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List:       suse-linux-uk-schools
Subject:    [suse-linux-uk-schools] de-myth-tification (was: Plans for a Linux distro)
From:       Damian Counsell <linux () counsell ! com>
Date:       2002-02-06 11:27:19
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This is a long email, but, I hope, illuminating.

It's very difficult to resist the temptation to launch a personal attack 
on Frank Shute---not least of all because he has no reservations about 
such behaviour himself.  Amusingly, his name appears in quotes whenever 
it pops up in my mailbox and I am beginning to wonder if 'Frank Shute' 
is a sort of Alf Garnett of the SuSE-Linux-Schools list, created as a 
front to troll the mild and reasonable into a frenzy. Oh! for a 
Slashdot-style moderation system.

I am going to give 'Frank Shute' the benefit of the doubt, anyway, and 
try to concentrate on the points rather than the person.  It's easier to 
separate arguments from an individual when the arguments have been so 
overused and are so divorced from reality that they already have lives 
of their own.


>That's my point too! They're taking students they really shouldn't be
>taking because a decree has gone out that 50% of people should go to
>university. So irrespective of the individual merit of an applicant,
>university's are feeling compelled into dropping standards to fill
>what is by any stretch of the imagination a bogus quota dreamed up by
>some think-tank.
>
This presupposes a wondrous past age when universities admitted students 
solely on the basis of merit. University entry is a great deal more 
meritocratic than it has been for a long time.  (It's a shame our state 
secondary education system has simultaneously adopted a system of 
selection on the basis of house price, thought this has happened by 
default and is another argument entirely.)

It was only relatively recently that UK higher education institutions 
were obliged to publish objective admission standards. When my dad 
attended university in the late fifties/early sixties only a small 
fraction of the population were admitted.  Back then a degree was a 
prize for the elite, yet there were still a significant number of 
admissions made on arbitrary criteria---old school tie anyone? 
 Unfortunately this class-based elite gave the idea of elitism a bad name.

It's an irritating feature of Cambridge life that the railway station 
has only one proper platform.  This was ordered by the university when 
the station was built to ensure that the "young gentlemen" could be 
observed by the university authorities and prevented from avoiding 
lectures.  Today you need 5 grade As at 'A' level, grade 8 piano and a 
gold Duke of Edinburgh award just to get a sniff of the place.  (I 
exaggerate, but only slightly---I had lunch with an geography don at St 
Catharine's a couple of months ago who confessed in hushed tones she had 
let someone in with a 'B' once.)  Back then most of the students 
probably had nice titles and wardrobes put precious little of substance 
to be proud of---though possession of a penis was, of course, an 
essential prerequisite for entry.

There's nothing wrong with saying that "all shall have prizes" (or even 
"50% shall have prizes") as long as the outside world has a clear sense 
of the relative "worth" of those prizes---I think we might agree that a 
degree from Cambridge is possibly more valued in the graduate jobs 
market than one from Anglia Polytechnic University---and the advertised 
admissions criteria for each institution vary accordingly.

>Whatever, that is not the real point. The thing is that these students get 
>> access to the courses otherwise quite a few university lecturers are out of a 
>> job. 
>
>
>As I indicated, I don't really care. Why give people jobs if they
>aren't worthwhile?
>
If people are happy to pay for their children to obtain "bogus" degrees, 
why not let them do so?

Our universities educate more people to a higher standard and more 
cheaply than most equivalent continental institutions and our 
"worthless" lecturers generate more and better publications from their 
research than most of their European counterparts at a fraction of the 
cost.  Check out the results of the last Research Assessment Exercise 
for a level of productivity that would put most other British industries 
to shame.

I was always surprised at the number of Germans I met as an 
undergraduate student and researcher at Oxford.  They came from a 
primary and secondary educational system that I had admired for years as 
an exchange student, yet, when I asked them, they all felt that British 
higher education was far superior.  And the German universities (more 
disorganised, crowded and inefficient than some of our railways) were 
relatively better than, say the Italian ones.

If you don't believe this, read this

      http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/News15/text14.html

review which refers to a survey in "Der Spiegel" (that famous British 
tabloid) putting British universities ahead of the rest of Europe's as 
of 1999.


>Now we are beginning to suffer the consequences of the more
>choice/falling standards/lack of people doing intellectually rigorous
>subjects.
>
>The few who do go and do maths/engineering at university get
>immediately cherry-picked by industry for well-paid jobs thus leaving
>education to pick up the crumbs for maths/sciences teaching. The
>result is declining teaching standards & even fewer students going on
>to do maths/science at uni.
>
This has nothing to do with increased choice/falling standards/lack of 
rigour and everything to do with paying teachers too little.  Put up 
salaries and the problem would fix itself within two years.

Similarly, the "shortage" of well-qualified maths/engineering graduates 
is just like the shortage of I.T. staff in the late nineties---a result 
of people in senior management being unwilling to pay the going rate for 
people sneeringly referred to by the technologically illiterate as 
"techies".

This *does* trickle down, however.  If big brother can earn as much with 
a degree in "meedja studies" as he would with a degree in physics then 
why should little sister bother with all that calculus and those dead 
hard sums?  There are 71% of science engineering and technology (SET) 
graduates in full-time employment after graduation, compared with 68% of 
non-SET graduates in full-time employment (courtesy of the DTI:

      http://www.dti.gov.uk/ost/setstats/data/5/setstats2001-tab0508.htm

).  This is hardly a huge difference in employability given that the 
non-SET students probably do at least 10 hours less timetabled work per 
week at uni.  Students are simply making a rational choice of subject to 
study.

>The fact is that huge amounts are being wasted to meet the bogus
>targets which do nobody any good except the government because they
>can then advertise how `successful' they've been & hence get re-elected. 
>
Targets are very useful things, but so are cars---and we all know how 
dangerous they can be.  People who set themselves a list of targets at 
the start of a day, however, generally achieve more than people who don't.

When it comes to government, at least with a target there is something 
to argue about.  I would much rather compare some more-or-less objective 
performance measure (or argue about its objectivity) than spend time 
reading an infantile media ruckus about whether or not some old woman 
was left covered in blood in a hospital waiting room.  Public hospital 
statistics are, like proper public university admissions criteria, 
shockingly recent innovations which will take time to get right.

Methods for calculating UK unemployment figures have varied for decades 
for political reasons, but now most people use EU criteria which are 
reasonably reliable and allow for useful comparisons across time and 
between nations.  The same will happen with waiting lists etc.  Like 
many things in a democracy, the obsession with waiting lists arose in 
response to opposition, public and media demands rather than any real 
interest on the part of governments.

>- Although it's said that IQ has improved, I personally think IQ is
>  another entirely bogus statistic & can't be measured satisfactorily.  
>
At the start of this paragraph I experienced the transient nausea that, 
for me, always accompanies agreeing with 'Frank Shute'.  Luckily he got 
back on form by paraphrasing the Nazi "interpretation" (too generous a 
word, I know) of "Darwinism".
 

>Darwinism would seem to say that since the brain-dead can
>  live on social security and procreate, people should be getting
>  thicker
>
"Darwinism" has never and will never say any such thing.  Even if we 
suppose a population of individuals with inherited mental deficiencies 
in a persistent vegetative state copulating like rabbits (whoa) there is 
a phenomenon called recombination which ensures all those scare 
stories---that there is a supposedly "stupid" subpopulation of humans 
(usually the too-poor-to-be-educated) reproducing at a faster rate than 
"the rest of us"---are just that: scare stories.  If you want a more 
extensive tutorial on the scientific shortcomings of the eugenics 
movement then email me and I'd be happy to oblige with a reading list.

>Gross exaggeration. Exams might or might not be easier. Independent
>> studies suggest they are different but no easier. 
>
>
>Then the studies suck and are done by people who are far from
>independent.
>
I merely quote this "argument" because it condemns itself so 
eloquently---especially as it actually reads like "ya boo sucks!".  And 
it makes me laugh.  I need a laugh.

>There was a more varied education available then: Unis, Polys,
>Colleges, apprenticeships...and everybody could find their niche.
>
And everyone knew their place.

We really should keep these oiks away from too rigorous an education, 
especially if their parents can't afford a decent school to give them 
the right 'A'-level grades.  A good solid practical apprenticeship would 
do some of these simple, working-class youngsters good.

Whoops, I'm at it now.

>So should we deny these kids on the grounds they can't pass A 
>> level maths?
>
>
>No, you should deny them on the basis that university isn't the best
>place for them to learn such a subject. Education needs to be
>stratified but not just on the grounds of academic ability. 
>
Perhaps we should stratify education on the grounds of social class or 
height, or aptitude with a Game Boy?

(Actually, I think we should just keep it as it is and stream students 
according to the income of their parents ;-) .  For all the talk of a 
"classless society" parental income is still the best predictor of final 
educational outcomes in this country---it's even more reliable than IQ.)

 If we have a limited number of places at a football academy, we don't 
admit students on the basis of the stylishness of their haircuts or 
their ability to pull in a provincial nightclub---or, indeed, how close 
their parents live to the training grounds.  If we select footballers on 
their relevant skills, what is wrong with stratifying education on the 
grounds of academic ability?  If we must select in our educational 
system then it is the only fair way to do it. This is one of very few 
policies compatible with both left- and right-wing ideologies and yet 
both sides are reluctant to adopt it---I have my own pretty cynical 
theories as to why.  "From each according to his ability, to each 
according to his needs" is, funnily enough, a quote from Marx.


>The exams are easier to pass, there's no question of this - the
>results prove it.
>
The first part of this sentence is worthy of examination (excuse me), 
but the second part is a complete *non sequitur*. It *is* possible for 
exam results to improve rapidly across an entire nation over a very 
short time period in exactly the same way that a country's literacy 
rates can rise markedly.  Indeed, the latter is a far harder achievement 
which has been reproduced more than once in various locations with no 
relaxing of criteria.  Whether academic attainment has improved or not 
in England and Wales is a question worthy of subtle and disinterested 
statistical analysis of a kind I fear may be beyond even the so-called 
'Frank Shute'.


> Hence, there has to be a wider gap between the
>ability of those who scrape a certain grade & those at the top-end of
>that grade. A distribution diagram will prove this point.
>
No it won't. I could begin a disquisition on norm-referencing versus 
criterion-referencing and the mixture of the two rumoured to be at the 
heart of English exam boards' grade calculations, but I won't because 
I'm bored now and it would be like explaining to a skinhead with a 
broken bottle in his hand why violence is wrong.

>the Stalinist govt's bogus targets
>
Just to round off: our government, for its many faults, is not 
"Stalinist". Whatever else it is, it could hardly be described as a 
"nationalizing, totalitarian socialist regime".  (And, no, just because 
lots of other people voted for it, but you didn't, doesn't make it 
"totalitarian".)


I happen to have the day off work today so I have a little time to deal 
(almost) patiently with one of the more recent displays of wilful 
ignorance on this list. When the inevitable spluttering, ill-considered 
reply appears would someone else be interested in carrying the baton of 
reason?  I've got better things to do.


-- 
Damian COUNSELL                                http://www.counsell.com/



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