At an Intelligence Squared debate last week, Professor Mary Beard gave some indications of how the teaching of languages has suffered in state education.

- Fewer than 500 state schools now offer any classical languages and much of this teaching is offered in the 'twilight' hours after most classes have finished.

- The government is not providing enough training of classics teachers to replace the ones who will retire.

- The numbers taking French GCSE have fallen by 100,000 since 2004.

- There is some difficulty in finding sufficient translators for the London Olympics.

- Generally speaking she was Left-wing and disliked private schools but she wished them to survive because they were the place in which language and classics teaching were continuing.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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Here is part of talk I gave at the Cato Institute in Washington last year.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Welfare benefits

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Why do the people who frame the curriculum and GCSEs want to take out the tough, scientific content (see entry below)?

It certainly suits politicians to make exams easier to pass. Higher grades give the impression of successful education. Also if they make science exams easier, they calculate that more children will chose them than otherwise. This is politically useful because it slows down any flight in state schools from hard subjects to soft ones. Politicians wish to slow down this flight because it reveals the way that state schools are underachieving and this reflects badly on them.

However, teachers would not - one hopes - want to be associated with such political calculations.

Some, though certainly not all, have come to think that teaching children to think about science - or other subjects - is more important than teaching them a body of specific knowledge. On the surface, the idea has its appeal. I remember when I was compelled to learn Latin that the justification most frequently given for the task was that it would help me to think logically. It is also true that knowledge that is considered useful, important or up-to-date keeps on changing. But in most subjects, there is plenty of knowledge that does not change and more still that will not change for a few decades, at least.

But how did many teachers come genuinely to think that rigorously learning a body of knowledge, particularly in science, is of secondary importance?

Did it start with some theorist of teaching who then got taken up by politicians because they could see the ideas would help them? What were the mechanics of the dismantling of educational standards?

How important was the idea that tough science (and other subjects) are elitist because they are too difficult for less bright students? For those who feel like that, the appeal of the idea of teaching more accessible stuff about evaluation and problem-solving would be strong. But what they did not consider properly was how the clever state school students would be disadvantaged. With the debased science GCSEs, those bright state school students have their career prospects severely damaged.

This is a re-edited version of an entry posted earlier today. My apologies for re-writing it:

Origin of the idea: "teach skills, the knowledge will be irrelevant".

Unfortunately the dominant mode of thinking is that, if the argument makes sense, it is probably true. There is far too little "critical thinking" and use of evidence.

After hearing this line from the ATL union official a few years ago, I went through the GCSE science curriculum to see what could be "out of date" in 20 yrs.

Atoms? Elements? Cells? Expansion? Metals? Energy transfer? You get the picture: none of the basics will change. It's science!!! Its the way we explain the natural world.

On top of this there is clear and irrefutable evidence that trying to teach context-free "skills" does not work. They need to be learned in one context before they can be transferred somewhere else.

I detect an increase in "helplessness" from pupils who claim that the reason for their low marks is "the teacher was rubbish" rather than "I did no work".

I did not expect the dependence culture to get all the way down to the learning process - but I now meet so many "learning disabled" (backed up by "my rights" parents) I despair for them.

Mike

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education

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Now I have belatedly learned how to upload some videos, and for anyone who missed it, here is the classic speech from Dan Hannan that was an internet phenomenon:

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Politics

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The excellent letter below illustrates how state schools now reduce social mobility. The state schools are not allowed to take IGCSEs. But only the IGCSEs offer a rigorous training in science. So only those who have studied the sciences at private schools are in a good position to go on to do well in science A levels, get a good science degree and a science career. And it is not only careers in science per se that are affected but also science-based careers such as medicine. Whole swathes of bright, potential scientists at state schools are handicapped in their chances of getting good science-based careers. It is shocking. And these lives are hampered to suit the views of Left wing politicians.

Fact-free science lessons

SIR – The Government has spent huge sums on a laudable campaign to increase state-school students’ interest in becoming scientists and engineers, while simultaneously distorting the curriculum to make it more “relevant” in ways that make it more difficult to learn enough science to follow it as a career.

Content has been steadily removed in the name of accessibility. That which remains is largely chosen to illustrate wider “societal” themes, without sufficient regard to the theoretical coherence of the science being taught. I am head of science at a comprehensive school and was told at a training day: “It’s all about skills now. They [the students] can look up facts on Google.” Would you want to be treated by a doctor who has spent five years honing evaluation skills instead of mastering tedious old anatomy facts?

The International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE), which does retain a coherent structure, isn’t offered in state schools as it doesn’t conform to the “Science Subject Criteria” (the very cause of the problem). Calls to offer the IGCSE are denounced as “elitist”.

A two-tier system is returning to British education. Are we happy with private-school students learning about electromagnetism, while their peers at comprehensives have to grapple with identifying “the use of evidence and creative thinking by scientists in the development of scientific ideas”?

Andrew Urwin
Umberleigh, Devon

The letter was in today's Telegraph.
(You have to scroll down to find it.)
See also this previous article on science GCSEs.

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The disclosure that just two GPs are available for out-of-hours duty in the county of Suffolk is the inevitable consequence of the contract with family doctors negotiated by the Health Department in 2004. Such sparse coverage is now commonplace throughout rural England

From an editorial in the Telegraph on GP out-of-hours services.

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Below is an attack on Alastair Campbeel by Michael Howard which is of lasting importance. I suspect that Alastair Campbell was a key player in the undermining of the independence of the civil service and laid siege to the independence of newspaper comment, too, during the time when he had some power. It is one of the worst things done during the Labour administration. Previous Labour administrations may have been misguided but they were run by decent men and women who generally upheld standards of public life. As Howard says, Campbell attacked these standards and Blair knew what was going on and so also bears responsibility for it.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Politics

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Kevin McCloud's experience of staying with a family in an Indian slum made fascinating television when I caught up with it last Saturday night. One of the most interesting aspects of it was that it challenged whether 'slum clearance' and new public housing leads to improvements in the lives of those concerned.

He found much to be appalled by in the slums but also much to admire and even envy.

Plague, cholera and TB abound, but its citizens are among the happiest and most beautiful I’ve seen.

This entirely echoes the discoveries of researchers in Britain when they got close to the removal of so-called slums here and their replacement by planned, architect-designed council housing. Michael Young, who had written the 1945 Labour Party election manifesto, joined by Peter Wilmott studied a slum in great detail and then also a council estate. They found that contact with extended families fell by as much as 75 per cent after the move to the estate.

George Orwell, another Left-winger, when he lived among the poor also found that much was lost when people moved to council estates. What are the most important things? I suspect that two are among them: a strong sense of community and family and a sense of being responsible for one's own actions. The idea of community and the benefit it gives is well known. What is less commented on is the impact of independent action. I struggle even to find a language to write about it.

It is illustrated at its best by the daughter of the family in the overcrowded, rat-infested slum building where McCloud stayed. She emerged looking immaculate each morning in her school uniform. She was evidently bright and one believed she would succeed when she said she aimed to be a lawyer. How did she come to be ambitious and work hard? Because she knew very clearly that if she did not work, she would never emerge from the slum and grim. long hours of manual labour. Compare her with the offspring of a household in Britain where no adult works but the flat or house is paid for by the state and they get income support. The children learn that you can get a tolerable life style without really bothering and if anything is wrong, in the house or the education or healthcare they get, it is all down to someone else. Life it not what they make it. It is what the state makes it. That takes away from them a self-respect and a sense of being able to make a difference to their own lives.

"Slumdog Millionaire" was a superbly made film and one can understand the power of the story of the TV quiz changing everything in the hero's life. But the more important story is of the thousands of girls like the one in Kevin McCloud's film who was going to change her life through a decision in her own mind to work. The state changes the condition of people's minds. That is the way it tends to do the greatest damage.

ps The name that was not mentioned, as far as I know, in the programme was Hernando de Soto who is a leader in this field and who has argued that the key thing for economic growth is to give property rights to slum dwellers.

pps Much more about the damaging effects of council housing - and their possible causes - is in the housing chapter in The Welfare State We're In.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Housing

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