Making Sense of China

I feel at home in China, because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near –      ………………………………………………………………………………………..Stanley Spencer

In the playground of a Chinese private school, a very young girl asked a very important question. I could tell it was important by the serious expression on her face and the fact she repeated it several times, obviously unable to understand the ridiculous idea that I spoke no Chinese at all and insisting on a response. I took her to my translator and discovered her question to be “what is that stuff on your face and can I touch it?” Beards are not common China and foreigners of any sort are rare in that particular corner. After receiving permission and conducting a brief, brave exploration, she departed satisfied. As did the gaggle of young boys who followed me to the urinal then gathered again outside for a photograph, flashing the ubiquitous V sign (knuckles inward) and smiling at their own bravery in getting to speak with a strange white person.

There is no privacy in provincial China. Old men can walk up to you in the street, stare and take a photograph of the weird foreigner, without saying a word. But, on the other hand, as I passed though the dining hall I noticed, among the thousand chomping faces, a table set aside for Muslim students. I was just formulating some complex thought about minorities when one of them smiled, waved and shouted “Hello Santa.” The world seemed smaller again. Foreigners are a curiosity to be enjoyed and being one is an education, but children seem fairly similar wherever you meet them. Are issues about citizenship and education also universal? What is specifically Chinese about the place, and what is an ignorant foreigner to make of it?

The customs queue was long. After a tiring flight you find yourself no longer a privileged EU national but stacked behind a surprisingly motley collection of immigrants from the many countries in which China has an economic interest, including full burqas and a majority of Africans. Later, I find they have all gone elsewhere and none of them turns up in my distant province.

Bureaucracy is inevitable anywhere. Over the next few weeks I discovered that changing a few traveller’s cheques in a minor bank could cause major concern, as complex forms were inspected minutely so that no minor clerk would be held accountable for a lapse of protocol. Signatures were inspected closely and had to match exactly. When, on returning, I was asked if I had experienced a police state, my reply focused on form filling rather than any politically inspired restrictions on liberty. You know from newspapers and forums that artists and protesters disappear but you don’t experience that. You only experience pedantic clerks. Their jobs have to be protected and it was no more annoying than opening an ISA or renewing your passport.

There were uniforms everywhere – even car park attendants need one – but within inches of what might have been a police or army official I was boldly asked if I wanted “fine hash” or a “young lady massage”, so they hardly inspired fear, or even close attention among a vigorous proletariat. In the customs hall severe looking men with epaulettes opened an extra desk and then cracked a smile as they moved the queue across with a friendly wave to improve the service.

In three large residential schools, students could only use computers and cell phones without supervision at weekends, in case the temptations of computer games interfered with their studies. An earnest young teacher explained that her charges needed protection from the twin evils of pornography and time-wasting. Many UK teachers would have agreed with her, and a world without mobiles was a pleasant change. They read books instead.

The first thing I saw in the very first school was a queue of young children waiting for their regular eye test. There are exercises for the facial muscles at intervals in the day and, in the hot climate, they retired to bed at noon for a supervised sleep. Intervals are marked by the playing of gentle music and it feels benevolent, causing nostaglia for our own once-optimistic idea of a welfare state. When teachers enter a class with “Good Morning Dear Boys and Girls” they actually mean it. Private emails have explained since that they want their students to love them so they will love the subject and learn more. Many live on site and spend their evenings preparing PowerPoint presentations. They are tired and feel the lack of a social life, but when they say they care most about their students it rings true. But a genuine desire to increase learning creates a pressure to perform that can have the opposite effect.

Several teachers asked insistently for the ‘right answer’ so they could click the Power Point and make it appear on screen, confirming that progress was being made. Anyone offering wrong answers was dismissed as irrelevant, so nobody got to explore their misunderstanding. But when that was pointed out, there was never any question of not responding to the criticism. Suggestions made on Monday would be implemented on Wednesday.

Reading was a group activity, chorusing the words in unison until their auditory memory for lumps of text allowed them to give right answers even to questions they did not fully understand. When it was explained that reading was a private activity, requiring the right to choose your own pace, skim and scan then try to guess meaning from the context, the next lesson implemented a very different regime. The desire to improve was stronger than any notion of self-defence. When I went to observe a class all the other teachers came too, and feedback was also expected to be a group affair. It became hard to unpick the benefits and dangers of such a zealous approach to education.

As the Common Entrance Exam approached, classes ran from 6.30 a.m. to 9 p.m. – a regime that was brutally well-intentioned but, for all I know, also motivated by a desire to maintain pass rates and thus future enrolments and profit. In a class of ten year olds the music during a break is so loud I was amazed nobody asked them to turn it down. Then I realised it was being played through communal speakers by a kindly young teacher who explained that “It keeps them awake”. And when the music stopped and the announcement is made “class begins”, the reaction is immediate. Attention is almost universal until the end of the end of the class is announced with a raucous bugle call.

Physical exercises before the day’s study seem to conform with the best liberal theories. Yes, they march onto the field in lines, but with cheeky and very unmilitary smiles. When, on a Monday, the whole school gathers to raise the flag, everyone wears a uniform that looks like a group of cubs and brownies and statements about respecting the national flag and being proud of your country sound like something from a 1950s street party in Bermondsey, until one of the older students leads the final ceremony. He has ‘improved’ his English by watching too many American films and his intonation is pure Hollywood B movie. I realise that the only time I find such patriotism disturbing is when it come at me with a B movie American accent, and it takes a while to decide what kind of prejudice is at work.

The hotel has very few foreigners, and of the small number most seem to be obese American women whose husbands wear baseball caps over breakfast as they fuss over a brand new Chinese child, condemned to a new life of western democracy and calorific freedoms. Their unctuous Chinese-American guide is probably running an agency – there is certainly an interesting turnover – and you have to hope that some form of state sponsored quality control is being exercised. By the time this groups of exports are old enough to ask about their mother country, it might just be as rich and powerful as their adopted country.

In the buffet-service restaurant I watch an American adopter tapping a knife against his glass to summon skivvy to fetch him more coffee. Later, I am told about the newly rich Chinese who collect expensive red wines and wonder, as they spread though Africa buying up mineral rights, if the new imperialists seem as arrogant to their workforce. Later research throws up strikes against naked exploitation and suggests they might, so that the corroding effects of power are clearly universal. And yes, there are plenty of articles about factories where Chinese locals are worked into suicide making cheap electronic goods with insufficient sleep or dignity. We also know that villages are flooded and residents forcibly resettled to make a new dam, because progress requires efficiency more than democracy. But how much is natural to capitalism and how much is natural to China?

In the late 60s, having been refused entry to Turkey as an obvious undesirable, I was meandering through Eastern Europe when I ran into two Americans. One had just left the army, not necessarily with their permission, but the other, annoyingly named DY, had just left a rich family and was concerned to buy toothpaste to protect his perfect smile. We didn’t know it was a national holiday and that a parade was arranged which all citizens were expected to attend. We found ourselves funnelled towards the city centre and marching below banners that showed a defiant North Vietnamese shaking his fist at a distant B52.

Curiosities, we were welcomed, smiled at and a young girl was ushered towards us to hand over a flower and a badge each, on which the same motif appeared. Denied his toothpaste and distressed at the idea of wearing such a betrayal on his lapel, DY wanted to find his embassy. We tried to explain to him that the crowd probably didn’t care for it any more than he did, that the separation of a people and their government should be automatic, but he was not convinced. Much later, when a Chinese teacher offers to help me learn her language, the second phrase she uses is “I Love China” and I feel sure if she is asked to march beneath a banner she is very likely to agree with whatever it will say. I wonder what it is like to feel so proud of your country.

Confusions multiply. Temples in the park do a lively trade in incense for those wishing to pray for good luck. I assume, but not very confidently, it is no more significant than tossing a coin into a fountain, until a young teacher tells me about her father’s excessive Christian zeal and an email from another contact is signed ‘God Bless’. It doesn’t add up. But how could it when you are just passing through so quickly.

In one school, designed with turrets like some Disneyland fantasy, a visitor is impressed by the front lawns and the statues of deer. Then you go round the back and find students on the balconies of their dormitory block. For safety, presumably, there are wire cages around the balconies. There is washing hung on lines behind the mesh. They wave and call out “Hello foreigner!” It looks like the back end of a state prison but they can come and go as they please, within the grounds. I later see three of them in the toilets having crafty cigarette. The tap doesn’t work and you have to bring your own paper. For this parents pay high fees. You have to learn, to get on.

http://nnwb.nnnews.net:9999/epaper/nnwb/html/2011/03/14/29/29_31.htm

How many cheers for democracy?

It’s all very confusing.

In the bad old days, before had the vote and unemployment benefit, wicked aristocrats in The Big House would look down on the poor and decide, in times of great hardship, when bread was expensive and the turnip crop failed, to employ them for a pittance picking stones out of the fields or redirecting rivers to improve the view. It made their Big Houses look nicer and prevented riots and starvation. Soldiers who lost limbs on the field of battle against the wicked French could hobble up to the back door and get a few spare bones.

Now, our democratically elected representatives have decided the spoiled and undeserving poor just don’t want to work so they have to be forced into stone picking against their will. The best way to do that is to make lots more people unemployed so there are plenty of jobs to go round. Or something like that. Those who lose limbs on the field of battle will have to piss off back to the estates they came from, along with all the pilots we don’t need as we can’t afford any planes, only aircraft carriers to put them on if we had them, which we haven’t. But at least that keeps the ship builders in work, until we finish the ships we don’t need, after which we can close the docks for good. And that’ll make more jobs for the lazy poor to be forced to apply for. I think that’s how it works.

Of course, we can’t just bring back the old paternalism. If we wanted to re-route a river we’d find all the water belonged to a French conglomerate and was being used to cool nuclear power stations that belong to British Energy which, despite the name, also belongs to the French who are, of course, unlike the workshy British, busy rioting with gusto because their randy little President seems to be acting like some sort of Thatcherite.

It’s all very confusing. My brain cells have formed a coalition but they still can’t figure it out, although at least now they can blame my previous thoughts for leaving them an expensive legacy.

Thank god we have the vote. We can use it to express our mild irritation with ourselves for never learning our lesson.

Slugs and Snails and Old Wives Tales.

The lazy way to try to protect your crops is to scatter pellets about. They can be made of methiocarb or metaldehyde and manufacturers insist that if you use them according to instructions they are safe and will not harm birds, hedgehogs and other slug eaters.

Of course, many people don’t follow instructions. They may scatter them too thickly. One every few inches is really enough. Too many will actually repel slugs instead of attracting them and provide a toxic pile for other animals. Dogs and children can be stupid enough to eat them and die unpleasantly. They can fall into ponds and see off your fish.

Methiocarb is the most dangerous and expensive but concerns have been expressed about either chemical being absorbed into the plants we eat. Sentimental gardeners can  be upset by carnage the following morning – an explosion of mucus on the ground and piles of dried up bodies. Are there better alternatives?

The first question is why we kill slugs and snails at all. There are many types. The most common are the grey and brown varieties, one of which has a bright orange skirt. Walk about your lawn on a warm wet night  and you may be surprised how many you meet, often 3-4 inches long and looking for juicy plants to ruin. The shock horror big black six inch monster you may also meet is actually fairly harmless by comparison, and most damage of all will be done by the tiny ones curled up inside the lettuce which you don’t even see until you start making the sandwich. Or eating it. If you want to kill, get the little devils first.

But do you have to? Buddhist gardeners can actually save their plants by attracting slugs and snails to a central place then just moving them elsewhere.  Any damp place might attract them – a stone or flower or flat board suitably propped. You can increase the appeal with upended cabbage leaves or grapefruit halves, orange peel or any decaying green matter. Let them gather, scoop them up and  - ah, well then what? Left in your garden they will return. Thrown next door they will still return, along with an angry neighbour. You can put them in the compost to help break down the rotting layers, but once that is done they’ll be back again for more. Especially soft-hearted gardeners have been known to motor into the countryside, but remember to put a lid on the bucket first. Even one slug in the boot leaves a whopping trail overnight and its very hard to get off.

More casual slayers will just walk round on a damp night, hunting by torch or moonlight to pick up what they find and place them in a bucket of water. What do you do with a hundred slugs in a bucket, all trying to get back out again? The drain is tempting but better is to use salt water, cover and empty onto the compost in the morning. Then again, too much salt is bad for the soil. Really hard-hearted slayers use a large knife and just slash them where they crawl. Not a pretty sight, but effective. And, to some, cathartic. But not just after a large meal.

For a long time I favoured the compromise of a beer trap. Bury a container of beer and in the morning it is full of dead slugs. They have four noses and a taste for yeasty liquid, so genetically we are both removed and yet strangely related. Obviously, emptying pints of the best real ale into the ground is a painful experience. I tried the cheap supermarket lager but even slugs don’t really want it so you won’t catch nearly as many.  Ideally, you can buy a barrel for yourself then use the yeasty residue when it is over. They love it and you’ll catch hundreds. But there are drawbacks.

I went out one night and saw dozens of slugs and snails drinking greedily round the edges of The Munchers Arms. By the following morning they had staggered away to sleep it off somewhere safe. It has to be deep and steep enough to let them drop in and not crawl out again.

Beetles and even the proverbial newt have fallen in over time. The answer is to raise the lip of the container a few inches.

Also, of course, you have to empty it. If you leave it too long it smells. I use a ladle the following morning and just leave them on the earth as a marinaded offering, although,  I’ve never actually seen anything eat them.

Apparently it also works with honey and even milk, but you don’t feel the same warm glow that you let them go out smiling.

If you want to use nature at its most pitiless, you can buy ‘nematodes’. They are parasites that you mix and water on the ground. Microscopic organisms enter the slugs to kill them from within. After which they sneak off to find a fresh sluggy host. But they don’t like manure, so that’s a limitation. Also, it encouraged odd nightmares.

If you want to use clever science you can use copper strips as a physical barrier, although your garden will start to look like an old scrapyard after a while so you might be better off with sharp sand or grit or soot or broken egg shells. All of these work to some extent, but rain or careless handling will break down the barrier. You can use plastic bottles as a kind of mini cloche, if you have enough and don’t mind the sight of them. Make sure you don’t just provide a nice warm home for hatching the eggs you trapped inside the area.

Mainly, of course, you need to keep the area clean, pick up or strip away dead leaves and use a hoe very often. If you don’t mind the garden looking just a shade too tidy. And you want to drive away all the hedgehogs and toads because they have nothing to eat. In theory, if you bring in enough predators, like slow worms, blackbirds, owls, frogs and centipedes – they do the job for you. I have never found they do it well enough. Perhaps I should get a duck.

Balance is all. Plant enough for you and a small number of your slimy brethren to share. Only if they get too greedy do you really have to worry. And if you bought that barrel, as suggested, you may not care.

The limits of tolerance

Bertrand Russell used to argue that the most important thing to remember about any opinion was that it could be wrong.  That might seem like a reasonable basis for civilised life, even if it is also first step towards moral relativity.

Sometimes we need to think there are certain matters we hold to be right, fundamental, true – even if we can’t gather any evidence for them that would convince a sceptical philosopher. But we might also agree that we’d like to see out schools inculcate a degree of tolerance towards others. In a multi-cultural, multi-faith environment, it warms the cockles of our liberal western hearts to see little boys and girls in their tiny classrooms learning to be nice to each other and grow up in harmony. Unlike those less developed people in their villages, who rise up in angry crowds every time they feel some slight against their nationhood or their holy book, we are so secure in our position we can afford to be tolerant.

And if part of that tolerance includes a passion for free speech, so much the better. It is apparently, a good thing that all sorts of what may or may not be nonsense can be freely expressed without let or hindrance. Even if – how ironic – what is expressed freely in our liberal democracy annoys the hell out of the people for whom we are learning tolerance. We defend their right to believe what they want, and to express their belief that we shall go to hell for not agreeing with it, and, from time to time, to wish we would do so without delay. Just so long as they stop short of sending us there, that’s fine.

It tends to work best when the ‘others’ of whose beliefs we preach tolerance are not too committed. Educated, middle class people from other countries know how to keep their beliefs within the bounds of civilised discourse. It is, of course, only the villagers and extremists who embarrass us by throwing out tolerance back in our faces as proof of our moral decline.

So, when The Pope visits the UK, a few journalists  make good headlines from references to child abuse, aids, contraception and the Hitler Youth, then British Catholics write in to say we should respect their faith and not assume they all support his more extreme views just because he claims to be their Holy Father. Fair enough. No desire to fall out with my neighbours, whose views are doubtless complex and ought not to be parodied or oversimplified. But I also have the right to argue that the views of His Holiness are really the most arrant shite. I may be wrong, but they do strike me as not only wrong but offensively stupid.

And this is not just because it is a Catholic view. Other forms of Christianity are equally offensive. On the edges, we have the people who shoot doctors for performing abortions, burn Korans for publicity and write to strangers hoping they’ll die of caner because they don’t accept God’s love. But further in we have the silent majority who still think that something called God made a virgin give birth to a man who later rose from the dead and will help us all live forever in heaven. And think we should base our national culture on this stuff.

Yes, of course, many educated and sensible people are Christians, and many of them reject some of the weirder parts of their own inheritance. We must not fall out with our neighbours by parodying their doubtless complex views. We may be wrong. But, alas, they won’t admit that they may be wrong – faith is a good thing by definition – and many of them express their ridiculous ideas with such conviction that their conviction itself becomes offensive.

It is always difficult to object to the more annoying bits of Judaism without being accused of anti-Semitism. But again, you can respect the complex minds of your neighbour without giving up the right to be irritated by the often racist consequences of an insistence on being chosen, and thus unable to marry into lesser races. Or by prayers in gratitude for not being a woman. And those silly wigs worn because of mediaeval attitudes to female hair.

We can tut tut about female genital mutilation (feminism trumps multi-culturalism and we can’t, surely, be wrong about that). We can object, obviously, to throwing acid in women’s faces. But not to leaving bibles around where children may stumble across them. And then they can read the story of Lot, who gave shelter to two visiting angels. And when the people of Sodom came to rape them, he was so ashamed that the mob would dishonour guests under his protection that he offered them his two virgin daughters instead to protect them. If that happened today in Afghanistan we would be ritually horrified. The fact that is lies unmolested in our own Holy Book is apparently OK.

Except that it isn’t.

In return for the free speech of others we need the right to say in public that all religions are wrong, often silly and frequently offensive. Yes, we might be wrong about what we think. But religions by definition can’t say that. They consider us inferior because we can. The true believer will call us arrogant for thinking we know better than God, which is like saying we are deluded because we can’t see Father Christmas.

So tolerance has to have its limits. We just can’t all agree exactly where they are, in case we offend anyone, and could be wrong.

How special are your needs?

A new report is out so a new controversy breaks. Ofsted release the cleverly titled A statement is not enough – the special educational needs and disability review[1]. As newspaper reports spread about thousands of students being labelled as SEN when they are not, parents are starting to worry and teachers are already taking offence.  But what kind of a problem is this?

The basic principle of personalised learning is that all students have needs and each of them is to be properly assessed and treated accordingly throughout their academic career. Every individual is to be taught in a way and supported to an extent that is appropriate to them.

Of course, that takes a lot of time and money, both of which are scarce and about to be reduced. Although one element of government insists that Every Child Matters, and ought to be treated as a rare individual, the funding element encourages factory farming – it assumes a high teacher to student ratio with a limited number of Learning Support Assistants (LSAs). If a student needs special support, for dyslexia or behavioural problem, they need to be suitably  labelled by an expert to release special funds to pay for it.

At this point, of course, radio and t.v. stations can always find one parent who desperately wanted to get help for their child but could not obtain it, despite medical proof obtained privately and appeals through the system. And, look, surprise surprise, here is another in the studio and does want their child to be tested and “labelled as SEN”.

Inevitably, some teachers will argue they can only deal with students who want to learn, or are capable of learning under whatever regime the teacher cares to impose. The rest have to be removed, or supported, or labelled as different (= inconvenient or wrong). So, inevitably, students who are merely bored by poor lessons, or going through a difficult time because their fathers are in Afghanistan, will end up being ‘labelled’ and treated with funds designed for those with serious disabilities.

The problem is not helped by varied interpretations of the terms disabled, and special need. They can be genuinely misunderstood and equally they can be abused to gain finding. The Ofsted report Appendix A considers this and refers to the Code of Practice – students qualifying for special finding must have  “a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of the same age; or have a disability which prevents or hinders them from making use of educational facilities of a kind generally provided for children of the same age in schools within the area of the local authority’.[2]

In other words, the term is relative.

School Action is taken for those with ‘needs’, and a different kind of education  will be provided. School Action Plus kicks in when the school thinks they need to provide more specialist support, and at that point a formal statement might be generated to provide a label to provide the funds to pay for it. We also have definitions of ‘disability’ within the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and of ‘children in need’ used by Social Services. Plenty of room for confusion, sleight of hand and for worried parents to be unsure whether a label will help or harm in the long term.

So how special does a need have to be before the school or college will take measures to meet it?

In January 2007, the Teaching and Learning in 2020 Review described the hallmarks of personalised learning. They didn’t sound any different from ordinary learning if it is done well [3]. In 2005, Ofsted was already pointing out that:

The most effective teaching for learners with the most difficult behaviour is little different to that which is most successful for all learners. – Managing Challenging Behaviour, March 2005

But then, two years later, the TES published the opinion that more than a million students (15% of the school population) have special educational needs but no formal statement (27/4/07). Special in what sense? How many bored or confused or frightened students would not welcome more support. Or perhaps teaching of a different sort so that extra support to deal with it was not required?

Not surprising, then, that in September 2010 Ofsted can argue that

at School Action level, the additional provision was often making up for poor whole-class teaching or pastoral support. …. Inspectors saw schools that identified pupils as having special educational needs when, in fact, their needs were no different from those of most other pupils. They were underachieving but this was sometimes simply because the school’s mainstream teaching provision was not good enough.

At this point, overworked and harassed teachers defend their professional good name  by pointing out that you get what you pay for.  And for the next few years. HM Government will ask for cuts in the name of responsibility, Ofsted will blame teachers in the name of driving up standards, teachers will blame government for not listening to them and students will continue to receive labels in a haphazard system that will help some, harm others and not really address the fundamental issue. Old models of teaching are based partly on old models of funding. We now have new ideals to live up to but still the same old underfunded jungle to work in. The postcode lottery will remain in force whilst the best of the profession try to adapt.

---

[1] http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Publications-and-research/Browse-all-by/Documents-by-type/Thematic-reports/The-special-educational-needs-and-disability-review

[2]www.sen.ttrb.ac.uk/viewarticle2.aspx?contentId=12386″>Special educational needs: code of practice, DfES, 2001; www.sen.ttrb.ac.uk/viewarticle2.aspx?contentId=12386.

[3] http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFunction=productdetails&PageMode=publications&ProductId=DFES-04255-2006&

Who can you trust?

Teachers and parents, faced with a wide range of confusing and dysfunctional behaviours, are sometimes tempted to turn to experts for advice. They immediately discover that it is the full-time job of ‘experts’ to disagree with each other, leaving the well-meaning individual more confused than before. Now we have the internet to help us, it is possible to become even more confused, very quickly.

To take just three examples, how do you react to news about ADHD, learning styles and the effect of diet on behaviour?

The internet is awash with sites that deny ADHD exists, often claiming that it is a scam to sell Ritalin and that healthy children should not take drugs. They describe ADHD as a ‘belief system’ and a ‘fraud’.

Dr. Robert Spitzer is a Professor of Psychiatry who chaired the process that led to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1980s. This gave us a new vocabulary which included ADHD. Subsequently, some parents put pressure on doctors to provide drugs to ‘cure’ or manage the problem. Clearly, Ritalin then became big business, with plenty of people standing to profit from its use.

In 2007, Professor Spitzer announced that he might have been wrong, and some conditions were ordinary reactions or mood swings, better labelled as happiness or unhappiness (TES, 9th March 2007). He did not say that all successful treatments of whatever it was that was treated should now cease, but arguments in the popular mind became confused.

The fact that some people profit from sales of Ritalin does not mean that its use if always wrong. The fact that a scientist amended his position does not mean that the behaviours worrying parents or teachers, now labelled ADHD, do not exist as behaviours and are not worrying. The fact that it is quick and easy to publish your opinion on the internet means that anyone can rush into public debate and readers often have no easy way of separating good advice from dangerous ignorance or propaganda.

Learning styles are so often referred to by government sponsored web sites you might think it is official policy to take notice of them. Indeed, Ofsted inspectors would probably be shocked and disapproving to find you ignored hem or, worse still, refused to admit their relevance.  And yet, several experts in the field of academic research argue fiercely that the whole thing is a tissue of lies, that the inventories have no basis in fact, they are invalid and we should stop referring to learning styles immediately.

If you had the time, you could read their long report and find that some inventories are better than others, but even the best of them need careful handling and complex interpretation to be safely applied. To make money, their owners have often simplified the complex science and sold to a willing public something so stripped down that researchers can easily decry it. That doesn’t mean that engaging in conversation with a student about how they learn is to be discouraged, or that we don’t want some short of shorthand language for doing so. It does mean we have to be careful not to take too seriously what appears to be a simple answer to what we know to be a complex question.  Often, the experts’ reports are too long and complex to be read and the popular solution is too easy to be trusted.

That is certainly the case with arguments about food and behaviour. A few complex reports tell us that certain chemicals, found in various places but especially in oily fish, have an effect on learning that seems to be beneficial. Immediately, exploiting that research, fish oil pills appear on the market that claim to increase your IQ, followed by arguments to ‘disprove’ a simple argument the original research never actually made.

Tests seem to show that certain chemicals used as food additives have unfortunate effects on certain students in certain conditions. Commercial interests, whose profits depend on keeping those additives, can easily fund research to cast doubt on the claims, then encourage attacks on some oversimplified version of the original statement. Extreme positions are taken on internet sites and the genuine science, along with the useful advice, gets drowned out.

One answer is to use the Personalised Learning Forum  (personalisedlearningforum.eu), which offers simple guidance on these and many other issues, with links to more comklex documents if you need to check sources. Normally, there is a membership fee, but if you email the address on the site and quote this blog you can get free membership to help us test a new version.

The Skilling Fields

Here we go again. The National Skills Survey tells us employers can’t find enough suitably talented people to do their important jobs to drive the economy and make us all financially secure. But do we, or they, really know what they mean?

In the South East – the richest area overall –  they report 68% of all staff as lacking technical or practical skills to come extent, 45% as deficient in customer handling, 42% in team working. Nine per cent of elementary staff and 10 per cent of sales and customer service staff are described by their employers – who presumably selected and trained them –  as ‘lacking proficiency’.

People come to the factory doors asking for work but are not suitably prepared for the experience, apparently lacking in life experience or maturity or general knowledge, having a poor attitude or personality or lack of motivation.

It’s not just that applicants lack the usual technical or job specific skills, problem solving skills, team working skills, literacy and numeracy . Whether it is a sixteen year trying to escape the NEET register or a graduate from our expensive universities, it makes no difference, they are said to lack ‘common sense’ to an equal, measurable, extent – 17%, since you ask.

You may wonder how exactly researchers or respondents define general knowledge or common sense. Is it knowing the names of the last five monarchs, or Big Brother winners, or the longest river to overflow this year? Is it defining a horse as a graminivorous quadruped or having the sense not to get into debt just to earn a B.A. from a third rate institution with a low retention rate that doesn’t teach you the skills employers value?

It is not much easier working out precisely what we mean by employability skills. The CBI’s report in May claimed half of their employers found weaknesses in school leavers’ self-management skills – such as time management – and two thirds (68%) believe they have inadequate business and customer awareness . I suppose, if you have recently stood in a chain store waiting to be noticed -

Is that a customer over there?

I am not aware of them.

But one must not jest. The old complaints come round every year, like chilblains. In 2005 as many as 72% of respondents were unimpressed with the “business awareness” of their applicants, and Digby Jones (remember him?) claimed half of all school leavers were unfit to enter the job market.

In 1976 one local authority was concerned at complaints that new employees were unable or unwilling to read material that was vital to their job. Researchers discovered that much of the information was very badly written. Employers complained their apprentices lacked  ‘communication skills’ research showed that in many cases noise levels were so high that very few job-related conversations took place – they relied on gesture. More recently, a local travel agent complained that her new employee lacked “numeracy skills” because she had booked someone’s holiday on the wrong date. Annually, such clichés are repeated by people who have no idea what they mean, then measured and used to shape educational policy.

Of course, it is true that students themselves often ask for their lessons to be more vocationally relevant. That is because they fondly imagine that somehow vocational relevance might reduce pointless teacher talk and thus boredom levels. But when they actually get to work, they can find the experience so mind-numbing they wonder why they bothered and rush back to the NEET register. As Coffield put it, “I question the propriety of raising the awareness and aspiration of learner who then cannot find jobs worthy of a human being”.

A report from the IPPR in 2006 looked carefully at “the current conception of what need in order to succeed in life” and argued that our “increasingly service-orientated economy” placed increasing emphasis on social skills, making them 33 times more important than they were a decade ago and thus disadvantaging prospective employees from particular social groups. But the ‘skills’ debate gets cloudier every year as we tie ourselves up in knots.

We can’t replace key skills with functional skills by the original deadline as we still haven’t agreed what they are. How would you define the soft key skill ’working with others’ in the context of, say, Brutish Airways, or HM Treasury?

Experts disagree whether study skills can be taught separately or need to be subject- specific,  and whether thinking skills can be taught at all. Should we distinguish between transient, enduring and transferable skills and, if so, can study skills be transferred between maths and biology?

I doubt if anyone remembers Postman and Weingartner, who in 1969 argued that mostly “what students do in class is to guess what the teacher wants them to say”. They learn to please authority to get a quiet life. They consume and obey. I am not sure any more whether that is supposed to be good or a bad thing. But I do think employers might find common cause with the odd poet, Like, for example, William Cory, the 19^th century lyric poet and master at Eton:

You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits.

For the habit of attention and the art of expression

For the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts

For the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms

For the art or working out what is possible in a given time

For taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness

Stripped of its antique elegance, that could be the syllabus for a Wider Key Skill, or the customer service element of a vocational diploma. Have a nice day.

Further reading:

National Employer Skills Survey for England 2009: Evidence Report 23 , August 2010, UKCES.

Ready to grow: business priorities for education and skills – Education and skills survey, CBI/EDI May 2010

Just suppose teaching and learning became the first priority, Frank Coffield, LSN, 2008

What are universities for?

As more and more people find themselves unable to attend a university – or at least to attend the one they want, or one ‘worth attending’ – the cost of subsidising them is becoming insupportable to the tax payer and the cost of the average degree will freeze out all but the richest or most debt-laden and foolhardy. So who benefits from all this angst, and why do we want them at all?

The official government line is that a better educated workforce creates a stronger economy. This assumes that getting a degree means being able to do something useful to employers, when in fact the CBI’s Education and Skills survey and the National Skills Survey  both contain well catalogued complaints about graduates having no common sense and what the employers call an inappropriate attitude to work, with poor problem solving skills and poor self-management. It also assumes that somehow having more universities awarding more degrees will equate with a general rise in economically useful skills across the population. That seems rather naive. The same officials, faced with a rise in A level passes, usually argue that the exams must be getting easier, not the population more capable.

From an individual point of view, a degree can be a poor investment. Fees rise on the basis that you will eventually cash in your degree to earn more so it is only fair you should pay for that rise in earning power. But that is only true in certain subjects, and lately the chances of joining the NEET cohort have risen by at least 40% for graduates. For less prestigious universities (you know who you are) in certain depts, it looks increasingly like selling a debased coinage to a captive market.

Seeking to make HE affordable, the system offers them part-time degrees, modular degrees or two year degrees, ignoring the fact that when everyone has a degree it will cease to have market value, like a Zimabwean bank note. As employers takeover the educational and appraisal systems, and future graduates emerge from The University of United Widgets plc with better attitudes and more common sense, we may or may not find ourselves with a stronger economy, but will probably not have a richer culture.

By which I mean?

Another way to judge the results of a university education is the extent to which graduates have the intellectual rigour and self-confidence to question all the assumptions that have led us to this situation. It could be argued that a three year, subsidised, full-time experience, in which students have freedom to study what they want for the sheer pleasure of studying it, with time to mature and experiment with new attitudes and ideas, will offer us a generation that can be free, willing and able to formulate better ways to organise society. Or perhaps just a better way to write haiku. Like pure science, you can’t be sure that this sort of education will give us economic rewards in every case, but if you don’t fund it you can be sure we will be poorer in the long run. So you just have to pay up, but perhaps limit the numbers who are awarded subsidised places.

And no, this is no an elitist argument. More universities have not  noticeably increased social equality, although the drive to shovel more working class people into them has radically increased working class debt among 18-24 year olds, betraying their hopes at great cost to themselves and their families. Supposing we turn most univesities into, for want of a better word, polytechnics. They can offer cheaper, fast-track, part-time, modular courses dedicated to producing what employers want at the employers’ expense. The remaining elite universities can offer something quite different, but at the same time ensure that their systems of selection carefully ensure that all social classes are equally able to enter. It is over thirty years since some of them started mature student schemes for precisely that purpose, which is how I stopped being a postman and became a graduate by writing two essays and taking a single A Level at evening classes. I’d like to think this route was still open to those capable of enjoying it. But I also want reassurance that when they arrive the same high standards will apply, and the same freedoms be available to them. Otherwise, nobody benefits.

***

Technorati code – E32VU3QWWRFY; RSS feed http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpauleustice.wordpress.com%2Ffeed%2F

privacy and reputation on line

It seems I live in the Russian Federation, although it is news to me.

I had just read an article on privacy and the web by Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. I’d also just experimented with WordPress blog so, combining the two, I googled  the latest blog to see how it ranked. It used to be considered gauche to google our own name – something everyone did but nobody admitted to. From now on I would recommend it as a necessary precaution.

Without even knowing they existed, I was treated to a page by pipl.com on which there were several blogs posted, and several web pages and photos for people with my name. There was a nephew on Facebook, a distant cousin running a business in Cornwall and sundry Americans who were probably related to an ancestor (check it on www.bpfe.org.uk/trees).

There was also a MySpace entry that I seem to have made years ago, when first experimenting with social media, and forgotten all about. It contained a blog I don’t remember writing and a photo taken at a wedding that was funny at the time but isn’t quite right for a public persona when looking for work as a freelance. It was easy to change the picture, the blog is harmless enough, but I couldn’t understand why it listed me as GB and RU. I have learned to associate Russia with spam, usually offering conversation with young women who send their photos without being asked and are unaccountably impressed by my online profile, insisting with on some kind of relationship. Spamarrest takes care of their messages but who knows what else they are up to behind the scenes? If robots can send me emails from my own address, what else can they do with my name and reputation?

There is, of course, a service to look at the ‘deep web’ and update you on anything that purports to be from or about you which you might wish to delete. ReputationDefender.com will do it for you for a fee between £9.95 and £14.95. Should I worry enough to make that kind of layout?

Using PIPL, I found myself lurking in all sorts of places, mostly harmless. There were articles, letters and poems from magazines and newspapers, including a specialist magazine article so old it has been archived, even though internet browsers hadn’t been invented when it was first published. Harmless enough, except that what you write for a given specialist audience is now freely available for all, so your choice of register and tone, your carefully nuanced sense of humour, is now going to be read by all sorts of people it was never intended for. It may never be erased, and what you said thirty years ago may not be what you would choose to say now. Any slip, any sloppy work on an off day, any change of mind – unlucky – it’s here forever and can’t be taken down. We all know that emails encourage sloppy writing. Facebook and twitter encourage the immediate publication of careless comments you may late wish you had kept to yourself. The internet encourages more and more public exposure with less and less ability to remove what you have exposed.

There were delegate lists for conferences I had forgotten I’d been to, public profiles from contact systems I no longer use. In the early days of the net, one tended to experiment with new systems to see how they worked and whether they were useful. On finding they were not, have you been back and checked on the record you left behind? Is it current and should you remove it?

Given the increasing complexity of internet nastiness – the dedication so many people put into trying to infect your machine with viruses and steal your identity, I would recommend everyone to google their own name as regularly as they make back ups of important information. Sooner or later, you’ll find something you need to remove. You may not be able to, so in the meantime think carefully before you press “publish”.