How to teach kids

From Shuggy:

In one year eleven class, I was trying to explain trench warfare. They did not respond. So I got them to re-arrange the desks into trenches. Then I got out my Lee Enfield .303 and blew the heads off anyone who stuck their heads above the parapet. It was such a valuable learning experience that I feel a career as a management consultant beckons. Unfortunately I’m now awaiting trial. I intend to plead insanity.

LOL

Get a degree in teaching creationism

According to New Humanist:

The state of Texas may be about to approve an online master’s degree in science education provided by the Texas-based Institute for Creation Research. The “degree”, which has already been given preliminary approval by a Texas state advisory group, is now awaiting the final go-ahead from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Events like this make it more plausible that China will be running the world in 50 years time.

Britain may be dumbing down its educational system but at least we’re not teaching this ridiculous nonsense (mostly not, anyway).

More on McA-levels

There’s been more coverage of the McDonald’s A-level story.

Dave Osler says “Palming off teenagers from poor backgrounds with fourth-rate pseudo-qualifications can only further entrench their disadvantage.” I’m sure this is true, and when they realise they’ve been conned into wasting their time getting worthless qualifications, it’ll put some of them off the idea of education for life.

Tim Worstall, on the other hand, says they’re an excellent idea:

I’m really not quite sure why the howls, I think it an excellent idea. Two constants in the analysis of the British economy over the past century (and if you read Corelli Barnett, further back as well) have been that we don’t do vocational training well and that we don’t do management well.So when someone proposes vocational training in management (please, note that this is not training in burger flipping, this is training to run a store), an apprenticeship if you like, I think it’s an excellent idea myself.

A “basic shift manager” at McDonalds doesn’t make more than a bad lawyer, to be sure, but the company, via it’s franchising process, has created more millionaires than any other on the planet so far.

I’ve never run or worked in a McDonald’s but I suspect managing one cannot be too hard. McDonald’s is successful, not because they make great burgers, but because they do so cheaply, and they’ve got the whole thning donwn to a system, a process, whereby each McDonald’s store is run on the same principles. In other words their workers — including store managers — are essentially cogs in a machine with little scope for independent thought or intelligence; they have to be so, because otherwise their system wouldn’t work.

Janine at Stroppyblog thinks it important to remember this is not just McDonald’s, the government is doing it with other private firms too:

The media has concentrated on McDonald’s way more than the other firms involved, with headlines such as Would you like a diploma with those fries? or SuperSize my CV. Maybe McDonald’s is more newsworthy than FlyBe or Network Rail, maybe its brand best represents the radicalism of the policy for its supporters or its ludicrousness for opponents.

We should certainly oppose this policy, but be careful how we do so, avoiding chiming in with any snobbishness about academic purity or suggestion that young people who get jobs in McDonalds do not deserve equivalent qualifications to those whose families can afford for them to go to college. Nevertheless, oppose it we must, for two reasons:

• It is outside public education and training, and is therefore unaccountable;
• It is run by private firms, and is therefore compromised by the profit motive.

If McDonald’s trains its staff in, say, food hygiene, then it does not do so in the sole interest of public health, but in the interests of doing just enough to keep the inspectors away and the customers coming through the door.

What’s wrong with doing things on the cheap, with doing “just enough”? I don’t think anything is wrong with it. In fact I’m rather in favour of it. For example yesterday i bought a pair of jeans that cost me £8. Yes, they were cheap. They were also good enough to do the job, and I’m buggered if I’m going to spend more (money or time or effort) than I need to. Or consider when I was a kid and I was studying for exams. If it was a subject I was interested in, I put some effort into it, but if it was something that didn’t interest me, I did the bare minimum I needed to pass the exam.

Doing just enough has one big advantage: it is cheaper, which means everyone is better off because they can have more stuff. If McDonald’s spent more on their food hygeine, bought better ingredients, and had more luxuriously furnished premises, I’m sure eating there would be nicer. It would also be more expensive — and their are plenty of other establishments that are operate in that sector of the market.

The modern world has been created on the premise that it’s best to aim to do things cheaper, with less effort, less time, less money, less care, less raw materials, with less thought, etc. And I’m very glad that’s the case, because if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to write this post, and you wouldn’t be able to read it.

Get an A-level in burger flipping

From the people who brought you McJobs, Mc A-Levels:

McDonald’s has won approval to offer courses which could form part of an A-level standard qualification.

The fast-food giant, airline FlyBe and Network Rail are the first three firms to be approved to offer courses equal to units of the new diplomas. It means students could combine units from in-house courses with others to obtain the government’s flagship new vocational and academic qualification.

Ministers are keen to involve business in attempts to boost workforce skills. It follows concerns raised by business leaders that schools, colleges and even universities are failing to equip youngsters for the world of work. But critics complain that the diplomas they see as the answer to the issue are not sufficiently academically rigorous.

Personally I think there should be an A level in Erotica Studies, which would involve watching porn and wanking over it, and maybe creating a porn movie or website; I’m sure this would be every bit as worthwhile and academically rigorous as the new “diplomas” the government is introducing.

Incidently if you want to know how good these diplomas are, consider what university admissions officers think of them:

Just last week, four out of 10 university admissions tutors said they would not accept students who had taken the new diplomas which are being introduced next autumn.

Religious schools

Mr Eugenides isn’t impressed with a new Hindu state-funded school in Britain:

If you want to teach your kids that chanting “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare” is going to bring about “a higher state of consciousness”, then you are entirely welcome to; Hindus tend to be fine upstanding citizens, and I am sure that Hare Krishnas are even more so. But please put your hand in your own fucking pocket, not mine.

The same goes for other religions, of course.

Want to buy a bear?

Mohammed Bear for sale:

For sale due to a change in the school curriculum.

Mo is a delightful little bear who all children would love, but not some adults.

Condition: As new, but by time of delivery may have 40 scratch marks on back.

Any proceeds to Prisoners Abroad http://www.prisonersabroad.org.uk/

Exams for terrorists

Do you have an A level or AS level in biology or chemistry? Then you must be one of those evil terrorists the government is always warning us about. At least that’s the conclusion one can draw from this report in Nature:

A British resident who is under surveillance for suspected terrorist activities is being prohibited from taking secondary-school-level science courses by the government, Nature has learned.

The man, referred to as A.E., is contesting the decision in court, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind. The preliminary hearing over whether A.E. should be allowed to take AS-level courses in human biology and chemistry took place on 16 November at London’s High Court. The UK Home Office, which has an order restricting A.E.’s actions and affiliations, argues that such coursework could be turned towards terrorism. His solicitors counter that the knowledge is public, and that the furthering of A.E.’s education poses no threat.

I was in Waterstone’s the other day and they had a whole shelf of revision guides for AS levels. I guess they must be in league with the terrorists too, which demonstrates that the terrorist conspiracy is much bigger than I had hitherto suspected, and that the government is therefore right to throw away all our civil liberties to combat it.

School uniforms and religion

Pub philosopher is annoyed at religious challenges to school uniforms:

Yet another schoolgirl has found religion and is taking advantage of the current climate in which the authorities flinch in the face of religious demands. Following the example of Muslim and Christian pupils, a Sikh girl is invoking her rights in an attempt to overturn a perfectly reasonable school uniform rule.

I disagree with him. Firstly, this is not about a school uniform, it’s about a school’s policy on jewellery (more on this later).

Secondly, rules enforcing a school uniform are not “perfectly reasonable”. The reasons given for school uniforms — that they promote a school identity and prevent people prevent people getting jealous of others’ more expensive or more fashionable clothes — apply equally as well to the nation as a whole, but if the government attempted to make all adults wear a national uniform, they would get kicked out by the voters at the next election, and rightly so.

Thirdly, the school’s jewellery policy, this:

The only two forms of jewellery that girls were allowed to wear in school were a wrist watch and one pair of plain metal stud earrings.

seems hard to justify on principled grounds. If wrist jewellery is OK if it tells the time, what’s objectionable about wrist jewellery that doesn’t tell the time? If a girl’s wrist watch stops working, must she then take it off? If studs on ear piercings are OK, why not studs on other piercings? No doubt the reply to this last question would amount to “other piercing are unconventional and not so much a part of mainstream culture as ear piercings”; this is an entirely reasonable answer if you see the purpose of schools as making people into obedient, rule-following worker drones for the system, but less so if you think that education should create active, inquiring, flexible, intelligent minds able to cope with the challenges of the 21st century.

I don’t object to kids coming to school wearing any clothes or with any jewellery (or anything else) they like, unless it disrupts their or others education. The one thing I would object to is them coming to school with the attitude that they don’t want to learn, and if they did they should either have the attitude beaten out of them, or be expelled.

What I do find objectionable is religious groups attempting to use their religion as a reason not to obey rules. It’s like they are saying “we’re a religion, so the rules shouldn’t apply to us”, as if believing a load of superstitious nonsense somehow makes them superior people. If they were instead saying “this is a stupid rule, no-one should have to obey it”, I would have more sympathy with them.

Chipping children

Britain’s long slow march towards paternalistic totalitarianism continues:

Children are being tracked by micro-chips embedded in their uniforms in a trial at a secondary school.

The devices are used to monitor pupils’ movements and register their arrival in class on the teacher’s computer. Supply teachers can also be alerted if a student is likely to misbehave.

The chip connects with teachers’ computers to show a photograph of the pupil, data about academic performance and whether he or she is in the correct classroom.

Why don’t the government just go the whole fucking hog and have the entire population RFID-chipped at birth, and track their movements constantly by computer? Of course they would need to create a new government department to do that; perhaps they could call it the Committee for Public Safety.

(via Boing Boing)

Uruguay and Peru buy OLPC computers

Uruguay is buying 100,000 OLPC XO-1 computers. And Peru is buying 40,000.