I have learned how the UK is as centralised as any third-world country
around the government barracks in the capital city.
That's what the UK government is like, in London.
They devolve power to communities only to grab it back when
nobody's looking.
So, Councils have the run of education, or had, until recent
governments have sought to micro manage every school.
If you have a failing school, London steps in, closes and wrecks
your school so that you can't go back, no matter what. They
get their rich buddies to build a gleaming new school, filling
it with low paid instructors, following a syllabus that
the businessmen create. No pedagogical wizards, here. Businessmen.
And London is happy because their buddies will be chummy
with the Central government. All's well, right?
WRONG
Apparently these 'Academies', much like Police Academy,
are producing worse results than the other types of schools,
on average.
IshitUnot:
School head resigns amid academy row with Michael Gove
Leslie Church steps down as head of Downhill's school, which lawyers say is being illegally forced into becoming an academy
Jessica Shepherd, education correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 February 2012 19.03 GMT
The headteacher of a primary school embroiled in a row with education secretary Michael Gove over academy status has resigned.
Inspectors who visited Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London, last week are said to have placed the school in special measures, their worst rating. In January 2010, inspectors judged the school to be doing less well than expected and gave it a "notice to improve".
Ministers had given the school a deadline of mid-January to commit to becoming an academy and finding a private sponsor. Academies are accountable to central government rather than their local authority. Becoming an academy would mean the school's governing body would have to be replaced. But lawyers representing the governing body accused the education secretary of illegally trying to enforce academy status.
The local community has mounted a campaign to save Downhills and argue that its results are improving. Gove, who has described the campaigners as "Trots" to MPs on the cross-party education select committee, ordered the most recent inspection so that there was an up-to-date verdict. Inspectors are said to have described the school as "underperforming"....
Wednesday 21 March 2012
Monday 5 March 2012
Kids' education is a war zone
between the London Controllers of Everything, and local councils.
I can't tell whether a local council is the right body to decide school
policy, but the UK government butting in to close schools
and open new academies is wrong for all the well-known reasons
that nobody seems to be discussing.
1 they equate troubled schools with old buildings and local council control
2 they open new academies which can teach whatever they want to kids,
which is simply irresponsible. That's more so because many of the academy
owners are buddies of the political classes
3 the academy owners are given way too much public money to build a
school which is not needed, and then they charge the government rent
and upkeep.
4 staff are fired at a whim and replaced with people on lower wages.
5 they're probably at the leading edge of allowing untrained classroom
assistants to teach classes.
6 the latest Toff in the hotseat is Michael Gove. Try to remember that
name in 5 years' time.
7 Academies are now the thin edge of the wedge, since Free schools are
also being readied for approval.
If this stuff is new to you, you may be thinking
"WTF is the UK government doing?"
Perhaps the answer is "social engineering", designed to keep the poor
poor and stupid and their buddies rich and lazy.
IshitUnot:
soon
a Guardian story which will show that the shiny new academies
are doing worse, on average, than normal schools.
I can't tell whether a local council is the right body to decide school
policy, but the UK government butting in to close schools
and open new academies is wrong for all the well-known reasons
that nobody seems to be discussing.
1 they equate troubled schools with old buildings and local council control
2 they open new academies which can teach whatever they want to kids,
which is simply irresponsible. That's more so because many of the academy
owners are buddies of the political classes
3 the academy owners are given way too much public money to build a
school which is not needed, and then they charge the government rent
and upkeep.
4 staff are fired at a whim and replaced with people on lower wages.
5 they're probably at the leading edge of allowing untrained classroom
assistants to teach classes.
6 the latest Toff in the hotseat is Michael Gove. Try to remember that
name in 5 years' time.
7 Academies are now the thin edge of the wedge, since Free schools are
also being readied for approval.
If this stuff is new to you, you may be thinking
"WTF is the UK government doing?"
Perhaps the answer is "social engineering", designed to keep the poor
poor and stupid and their buddies rich and lazy.
IshitUnot:
soon
a Guardian story which will show that the shiny new academies
are doing worse, on average, than normal schools.
Wednesday 18 January 2012
creeping managerialism in universities
I've always thought that managers and politicians are like a virus.
They protect the space they've invaded, and then look for extra
padding and protection by bringing more of their kind into the ranks.
Oh, and now they're killing tertiary education. At my uni,
they're laying off teaching staff at the rate of 40 a year, and continuing
to hire managers, that cost 3 lecturer's salaries each. And then, they
all gotta do something to legitimise their paychecks, thus destroying
things further.
checkitout:
Ever wealthier vice chancellors are leaving education behind
Expanding pay packages are the latest evidence of the cosy position of university chiefs – as staff and students suffer
* Comments (42)
Michael Chessum
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 January 2012 16.34 GMT
o Article history
David Eastwood
David Eastwood 'described the events of the past year as if he had no role in them'. Photograph: Sam Frost
Pay packages for university vice chancellors are rising by an average of £9,700 per year – the equivalent of one year's undergraduate fees under the new funding system. Although not unprecedented, in a new era of campus politicisation and financial hardship, this news will cause uproar on many campuses. To properly address the root of the problem, however, students and university staff must challenge the deeper ideological and managerial consensus that has allowed such inequality and waste to persist.
With job security, pay and pensions under attack everywhere, it is no wonder that the University and College Union is up in arms at high managerial pay. This week London Metropolitan University announced the redundancy of 229 staff, 201 of which are academic grade, across seven faculties – adding to last year's 70% cut to undergraduate courses.
Across the country, the increasingly comfortable position of many vice chancellors contrasts heavily with the daily realities of life for university employees in the chaos being wrought by the present government.
Students are also facing an attack on their conditions. With millions of people now in higher education, student poverty can no longer be portrayed as a melodramatic middle-class concern – and it is set to get worse. With bursaries being raided by many university managements to fund fee waivers, living costs are rising and accommodation prices are sky-rocketing. A catered place in a University of London hall, with shared bathroom and toilet, will cost you upwards of £170 per week in 2012-13, the first year of £9,000 fees.
The high pay of university heads, although a good headline and a reasonable criticism, is not the end of the story for high managerial pay at universities. In March 2010, University College London had 311 staff paid more than £100,000. When approached by the Evening Standard about the fact that his cleaners were living in poverty, the UCL provost Malcolm Grant, himself on £404,000 at the time, described the London living wage as a "luxury" that he could not afford. Although Grant later committed to paying the living wage, this has still not been implemented, and many auxiliary staff have now been outsourced, stripping away their pension rights and sick pay.
The concentration of wealth at the top of universities is merely one manifestation of an increasingly managerial approach in higher education. Most vice chancellors have no mandate for their actions other than the (often pretty much automatic) consent of their governing bodies, which are more and more populated by unelected business people and managers rather than academics.
This approach has been backed up by a much broader ideological consensus about higher education, which has gone almost unchallenged for more than a decade. David Eastwood, the vice chancellor of Birmingham University, was singled out by the report as the second-highest-paid vice chancellor in the country. He was also a member of the Browne review panel, and in December reviewed the higher education debate that exploded over the past year. Tellingly, he described the events of the past year as if he had no role in them. This is a common rhetorical technique for vice chancellors, who often balance a cosy relationship with government with an increasingly restless atmosphere on campus.
In reality, vice chancellors, particularly in the Russell Group, have spent serious energy lobbying for a higher education system increasingly funded by fees, increasingly motivated by individual rather than societal benefit, and increasingly run like a business – with soaring executive pay.
Their lobbying efforts have chimed with a succession of governments, who have given them precisely that, forming a growing consensus under both major parties about the future shape of universities. When the Browne review was released, Eastwood described its recommendations, including unlimited tuition fees, as "a very good deal for students and a fair and progressive way forward that will enable universities to provide a high quality education on an affordable and sustainable basis".
Parallels can be drawn with Grant's record as provost of UCL. He has also very publicly backed higher fees, and has been at the forefront of arguing for research funding concentrations, which would have left poorer universities facing closure. Grant's closeness to consecutive governments is reflected in his role as trade envoy for the prime minister, and his latest appointment as the chair of the NHS commissioning board – a controversial body invented by Andrew Lansley's reforms.
Under the prevailing policy consensus in higher education, vice chancellors and government ministers have learned to speak the same language. Rightwing political agendas and questionable ethical practices have become hidden behind a wall of innocuous newspeak. "Excellence" – often a byword for regressive funding concentrations or for national pride – and "sustainability" – a euphemism for taking public money out of universities – are the order of the day, precisely because they mean nothing and can be filled with consensus dogma.
The closeness of university managements to the government has been a disaster for everyone in education. This year, the government will try to push through its higher education white paper. On top of the EMA cuts, fee rises and almost total teaching grant cuts of last year, the white paper has been roundly denounced as an attack on the very idea of education as a public service. It represents the radical outcome of decades of policy consensus in higher education under Labour and coalition governments, none of which has had an electoral mandate.
Picking up the pieces from the fee rises and the higher education white paper, students and university staff will rightly ask who gave successive governments the permission to launch this attack. Set against a prevailing consensus of unaccountable and overpaid politicians and vice chancellors, the democratisation of universities and colleges may yet prove to be a key point of reference for those who want to keep fighting for an education system run as a social good, accessible to all.
They protect the space they've invaded, and then look for extra
padding and protection by bringing more of their kind into the ranks.
Oh, and now they're killing tertiary education. At my uni,
they're laying off teaching staff at the rate of 40 a year, and continuing
to hire managers, that cost 3 lecturer's salaries each. And then, they
all gotta do something to legitimise their paychecks, thus destroying
things further.
checkitout:
Ever wealthier vice chancellors are leaving education behind
Expanding pay packages are the latest evidence of the cosy position of university chiefs – as staff and students suffer
* Comments (42)
Michael Chessum
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 January 2012 16.34 GMT
o Article history
David Eastwood
David Eastwood 'described the events of the past year as if he had no role in them'. Photograph: Sam Frost
Pay packages for university vice chancellors are rising by an average of £9,700 per year – the equivalent of one year's undergraduate fees under the new funding system. Although not unprecedented, in a new era of campus politicisation and financial hardship, this news will cause uproar on many campuses. To properly address the root of the problem, however, students and university staff must challenge the deeper ideological and managerial consensus that has allowed such inequality and waste to persist.
With job security, pay and pensions under attack everywhere, it is no wonder that the University and College Union is up in arms at high managerial pay. This week London Metropolitan University announced the redundancy of 229 staff, 201 of which are academic grade, across seven faculties – adding to last year's 70% cut to undergraduate courses.
Across the country, the increasingly comfortable position of many vice chancellors contrasts heavily with the daily realities of life for university employees in the chaos being wrought by the present government.
Students are also facing an attack on their conditions. With millions of people now in higher education, student poverty can no longer be portrayed as a melodramatic middle-class concern – and it is set to get worse. With bursaries being raided by many university managements to fund fee waivers, living costs are rising and accommodation prices are sky-rocketing. A catered place in a University of London hall, with shared bathroom and toilet, will cost you upwards of £170 per week in 2012-13, the first year of £9,000 fees.
The high pay of university heads, although a good headline and a reasonable criticism, is not the end of the story for high managerial pay at universities. In March 2010, University College London had 311 staff paid more than £100,000. When approached by the Evening Standard about the fact that his cleaners were living in poverty, the UCL provost Malcolm Grant, himself on £404,000 at the time, described the London living wage as a "luxury" that he could not afford. Although Grant later committed to paying the living wage, this has still not been implemented, and many auxiliary staff have now been outsourced, stripping away their pension rights and sick pay.
The concentration of wealth at the top of universities is merely one manifestation of an increasingly managerial approach in higher education. Most vice chancellors have no mandate for their actions other than the (often pretty much automatic) consent of their governing bodies, which are more and more populated by unelected business people and managers rather than academics.
This approach has been backed up by a much broader ideological consensus about higher education, which has gone almost unchallenged for more than a decade. David Eastwood, the vice chancellor of Birmingham University, was singled out by the report as the second-highest-paid vice chancellor in the country. He was also a member of the Browne review panel, and in December reviewed the higher education debate that exploded over the past year. Tellingly, he described the events of the past year as if he had no role in them. This is a common rhetorical technique for vice chancellors, who often balance a cosy relationship with government with an increasingly restless atmosphere on campus.
In reality, vice chancellors, particularly in the Russell Group, have spent serious energy lobbying for a higher education system increasingly funded by fees, increasingly motivated by individual rather than societal benefit, and increasingly run like a business – with soaring executive pay.
Their lobbying efforts have chimed with a succession of governments, who have given them precisely that, forming a growing consensus under both major parties about the future shape of universities. When the Browne review was released, Eastwood described its recommendations, including unlimited tuition fees, as "a very good deal for students and a fair and progressive way forward that will enable universities to provide a high quality education on an affordable and sustainable basis".
Parallels can be drawn with Grant's record as provost of UCL. He has also very publicly backed higher fees, and has been at the forefront of arguing for research funding concentrations, which would have left poorer universities facing closure. Grant's closeness to consecutive governments is reflected in his role as trade envoy for the prime minister, and his latest appointment as the chair of the NHS commissioning board – a controversial body invented by Andrew Lansley's reforms.
Under the prevailing policy consensus in higher education, vice chancellors and government ministers have learned to speak the same language. Rightwing political agendas and questionable ethical practices have become hidden behind a wall of innocuous newspeak. "Excellence" – often a byword for regressive funding concentrations or for national pride – and "sustainability" – a euphemism for taking public money out of universities – are the order of the day, precisely because they mean nothing and can be filled with consensus dogma.
The closeness of university managements to the government has been a disaster for everyone in education. This year, the government will try to push through its higher education white paper. On top of the EMA cuts, fee rises and almost total teaching grant cuts of last year, the white paper has been roundly denounced as an attack on the very idea of education as a public service. It represents the radical outcome of decades of policy consensus in higher education under Labour and coalition governments, none of which has had an electoral mandate.
Picking up the pieces from the fee rises and the higher education white paper, students and university staff will rightly ask who gave successive governments the permission to launch this attack. Set against a prevailing consensus of unaccountable and overpaid politicians and vice chancellors, the democratisation of universities and colleges may yet prove to be a key point of reference for those who want to keep fighting for an education system run as a social good, accessible to all.
tertiary re-education, part 2
the future is looking bright:
Students are already consumers - but will we get cannier?
It's easy to portray government reforms as a Dickensian nightmare. But there is something to be gained from seeing university education as a commodity, says Lucy Snow
* Comments (1)
Lucy Snow, student blogger
Lucy Snow: just another pianoforte leg?
Education Guardian teamed up with Ones to Watch, the website that showcases the best UK student journalism, to launch a writing competition. We asked:
"With fees tripling to £9,000 a year at most universities, is it inevitable that the student will become a consumer?"
Here's, Lucy Snow, the first of two runners-up.
"Students as consumers" is one of those horrid phrases that provokes much indignant bleating: education becoming a commodity, universities becoming sausage factories, lecturers becoming Gove's finger puppets.
But students have been consumers ever since fees were introduced, by definition. University offers us a product – made up of libraries, academic experts, careers advice – and, rightly or wrongly, we pay what the government deems is an appropriate price.
The real question is, will increasing these fees make students more aware of their status as consumers, and demand more bang for their buck? Or will the result be a creativity-sapping Dickensian nightmare: Mr M'Choakumchild at the helm churning out graduates like "so many pianoforte legs"?
University should be about creativity, and education for education's sake. My BA degree has been amazing and enriching, a golden period between the box-ticking of secondary school and the online numeracy and non-verbal reasoning tests apparently integral to getting any graduate job.
But many a morning I have had to convince myself to get out of bed and go to my lecture by working out exactly how much each hour of contact time is costing me.
Does my awareness of this negate the positive stuff? As with most student issues, opinion tends to be polarised: either you're a free-spirited creative sticking it to the man, or you're an institutionalised scab practically encouraging higher fees by utilising every cringeworthy opportunity to "network" that the careers centre gives you.
However, I believe that an appreciation of the purely educative, enriching processes of higher education can exist alongside an awareness that students should be offered a range of services in return for their fees.
As much as events entitled "How to sell yourself to employees" and "How to use social networking to get ahead" may turn your stomach, they are attempts to improve the consumer experience and give students a leg up in a saturated jobs market. There should be no shame in accepting this help, and no dent to your academic or creative integrity.
Against a backdrop of anti-capitalist protests, it's difficult to see the phrase "student as consumers" in anything other than a negative light.
But university is a unique product that markets itself to you at great expense. Students need to be conscious consumers so we can get the best out of our three years.
When it comes to the business of learning, it's not what your university can do for you, but rather what you can do for yourself – with the resources and support provided.
Students are already consumers - but will we get cannier?
It's easy to portray government reforms as a Dickensian nightmare. But there is something to be gained from seeing university education as a commodity, says Lucy Snow
* Comments (1)
Lucy Snow, student blogger
Lucy Snow: just another pianoforte leg?
Education Guardian teamed up with Ones to Watch, the website that showcases the best UK student journalism, to launch a writing competition. We asked:
"With fees tripling to £9,000 a year at most universities, is it inevitable that the student will become a consumer?"
Here's, Lucy Snow, the first of two runners-up.
"Students as consumers" is one of those horrid phrases that provokes much indignant bleating: education becoming a commodity, universities becoming sausage factories, lecturers becoming Gove's finger puppets.
But students have been consumers ever since fees were introduced, by definition. University offers us a product – made up of libraries, academic experts, careers advice – and, rightly or wrongly, we pay what the government deems is an appropriate price.
The real question is, will increasing these fees make students more aware of their status as consumers, and demand more bang for their buck? Or will the result be a creativity-sapping Dickensian nightmare: Mr M'Choakumchild at the helm churning out graduates like "so many pianoforte legs"?
University should be about creativity, and education for education's sake. My BA degree has been amazing and enriching, a golden period between the box-ticking of secondary school and the online numeracy and non-verbal reasoning tests apparently integral to getting any graduate job.
But many a morning I have had to convince myself to get out of bed and go to my lecture by working out exactly how much each hour of contact time is costing me.
Does my awareness of this negate the positive stuff? As with most student issues, opinion tends to be polarised: either you're a free-spirited creative sticking it to the man, or you're an institutionalised scab practically encouraging higher fees by utilising every cringeworthy opportunity to "network" that the careers centre gives you.
However, I believe that an appreciation of the purely educative, enriching processes of higher education can exist alongside an awareness that students should be offered a range of services in return for their fees.
As much as events entitled "How to sell yourself to employees" and "How to use social networking to get ahead" may turn your stomach, they are attempts to improve the consumer experience and give students a leg up in a saturated jobs market. There should be no shame in accepting this help, and no dent to your academic or creative integrity.
Against a backdrop of anti-capitalist protests, it's difficult to see the phrase "student as consumers" in anything other than a negative light.
But university is a unique product that markets itself to you at great expense. Students need to be conscious consumers so we can get the best out of our three years.
When it comes to the business of learning, it's not what your university can do for you, but rather what you can do for yourself – with the resources and support provided.
9000 reasons to re-educate ourselves
If the UK government wants to marketise tertiary education, I think we'll
have to come to our senses quick and show him:
"we don't need no marketised education"
The Guardian held a contest to ask young minds for a way around this
seemingly draconian class-separation machine called the university.
the winner:
Pay-as-you-go lectures would give us real choice
Turn us into consumers if you must, but at least give us the right to decide what we pay for, says winning student blogger
* Comments (151)
A lesson on hysteria by Jean Martin
These guys got their money's worth: a lecture on hysteria by Jean Martin Charcot (1825-93), complete with hypnotised patient. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images
Education Guardian teamed up with Ones to Watch, the website that showcases the best UK student journalism, to launch a writing competition. We asked:
"With fees tripling to £9,000 a year at most universities, is it inevitable that the student will become a consumer?"
Here's our winner, Luke Braidwood.
"It's 9.45. I'm mildly hungover and relying on a strong black coffee to stay awake. The dulcet tones of a greying, portly biochemistry professor rumble around a gloomy lecture hall, which is clad in oak and filled with plastic chairs.
"We're learning about the organisation of the plant metabolic network, which is only about half as much fun as it sounds. After the summary, which seems strangely unfamiliar, we rummage around in our pockets, pull out £30, and place it on the front desk in a heap of crumpled notes and loose change. Sam asks me to lend him some cash; he's forgotten his wallet for the third time this month.
"The professor pulls out a hessian sack and sweeps the money (about £1,800) into it, then walks outside whistling.
"I have 10 lectures a week, some of them obtuse or incomprehensible, and place £300 weekly on front desks of lecture halls. There are 30 teaching weeks in a year, so I'm paying around £9,000 for all my lectures. I think about this as I look for a paracetamol in my bag, and wonder if I'm getting my money's worth."
Joe, the protagonist of this tale, lives in a slightly different world, where roughly £9,000 tuition fees are payable on a pay-as-you-go system. It's like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep with education instead of appliances. Joe can choose to stop attending the lectures on plant metabolism he finds so dreary, and save money on this module. Perhaps he will spend some of it on a plant metabolism textbook to help him in the exams.
Joe is a consumer: he pays only for what he wants. That way, the university receives detailed feedback on which topics and lecturers the student body values most. In our world, students must pay the full fee at the start of each year, and are expected turn up to the lectures, laboratory work and classes that the university provides.
With fees tripling, it is inevitable that students – other than those born to very wealthy families – will be thinking harder about whether to go to university and what to study. We've watched banks go down, and drag countries down, because of excessive borrowing, so mountainous debt isn't appealing to anyone.
Making young people think harder about the value of their degree may not be a bad thing. But the value of a degree is simply the perception of that degree by prospective employers. And their perception will have little to do with how well it was taught.
If Oxford stopped giving lectures tomorrow (and the media didn't notice), it would take many years for employers to realise the increased ineptitude of Oxford graduates, and start discriminating accordingly. In contrast, even the most dynamic, useful and thrilling degree may be undersubscribed if it's being offered by the new kid on the block – because employers don't demand it.
The biggest problem with the fee rise is that it turns students into consumers who lack real choice. They can only pick between degrees, not within them. It's a system that which robs students of the opportunity to pay only for what benefits them most, and universities of the chance to learn how best to teach their students.
have to come to our senses quick and show him:
"we don't need no marketised education"
The Guardian held a contest to ask young minds for a way around this
seemingly draconian class-separation machine called the university.
the winner:
Pay-as-you-go lectures would give us real choice
Turn us into consumers if you must, but at least give us the right to decide what we pay for, says winning student blogger
* Comments (151)
A lesson on hysteria by Jean Martin
These guys got their money's worth: a lecture on hysteria by Jean Martin Charcot (1825-93), complete with hypnotised patient. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images
Education Guardian teamed up with Ones to Watch, the website that showcases the best UK student journalism, to launch a writing competition. We asked:
"With fees tripling to £9,000 a year at most universities, is it inevitable that the student will become a consumer?"
Here's our winner, Luke Braidwood.
"It's 9.45. I'm mildly hungover and relying on a strong black coffee to stay awake. The dulcet tones of a greying, portly biochemistry professor rumble around a gloomy lecture hall, which is clad in oak and filled with plastic chairs.
"We're learning about the organisation of the plant metabolic network, which is only about half as much fun as it sounds. After the summary, which seems strangely unfamiliar, we rummage around in our pockets, pull out £30, and place it on the front desk in a heap of crumpled notes and loose change. Sam asks me to lend him some cash; he's forgotten his wallet for the third time this month.
"The professor pulls out a hessian sack and sweeps the money (about £1,800) into it, then walks outside whistling.
"I have 10 lectures a week, some of them obtuse or incomprehensible, and place £300 weekly on front desks of lecture halls. There are 30 teaching weeks in a year, so I'm paying around £9,000 for all my lectures. I think about this as I look for a paracetamol in my bag, and wonder if I'm getting my money's worth."
Joe, the protagonist of this tale, lives in a slightly different world, where roughly £9,000 tuition fees are payable on a pay-as-you-go system. It's like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep with education instead of appliances. Joe can choose to stop attending the lectures on plant metabolism he finds so dreary, and save money on this module. Perhaps he will spend some of it on a plant metabolism textbook to help him in the exams.
Joe is a consumer: he pays only for what he wants. That way, the university receives detailed feedback on which topics and lecturers the student body values most. In our world, students must pay the full fee at the start of each year, and are expected turn up to the lectures, laboratory work and classes that the university provides.
With fees tripling, it is inevitable that students – other than those born to very wealthy families – will be thinking harder about whether to go to university and what to study. We've watched banks go down, and drag countries down, because of excessive borrowing, so mountainous debt isn't appealing to anyone.
Making young people think harder about the value of their degree may not be a bad thing. But the value of a degree is simply the perception of that degree by prospective employers. And their perception will have little to do with how well it was taught.
If Oxford stopped giving lectures tomorrow (and the media didn't notice), it would take many years for employers to realise the increased ineptitude of Oxford graduates, and start discriminating accordingly. In contrast, even the most dynamic, useful and thrilling degree may be undersubscribed if it's being offered by the new kid on the block – because employers don't demand it.
The biggest problem with the fee rise is that it turns students into consumers who lack real choice. They can only pick between degrees, not within them. It's a system that which robs students of the opportunity to pay only for what benefits them most, and universities of the chance to learn how best to teach their students.
real education, part 2
Comments later
from Zerohedge: JS Kim
The Hidden Dark Agenda of Public Education
Submitted by smartknowledgeu on 01/13/2012 03:45 -0500
“An alien collectivist (socialist) philosophy, much of which came from Europe, crashed onto the shores of our nation, bringing with it radical changes in economics, politics, and education, funded - surprisingly enough - by several wealthy American families and their tax-exempt foundations. The goal of these wealthy families and their foundations - a seamless non-competitive global system for commerce and trade - when stripped of flowery expressions of concern for minorities, the less fortunate, etc., represented the initial stage of what this author now refers to as the deliberate dumbing down of America. Seventy years later, the carefully laid plans to change America from a sovereign, constitutional republic with a free enterprise economic base to just one of many nations in an international socialist (collectivist) system (New World Order) are apparent. Only a dumbed down population, with no memory of America’s roots as a prideful nation, could be expected to willingly succumb to the global workforce training planned by the Carnegie Corporation and the John D. Rockefellers, I and II.”
- US Department of Education Senior Policy Advisor Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt
Yesterday I released an article, “Lack of Critical Thinking is Key to the Corrupt Status Quo Maintaining Their Power”, on my blog and at ZeroHedge and it generated a lot of comments including those that stated they don’t believe in conspiracies or the existence of a “big bad wolf” that deliberately is “out to get us”. However, for those of us familiar with the works of John Taylor Gatto, we know that there are literally mountains of evidence that indict former Presidents and corporate businessmen with deliberately steering the global education system towards the singular mission of producing obedient factory workers to serve the corporate industrialists during the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, there are mountains of evidence, direct from the horse’s mouth, that their continued mission for the academic system today is to produce obedient servants to the State and to kill any individualism and critical thinking that may lead to an awakened state among the masses that would challenge the moral authority, or rather lack thereof, of those in power.
John Taylor Gatto, one of the most well-known and outspoken critics of the public education system, quit his 30-year teaching career in 1991, because confined within the system, Gatto believe he was hurting children more than helping them. He stated the following as his reason for leaving institutional academia:
“I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free...I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger...the training field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, and generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, family-less, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about. An executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected ‘to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.’ You can’t get much clearer than that. WWII drove the project underground, but hardly retarded its momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school became a major domestic battleground for the scientific rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination.”
I precisely stated in my article yesterday, “Refuse to accept something as fact just because an authority figure, whether a professor, the Vatican, or politician, told you to believe it, and automatically many amongst the sheep will accuse one of pandering to conspiracy theories, even when one can present many facts that support one’s opposition view much more strongly than the widely accepted view” in the hopes that people would read this line and digest historical facts before dismissing the main points of my article. Yet, from reading the comments posted below my article yesterday, it seems as though some may have dismissed my argument before even examining the facts.
Mr. O.A. Nelson, retired educator, recounted a December 1928 meeting in which he spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His recollection of the meeting below addresses some of the comments posted on my article from yesterday regarding the importance of sciences.
"We were 13 at the meeting. Two things caused Dr. Ziegler, who was Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, to ask me to attend...my talk on the teaching of functional physics in high school, and the fact that I was a member of Progressive Educators of America, which was nothing but a Communist front. I thought the word ‘progressive’ meant progress for better schools. Eleven of those attending the meeting were leaders in education. Drs. John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, from Columbia University, were there, and the others were of equal rank. I checked later and found that all were paid members of the Community Party of Russia. I was classified as a member of the Party, but I did not know it at the time. The sole work of the group was to destroy our schools! we spent one hour and forty-five minutes discussing the so-called ‘Modern Math.’ At one point I objected because there was too much memory work, and math is reasoning; not memory. Dr. Ziegler turned to me and said, ‘Nelson, wake up! That is what we want… a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!’ That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. A milder course by Dr. Brechner was substituted but it was also worthless, as far as understanding math was concerned. The radical change was introduced in 1952. It was the one we are using now. So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don’t blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless."
While I agree that sciences are critical for learning and also critical for the development of reasoning skills, Dr. Ziegler’s comments reveal that men like him, men that helped shape our academic system, clearly did not want sciences to be taught in a manner that would improve critical thinking and reasoning skills, but instead, in a manner that was completely inapplicable to real life situations.
It is not a coincidence that after I graduated from university, I often would comment to my friends, “You know what, there is not one thing I learned in school that I apply in life today.” In fact, the inapplicability of schooling in life reaches far back from even my university days. When I was 14, I had already completed two years of advanced calculus, and believed in a typical teenager bout of self-delusion, that I was some sort of mathematical genius. But in reality, outside of the praise of my teachers, what was the point of my mathematical "progress" back then? Yes, it enabled me to score a perfect score on the math portion of the SATs and then gain entrance into an Ivy League university. However, in retrospect and in complete absurdity, I cannot think of one instance since my educational career ended that I have ever applied, in real life, anything that I learned during my years of mathematical schooling. It is as if the purpose of my institutional mathematical training was solely to enable me to gain a higher score on a standardized test, a ridiculous purpose if there ever was one. And today? Because all I did was memorize advanced mathematical formulas back then, I have long since forgotten them all, and nothing is applicable to my life today just as Dr. Ziegler of the CFR had desired.
In great irony, it was the very inapplicability of education that allowed me to excel through the system. The advantage I held over all my peers was that I had a photographic memory. I recall even as early as the 6th grade when I could read a passage about the Civil War a single time and remember exactly how many soldiers died from each side in each battle and on what specific date in history. Because the academic system stressed rote memory and regurgitation without any true learning, my photographic memory served me exceedingly well and my teachers labeled me as “gifted” and heaped extra attention upon me, even though I never really began to learn how to critically think until I read books on my own outside of the academic system and after I had already graduated from university.
But what if sciences were taught in a manner that developed critical thinking and reasoning skills? How much easier today would it be today to actually convince people of the fact that the global monetary and Central Banking system is a criminal, immoral system deliberately designed by corporate thieves to harm people instead of help people? How much easier would it be to convince people of State run false flag propaganda such as the bogus enemy engagement of the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin at the time it happened instead of 40 years later? How much easier would it be to convince people that the two-party system in America is just an illusion to con people into believing they have a choice when no real choice is ever offered to people in elections? Of course, the answer is that it would be infinitely easier.
The lack of developed critical thinking skills in the institutional academic system is also the reason why people continue to falsely believe the propaganda of banker shills that a gold standard helped cause the Great Depression and why it is so difficult to convince Westerners of the value of gold and silver but infinitely easier to convince Asians of the value of gold and silver. The stark dichotomy is due simply to the fact that people believe what the State tells them to believe. Logic, reasoning, and critical thinking are all meals on the menu of threats to the power of the status quo. And this is why the goal of academic education by the elites is to strip away reasoning skills from subjects such as math that inherently rely on reasoning. This is also the reason why institutional academia will never change and that those that wish for it to change find that they cannot work within the system but have to leave it. My friend, Alyssa Gonzales, decided that operating outside of the system and serving as a founding teacher of her own school, Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts, was the best solution to be able to encourage, instead of suppress, the development of critical thinking and reasoning skills of young children. If you live in Los Angeles, please visit her school and support Ms. Gonzales’s efforts, described at their website as the following:
"In contrast to curriculum found in a traditional public school setting which stresses teaching and learning in the areas that can be most easily assessed by standardized testing measures, arts-integrated curriculum develops the whole child: kinesthetic, musical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and natural intelligences. At LFCSA, we challenge children to construct their own meaning from complex ideas and concepts. Acknowledging that students learn and demonstrate what they know in a variety of ways, our instruction allows children to see, hear, and express according to their individual learning styles."
In support of spreading awareness of the true intent of corporate businessmen that have “donated” billions of dollars to shape the curricula of the most “prestigious” schools in the world today, here is a video titled “The Dark Secrets of Public Education”. Certainly, this video deserves a thousand times more views than the current 9,900 views it has thus far received. If you would like for our communities to be more thoughtful, more open-minded, and more co-operative in the future instead of obedient to the powers that be, please send this article and video to everyone you know so we can foster a more honest and open debate about the State’s goals of institutional academia. Thank you.
from Zerohedge: JS Kim
The Hidden Dark Agenda of Public Education
Submitted by smartknowledgeu on 01/13/2012 03:45 -0500
“An alien collectivist (socialist) philosophy, much of which came from Europe, crashed onto the shores of our nation, bringing with it radical changes in economics, politics, and education, funded - surprisingly enough - by several wealthy American families and their tax-exempt foundations. The goal of these wealthy families and their foundations - a seamless non-competitive global system for commerce and trade - when stripped of flowery expressions of concern for minorities, the less fortunate, etc., represented the initial stage of what this author now refers to as the deliberate dumbing down of America. Seventy years later, the carefully laid plans to change America from a sovereign, constitutional republic with a free enterprise economic base to just one of many nations in an international socialist (collectivist) system (New World Order) are apparent. Only a dumbed down population, with no memory of America’s roots as a prideful nation, could be expected to willingly succumb to the global workforce training planned by the Carnegie Corporation and the John D. Rockefellers, I and II.”
- US Department of Education Senior Policy Advisor Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt
Yesterday I released an article, “Lack of Critical Thinking is Key to the Corrupt Status Quo Maintaining Their Power”, on my blog and at ZeroHedge and it generated a lot of comments including those that stated they don’t believe in conspiracies or the existence of a “big bad wolf” that deliberately is “out to get us”. However, for those of us familiar with the works of John Taylor Gatto, we know that there are literally mountains of evidence that indict former Presidents and corporate businessmen with deliberately steering the global education system towards the singular mission of producing obedient factory workers to serve the corporate industrialists during the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, there are mountains of evidence, direct from the horse’s mouth, that their continued mission for the academic system today is to produce obedient servants to the State and to kill any individualism and critical thinking that may lead to an awakened state among the masses that would challenge the moral authority, or rather lack thereof, of those in power.
John Taylor Gatto, one of the most well-known and outspoken critics of the public education system, quit his 30-year teaching career in 1991, because confined within the system, Gatto believe he was hurting children more than helping them. He stated the following as his reason for leaving institutional academia:
“I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free...I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger...the training field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, and generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, family-less, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about. An executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected ‘to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.’ You can’t get much clearer than that. WWII drove the project underground, but hardly retarded its momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school became a major domestic battleground for the scientific rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination.”
I precisely stated in my article yesterday, “Refuse to accept something as fact just because an authority figure, whether a professor, the Vatican, or politician, told you to believe it, and automatically many amongst the sheep will accuse one of pandering to conspiracy theories, even when one can present many facts that support one’s opposition view much more strongly than the widely accepted view” in the hopes that people would read this line and digest historical facts before dismissing the main points of my article. Yet, from reading the comments posted below my article yesterday, it seems as though some may have dismissed my argument before even examining the facts.
Mr. O.A. Nelson, retired educator, recounted a December 1928 meeting in which he spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His recollection of the meeting below addresses some of the comments posted on my article from yesterday regarding the importance of sciences.
"We were 13 at the meeting. Two things caused Dr. Ziegler, who was Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, to ask me to attend...my talk on the teaching of functional physics in high school, and the fact that I was a member of Progressive Educators of America, which was nothing but a Communist front. I thought the word ‘progressive’ meant progress for better schools. Eleven of those attending the meeting were leaders in education. Drs. John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, from Columbia University, were there, and the others were of equal rank. I checked later and found that all were paid members of the Community Party of Russia. I was classified as a member of the Party, but I did not know it at the time. The sole work of the group was to destroy our schools! we spent one hour and forty-five minutes discussing the so-called ‘Modern Math.’ At one point I objected because there was too much memory work, and math is reasoning; not memory. Dr. Ziegler turned to me and said, ‘Nelson, wake up! That is what we want… a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!’ That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. A milder course by Dr. Brechner was substituted but it was also worthless, as far as understanding math was concerned. The radical change was introduced in 1952. It was the one we are using now. So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don’t blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless."
While I agree that sciences are critical for learning and also critical for the development of reasoning skills, Dr. Ziegler’s comments reveal that men like him, men that helped shape our academic system, clearly did not want sciences to be taught in a manner that would improve critical thinking and reasoning skills, but instead, in a manner that was completely inapplicable to real life situations.
It is not a coincidence that after I graduated from university, I often would comment to my friends, “You know what, there is not one thing I learned in school that I apply in life today.” In fact, the inapplicability of schooling in life reaches far back from even my university days. When I was 14, I had already completed two years of advanced calculus, and believed in a typical teenager bout of self-delusion, that I was some sort of mathematical genius. But in reality, outside of the praise of my teachers, what was the point of my mathematical "progress" back then? Yes, it enabled me to score a perfect score on the math portion of the SATs and then gain entrance into an Ivy League university. However, in retrospect and in complete absurdity, I cannot think of one instance since my educational career ended that I have ever applied, in real life, anything that I learned during my years of mathematical schooling. It is as if the purpose of my institutional mathematical training was solely to enable me to gain a higher score on a standardized test, a ridiculous purpose if there ever was one. And today? Because all I did was memorize advanced mathematical formulas back then, I have long since forgotten them all, and nothing is applicable to my life today just as Dr. Ziegler of the CFR had desired.
In great irony, it was the very inapplicability of education that allowed me to excel through the system. The advantage I held over all my peers was that I had a photographic memory. I recall even as early as the 6th grade when I could read a passage about the Civil War a single time and remember exactly how many soldiers died from each side in each battle and on what specific date in history. Because the academic system stressed rote memory and regurgitation without any true learning, my photographic memory served me exceedingly well and my teachers labeled me as “gifted” and heaped extra attention upon me, even though I never really began to learn how to critically think until I read books on my own outside of the academic system and after I had already graduated from university.
But what if sciences were taught in a manner that developed critical thinking and reasoning skills? How much easier today would it be today to actually convince people of the fact that the global monetary and Central Banking system is a criminal, immoral system deliberately designed by corporate thieves to harm people instead of help people? How much easier would it be to convince people of State run false flag propaganda such as the bogus enemy engagement of the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin at the time it happened instead of 40 years later? How much easier would it be to convince people that the two-party system in America is just an illusion to con people into believing they have a choice when no real choice is ever offered to people in elections? Of course, the answer is that it would be infinitely easier.
The lack of developed critical thinking skills in the institutional academic system is also the reason why people continue to falsely believe the propaganda of banker shills that a gold standard helped cause the Great Depression and why it is so difficult to convince Westerners of the value of gold and silver but infinitely easier to convince Asians of the value of gold and silver. The stark dichotomy is due simply to the fact that people believe what the State tells them to believe. Logic, reasoning, and critical thinking are all meals on the menu of threats to the power of the status quo. And this is why the goal of academic education by the elites is to strip away reasoning skills from subjects such as math that inherently rely on reasoning. This is also the reason why institutional academia will never change and that those that wish for it to change find that they cannot work within the system but have to leave it. My friend, Alyssa Gonzales, decided that operating outside of the system and serving as a founding teacher of her own school, Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts, was the best solution to be able to encourage, instead of suppress, the development of critical thinking and reasoning skills of young children. If you live in Los Angeles, please visit her school and support Ms. Gonzales’s efforts, described at their website as the following:
"In contrast to curriculum found in a traditional public school setting which stresses teaching and learning in the areas that can be most easily assessed by standardized testing measures, arts-integrated curriculum develops the whole child: kinesthetic, musical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and natural intelligences. At LFCSA, we challenge children to construct their own meaning from complex ideas and concepts. Acknowledging that students learn and demonstrate what they know in a variety of ways, our instruction allows children to see, hear, and express according to their individual learning styles."
In support of spreading awareness of the true intent of corporate businessmen that have “donated” billions of dollars to shape the curricula of the most “prestigious” schools in the world today, here is a video titled “The Dark Secrets of Public Education”. Certainly, this video deserves a thousand times more views than the current 9,900 views it has thus far received. If you would like for our communities to be more thoughtful, more open-minded, and more co-operative in the future instead of obedient to the powers that be, please send this article and video to everyone you know so we can foster a more honest and open debate about the State’s goals of institutional academia. Thank you.
educating for our real world
I picked up 2 very good stories on how education, even when it is done
properly, is not preparing children for life. Many kids are cunning
enough to see that schools and the oligarchs are just pulling our chains.
They're preparing us for a life of survitude.
Well, there are two answers to this. The first is from Reggie Middleton,
the market analyst. the one above is from JS Kim, another excellent
market analyst.
Now, I don't agree with everything they say, but I don't know if I'll have
time to question some of this stuff. But, their ideas are generally good, and
their proof is fairly clear and convincing, so, no rants here.
I also don't think they're saying that everybody should be a derivatives broker.
properly, is not preparing children for life. Many kids are cunning
enough to see that schools and the oligarchs are just pulling our chains.
They're preparing us for a life of survitude.
Well, there are two answers to this. The first is from Reggie Middleton,
the market analyst. the one above is from JS Kim, another excellent
market analyst.
Now, I don't agree with everything they say, but I don't know if I'll have
time to question some of this stuff. But, their ideas are generally good, and
their proof is fairly clear and convincing, so, no rants here.
I also don't think they're saying that everybody should be a derivatives broker.
- 4:00 Reggie starts
- 9:00 INCL. LAZY RICH. Defend their position.
Rot causes poor economy
- Students as foder for rich - (agrees with Kim) "caste system"
- Rules made by rich. Break the rules to succeed
- 25:00 Demetri on an example of stupidity and gov waste
- 26:00 stupidity and building towers of babel and ego
Wealth creation. Money=proxy for labour
Test-taking is useless (agrees with Kim)
Grammar not most important.
True, but Reggie's grammar is sometimes dangerously bad.
- 9:00 INCL. LAZY RICH. Defend their position.
Rot causes poor economy
- Students as foder for rich - (agrees with Kim) "caste system"
- Rules made by rich. Break the rules to succeed
- 25:00 Demetri on an example of stupidity and gov waste
- 26:00 stupidity and building towers of babel and ego
Wealth creation. Money=proxy for labour
Test-taking is useless (agrees with Kim)
Grammar not most important.
True, but Reggie's grammar is sometimes dangerously bad.
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