From the category archives:

Education

Shakespeare’s hysterectomies

by Harry on June 8, 2006

Richard Garner provides some nice howlers about Shakespeare from 14-year-olds. Worth showing to your own 14-yr-olds, perhaps:

a pupil dealt with Macbeth’s three witches and the appearance of the dagger used to kill Duncan by saying: “Macbeth had been smoking up and imaged them all.”

Macbeth, on hearing of his wife’s death, according to one pupil,”goes into full-on soliloquy mode”. Another says that the Scottish noble gets his revenge because “as my mum always sez ‘wot goes around comes around'”.

I’ve deliberately not quoted the best ones.

Academic pay and justice

by Chris Bertram on June 2, 2006

The main union representing academics in the UK is “in dispute with university employers at the moment”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/world/europe/01cnd-britain.html?hp&ex=1149220800&en=a1097c439ced02b9&ei=5094&partner=homepage, a dispute that is getting nastier all the time. Academics are refusing to assess students’ work, leading to the worry that many of them will be unable to get classified degrees this summer, and universities are now threatening to withhold a proportion of salaries (30 per cent in my institutions, up to 100 per cent in some other) as a penalty for partial breach of contract. I’m supporting the action as a loyal union member, but also because there is something right about the union case. However, as an egalitarian liberal, I can’t feel other that unhappy about some of the arguments put for higher academic salaries.

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Unfulfilled and Unfulfillable Ambitions

by Harry on May 29, 2006

I just finished Charles Murray’s new book, In Our Hands (I’ll post a review in a couple of weeks). Almost in passing he comments that:

Few teenagers finish high school already knowing what job will make them happy. Or they may think they know, but change their minds. This is as true of those who go to college as of those who do not — that’s why students change their majors so often. The process of finding a job that makes one happy often continues well into a person’s twenties, if not beyond.

Or they do know, but that job disappears! I didn’t know what an academic was till I went to college, and I only developed the ambition to be one after I had already become one (about 2 years into my current job). As a kid I had numerous possible jobs in mind, but after I learned that there were jobs other than teaching, only one was a really lasting ambition; I thought what I’d most like to do was make History programmes for the BBC schools radio service. I thought schools radio programmes were fantastic, good enough that I would sometimes try to stayhome from school in order to listen to them; and the history programmes, with dramatisations of everyday life in distant times, were the best of the lot. When I told my 9-year old daughter (who is, if anything, more of a radio fan that I am) she pointed out that she never listens to the radio at school and that, probably, nobody does. There is some stuff up on the BBC site, mainly loads of great archival clips, but not much in the way of actual programmes (and I had no interest in making any other kinds of radio programmes, still less TV progammes, even in History); forming that ambition in the 1960s was probably rather like forming the ambition to be a blacksmith just before the explosion in car and tractor ownership. What did you want to be before you became what you are; and does that job still exist?

Swimming with the fishes

by Chris Bertram on May 25, 2006

Blogger Alex Tingle has made enterprising use of Google Maps by designing “an overlay that shows the effects of the sea level rising”:http://flood.firetree.net/ . You can choose your level (up to 14m) and the map will show if a given bit of land would be underwater, and you can toggle between a map view (with placenames) and a satellite view, and you can zoom in and out. Of course, there are “lots of caveats”:http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/ since he’s ignored tides and flood defences, the data may be less that 100% accurate, etc. Still, it’s an entertaining and instructive bit of coding. I’m happy to report that my own house will remain dry (though I’ll be dead long before we get to 14m, anyway).

Subsidising Public/State Education

by Harry on May 24, 2006

Alison Wolf had an interesting piece on the consequences of women entering the workforce in April’s Prospect; May’s issue has responses by Rosemary Crompton and Pat Thane (all free I think) with a reply by Wolf in the June issue.

Wolf notes three supposedly neglected consequences:

Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. The second is the erosion of “female altruism,” the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies—particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick. The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.

Thane argues that women never had the similar experience that Wolf claims, and Crompton that neoliberalism, rather than any moral decline in women, is to blame for the deline in altruism. Wolf, I think, gives a pretty good account of herself in the reply.

You can make up your minds by reading the pieces. But I wanted to highlight a point not in dispute between the authors, and that I think Wolf and other people who think a good deal about education take for granted, but is not widely appreciated beyond that world; that restrictions on women’s participation in the labour market constituted a massive subsidy to public education:

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Liberalism and cultural disadvantage

by Chris Bertram on May 9, 2006

Since Harry “recommended”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/david-brooks-on-unequal-childhoods/ Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520239504/junius-20/102-8303545-9810554 I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about it and related issues. Two questions seem particularly pertinent to me: first, I think that Lareau’s demonstration that different parenting values and styles impact on children’s life chances has implications for the way in which political philosophers view the social world since it suggests that social outcomes are not just the result of the the “basic structure” of society, but also of ingrained habits and dispositions that are reproduced from one generation to another. Second, I think that fact, if true, poses a problem to liberals in that state action to overcome disadvantage-reproducing “habitus” requires the state to take a stand on the relative value of different conceptions of the good.

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Unintended Consequences

by Harry on April 28, 2006

David Beito reminds conservatives that they can’t always get what they want. Apparently Michelle Malkin complained vociferously about a math teacher at Bellvue Community College asking the following question:

“Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second.”

As a result of the campaign by Malkin and others the teacher was upbraided, the President of the College expanded the administrative staff dealing with diversity issues and the consequence of the whole thing has been a nice bounty for another diversity expert:

In response to Malkin’s campaign, Bellevue College not only has given the diversity police more monitoring authority over the curriculum and personnel evaluations, but will hire the notorious Glenn Singleton to conduct ideologically one-sided training for faculty and staff. Apparently, it will be mandatory.

(Readers with long memories will know that I am less than enamoured with Singleton’s trainings).

David Horowitz take note!

Is Teaching Patriotism Justified?

by Harry on April 24, 2006

Peter Levine has a post objecting to my argument in chapter 6 of On Education that schools should not teach patriotism. Peter makes the case for patriotism (understood as “love of country”) being a legitimate feeling in itself, and that it has various instrumental benefits, in particular that it encourages citizens to participate in the affairs of the nation, and that it can play an important role in moral development, training the sentiments to attach beyond the confines of those we are immediately attached to, and therefore helping our characters to learn the virtue of impartial justice. (See also, Sigal Ben-Porath’s nice new book, Citizenship under Fire : Democratic Education in Times of Conflict ). He then tackles two of the main arguments I make against teaching patriotism; that if its agencies promote love of country the state interferes with the development of authentic, legitimacy-producing, consent, and that using, say, History teaching to produce patriotism can conflict with other more academic goals of History teaching (like, e.g., getting the students to learn the truth!). He points out that learning the full truth about Rosa Parks’s involvement in politics can increase one’s sense of attachment to the nation (as it did his) and describes an interesting hands on history project with black students in a local school which was aimed in part at cementing their attachment to their own communities.

Peter’s post is lengthy (if concise), and rather than reproduce it I’ll assume that readers have followed the link and done the reading. Here’s my response:

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Peter Levine on School Reform

by Harry on April 12, 2006

Peter Levine has a nice essay on the contemporary school reform strategies being pursued at the Federal level in the US. Like me he is more well disposed to many of the levers being used than most of the left; as he says:

It’s important to think about incentives; that’s one of the main themes of modern social science. Asking schools to educate better (or differently) without changing their incentives won’t work.

But he points out what seems right once it is pointed out that many reformers evince a startling lack of interest in what is actually going on in schools:

Politicians and policymakers now show an extraordinary lack of interest in the “what” and “who” questions. They seem to agree with the economist Gary Becker about the futility of looking inside schools: “What survives in a competitive environment is not perfect evidence, but it is much better evidence on what is effective than attempts to evaluate the internal structure of organizations. This is true whether the competition applies to steel, education, or even the market for ideas.”

He goes on to criticise the reformers for, in effect, neglecting the collateral effects of their reforms. The incentives are changed, and the outputs that we measure (test scores) are not the only important, or even the most important, outputs of education. Many of the important outputs can only be assessed very roughly, and even to do it roughyl you have to look into the schools themselves (one of several good reasons why the UK has long used an inspection regime).

I’m not going to defend the reformers, because I think Peter is right; but I will note that most of the conservative opponents of reform (those who oppose the current battery of reform ideas without offering serious and thought-out alternatives), although they talk about what goes on in schools, do not often offer suggestions for how the democratic public that is supposed to deliberate about schools is going to find out anything about what goes on in them.

Right-wing bias in my classroom.

by Harry on April 6, 2006

I teasingly announced in my class on political policy and education reform that next week I shall be defending NCLB; “Brighouse defends Bush” was what I promised them. I told my family the same at the dinner table, and confronted the following rebuke by my 9 year old: “But dad, you’re not supposed to use your teaching to persuade your students about politics. That’s bias”. This was, I thought, a bit rich from someone who slavishly adopts her teacher’s views, and criticizes me every time I use the word “Indian” for what she regards as “using stereotypes”. But I agree with her basic point. So why is it ok for me to defend NCLB in class?

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Precocious 5 yr olds?

by Harry on April 6, 2006

I’ve been doing some research trying to find out the sizes of schools in different countries (I want to know the average size and the median size of schools — anyone know this for the US, UK, and a couple of other randomly chosen countries? Tell me below). Anyway, in the course of this I have found this document at the DFES site. Unless I am reading it wrong (which I must be, surely) it says that in 2004-5 there were sixty 5 year old children attending secondary schools in England and Wales, fifty 6 year olds, and 110 seven year olds (see table 2b on p. 9). “Secondary” includes schools “deemed middle” so the numbers of 8 year olds and above are less startling, but it is very odd, no? Can anyone explain this? Or am I going to be reduced to asking my dad?

On Education

by Harry on March 18, 2006

Here’s a bit of not-quite-shameless self-promotion. My new book On Education has been out for a couple of months in the US, and longer in the UK.

I started writing the book around the time I started blogging here at CT, and wrote it largely with a CT-type audience in my head — smart, intellectually serious, and interested, but not necessarily specialists, in Philosophy or in Education. Also a transatlantic audience; I try to develop arguments and positions that will be interesting and useful to people in both the countries I know well. It’s an attempt to argue for a (small l) liberal account of the purposes of education, and to explore some current policy controversies in the light of those purposes — viz, funding of faith schools, teaching patriotism, and citizenship education; all with the aim of being accessible to just about anyone who is interested in these things (unlike some of what I write). It’s not for me to say how good it is, but it was reviewed very favourably in the TES, and the nicest comment was reported to me by the spouse of a teacher who is reading it: “She’s had several moments where her reaction as been that as soon as you said something, she sees that it’s obviously right, had thought about similar things, but had never formulated the point quite that way.” That’s a large part of what I hoped to achieve in the first part of the book.

I can say that it has three unquestionable virtues. It is short, inexpensive, and it has a nice cover (according to my wife, not always my strongest point).

David Brooks has discovered Annette Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods. Through the miracles of modern blogging those of you who missed the column can read it in the body of Laura’s post on it. If, like Laura, you’re unnerved in some way by Brooks’s interpretation, don’t let that put you off the book. He is right about several things, the main one being that the book is brilliant, and should be read by just about anyone interested in family life. If you’re a teacher of poor children it will help you understand what’s going on in the children’s lives; if you’re a teacher of wealthy children it’ll probably confirm what you already know. If, like me, you’re a parent, it’ll help you reflect on your own situation. I don’t do anything radically different because of reading the book, but there are several ways in which I treat my children somewhat differently; in particular giving them more unsupervised time, and being (even) less interventionist when they are at odds with each other which, as if by magic, is much less often.

So what does Brooks get right?

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Well Thank Christ for That

by Kieran Healy on February 25, 2006


You Passed 8th Grade Math


Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Via Pharyngula. I have to say that having “None of the Above” as the second option out of four on Q7 caused me some concern.

Email from Students

by Kieran Healy on February 21, 2006

Dan Drezner “picks up”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002592.html on today’s NYT article about students emailing their professors in slightly weird ways. I thought the article ran together several different kinds of email oddness, some of which are more of a problem than others. One thing it didn’t mention: even though universities give students email addresses, it’s often the case that students won’t use them. Instead they prefer their free hotmail or yahoo or gmail addresses. No problem as such there, except that sometimes the students pick the kind of addresses for themselves that aren’t exactly professional-quality. Frankly it feels a bit odd to correspond with, e.g., missbitchy23 or WildcatBongs about letters of reference or what have you.

_Addendum_: One other thing: Assistant Professor of English Meg Worley’s rule that students must thank her if they receive a response because “One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back.” Very Foucauldian. Only not really. I think Erving Goffman makes the observation somewhere that the capacity to be gracious is actually an _aspect_ of being powerful, not something that’s _owed_ to the powerful. In any event, I thought it seemed a little snotty. _More_: In the comments thread to “this post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=149#comments by Tim Burke, Meg says she was misquoted, and the rules she says she talked to the reporter about are in fact quite reasonable. Stupid NYT.