Tenured failure and self-indulgent pedagogy

[erudito]

If one judges matters by intentions (such as by presuming that effects flow from intentions), one lives in a very congenial world. You are always right, because your intentions are always good. Those who disagree with you must, therefore, have “wrong” intentions and so always be wrong

Comments

[catsidhe]

That's not just nonsense, it's offensive nonsense.The real reason to have government-provided schooling is to control the socialisation of students so as to control socialisation of belief.
is simply bullshit.

Your ‘example’ of totalitarian regimes is a furphy: they want to control education, like they want to control everything else, because that is what they do. They eliminate private schools because they eliminate all opposition, competition and choice, because that is what they do.

That is a very different thing from providing a service. A service which, don't forget, was provided by the government in the first place out of the socialist, dare I say communist, idea that poor children deserve education too

Hysteria

[erudito]

A service which, don't forget, was provided by the government in the first place out of the socialist, dare I say communist, idea that poor children deserve education too.You should check your history. There was already extensive provision of private education, even catering for quite poor student, before state education. It was quite explicit in its original provision that state education had specific socialisation aims

Re: Hysteria

[erudito]

I should make it clear I mean 'socialisation' with a small 's' (not "Socialism"): hence religious schools being a common competitor.

"Making little Americans" was an explicit part of having government schooling in the US. Such "nation building" was, in one form or other, a pretty common aim, including in Australia. The story out here was not quite as different as all that.

I am a little confused about how providing education is seen as discouraging a wish to get educated.

That there was going to be a push to increase provision for education is more or less a given. Besides, we all have an interested in a literate citizenry. The issue is more why the government would do it. It persistently came down to some form of "because we do not trust anyone else to do it the way we want".

My point about intentions was not to complain that people or policies have them, but about using them as a basis judgments about policy effectiveness/goodness.

Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[catsidhe]

The reason religious schools are the main competitor to state schools is because the Church was already doing it by the time the state started. And the religious schools really have had socialisation into Right Thinking as their stated purpose since the beginning. But they provided widespread education as a result of the humanist response to the crushing poverty of the mid 18C. Those same humanists who gained power and influence in Parliament pushed to follow the Church's lead, and they justified it to the Tories as that it would educate the poor benighted undeserving urchins into being good servants, the middle classes into virtuous shopkeepers, and the upper classes into masterful leaders, and all of them into good worshipful Christians. But the Christian emphasis dropped out relatively early (as low as background level, anyway), and the emphasis was put onto the minimum levels of knowledge required for someone to have options other than crime and subsistence farming. Educational theorists moved onto theories of how to identify

Re: Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[erudito]

The reason why the Churches are the main competitor is the reason why they were already doing it.

That there was going to be a push to increase education levels is a given. The interesting question is why get the state to provide schooling itself. Which is some version of "because we do not trust others to do it". Having the regulator also be the provider means you can also give yourself necessary free passes.

As for literacy, etc, government provision has not exactly been covering itself in glory on that one. Not that it is easy to find out exactly how well, or not, they are doing. Perhaps someone should prod the regulator on that. Oh, wait ...

Re: Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[catsidhe]

“The interesting question is why get the state to provide schooling itself.”

Because at the time, there were the religious schools, and there were the (few) private schools, and there were... Oh, right, there was nothing else, and it wasn't seen as cost effective, let alone profitable, to give education to poor people. And yet it was a common good, which enhanced all people. And so, as a common good, the government took up its provision.

I imagine that a Thatcherite might find this incomprehensible, yet still it makes sense.

Re: Yes, your post contained quite a lot of Hysteria (part I)

[erudito]

Actually, there were quite a lot of private schools and it was obviously possible to expand provision. Fund it, and they will come, so to speak. There was quite a debate at the time over the notion of the government providing schools. The notion that private provision was as lacking as you imply is a bit of a myth: indeed, pushing out private provision was clearly (for some) the point of getting the government to do it.

Re: Hysteria (Part II)

[catsidhe]

The ASAT tests are one of the reasons why the US school system is so bad. Syllabi must be fitted around The Test. The Test measures, perforce, things which can be tested, so all the things which make the difference between ‘putting up with school’ and ‘loving to learn’ are necessarily put aside. Schools are actively punished for being distracted with improving the quality of their courses by having attention drawn away from cramming for The Test. So while The Test is comparable across whatever, it is measuring the wrong things, its results are misused to make the situation worse, and it's very existence is warping and degrading what it is supposed to be measuring.

Australia does not have such a system of tests, and the inevitable orders from politicians and other people with no idea what they're talking about are resisted because those who know most about pedagogy know that the results of such tests can be used productively, but as soon as they get reduced to a meaningless number, and the schools put into a ranked list, all that

Re: Hysteria (Part II)

[erudito]

Yes, it is hard to test correctly. But "trust us" is not an improvement.

And the American system does about as well as a range of other government systems, so it is hard to blame ASAT for that. Americans can at least actually do some comparison in outcomes from year to year and group to group.

Re: Hysteria (Part II)

[catsidhe]

Trust us is no basis for regulation, indeed.

The ASATs may well be providing comparable data, but if those data are not the data that actually carry useful and meaningful information, then what is the point?

And measuring to three decimal points the increase in adult illiteracy rates in the US is not actually going anywhere to fix that problem, and the incessant testing (which, every time the scores come out worse, the calls come to increase the testing, as if measuring something twice will change the answer) are actually part of what is causing those degradations.

Amongst other things, of course. Such as the school system in the US consisting in many places as a cross between a child-minding service and a jail, with a insane hothouse social environment, with teachers with even less pay and lower conditions than in Australia, &c &c.

Re: Hysteria (Part II)

[erudito]

Which would all no doubt explain why, for example, German schools do even worse on literacy, etc.

And listing predictable problems of public provision, of regulator-as-provider, is not exactly an endorsement of public provision.

Re: Hysteria (Part II)

[catsidhe]

The US problems are predictable problems of too much centralisation, and too much government inspired reactionary panic reactions to endemic and systematic problems. They are not necessarily because the regulator is the provider: indeed, quite the opposite. In most places in the US the provider is the local school board

Re: Hysteria (Part III)

[catsidhe]

The thing is, the Government does not run schools, the Education Department does. The Government funds the Education Department, gives it policy directions in which to head, but that is not the same as running it. Whenever the government does stick its hand in, it's usually a disaster. There is a place for private schools, there is a place for religious schools, but I disagree that the answer to problems in the school system is to privatise and subsidise it

Re: Hysteria (Part III)

[erudito]

Telstra was an abortion (thank you Kim Beazley). The network should have been separated off, kept in public hands and the rest privatised.

Water has been corporatised, not privatised and any problems are the failure to build dams and price correctly, both government failures.

I fail to see what the major issues are with power (apart from some of the private operators over-bidding for the assets) or buses. Have not been following the ins and outs of Connex's problems in detail, but I suspect the contracts have not been sufficiently well specified (or, alternatively, properly enforced). We still seem to be doing notably better than Sydney rail.

That the Government is both schooling regulator and provider and uses the bureaucracy as its instruments for both remains a fundamental conflict of interest that (negatively) purveys the system. Yes, regulation of schools should be entirely separated from their management.

Re: Hysteria (Part III)

[catsidhe]

Article of Faith I: Regulator must not be Provider
Article of Faith II: any department of the Government may as well be the Government