The poverty of learning

Homeschooling has revealed the absurdity of England’s national curriculum – Prospect Magazine

Part of the problem is that “knowledge” has been incorrectly defined as “grammatical concepts.” Children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce tells me he has done readings in primary schools where the teacher says afterwards: “Now class, let’s identify the wow words, connectives and metaphors that Frank is using here.” This is not the fault of teachers: “I see amazing work all the time,” he says, “but it’s in the teeth of what they’re asked to do—they’re having to gouge moments out of the day and twist the curriculum to be able to do it.”

Cottrell-Boyce believes the value of listening to stories is being missed. “It’s a strange thing for a writer to say,” he tells me, “but I think we really overvalue writing”. A lot of the writing that’s done in the classroom is to create some physical entity that can be assessed. It has no intrinsic value apart from the testing—and kids know that.” [emphasis added]

I was just going to say: some people seem to hate children — and it is not the teachers. But it is more than that: some people just seem to hate the idea of childhood.

The thing to be known grows with the knowing

A climber’s story evokes classic mountaineering literature | The Economist

Though most celebrated mountaineers have been men, many of the best books about climbing are by women. Ms Fleming pays tribute to perhaps the greatest of all mountain writers, Nan Shepherd, the Scottish author of “The Living Mountain” (written in the 1940s but not published until 1977). Part memoir, part Buddhism-inflected meditation, Shepherd’s work influences both Ms Fleming’s prose and her approach to mountain life. “The thing to be known grows with the knowing,” Shepherd thought, a conviction reflected in Ms Fleming’s attitude to the mountains she scales. “We shape the rock,” she says, and “the rock shapes us”. [emphasis added]

A motto not to be confused with learning outcomes.

A worthy thought for the New Year

Endemic civil disorder could be America’s future | Financial Times

There are several reasons to worry about the future. One is the past.

Janan Ganesh in the FT.

The department for patients no-one else wants – The BMJ

This blog by Chris Bulstrode was written well before Covid. The future needs to be different: it’s the doctors stupid.

However both of these issues pale into insignificance compared with the challenge of providing life-long job satisfaction in a career consisting of endless night and weekend shifts. The consequence is that if we don’t do something radical soon, I fear that the emergency department may collapse and bring the whole NHS system down with it. Sometimes, when I am not on duty, I muse about how our society as it is now will be seen in 100 years’ time. Children might be taught in history classes that in 1948 a small island off the west of Europe set-up a revolutionary advance in civilization which was the talk of the rest of the world. It was called the NHS and provided free healthcare for all. My fear is that the next sentence from the teacher will be that it collapsed in the year 201..? [emphasis added]

Kind words: an obituary

Doc Searls Weblog · Remembering Kim Cameron

We all get our closing parentheses. I’ve gone longer without closing mine than Kim did before closing his. That also makes me sad, not that I’m in a hurry. Being old means knowing you’re in the exit line, but okay with others cutting in. I just wish this time it wasn’t Kim.

Britt Blaser says life is like a loaf of bread. It’s one loaf no matter how many slices are in it. Some people get a few slices, others many. For the sake of us all, I wish Kim had more.

I am reminded of what a friend said of Amos Tversky, another genius of seemingly boundless vitality who died too soon: “Death is unrepresentative of him.”

Via John Naughton

Tennis rules

John Lanchester · As the Lock Rattles · LRB 4 December 2021

The story of the UK is not the whole story of the global pandemic, but it is worth taking a moment to look at the local specifics. We could take as a benchmark the All England Club, which manages Wimbledon. In 2003, having learned from the experience of Sars, Wimbledon began paying around £1.5 million a year to insure against the cost of a pandemic. As a result, when Covid hit, the club trousered cheques totalling £174 million to cover the cost of the cancelled 2020 tournament. That is what competent governance looks like. What would the UK response have looked like if the All England Club had been in charge? What would the Wimbledon number – the death toll assuming competent government – have been?

Instead we are left with:

In other words, the UK is crowded, old, fat, cramped, unequal and much visited, and all of those things increase the impact of Covid.

UK science policy

The government thinks if you pump up UK science with a verbal diarrhoea of optimism – it can somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Andre Geim of the University of Manchester

New Scientist

higher education had become just too important to be allowed to be free

Free: as in free speech rather than free beer.

Peter Scott in Times Higher Education: 50 years of critical friendship | Times Higher Education (THE)

Losing at the Starting Line & the Nine Nine Six Culture

Wang Xiuying · Losing at the Starting Line: Nine Nine Six Culture · LRB 18 November 2021

Children start taking extra classes when they’re still at primary school. Chinese (language and literature), maths and English are the cornerstones: they are compulsory subjects in the gaokao, the College Entrance Exam, which students take in their final year of school and is the sole criterion for university admission (you can do another language, but hardly anyone does). The Olympic Mathematics Class is popular with primary school pupils who show an early interest in the sciences. In a big city like Shanghai or Beijing, one-to-one maths tutoring for young children can cost 500 RMB per hour (the average wage in big cities is around 50 RMB per hour). As well as academic tutoring, singing, dancing, piano, violin, swimming and badminton classes are also hugely popular. A private piano lesson taught by a conservatoire professor can cost 2500 RMB per hour. Middle-class parents often joke (not without bitterness) that their child is shredding money before their eyes.

She is a typical Gen Zer: can’t stick a job for more than a year (‘too boring, salary no good’) and has absolutely no desire for a family (‘taking care of myself is hard enough’). Women who do want a family have to prepare long before the wedding. In big cities, the downpayment on a decent apartment would empty six bank accounts (the couple plus all four parents). Occasionally viral clips circulate of random street interviews. The interviewer asks a passerby: ‘You’re about to divorce. Do you choose the house or the children?’ Most men choose the house because houses are too expensive to buy again. You can always find another wife and have another child if you have the house. Most women choose the children.

Shareholder value

The myth of healthy smoking

Menthol cigarettes were first promoted to soothe the airways of “health conscious” smokers. Long used as an analgesic, menthol evokes a cooling sensation that masks the harshness of tobacco smoke. In the competition to capitalize on the growing menthol market, the industry’s marketing experts “carved up, segmented, and fractionated” the population, exploiting psychology and social attitudes to shape product preferences.

[emphasis added]