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.

- 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.

private exam mills are more efficient. right @sarc

The scandals just keep on coming. I don't even have to think.

Why doesn't the government do this stuff which is vital to kids' futures.

Why do they have to farm it out?

Is it because the mills lose papers?
Is it because the mills inflate marks?
Is it because the mills make questions that are unanswerable?
Is it because they take bribes?
Is it because mills leak the papers?

Take you pick

Checkitout: the latest boondogle

..Watchdog warning over exam paper blunders
By Jeff Pachoud | AFP
.. ..Exam boards are being told to carry out out extra checks to avoid further blunders after thousands of students faced exam questions containing mistakes, it emerged on Thursday.

England's exam regulator Ofqual issued the warning as it investigates six errors in this year's A-level and GCSE exam papers.

The latest slip-ups to come to light were in AS-level geography and computing papers set by AQA, one of England's largest exam boards.

In the geography paper a graph showing the velocity of a river was incorrectly labelled as 0.5 rather than 0.05.

AQA apologised and said "no students will be disadvantaged as a result".

down with scholars

The Times Higher Education weekly publication writes about the HE sector and
has on its last page a comedic take on the troubles in the sector through
the fictional University of Poppleton.

One great story was the one that makes fun of the managerialism at all universities.
Universities turn out many MBA grads each year and they started getting hired to
handle the business future of univerisities. Instead, they are handing out jobs
to their out of work friends, at about £120 000 a year,

when lecturer pay has been
frozen for at least 5 years,
and all the universities are laying off lecturers and cleaners.

So, this is part of the bigger story of the Haves and the Have nots.
Whoever has their hands on cold hard cash:
banks, government ministers, managers, Churches
is living the high life.
Everybody else has to get ready for the poorhouse.

checkitout:
Down with scholars!
22 October 2009
By Laurie Taylor

Our vice-chancellor is to head up a brand new organisation called UMAS (University Managers Against Scholarship).

Speaking to The Poppletonian earlier this week, he explained that membership of UMAS was open to all university vice-chancellors who did not go along with "the fashionable self-serving research peddled in organs like Times Higher Education that suggests that scholars make the best university leaders".

"Look at this university now," he said. "Does anyone seriously believe that we'd be in our present state if there'd been an airy-fairy head-in-the-clouds scholar at the helm, rather than myself and my dedicated and ever-growing team of hard-nosed functionally illiterate managers."

Did he anticipate a large membership? "Oh yes. You've only got to attend a couple of meetings of UUK to realise that there are simply dozens of vice-chancellors sitting around the table who don't have an idea in their heads about Proust or particle physics but would certainly know a strategic objective if it looked them in the face."

Our vice-chancellor confirmed that UMAS would go forward under its newly designed logo - Scholarship Sucks. Management Moves.

Schools and low-performing, handy, techy kids.
Let them eat Jafa cakes!

The British government has studiously put poor, handy kids on the scrap heap of life
by not giving them apprenticeships for decades.
Those kids have also been without Technical institutes, because Thatcher
wanted to fool us into thinking that there was growth in tertiary education.
Now the current Con-Dems are set on closing many of those same post-92 'universities' through their generous £9000 fees.
Brilliant. Full-circle circle-jerk politics, for idiots




checkitout
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/mar/13/schools-failing-teenagers-with-vocational-aspirations
Half of pupils are being consigned 'to the scrapheap' by schools

Secondary schools in England and Wales focus on brighter children and fail to help teenagers prepare for world of work, warns Demos
o Share123
Comments (99)
* Tracy McVeigh
* The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011

Half of all teenagers in England and Wales are being failed by secondary schools that focus on brighter children destined to go on to higher education, according to a damning new report from the thinktank Demos.

The report, The Forgotten Half, claims that secondary schools routinely neglect pupils with vocational aspirations, offering minimal careers advice and little help in finding the type of jobs that would suit them. "Our schools are teaching just half of the population," said one of the report's authors, Jonathan Birdwell.

"The education system needs to be less focused on pushing young people through the hoops of assessment that lead on to higher education, and more on equipping them with the skills to enter and progress through the labour market," he added.

One of the key findings of the research is that many of the vocational qualifications that children are encouraged to aim for turn out to be worthless. "That was one thing that really shocked me," said Birdwell.

Work-related learning was found to be low quality and young people failed to benefit from compulsory work experience due to poor links with local businesses and a failure to relate work experience to lessons given in the classroom. Schools were also found to undervalue the importance of part-time work, after-school clubs and volunteering in building up young people's skills, experience and their CVs....

you pays yer money you gets yer degree

a discussion of private universities , coming soon
I've got enough problems with the 'customers' I teach, but if the whole uni exists for the purposes of making money, the whole epistemological edifice falls kinda flat.

-Cosmik67

what if children profit from education instead?

-I can't say it better than this Guardian story.

Exam system 'diseased', claims former education adviserMick Waters says exam boards 'almost corrupt' and make profits through textbooks that hint at exam questions

The Guardian, Friday 17 September 2010
No conferring, now ... A-level exam in progress.

England's exam system is "diseased" and rife with "insider trading", a former government adviser has said in a book which lifts the lid on the ideological divisions over schools policy at the heart of New Labour.
The book, Reinventing Schools, Reforming Teaching, is the first to look back at education policy under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and interviews several key players of the period, including some of Blair's closest advisers and officials.
In it Mick Waters, formerly a director at the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency, accuses exam boards of being "almost corrupt" and claims they make profits by publishing textbooks that practically tell teachers what questions will appear in the exams the boards set.
He says exam boards boast that their tests are the easiest to convince teachers to pick their syllabus, and they tell schools that their students will pass as long as they buy and follow the textbooks.
"We've got a set of exam bodies who are in a market place ... I've seen people talk to headteachers implying that their examinations are easier," Waters is quoted as saying. "Not only that, they provide the textbook to help you through it. Before I went for this job, I used to think that all this criticism of exams – that they were being dumbed-down – was unfair ... since I've been there, I think the system is diseased, almost corrupt."
The book, written by John Bangs, a visiting professor at the Institute of Education, and two Cambridge University professors, John MacBeath and Maurice Galton, is published today.
The authors argue that while the Blair and Brown governments rebuilt many of England's secondary schools and improved standards, they ignored teachers' views and failed to convince them of their reforms.
The book reveals cabinet tensions over the use of the phrase "bog-standard comprehensive" by Alastair Campbell, Blair's official spokesman, in 2001. The then education secretary, David Blunkett, was said to be furious at its implication of low standards. Peter Hyman, a former government adviser reveals that Blair called Blunkett's office to apologise for the use of the phrase, but privately told colleagues that the comments "had given [the party] some definition".
Fiona Millar, a former No 10 adviser, tells the authors: "There was a real divide within No 10 between people they would see as Old Labour like me and Alastair [Campbell] … and the sort of thrusting young Middle England people who allegedly knew what parents wanted. Some of them had just made their minds up that comprehensive schools were a disaster."
The book also includes interviews with former Tory education secretaries, Gillian Shepherd and Kenneth Baker, and the current education secretary, Michael Gove.
The authors warn the coalition government that the education system would only be improved with teachers' approval. "Many of the Labour government's achievements have been obscured by its poor relationship with teachers," Bangs said.
The exam boards are unlikely to accept Waters's criticisms. Edexcel said it has never said its exams were easier. "We are confident that all our qualifications are rigorous, fair to learners and represent the highest possible standards."
Waters also accuses the exams regulator, Ofqual, of lacking the courage to challenge the exam boards.
"I fully support having a regulator who can ask awkward questions. So, what I'd now want to see is a regulator asking the questions ... I don't think they've got the nerve. They should immediately look up whether the chief examiner should be allowed to write the textbook with regards to pupils' questions. That's insider dealing. You shouldn't be allowed to do that."
The authors argue that Ofqual is unable to ask difficult questions because its chair and chief executive are appointed by government .
----end

Business is good for the economy, stoopid. How else can we teach children how to scam the government?

-Cosmik67

Issue 1: abusive students are not removed from class

Definition: I don't mean 'student who talks too much', I mean 'abuses teacher'.

As bizarre as it was for me, when I heard this, it's true. Back home, everybody in class knew how much they could push their luck in a classroom. It took a rare idiot to cross the line and piss off the teacher. Of course, we had one chain-smoking teacher who got pissed off at everything, but he was a waste of space.
Back in the UK, having had a not-so-distant history of abusing students in many ways, let's say up to the '70's, now the system is all kid-gloves with the students. They can't bring themselves to ruin the educational experience of even one child. Unfortunately, that one child can ruin lessons for everybody else. The craziness of the rules came to the point that, last I heard, students who physically assaulted a teacher, let alone verbally, could not be removed from class, not permanently, not for the day, not even for the lesson in which the student hits his teacher!
Can you imagine the belittling of a teacher by students. Of course, that invites other students to do the same. In the end, those kids who abuse will try to impose themselves everywhere in the adult world, and often land themselves in jail. That's why schools are strict. Kids need it. Kids will respect control if it is fair (ask any psychologist). Kids, somewhere inside their noggins, know that they are ever-so-slightly out of control and need a leash.
Well, that doesn't exist in the UK schools. One easy conclusion to draw from this is that the government is seeking to deep-six the state system so that parents will borrow the money to send their kids to private education. As a result, many are doing so, and others have located the best-performing state schools and lie, cheat and steal to get their kids in. Chaos, ever summer!
Anyway, let's not lose sight of the teacher in all this. Many of them go nuts, under this system. The one class I observed some years ago, had a teacher who visibly shook during class, and spent her breaks smoking. Nothing else, but smoking.

Recent case:
One teacher basically flipped out, after the students (they admitted it in court) had been driving him nuts. Teacher took a dumbell (always good to have one in class) to a kid's head causing serious, but not life-threatening injuries. He escaped jail, but lost his job. He's probably a wreck anyway, and has to deal with his PTSD.
Here's a letter to the Metro newspaper from a couple of months ago, after the judgement. Try to read into it the implication of the hell that is the classroom for many teachers, because of the rule-makers ignorance:

Beating a child senseless cannot be right. But no doubt the circumstances that drove him to it were probably not right either. Peter Harvey has probably expressed the feelings of thousands of teachers- they are human too. I have a number of friends and family who are teachers and they have similar feelings. Who is going to crack next? Are the authorities now going to take notice? AG , Surrey

-Cosmik67