational drugs, and we have in state schooling a comprehensive absence of what used to be meant by education.
Rising truancy levels are to be welcomed. They show that increasing numbers of the young are withdrawing from the process of mass brainwashing. The young may not yet be expressing positive discontent with the corporatist police state New Labour and the Conservatives have made for us. But they are beginning to vote with their feet.
While the Libertarian Alliance does not encourage breaches of the criminal law, even if the law happens to be pointless or malevolent, we do look forward to a time when state schooling will be as dead an institution as the workhouse and the debtor’s prison.”
And when that day comes, human beings (being a somewhat strange lot) will be disinclined to recall or even believe in a time when there was a consensus around state education.
On page 31 of the August edition of the BBC History magazine, Mervyn Benford writes that, in Britain, “it was the demands of industrialisation that made the government educate the masses” an interesting statement considering that the industrial revolution occurred before even the tiny government subsidy to education in 1833. Benford goes on to write that, in 1862, “just 1 in 20 children went to school” – an absurd statement of the sort that E.G. West exposed more than forty years ago in Education and the State.
An historian should not say to themselves “I will pretend that every child who has not been to school for X number of years, without a break, has never been to school”. This is ‘history’ as in “first there was darkness, but then the state moved into the darkness and said let there be light”. As Ludwig Von Mises (and many other people) have pointed out, it is not the most stupid students or the most lazy (not always the same people of course) who become collectivists – on the contrary it is often intelligent and hardworking students (whether children or adults), people who seek out knowledge.
For the wells of knowledge have been poisoned. The above is one example, but it is one example from a legion. A child or an adult who seeks knowledge from the media or the ‘education system’ is betrayed.
Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:
David Ashley, headmaster of Greenslade primary, says that pupils who bring in packed lunches “are allowed chocolate on a biscuit but not a Mars bar”. If such sweeties are spotted, parents are called in for a quiet word.
At Charlton Manor primary, the head, Tim Baker, says: “Children get stickers for healthy boxes . . . If a child brings in a chocolate bar, we take it out of the lunchbox and give it back to the parent at the end of the day.” Pupils give each other away, he confides: “They say, ‘Miss, he’s got sweets in his box’.”
Perhaps the scariest thing about the article from which that comes is the vaguely approving tone. Here is information about what is being done, no questioning that it needs and should have government attention.
So I need to try hard to make this particular grammatical error far fewer often. I must write “less” on less occasions, and “fewer” fewer infrequently. It’s the fewest I can do. But realising precisely when to use “less” and when to use “fewer” remains fewer than obvious to me. Personally I blame my primary school teachers. If they’d wasted fewer time teaching me gorgeous italic handwriting (which is fewer than usefewer in this digital age) then I might have picked up more of the key rules of grammar instead. But one can’t improve one’s English unfewer one’s mistakes are identified. That’s why I’ve been much too carefewer on countfewer occasions in the past. Sorry, it’s all been mindfewer thoughtfewerness on my part. Bfewer you all for pointing out my linguistic reckfewerness. I recognise now that my writing has been fewer than perfect, and I’ve learnt my feweron. But don’t expect less mistakes overnight. Quite frankly I still couldn’t care fewer.
– diamond geezer
You know that this will result in less safety for the child, greater tyranny from ‘experts’ interfering in family life for any number of arbitrary reasons relating to targets ‘not met’ and could present the death-knell for home-schooling:
Changes being introduced since Victoria Climbie’s death from abuse include a £224 million database tracking all 12 million children in England and Wales from birth. The Government expects the programme to be operating within two years.
But critics say the electronic files will undermine family privacy and destroy the confidentiality of medical, social work and legal records.
Doctors, schools and the police will have to alert the database to a wide range of “concerns”. Two warning flags on a child’s record could start an investigation.
There will also be a system of targets and performance indicators for children’s development. Children’s services have been told to work together to make sure that targets are met.
This is the age of the database and the state loves them. Why does it love them? Because it reverses the roles of ruler and ruled in all matters. Dr. Eileen Munro of the London school of Economics begins to understand:
“They include consuming five portions of fruit and veg a day, which I am baffled how they will measure,” she said. “The country is moving from ‘parents are free to bring children up as they think best as long as they are not abusive or neglectful’ to a more coercive ‘parents must bring children up to conform to the state’s views of what is best’.”
How long before our children wear electronic tags for security and the monitoring of best practice, attendance at a state recognised school, and ironing out the anarchy that we used to call ‘play’?
The Libertarian Alliance is highlighting the disgraceful way Belgium has been trying to intimidate people who hold politically incorrect views. Put an article up that the powers-that-be do not like and they will order you to take it down or face prosecution. But then what can you expect from a country which simply bans established political parties they dislike?
Support the right to home school your children? Advocate the right to self-defence? Want to express your views about Islamic culture? Prepare to be criminalised by the Belgian state.
I had not heard about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco until I read about it on Natalie Solent’s blog. If, like me, you have not been keeping up with statist nonsense out of the Pacific North-West of the United States, the Seattle Public Schools administration defined cultural racism thusly:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers…
Following much-merited riducule from bloggers and exposure in the media, the Seattle Public Schools district has beat a hasty retreat. However, we know that they will be back, with a similar sort of attempt to smear their political opponents.
Natalie Solent made the point:
The policy decision that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” constituted racism came to my ear like a little echo of the draft European Constitution: an attempt to build in a left-wing position without going to the trouble of arguing for it. Under this definition pretty any student daring to defend Republican ideas could have been accused of racism. And that was the idea. It was all about power.
So anyone that subscribes to an individualist philosphy of any kind is clearly on notice; left-wing statists will continue to try to use intellectual gymnastics like this to try to silence Republicans, libertarians, Conservatives or anyone else opposed to their agenda. The racist smear is ideal for this.
Part of the point of Samizdata.net is to counteract nonsense like this. on the sidebar it says what we are about:
A blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective. 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.
“developing the social individualist meta-context for the future” means, in part, creating an intellectual climate where nonsense like that peddled by the Seattle public schools board is treated with the laughable contempt that it deserves.
It is true that we have a long way to travel, but every day has its own task.
While reading about the Seattle Public Schools fiasco, I also spotted this op-ed by Andrew Coulson, who made a very good point about public education in general.
But this is still a free country. Thanks to our (ostensibly racist) regard for individual liberty, Seattle Public Schools board members and officials are free to adopt whatever definitions of racism they choose. It is inherently divisive, however, for an official government school system to promote one ideology over another.
Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.
Whenever there is a single official school system for which everyone is compelled to pay, it results in endless battles over the content of that schooling. This pattern holds true across nations and across time. Think of our own recurrent battles over school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, the teaching of human origins, the selection and banning of textbooks and library books, dress codes, history standards, sex education, etc. Similar battles are fought over wearing Islamic headscarves in French public schools and over the National Curriculum in England.
There is an alternative: cultural détente through school choice.
Historically, societies have suffered far less conflict when families have been able to get the sort of education they deemed best for their own children without having to foist their preferences on their neighbors.
Some people fear that unfettered school choice would Balkanize our nation. Their concern is commendable but precisely backward. The chief source of education-related tensions is not diversity; it is compulsion. Why is there no cultural warfare over the diverse teachings of non-government schools? Because no one is forced to attend or pay for an independent school that violates their convictions.
Read the whole thing.
With a monopolistic provider, divided into a number of exam boards, and facing the requirement of meeting the targets set by the government, the A-level is no longer perceived as the de facto ‘gold standard’. Now that the anecdotal tales of remedial lessons in grammar for first year students, and bullet point answers, private schools are searching for alternatives:
One of the most damning criticisms is that pupils can gain top grades in the exams by providing only “bite-sized” paragraphs of information or bullet points.
A grade has risen to 22.8 per cent, up from 11.9 per cent in 1991.
Some questions even tell candidates what they should mention in their answer. For instance, an English literature A-level question from a 2003 paper, in which pupils are asked to comment on a passage in Othello, goes on to say “in the course of your answer, look closely at the language, tone and imagery of the dialogue and comment on what the passage suggests about attitudes to Othello.”
A group of private schools and Cambridge Universities International Examinations are constructing a new exam, the Pre-U, based upon stronger syllabi and ensuring academic rigour through the teaching of essay techniques. The centralised state sector is unable to innovate and set up a new examination system due to the demands of the government for greater control over the education system. They can prevent students stuck with state schooling from participating in dangerous ‘improvements’:
While the Pre-U will be available to state schools, they will effectively be barred from taking it up because it is unlikely to be included on the Government’s list of accredited qualifications.
Some state schools already complain bitterly that they cannot offer international GCSEs, which many believe are superior to normal GCSEs because they do not include coursework.
However, this new examination has stirred the civil servants to lift a pencil:
The criticism has led the Government to consider including tougher questions in A-level papers as part of its secondary education reforms, from 2008.
Would it not be a fitting amendment for the Tory party to champion the freedom to choose examinations, either at a parental or at school level? Perhaps, if the majority of parents vote for the ‘Pre-U’ or International GCSEs, the school should be forced to honour their wishes.
The frankly shocking discovery that this blog is being used as an educational aid for A-Level politics students is proof, if proof were ever needed, that state education is failing our children.
– Guido Fawkes yesterday (knowing that no-one will agree)
Tony Blair’s weak and rather feeble effort to give a tincture of independence to state schools – arguably none, in reality – was only pushed through in the House of Commons last night because of support from the Conservatives, as this BBC report and others have stated. Dozens of Labour MPs, outraged at the very idea of schools loosening any controls from the State, rebelled. The Labour Party, having kept its mouth tightly shut in some ways while Blair sought to pass himself off as a pale Tory, is getting increasingly stroppy. The Iraq war clearly has had something to do with it, but there seems to be a sort of natural life cycle with Prime Ministers. As the years go by, and enemies are made, MPs passed over for promotion, the groupings of malcontents increases. It seems rather odd that Blair should suffer such a blow from his backbenchers on what is in fact hardly a radical education bill.
The irony of course is that Blair continues to be fixated by the career and achievements of Margaret Thatcher, a true radical in some ways with some significant achievements to her credit. Blair talks a good game on radicalism, as they say in sport, but delivery is often way short. His achievement, if we can call it that, has been a sustained and deep assault on the network of checks and balances that constrain State power, in particular, his determined assault on the English Common Law.
My bet is that Gordon Brown will be Prime Minister in 12 months from now. Any takers?
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. The opponents of choice and higher standards in schools definitely deserve a Saturday detention.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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