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Melanie Phillips' peerless blog. Read, and learn.
Daniel Finkelstein's Times Comment Central
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Lots of interesting nibbles - and a ruthless swatter of economic gibberish.
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Must-read left of centre blog from writers who understand the threat to the West.
Clive Davis
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Centre for the New Europe
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| January | 21 |
| 2007 |
There are two must-read pieces today. First, the always excellent Niall Feguson has a superb piece on the state of British education and why it matters (do read the whole thing):
[I]n education, as Kingsley Amis famously observed, more can mean worse. The more that has been spent on British secondary education, the worse the outcomes have been. According to an OECD study published in 2005, fully a quarter of the UK population aged between 25 and 34 are "low-skilled" in terms of their educational attainment — five times the proportion in Japan.Even more damning statistics are produced by the US Institute for Education Sciences, which regularly surveys international standards in mathematics. In its most recent assessment, British 14-year-olds were out-performed by their contemporaries in 17 other countries. The average score in Singapore was 605, in Korea 589 and Hong Kong 586. In England and Scotland it was 498. In Western Europe, only Norwegians and Italians did worse.
...It really is a flat world, in the sense that the global labour market is an increasingly level playing field, with fewer and fewer barriers preventing Asian workers from competing across the whole range of tradable activities. That spells disaster for the unskilled in the West. In Britain today, fully 40 per cent of adults who left school at the earliest opportunity are now unemployed.
On the other hand, it emphatically isn't a flat world in terms of the returns on intelligence and education. The smart and the skilled get paid vastly more than the dumb and the dropouts, regardless of whether they come from Birmingham or Bangalore. Almost everywhere the story is the same: even as Asian average incomes catch up with Western average incomes, the distribution of income within both Asian and Western economies is becoming less equal. Paradoxically, greater international equality translates into greater national inequality. Once, only a handful of Asians were richer than poor Brits. Pretty soon, millions will be.
Then a worrying piece by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky on electoral fraud:
Three things are clear: first, there are problems of electoral malpractice in a considerable number of British cities. Second, there is a need for far closer examination of the problems (starting with the collection of detailed statistics). Mawrey is right: the political culture of complacency and denial must end. Third, good citizenship and social inclusion are not achieved by making voting procedures so simple that they are wide open to fraud. Increasing voter turnout at all costs is an unwise policy.
MessageSpace
Yes, good piece on British education, as if we still needed convincing of this.
"Good piece on British education"? Not so. Like literally every item I have read on British education since I had the brief experience of serving as a trainee teacher six years ago, it does not have the courage to cover the really essential point. In every school I visited, and every class I attended, it quickly became evident that even the most dedicated and competent teachers (that is, those chosen to train the next generation - and, in my experience, usually chosen well) were letting about a half-dozen children in each class do exactly as they pleased throughout the lesson, in order to be able to go on teaching to the majority of children who actually wanted to learn. These children grew up without any kind of learning; this is where the Jade Goodys come from. Work it out. If every class in most State schools (say even only a half of the total) allows half a dozen children to remain untaught, and if every class has, on average, twenty-four children, that is one quarter of one half of the total input getting no benefit from their time in school at all. This is a statistically highly significant percentage - one eighth, and I am being conservative, of all the children in a year. Add to this that these walking towers of ignorance affect even those of their peers who do commit themselves to a certain amount of study, bringing down the level, occasionally interrupting lessons, bullying and being bullied.
How is this remedied? In my view, all the peaceful conciliation techniques are being exhausted. Today's teacher is a trained entertainer, aware at all times of the need to keep his audience (the children) interested, to convey information in the liveliest fashion possible. Even so, he cannot reach all the children. This is a defiant minority, and it has to be compelled. Quite simply, punishment, including corporal punishment, must be brought back to the schools; and the teachers must be protected against all attempts to prevent them from using reasonable force.
Finally, the parents must, if necessary, be forced to accept this. There is a minority of obstreperous parents who bring up their children in an atmosphere of thuggishness and defiance, and who view anyone who would compel their little darlings as a natural enemy. These people must learn that there is no prize in defying authority - alas, at present there is.