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List:       suse-linux-uk-schools
Subject:    Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] de-myth-tification (was: Plans for a Linux distro)
From:       "'Frank Shute'" <frank () esperance-linux ! co ! uk>
Date:       2002-02-07 3:03:52
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On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 11:27:19AM +0000, Damian Counsell wrote:
>
> This is a long email, but, I hope, illuminating.

It's long, yes, but illuminating only in it's indicative nature of how
much you personally despise me.

> 
> It's very difficult to resist the temptation to launch a personal attack 
> on Frank Shute---

So you'll yield to tempation...

> not least of all because he has no reservations about 
> such behaviour himself.  

As other readers of this list will confirm I've been trying to put
forward my points in a rational manner solely for the purpose of
fostering debate about what I and others think is an important subject
for debate.

> 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. 

Yes there's a saying about certain people being `easily amused'. FYI,
it applies to cretinous individuals like yourself.

Further FYI, my name appears in quotes because I ssh into my mail
server which necessitates me passing a variable to the environment to
satisfy my MUA/MTA.


> Oh! for a 
> Slashdot-style moderation system.

It's really very simple - if you want to read populist opinions then
stick with moderated and censored places like Slashdot. If you want to
troll and demonstrate your ignorance to the world at large, then post
to a mailing list like you just have. 

But whatever you choose, don't subsequently whinge about it in that
forum like a very young, pre-pubescent girl - it's embarrasing for you
and it's embarrasing for the rest of us. 

Unless of course you happen to be a very young girl (Isn't Damien a
girl's name anyway?)

> 
> I am going to give 'Frank Shute' the benefit of the doubt, anyway, and 
> try to concentrate on the points rather than the person.  

So you spend half your post hurling insults. How very noble of you to
concentrate on the points instead of resorting to personal abuse.

> 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.

But you haven't seperated the arguments from the individual have you?
You've just spent a large proportion of your post condemning the
arguments because they've come from a certain individual.

You claim that these arguments `have lives of their own' in that they
are common currency. So you then dismiss them as `divorced from
reality'...you can't have your cake *and* eat it. 

> >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. 

Wrong. How does my argument presuppose that at all. Read the above
paragraph again and then tell me where it says that.

> 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.)

You have obviously swallowed the Bible according to Blair and think
that meritocracy and democracy are wonderful things and can actually
be implemented without any social exclusion whatsoever. I've got news
for you - they can't and they never will be and to suppose so is to
inhabit the same fantasy land that TB inhabits.

Hence, the social exclusion based on house price. And when they've
solved that there will be some other form of exclusion. 

And whilst you and TB are concentrating on your `big
vision/Shangri-La' of a truly meritocratic & democratic society the
schools and hospitals will go further down the toilet due to neglect
of basic necessities like competitive wages for teachers and
lecturers. 

> 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.  

Oh dear, the inhuman cruelty of it! Just a small fraction of the
population being educated to degree level.

Do you know what? It comes to my attention that only a small fraction
of the population become brain-surgeons or rocket scientists.

Why don't you and your mate Blair get on to it immediately and enable
all people irrespective of IQ or ability to become them? That seems to
be the only truly righteous thing to do.

> 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?  

There will always be an elite. Get over it and grow up.

> Unfortunately this class-based elite gave the idea of elitism a bad name.

No. It was clueless bozos like you who gave elitism a bad name by
saying an elite shouldn't exist because it doesn't follow democratic
principles.

> It's an irritating feature of Cambridge life that the railway station 
> has only one proper platform.  

Move elsewhere then.

> 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.  

Sounds like a good idea. What problem do you have with that?

> 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.)  

Margaret Thatcher is a St Catherine's alumnus and she went to a state
school and her father was a grocer.

Or is your real beef that the students were overwhelmingly
Conservative? 

> Back then most of the students 
> probably had nice titles and wardrobes put precious little of substance 
> to be proud of---

Along with Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge have produced the Most Nobel
laureates of any British universities. I'd say that would be something
to be proud of.

> - though possession of a penis was, of course, an 
> essential prerequisite for entry.

Wrong. See above.

> 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.

At last some sense. But the outside world has a less clear idea of the
worth of these prizes purely because there are now 10 times as many
prizes to go around.

The problem is one of public perception. I know and you know that a
degree in Maths from Anglia is just as good as one from any Oxbridge
college.

> 
> >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?

Because `bogus' look-a-like degrees devalue the currency of a real
degree.

As far as I'm aware `bogus' degrees aren't available. They're all
strictly monitored as to exam/course content and all of the HE places
I'm familiar with comply and there's no pressure for them to pass or
fail students. This is in contrast to GCSEs where yes the content and
exams are monitored but there is commercial pressure on the commercial
firms who produce the exams to make them easy.

In HE nobody takes a blind bit of notice to the league tables with
regard the number of firsts dished out by the universities. They're
sensible enough at that age to make an informed choice as to where
might be a good place to study.

> 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 don't doubt it.

> 
> 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.

British higher education is something that we should rightly be proud
of but I still say that it's not broad enough. But secondary education
IMO is a mess as a result of one government after another buggering it
around for purely political reasons.

As a result university lecturers are saying that the quality of their
undergrads is not what it used to be.


> >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.

Agreed, that too. But with increased choice in subjects we've seen a
decreasing demand in those wanting to do maths/science and falling
standards in these subjects as a result of good maths/sci grads not
being interested in teaching for peanuts. All these issues need
addressing.

> 
> 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".

It's the same in schools, the heads don't want to pay for decent ITC
technicians, whether it's because of budgetary constraints or whether it
is because they don't like the idea of paying somebody more than some
of the senior teachers...I don't know, but there was a thread on this
list about it a while back.

> 
> 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.

It may seem rational but I think it's probably just a passing trend
and largely depends on how much exposure each profession gets on the
telly. A few years ago you couldn't get a place as a vet for love nor
money, a few years before that doctors and then the dot-com bubble and
all these kids thought they could do a degree in media and have
Ferrari's to run around in a few years down the line.

Scientists and mathematicians are always portrayed as impoverished,
anti-social geeks and engineers are never portrayed. You tell somebody
in the street you're an engineer and they think you walk around with a
spanner in your hand.

You go to France though and engineers are held in the same social
esteem that doctors were once here.

> 
> >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.


Yes, but they have to be the right targets. Trying to nail down a hard
and fast target in some social interaction like teaching or health is
the equivalent task to nailing a jelly to the ceiling.

> 
> When it comes to government, at least with a target there is something 
> to argue about.  

In this case, whether this target serves any useful purpose. I say no
and have explained my reasons at length.

> 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.  

So would I. Unfortunately, the politicians know that peoples opinions
are formed by infantile media rucki (new word!) & they feel under no
obligation to set a sensible target.

The target to my mind can't be any more objective than: `more and
better education/health care'. There's no point in trying to
macro-manage things, you have to sort out the small details and the
big picture will then fall into place.

> Public hospital 
> statistics are, like proper public university admissions criteria, 
> shockingly recent innovations which will take time to get right.

They're too subjective and you can't produce hard and fast statistics
for such a thing except in the most rudimentary and useless way. It's
just jobs for the boys in Whitehall.

> 
> 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.


Get the timetable right:

1. Govt announce new education/health inititiative. X more pts/pupils
 to be taught/treated.

2. Media - Govt announces new health initiative, agrees it must be a
  good thing because more pts/pupils will be taught/treated.

3. Public - must be a good thing, aren't our govt wonderful must vote
 for them again.

4. Go back to 1.

> 
> >- 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.

You don't understand genetics or Darwinism. You just don't get the
same naturally selective pressures on Western populations nowadays. 

Read `Brave New World - Revisited' and then come back and tell me I'm
wrong and Huxley is wrong. And just because eugenics is inevitably
used in the same phrase as Nazism by ignorant, politically correct
bozos, doesn't mean the subject is devoted (or even vaguely related)
to putting Jews in ovens. 

> 
> >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.

Once you've pissed your pants address yourself to this:

Year A: 	x % pass exam B
Year A + 20:	x + 10 % pass exam B

Hence, a greater percentage have passed. So the exam is easier to pass
for *whatever* reason.

Be it students are cleverer, teachers are better, or the difficulty of
the paper has decreased - the exam is now easier for people to pass.

Then address yourself to why I get a little short temperered with
people who are unable to understand a very simple mathematical
argument.

> 
> >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.

You've got a chip on your shoulder about iniquity that is so large
that it is weighing you down and stopping you from thinking straight.

Try and forget it for a while and do some *real* thinking instead of
coming out with this knee-jerk stuff.

> 
> >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?

Whatever you do don't drag all the people down to the same shitty old
level just because you've got discredited & second-hand `right-on, we
the people' ideas. 

> 
> (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.)

Personally, I don't give a stuff about whether it's a classless
society or not, nor do I care about whether it's a democratic society

>  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?  

Thing is footballers are chosen by class. There are handful of middle
class professional footballers and none with peerages who run around
the pitches in their ermine AFAIK.

So why don't you whinge bitterly about social exclusion in that case?

> 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.

It's not left-wing policy nor was Marx a left-wing idealogue in the
modern sense. Read Orwell and understand how language is subverted.

> 
> >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*. 

See my 2+2=4 argument above. I know it will be difficult for you to
follow but try and do your best.

> 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.  

Who says literacy rates have risen? My personal experience and my
mother's experience with fellow newly registered nurses is that they
have fallen and it doesn't matter how many statistics you throw at me
saying they have risen, they still wont correlate with my personal
experience.

> 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'.

You just don't get it. You can't use `subtle and disinterested'
statistical analysis for such a subjective thing. At least I'm honest
in saying that. You insist on throwing statistics around as if
these statistsics had been handed down by God himself whilst very
obviously grinding your own axe.


> > 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.

You can witter on all you like about statistics, I've done them at
honours level and I know that they can be used and abused. In this
case they're being abused doesn't matter a damn how they cook them up.

> 
> >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".)

You have little understanding of the English language (I told you
literacy was declining).

A lesson:

If Tony Blair had a large moustache would I be correct in describing
him as Stalinist?
  
> 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. 

My ignorance may or may not be wilful, but your ignorance is not a
question of will it's a large immoveable object. 

> 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.

Don't be a coward. I can forgive ignorance but not cowardice.

-- 

 Frank 

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
   Boroughbridge.
 Tel: 01423 323019
     ---------
PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/


Lots of girls can be had for a song.  Unfortunately, it often turns out to
be the wedding march.

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