Last week in class I asked my students where we had all learned that it is illegal to kill people. [UPDATE 1/27/04 10:30am CST: Since the comments have gotten long and some may miss this clarification: this is not the exact wording of what I had said in class. I said something along the lines of “not supposed to kill people”. My question was not about legalities it was more general.] (Let’s set aside for the moment why this question would come up in a grad seminar on the Social Implications of Info and Communication Technologies.. the question seemed to make sense at the time.:) When I posed the question I wasn’t sure about my own answer to it so I was especially surprised when I saw that most students (of the eight in this class) had an immediate response: church.
From the category archives:
Education
Non-UK readers might not be aware of this, but there is the most almightly kerfuffle going on in the UK at the moment on a subject which I strongly suspect Americans would regard it as bizarre to be having a debate about. We’re all throwing beer bottles and calling each other fascists over the question of … whether different universities should charge different fees. Why? Well, for one thing, Blair and his government promised us in their last manifesto that they weren’t going to do this, and apparently some of us still care about the government’s habit of allowing us to go into the ballot chamber believing things that aren’t true (by the way, where the hell are our oversized pint glasses and longer opening hours?). But there is another, more fundamental reason; a lot of people believe that this is a fundamentally inegalitarian measure. And on my analysis (though not that of most other economists) they are right. Read on …
I see from comments to “another thread”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001197.html that Daniel is preparing to argue against the British government’s case for top-up fees for universities. A good thing that we don’t have a CT party-line! Actually, I’m not sure I would be in favour of them either if the choice were between the current proposals and any alternative that I’d care to formulate for an ideal world. But that isn’t the case. British universities have been starved of resources for over two decades, academic pay is extremely poor (especially at the start) and we’ll face a real difficulty in recruiting people to teach some subjects if things don’t change (Daniel — fancy a job an a junior econ lecturer in a British university?). So since the extra money we need isn’t going to come from increasing taxation and isn’t going to come from a graduate tax (both of which I’d be perfectly happy with), and since the likely outcome of a government defeat is further drift and starvation — I hope Blair wins this one.
The New Statesman (subscription required) just published this article about why school vouchers would not have a beneficial impact in Britain. I wrote it in a fit of irritation after hearing the know-all Melanie Phillips on the radio expressing her support for vouchers, and invoking the Swedish and Dutch experiences. The Swedish voucher scheme has been evaluated positively (and frequently) by Bergstrom and Sandstrom. But it is tiny, and if you read the version of their study put out by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation you’ll find no evidence of improved scores, and that it is regulated in a way that is unimaginable in the US or UK. The Dutch experience is very different — most children attend private schools on what is effectively a voucher system, but the State subjects all schools to heavy regulation, and the vouchers are highly progressive (schools get paid much more for low-income kids, kids from homes with low levels of parental education, kids from non-Dutch speaking homes). The Netherlands is consistently a pretty high performer in international comparisons of children’s achievement. But there is no particular reason to think this is due to their having private schools. The virtual elimination of child poverty, for example, might be responsible. My response to Phillips on the comparison is this: you give us high marginal tax rates, low levels of inequality and child poverty, etc, and I’ll give you progressive school vouchers.
Anyway, that’s the background — the article ignores the other Northern Europeans, and concentrates on the differences between the US and the UK. Here it is:
Kevin Drum has a piece of advice for composition students:
“ignore anyone who tells you to write like you talk”
I certainly agree with him that if someone can’t construct a simple English sentence without making two grammatical howlers, you probably shouldn’t listen to them any more. If someone were to instruct you to “write as you speak”, then there might be some point in having a pedagogical debate, but that’s presumably another matter.
Update: Kevin also suggests that “The meaning of a word is never unclear because an apostrophe has been misused”. Its not the daftest claim I’ve seen this week, but I think hell regret making it.
In my role as Adam Swift’s unpaid publicist I want to point out this piece in The Telegraph (you have to register, but its free, quick, and easy, and there’s lots of other good stuff). Swift explains — to Telegraph readers, remember — why the standard arguments in defence of private schools don’t work; either because they appeal to false values, or because they appeal to correct values but are beside the point. A great challenge to private schools — and kudos to John Clare, the Telegraph education editor, for running it. (For Americans who don’t know it the Telegraph is the furthest right of the UK newspapers, so this is a particularly incendiary piece for it).
I’ve just given a talk on education and social justice over at our Graduate School of Education. It was a fairly low key affair, aimed at some graduate students with no prior knowledge of political philosophy (and one CT-reader, as it turned out). So I concentrated on elaborating Rawls’s principles of justice and explaining how they might or might not feed into debates on educational policy. (I was greatly helped in this by reading Adam Swift’s extraordinarily clear and well-argued “How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415311179/junius-21 . Even if you disagree with Swift, he’ll help you to sort out your own thinking.) The point of the talk wasn’t to say that Rawlsian principles mandate this or that solution, but rather to explore how they could inform policy arguments. One of the questions I had from the floor concerned the permissibility of home schooling. Here’s, roughly, what I said as an off-the-top of my head Rawlsian response.
I just learned (rather late) that this week’s Times Educational Supplement is carrying this Platform piece by me. Since I don’t have a subscription I can’t read it, but assume it is a nicely edited version of the following.
Hysterical use of language alert: “Rachel Cooper in the Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-10-04&id=3575 , reacting to the suggestion that British universities admit student from rough state schools with lower A-level scores than their peers from expensive private schools:
bq. Professor Schwartz is happily preparing the ground for a pogrom of the privileged children whose successful grades are the product not only of their hard work and ability, but also the school they attended.
Those pogroms aren’t what they used to be you know.
Stephen Pollard is often worth reading on education, though almost always wrong. Take his “latest post”:http://www.stephenpollard.net/001180.html (and article from Fabian Review) in which he attacks the British left’s skepticism about specialist schools. I’m on record as being skeptical about the particular version of specialization Pollard attacks, and also as favoring abolition of private and selective schools in the UK (not in the US), another position he attacks. I am also, unlike most people with my politics, a strong supporter of parental choice. But Pollard is not, it seems. He says that we should fund ‘whatever parents, not bureaucrats or politicians, want’. But he also wants schools (run, let me tell you, by government-funded bureaucrats) to be able to select students. So whose choice is decisive in where a kid goes to school? Not the parent’s choice, but the bureaucrat’s.
Musing further on whether technological development has helped or hindered thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, it occurs to me that the ideas of which I’m (rightly or wrongly) most proud have generally started not when I’ve been trying to do philosophy, but when I’ve been daydreaming about it whilst doing something else: travelling on a train, riding a bicycle, swimming or whatever. Purely mechanical and repetitive activities can been good for this too, though it is for good reason that there are a whole range of philosophical stories in which philosophers let cooking pots boil over, poison people or run them down whilst in the middle of their reveries.
Then there’s the business of writing, of trying to turn ideas into publishable prose. I’ve adopted two strategies for getting this done – both of which work very well, but eventually seem to run their course.
Over at Calpundit there’s an interesting discussion going on about the stresses that contemporary high school education places on students. In the comments Kevin expresses surprise (at least I think it’s surprise) that there are students who take two years of calculus in high school. I was rather surprised that this is surprising.
Where I went to school (in a fairly good suburban Catholic school in Melbourne) the median student did two maths courses with hefty calculus sections before graduation, and a sizable minority (about 15 to 20%) did four such courses. And I didn’t think this was particularly unusual. It certainly didn’t strike me as an outrageous amount for high school students to complete.
Because there’s next to no philosophy taught in high school in America (or Australia) I’ve never had to pay much attention to how much incoming college students have learned. So I’ve got no idea really how to compare American and Australian students. But my (quite possibly erroneous) impression is that the demands of American high schools are much less onerous than their Australian equivalents.
If you want some more specific info on what Australian high students are expected to know, here’s the final exams from the last three years given to final year high school students in Victoria. At my school 50% or more of graduating students would have taken the course ‘Maths Methods’, and another 15 to 20% the course called ‘Specialist Maths’. (Back in my day they had different names, but the syllabus doesn’t look to have changed dramatically.) Quickly flipping through the VCAA website it seems the numbers across the state for how many took those two courses are more like 40% and 15% respectively, and you can get some detailed reports on how they did here.