A different kind of political blog.

David Cameron has launched the education section of the ‘Mending our Broken Society’ chapter of the Conservative Party’s draft manifesto, and is asking for your questions about it online.

Read more: Cameron launches our draft manifesto for schools.

Via Sex and drug lessons from age 5 – Telegraph, another forcible attempt to reengineer society, irrespective of the wishes of responsible parents:

Under the new curriculum, pupils as young as seven will learn about puberty and the facts of life and five-year-olds will be taught about parts of the body, relationships and the effects of drugs on the body.

Once they reach secondary school, pupils will learn about contraception, HIV and Aids, pregnancy and different kinds of relationships – including same sex unions and civil partnerships.

So-called Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education is to become compulsory in both primary and secondary schools from September 2011, and will be enshrined in new legislation.

Faith schools will not be able to opt out of any part of the new statutory curriculum, Ed Balls also confirmed today, although they will be able to teach topics within the ”tenets of their faith”.

Is it any wonder responsibility is passing away when parents are not even to be allowed to control when their children are educated about sex and drugs?

From Socialism, by Ludwig von Mises:

Proposals to transform the relations between the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production. Marriage is to disappear along with private property, giving place to an arrangement more in harmony with the fundamental facts of sex. When man is liberated from the yoke of economic labour, love is to be liberated from all the economic trammels which have profaned it. Socialism promises not only welfare—wealth for all—but universal happiness in love as well. This part of its programme has been the source of much of its popularity. It is significant that no other German socialist book was more widely read or more effective as propaganda than Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, which is dedicated above all to the message of free love.

Labour have got to go.

Further reading

• Right, wrong and education — an article on this site.
• The Aboliton of Man — a review on this site of C S Lewis’ classic pamphlet.
• Socialism, An Economic and Sociological Analysis, Mises

The BMA demand a resort to force:

A total ban on alcohol advertising must be introduced by the Government to halt an epidemic of problem drinking, doctors’ leaders said today.

A report from the British Medical Association (BMA) has called for a sea change in the approach to alcohol regulation to halt promotions including happy hours and sponsorship of music and sports events.

The move is necessary to stem the invidious ways it is promoted, particularly to young people, it said.

via Doctors demand ban on all alcohol advertising – Times Online.

There are who knows how many possible bad decisions in life; are we to resort to force to avert each one? Would anyone disagree with the assertion that over-consumption of alcohol is not only harmful in itself but leads to behaviour with harmful consequences? Of course people should drink in moderation — but where does the path of all-round compulsion lead? What else shall we protect people from?

What matters if we are to have a good society — a free and open society — is what lies within us: our values and beliefs, our thoughts and ideas, our emotions. This constant resort to compulsion will not deliver a healthy, happy society. It will create a destructive cycle of resentment, harmful actions and exhortation. Enough.

It is time for a change of heart. It is time for personal responsibility and freely-made good choices. That means letting people carry the consequences of their actions and punishing them when they trespass on the liberties of others.  It means the government getting out of the education system permanently so that teachers can get on with delivering a good education to the satisfaction of parents. Maybe where parents and teachers do not know what good choices look like, special action will be unavoidable, but that is possible without resorting to the total state.

Many who are in power on the New Left today were students when this was written in Education in America:

Meaningful freedom has always implied responsibility, and responsibility demands self-control. Self-control presupposes guidelines within which the individual attempts to live in accord with accepted and acceptable standards. The denial of those standards and of the necessity for self-control in the name of “academic freedom” is as much a denial of true freedom for the individual as is an attempt to censor student and teacher in the classroom. Either way, genuine academic freedom suffers.

…

The lapse of self-control in favor of the “humanitarian” view of life partially explains how the dreamer of utopian schemes menaces civilization. While all such revolutionaries share a willingness to destroy the existing order, their ideas of what should be erected in its place tend to vary from vision to vision, reflecting not merely a pipe dream untouched by reality, but a series of pipe dreams as unstable as the personality of the dreamer. Once self-control is abandoned and reality rejected, all that remains are half-formed, bizarre visions of typically unfulfilled revolutionary personalities. Such fuzziness in goals, such lack of personal fulfillment within the existing order, are both evident in the rhetoric of the New Left.

Of course we must be humanitarians, but let us achieve self-control and a realistic understanding of society first in order better to progress towards our compassionate goals.

At a friend’s request, I spoke to a sixth form class on “The Spell of Plato”, explaining how Plato’s philosophy is relevant today.

As the title suggests, I used Popper’s critique of Plato’s philosophy to explore these two propositions:

Government ought to control us to ensure social, political and economic justice.

We ought to control ourselves within the law to ensure freedom and progress.

We discovered that Plato’s Spell — his plan for building the perfect state in which every citizen is really happy — was at the root of some of the worst governments in history and we explored the echos of his philosophy in today’s political debate. We discussed Popper’s conclusion:

We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom,

asking whether we should look to the state for every answer or whether we should take responsibility ourselves for making the world a better place.

It was a real pleasure to meet post-modern young people who were intelligent, thoughtful, attentive, polite and independent. They are another reason for optimism.

I see now more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows. For these troubles are the by-products of what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual revolutions of history, a movement which began three centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority of the merely established and the merely traditional while trying to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.

This is ridiculous. It should not need saying:

Ofsted is to launch a crackdown on “boring” teaching in response to concerns that children’s behaviour is deteriorating because they are not being stimulated enough in class.

…

The inspectorate’s latest annual report, published in November, warned of “pedestrian” teaching in primary schools, and said pupils in secondary schools were too often set tasks that are not demanding enough of them.

…

Gilbert said: “People divorce teaching from behaviour. I think they are really, really linked and I think students behave much better if the teaching is good, they are engaged in what they are doing and it’s appropriate to them. Then they’ve not got lost five minutes into the lessons and therefore started mucking around. Behaviour in our schools is generally very good. But there’s what I would describe as low-level disruption where children are bored and not motivated, so they start to use their abilities for other ends. That then can lead to other children being distracted in lessons and so on.”

via Ofsted’s new mission – to get rid of boring teachers | Education | The Guardian .

The answer to boring teaching and bad behaviour will not be found in further attempts to whip teachers into running through deep treacle. It will be found in responsible freedom.

Honestly, it makes me want to do this:

The latest publication from the Centre for Policy Studies arrived today: “Freedom for Public Services” by William Mason and Jonathan McMahon. Better services at lower cost, and more fulfilling jobs for public servants, are quite possible.

As ever, this CPS report is intelligent, brief, clear and insightful. The sheer scale of central regulation is shocking even as one who has begun to study the situation. Consider for example the list of regulators for the NHS:

• The Healthcare Commission
• Strategic Health Authorities
• Monitor
• The General Dental Council
• Payment by Results (The Audit Commission)
• The National Patient Safety Agency
• The National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme
• The Commission for Social Care Inspection
• The Mental Health Act Commission
• The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
• The Health and Safety Executive
• The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency
• The Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts, part of the NHS Litigation Authority
• The National Commissioning Group
• and the Department of Health itself

Furthermore, healthcare professionals are individually regulated by, variously, medical schools, Royal Colleges, the Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board, the General Medical Council and other professional organisations.

As you would expect, the paper makes a number of practical recommendations for simplification, efficiency and greater accountability in health and in the other public services, including the police, local government, schools and higher education. One summary point is particularly telling:

Central control is not working. Leading politicians of both main parties recognise that public services in the UK today are too large and complex for effective central management. In particular, David Cameron’s advocacy of the post-bureaucratic age is based on the premise that freedom of information can “make possible a new world of responsibility, citizenship, choice and local control.”

I recommend the report.

Doh! Time to dumb down?

The Telegraph reports on efforts to make A-levels “harder”. My concern is that hard-working students and teachers too often have their work and achievements undermined by speculation about the quality of the system.

Is the problem more fundamental?

According to the QCA, grading swapped from “norm referencing” – where, say, the top 10% get an A – to “criteria referencing” – where you get an A if you meet the criteria. On first inspection, there seem to be two problems with criteria referencing: the criteria and the usefulness of the grade.

It appears that criteria referencing has been chosen so that everyone who meets the criteria gets the grade, and so that year on year, greater numbers of passes at higher grades are a meaningful indicator of improving standards. But surely when, inevitably, you change the criteria, the foundation of each grade is undermined? Surely the question “Are A-levels getting easier?” is only meaningful under criteria referencing? Provided questions range adequately in their difficulty, wouldn’t norm-referencing solve this problem?

Does criteria referencing answer the question universities and employers are asking: how did people fare relative to one another? Competition is a fact and hard-pressed companies can’t afford to make a bad hiring decision, so if A-levels aren’t grading people helpfully, the burden must fall on some other part of the recruiting process, shifting the burden of cost and risk further to the employer.

It seems that criteria-referenced A-levels are having their criteria changed to make them harder, to better grade students, but the changes themselves undermine the system. Does criteria referencing actually represent “progress” and is it time to return to norm-referenced A-levels and harder exam questions at the extreme?

Labour appear to be in yet another pickle, but in the meantime, a heartfelt congratulations to all those who have demonstrated their abilities through this year’s exam results.

read more | digg story

According to the BBC:

Fast-food giant McDonald’s has become one of the first firms to offer its own nationally recognised qualifications. It will offer a “basic shift manager” course, training staff in skills such as human resources and marketing.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said the company had been approved to develop courses up to the equivalent of A-level standard.

The QCA will also allow Network Rail and Flybe to award qualifications based on their workplace training schemes.

So, now the role of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is to rubber-stamp bespoke corporate training?

Before we go much further into changing education, we might do well to define its purpose. Is it to produce good employees who do what they are told and don’t think too much within the franchise system, or is it to set people free to appreciate our world and to make their own, independent, informed and sensible decisions?

Who gets to choose who goes down which path? What about “equality”? Will everyone ultimately be forced to sit for only narrow vocational qualifications? Where and what are the benefits?