Fish rot from the head down

Leadership is critical in any organisation

I found coverage of Michael Gove’s recent changes to employment conditions interesting as the clear implication is that this will empower head teachers to sack poorly performing teachers.  What it does not do is, perhaps, the most important thing it needs to do, which is to make it easier to identify and dismiss underperforming head teachers.

Leadership is critical in any organisation and in schools this is almost certainly so.  If the head is incompetent then no matter how good the teachers are, the school will not flourish.  One person can make a hell of a difference to a school, if that person has control of the school’s policies and staffing.  A good head teacher promotes good discipline in pupils and empowers teachers to make a difference in their pupils’ expectations of learning.  Poor head teachers are typically weak when disciplining pupils and strong when disciplining teachers.  The result of this is that teachers lose the confidence to assert themselves while at the same time pupils assert their desire to do less and less.  As the Greeks say, “Fish rot from the head down.”

Eventually Ofsted arrives

Not surprisingly, in such a case, students’ achievement drops and questions are asked.  Those questions are answered mainly by examining data about the school.  This data is provided in the form of the school SEF or self evaluation form, in which the head teacher describes the student results and tries to explain why they are the way they are.  As self preservation is a deeply ingrained instinct in the human race, an incompetent head will attempt to deflect as much criticism from himself (or herself) and onto others, thus the head survives.

Of course, eventually, Ofsted arrives and inspects the school. However, the starting point for inspection is the SEF and, consequently, the head still has a degree of protection.  If the head has taken action to deal with the weaknesses in the SEF, such as instituting disciplinary or capability procedures against staff who appear weak, then the head will survive.  By weak, I don’t mean poorly performing, I mean emotionally frail.

Apply enough pressure to such a teacher and they will crack.  The pressure may be increases in workload, lack of support in key decisions or in discipline, it might even be repeatedly questioning their judgment.  Wait until they are particularly vulnerable and observe a lesson with their worst behaved class and judge it less than equitably.  Tell them that they will be observed in a week with the same class justifying it by saying that this is to avoid capability being invoked against them and there’s the recipe to a guaranteed unsatisfactory lesson.  I know of one case in which a teacher was put through this with a disruptive year 11 class (who were underperforming for the other two teachers that shared the class) less than 10 working days after returning to work from six weeks absence due to work related stress.

Cause and solution for the school’s problems in one neat package

Of course, in most cases, a teacher’s work related stress is due to poor work-life balance and poor discipline in the school.  Both of these are controlled by the head teacher.  Of course teachers suffering from such high levels of stress  will never perform at their best, just as in such a climate, pupils will fail to achieve.  However, the head teacher can point to the fact they have identified a failing teacher and are dealing with them to neatly show an Ofsted inspector cause and solution for the school’s problems in one neat package, allowing the status quo to be maintained.

The paramount importance of a good head

Please bear in mind that I am not saying that most head teachers are like this.  I have personally seen one head take a failing school and in three years almost treble its 5 A*-C percentage at GCSE and pretty much double its roll.  That she did so with a very small turnover of staff (as compared with the turnover in most schools in stable conditions) shows just how important a head teacher can be. That another head teacher came to that school years later and, within a two years, brought it to the brink of closure, where it has teetered ever since confirms it the paramount importance of a good head.

Head teachers exist in a continuum from the excellent at one end to the appallingly incompetent at the other.  The trouble is that weakness in this one person has a disproportionate effect on the effectiveness of a school.  Those at the less effective end of the continuum hide behind statistics: the statistics of falling numbers of exclusions and rising average GCSE points gained per pupil.  Neither of these statistics are necessarily what they seem.

It is futile to try and enforce discipline with an absence of back up

Falling numbers of exclusions make it look as if the school has solved discipline, so that fewer pupils need the ultimate sanction.  Conversely, it could be the case that what has simply happened is that the head has refused to authorise any exclusions and these troubled pupils are left in school to wreck the educations of their peers.  Teachers who continually report that said pupils misbehave get labelled as incapable of keeping discipline and end up being targeted, so as to save the head’s skin from the consequences of his failure to establish effective discipline.  So teachers in such a school will either “go with the flow” because it is futile to try and enforce discipline with an absence of back up or they will leave for a school where discipline is effective.

One wonders what schools that use BTECs are actually paying for

Likewise the number of GCSE equivalent points per pupil could suggest that every student is achieving highly.  Or  it could imply that students are pushed away from more difficult academic GCSE to easier vocational BTECs.  A school that does a double level 2 BTEC in Applied Science gets the equivalent number of points for 4 GCSEs at grade C in the curriculum time allowed for triple science with a far higher pass rate.  However, the school does all of the assessment work (none of it by exam) with very little checking by the exam board and yet pays the exam board more.  One wonders what schools that use BTECs are actually paying for; it’s certainly not for marking or exam administration.  Neither is it for the utility of the qualification; employers and universities are increasingly dubious of their value.  Still, a school that uses BTECs will have a good chance of all of its pupils gaining the equivalent points to 5 A*-C grades at GCSE.  I will leave it to the imagination of anyone reading to decide whether a head that has most students taking BTECs serves his or her students better or one that insists that students take a majority of GCSEs in traditional academic subjects.

Pupils and teachers are failed by poorly managed schools

If Michael Gove wants to address the problems in schools effectively, he needs to look at the calibre of head teachers.  The BBC’s Waterloo Road is frequently trailed on BBC 1 HD just before 7 p.m.  The trail is always the same and features the head teacher (played by Alec Newman) telling his staff, “I’ve never met a failing pupil but I’ve met plenty of failing teachers.”  The sentiment is a noble one, that no pupil should fail.  It is a principle that every teacher worth his or her salt believes in.  However, the second part with it’s implication that pupils only fail ecause of their teachers is less worthy.  Pupils fail in lessons for a variety of reasons, many of which are outside the teacher’s control.  Undoubtedly, there are teachers who do fail their pupils.  However, far more pupils and teachers are failed by poorly managed schools.  In my experience, the statement that a head teacher has met plenty of failing teachers says a great deal- and little of it positive- about how well that head runs his school.

Factoids

By profession, I’m an educator, in that I attempt to teach science to children.  This is both rewarding and frustrating in equal measure.  Rewarding in that you can see students make real progress and frustrating because of the barriers that, all too often, impede that very progress.

The most significant of these obstacles to progress is not a lack of understanding or knowledge but rather the preconceptions that the learner already has.  If someone thinks they already understand  something, it follows that their efforts are significantly reduced.  And when that understanding is flawed- or just plainly wrong- the barrier to learning is very great indeed.  Quite simply, the mind cherishes the misconceptions and treats all attempts to correct them as personal attacks.  Unless you are very careful, correcting knowledge becomes a criticism of the person and not their understanding- and that really does get in the way of learning.

In many cases, the most significant misconceptions are the things that everybody knows.  Things everybody knows but in fact knows wrong.  Life is full of these little factoids, things that have been repeated so often that we just accept them uncritically.  And these factoids can become significant problems to understanding.

A good example of this is the statement that carrots help you see in the dark.  Like a lot of- but not all- factoids, there is a kernel of truth at its centre.  Carrots contain the orange pigment, carotene, which the human body can convert into retinol, a substance that is better known as vitamin A.  The fact that retinol is then used in the eye to manufacture the light sensitive pigment rhodopsin, which is necessary for the rods in the retina to detect light only helps to give credence to the factoid, especially when you understand that the rods are the light receptors most active in low levels of light.  Indeed, a deficiency in vitamin A can cause night blindness.  However, no amount of said vitamin will allow you to see in pitch dark.

So where did this statement come from?  It was thanks to a programme of misinformation engineered by the RAF during the Second World War.  It had become apparent to the Luftwaffe that night bombing raids of Britain were significantly less dangerous than day time ones, as the brave pilots of the spitfires and hurricanes that defended Britain from aerial assault were unable to see the approaching bombers and their fighter escorts.  Indeed, in the early days of the war, the early warning system of such attacks was down to the Royal Corps of Observers, who watched the skies over the English Channel through binoculars for signs of imminent attack.

Naturally, a better system of detection was needed, and so, a Radio Direction Finder (RDF) was invented, a device that broadcast radio waves and then detected any that were reflected back by incoming aircraft.  By 1941 this device had the ability to give the range of the aircraft and the acronym became RADAR, short for RAdio Detection And Ranging.  In those early days, radar stations were large and were often disguised as ice cream parlours so that they did not themselves become targets for the German bombers.  The first aircraft borne version of this system, called AI (for Airborne Interception) was installed into the Bristol Beaufighter and later the Mosquito fighter bomber of Group Captain John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham.  With this equipment, he was able to chalk up twenty kills defending the country from the Luftwaffe, nineteen of them at night.  To keep the existence of such technology secret and to preserve the tactical advantage it engendered, the story was put about that Cunningham ate a special diet mainly of carrots to give him such excellent night vision.  From there, the notion that carrots help you see in the dark became so firmly entrenched in the public consciousness that it is all but impossible to shift it.

Many factoids are like this, they start with a truth, or a half truth, sometimes created in order to prevent a different truth coming to light, sometimes created because they make the story more interesting and enjoyable for its audience and sometimes simply because of political expedience.  The factoid about carrots is the first of these and another factoid to do with radar illustrates the second. 

The story goes that the early radar stations operated using microwaves rather than radio waves and, in the morning after use, a significant number of dead seabirds were found outside them, some of which were partially cooked.  As a result, the heating effect of microwaves was discovered and thus the microwave oven born.  In fact, this is completely untrue and is an example of a factoid that is believed because it is too an amusing story to be doubted. Like the carrots factoid, it has been repeated so often that it is believed without question.

While neither of these two types of factoid are particularly damaging, except to my blood pressure as I try to teach the correct versions to children who hold onto their misconceptions with an almost religious fervour, the last type, the factoid born of politics is.  Such factoids shape opinions and the true damage such factoids can wreak can easily be seen when we see them used to shape public opinion.  When opinion is based on the flimsy basis of a series of factoids rather than on solid evidence, disaster can follow in its wake.

A good example of this, at the moment, are the attacks on the BBC that are being made, because they are allowing the British National Party’s lead, Nick Griffin, to participate in the Question Time programme on BBC1.  Now, I have no great love for the BNP and its odious political views, but I have even less love for those who are threatening the BBC with prosecution if they allow Griffin to speak.  That the BNP espouses opinions that many- including myself- call fascist is not something I argue against.  What I do argue against are the factoids that some opinions are so dangerous that they should never be allowed utterance, that the public are so unsophisticated and easily led that allowing the BNP a platform will lead to the public beginning to support them.

This is not only insulting to the public at large but dangerous, far more dangerous, in fact, than allowing the BNP a platform.  Censoring an opposing political opinion is a despicable action, whatever the opinion censored.  And that is what those who are criticising the BNP are doing.  To my mind, seeking to deny the BNP a platform is counterproductive at best.  In doing so, they give credence to the BNP’s assertions that we do not live in a free society and therefore help them spread their vile message of intolerance.  In short, they are helping the BNP create their own little factoids that will, eventually, be accepted by a significant minority if they are unchallenged.

The correct course of action, in my opinion, is to allow the BNP a platform and then to challenge every untruth, every logical fallacy and every false assumption they make, and thus show up this hateful organisation for what it is: not something that glorifies Britain but, instead, a vile smear on my country’s reputation.  Why is this action not taken? Because the two factoids I stated earlier are accepted uncritically: that some ideas should never be allowed utterance and that the public are so stupid, they will believe anything they hear.  Whatever you try to do, the BNP will spread its vile message and, by denying them a platform on a debating programme, they are allowed to spread their message unchallenged.   Moreover, the public are bright enough to recognise bigotry when they see it exposed under the harsh light of public scrutiny.

In the end, it’s a shame that factoids are accepted in this regard rather than the simple fact, expressed long ago, that the only condition required for evil to triumph is that it is allowed to go unchallenged.

Too Many Salesmen

I’m about to end the month at work as I began it, being “trained”.  You might wonder why I’ve put inverted commas around the word trained.  You might consider that I am perhaps being a little cynical about the whole “training industry”.  You wouldn’t be far wrong.  I began teaching twenty years ago and you might well imagine that in that time I’ve got to learn a few things about education.  And that’s what training is, essentially; education.  Well, from a lot of the training I’ve received hasn’t even met the minimum requirement of education.  To be educated one must either have learned or had one’s skills enhanced.  Most training today does not do that.  Instead  what it does is sell, sell ideas.

To be utterly frank, I’m sick of it.  I’m sick of the whole damn thing.  I’m sick of spending my time in sessions in which the latest paradigm is stuffed down my throat.  And isn’t that a word that triggers feelings of scepticism?  Paradigm.  The link tells us how the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary defines paradigm.  Haldo Longwidget’s Lexicon of Loosely Applied Linguistics defines it thus:

Paradigm noun.  1. a method of working which has been in common use but has been rebranded to make it seem new;  2. an idea or way of looking at a particular set of circumstances that shows off a speaker’s views in the best possible light; 3. a word used by purveyors of management-bollocks for no apparent reason. 4. the emperor’s new idea.

I’ve grown a little numb, it must be said, to the mouthings of the endless paradigm-pushers and to the inadvertent malapropisms perpetrated by those who use fancy language where simpler would do just to appear more knowlegeable than they are.  I’m sick of words like paradigm, subsume, conflate, step-change and proactive.  I’m tired of  nouns being used as verbs: why do these people never do something but action it instead?  And don’t even get me started on the addition of -ize to a noun to turn it into a verb that impoverishes the language.  I am suffering from P.A.A.S.D.- post acronym abuse stress disorder.  Most of all I am heartily sick of being told what I already know in language that makes me want to retch by those in whom I have no confidence.

In one recent training session, we were trained in the latest discipline strategy, which amounted to little more than being honest, firm and treating children with the respect they deserve.  I’ve nothing against that.  What I do have a gripe about is the following.  Firstly, there is an implied assumption here that I need to be trained in discipline even after twenty years of experience.  Secondly, I really resent the way that the ideas were pushed at us.  I’ve seen mass evangelists at work close up, I’ve seen high pressure selling and those guys had nothing on this.  The speaker pushed and prodded at every guilt centre he could, he appealed to the emotions and used some very sophisticated patterns of speech designed to subdue rational examination of his message.  He was a snake-oil salesman par excellance.

He was not the only one.  I’ve seen the pattern again and again, when training becomes manipulation.  They come in and slowly work to lower the self-esteem of the trainees and then offer them a chance of rebuilding it  by applying whatever paradigm they are pushing.  It’s a lazy way to convince people and seeing it, it makes me think immediately that there is a problem.  If the idea, method, whatever, that is being pushed is so good, why should one need to push it with underhand techniques?

I hope tomorrow’s training is not an exanple of such paradigm-pushing, that it is not another exercise in pointlessness.  Given that it is about leadership, I doubt it.  Somehow, I fear I’ll be incentivized subsumed into the ranks of the paradigm-pushers.

Or at least they’ll try.

Right on Queue

Toiling in the Mines of Academia

I was wondering, as I lay in bed this morning after listening to Clive James’ excellent broadcast on the radio, about what I should write this week’s blog about.  I’m going to try to keep to posting at least one blog per week.  I’d like to post more but my duties in the mines of academia often prevent me from having either the time or the energy with which to write.  Indeed, over the last couple of weeks I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the aforementioned mines’ service so that, on several occasions, it was nearing 9 p.m. when I returned home at last.  All of these events- save one- were were worthwhile and the last was even moderately enjoyable, if eating roast chestnuts and mince pies while marketing post-16 educational opportunities is your idea of a good time.

It is the occasion of my late return home which was not worthwhile that I wish to (partially) address.  I had been assigned to a trip to the Science Museum, partly because I’m a scientist and mainly because I’m scary (apparently).  I would- I was told- be effective in getting our students to behave when faced with the wonders of science that would be so readily available to them there.  The trip, in itself, was a worthwhile thing and our students left the museum happy and enthused.  My scary powers of sarcasm were not needed and I had been able to play with my latest fad usefully put into practice the training I had been given on recording interviews with students for podcasting later.

The Power of Grumpy

It was none of these things that blighted my trip and changed an e.t.a. of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.  It was heavy traffic.  For some reason known only to the Great Traffic Controller in the Sky, the M11 was closed just shortly after our coach joined it.  Thus we had to wait in a queue to get off the M11 and onto the M25 and once there queue again to get onto the A12.  It was then that I had to use the scariness for which I had been selected for this mission.  I became somewhat grumpy.  Almost every denizen that dwells within the mines of academia is aware that a grumpy Haldo is not to be taken lightly.  Indeed, it has been commented by my A’ level students that my grumpiness is more unpleasant than the wrath of many others on the faculty.

So I let my grumpiness have full reign and somehow, order was maintained on the coach and we all returned safely.  What was more satisfying was that I had been able to forestall the almost inevitable “Stop-the-bus-now-we-want-the-loo” mutiny by grumpily complaining about the lack of services on the road that could accommodate us and by pulling faces that gave any who beheld them an almost visceral understanding of the strain my own bladder was under.  Any who failed to get the hint that complaining was Not A Good Idea soon changed their mind after a Little Talk.  One of these proved memorable, as the lad, when I approached him, pleaded, “Please don’t be sarcastic with me, sir.”  I found it hard not to smile at his relief when I told him I would restrict myself to irony.  Sometimes, being a grumpy old git has its uses.

The Trials of Blogworthiness

The thing is, though, none of the above, as tediously time consuming as it might have been at the time is inherently blogworthy.  You might say that none of what I write about is blogworthy and you could very well be right, but I write for my own amusement and to get things off my chest as much as for any other reason.  Given my weekly commitment to write something I was beginning to get a bit concerned that nothing had popped into my head as I tucked into my second breakfast of sausage and mushrooms.  It was when I checked my email that I had my inspiration.  I had a few  emails from friends on the other side of the pond.  All three of them had suffered misfortunes of various sorts.

Wesley M had suffered another misfortune after the car incident that he blogged about last week.  His computer has broken down and he was only able to access the internet in whatever time his wife granted him on her mac.  This is a great shame as I do enjoy reading his daily blog.  I hope the techies that work on it are able to put it right soon or I’ll be getting withdrawal symptoms.  To be honest, I am somewhat in awe of his ability to post such thought provoking, varied and interesting stuff on there so consistently.  But then, he is a proper writer, so I guess it’s only natural.

He whom I shall name only as The Cap’n had suffered a less permanent but much more annoying problem.  He, I, Wesley and various others have been trolled over the last year or so by a rather passive-aggressive little twerp who makes demands presuming on our friendship.  Since we have never actually became friends with him, this is a bit much.  When he began demanding that we help him grow as a person, we got fed up and- since the summer- he has not bothered us.  Well, the Cap’n has just been informed by Yahoo! that the twerp wants to be his friend still.  This is without any encouragement on the Cap’n’s part.  Why is it that such people feel they can impose on others without their consent?  Is it that the internet frees them from the normal constraints of social interaction?  Now this was a possible theme, but Lubyanka has written far more eloquently wittily and above all lengthily than I ever could, so I was back to square one.

It was the last email, from Brad-the-Lad, that gave me the inspiration for this week’s blog.  Brad, unfortunately, doesn’t keep a blog that I can link you to (unless he keeps it hidden from me, of course).  This is a shame as he has a tremendous imagination and a great naturalistic writing style.  Words flow easily fron the fount of his word-processor and I do hope that he makes the effort to get himself published.  The short stories of his that I have read are that good.  Then again, quality of writing and depth of story are not the key things in getting published.  If they were, Nig (who drops the odd comment here from time to time) would have had a successful series of children’s books published by now.

Cue the Queue

Anyway, I digress.  Brad, according to his email, had been caught up in a dreadful queueing experience that made my coach trip on the motorways around London seem like a model of free-flowing-movement-through-a-constricted-aperture-in-either-a-physical-or-transactional-sense.  In other words, Brad’s experience was bloody dreadful.  And that was what sparked inspiration in me, just as I was contemplating describing my trials on a near vegan diet for the last couple of weeks.  Right on cue, Brad-the-Lad saved us all from me writing wistfully about steaks I have eaten, by giving me the far more diverting (though less full of meaty goodness) topic of queues and queueing to write about.  I mean, did you know that there’s a whole branch of mathematics devoted to queueing?  That queueing has generated a whole new area of psychological research?

The upshot of Brad’s email was that he had spent a miserable and even harrowing number of hours waiting to buy tickets for the Rose Bowl.  My first thought on reading this was to wonder why an American would want to watch Hampshire play cricket so much that he would queue for the privilege.  And then I realised that it this was something esoterically American, probably to do with their version of rugby-for-wimps that they mistakenly try to call football.  At that point, I stopped worrying what he was queueing for and instead became absorbed in his tale of  thousands of people showing all the worst traits of human behaviour as gate-fever overtook them and they surged, horde-like for the ticket office.  At least Brad got his tickets and escaped with only wounds to his patience.

Until a few years ago, such behaviour while waiting would never have happened here.  Queueing is integral to the British way of life. We queue therefore we are… British.  It’s broken down a little now, but still my Dark Lady is amazed at how readily we queue and at how vehemently the whole queue will condemn any queue-jumpers.  Indeed, she was astonished at the minor argument that broke out at the Park and Ride bus stop in Ipswich, the other day, over who was at the head of the queue for the bus.  Each party was arguing, quite strenuously, for the right to defer to the other party and let them go first.

We will Fight Them For the Sun-Loungers

I think that’s why we don’t get on with the Germans.  Forget the two world wars and their always beating us at the footie (save for one glorious moment in 1966); their queueing culture is different to ours.  We believe that to queue effectively, one must actually be present in the queue at all times, save for emergencies of the bowel and bladder.  The Germans, it seems, believe that the intention of being in the queue is enough and that an inanimate proxy may well be good enough to state their claim.  So on the pistes of the Alps, you’ll see an orderly queue of Brits waiting for the snowcat suddenly displaced by a horde of hun barging onto the aforementioned snowcat as soon as it arrives, deflecting adverse comments with, “Ve haf bought our tickets thirty minuten ago.”

Of course, Churchill was mistaken, when he said that, “We will fight them on the beaches,” because the real arena for Anglo-Deutsch queueing-conflict is the area around the swimming pool in the hotels of Spain.  Here, wars of conquest are won and lost depending on which queueing culture is in the ascendant. Will the patient Brits gain the coveted sun-lounger by right of standing around for a long time or will the daring German night-time raid to plant a towel on the sun-lounger bear fruit?  Will the impartial arbiter of the conflict (the pool attendant) treat the towel as a flag granting German sovereignty over all such patio furnture in the area or will they recognise the moral authority of those who have waited so resolutely for access?  Or will they instead act (or more accurately fail to act) in emulation of the United Nations and merely let which ever nation who has the most citizens around the pool hold sway over the sun-loungers?

In reality, while the Brits and the Germans argue, a French phalanx sweeps in and renders the area uninhabitable with the poison gas of their gauloises before they queen it over the pool with the style and panache that can only be affected by those who actually have the sun-lounger no matter what the rights and wrongs of the situation are.  At least ’till the Italians arrive…

Action for the Environment

I’m not green, let me say that first.  I find a lot of the baggage of the “green movement” somewhat offensive.  What offends me most is the way that every fringe environmental issue and certain other, non-environmental, issues have been grouped together to form a core doctrine that is termed “going green”.  Why should these issues be grouped together?  Why should a concern for the Amazon rain forest also include a violent dislike for nuclear power?  There is no reason that they should, other than the fact that the loudest voices in the environmental movement hold both opinions.  And in a movement that is based around protest, that is based around an appeal to the emotions rather than reasoned argument, the loudest voices most often dictate how a movement is perceived.

One perception is that there is actually a movement.  It seems remarkable that over the thirty or so years that we have been hearing of the popular support for the green movement we have yet to see any real progress in environmental matters.  It strikes me that the reasons for this are that there is no movement as such but, instead, a loose coalition of vocal pressure groups and that the aforementioned grouping of disparate issues under a single banner prevents people from acting.  Some of the issues that have been brought up as matters necessary to the preservation of our planet seem, to the uninitiated observer to have a) nothing to do with the environment and b) everything to do with a single interest group trying to exploit a possible opportunity to get its message across.

Recently, there were loud claims that “To preserve our planet from global warming we must all become vegetarians.”  This is justified on the grounds that cattle belch and that their belching contributes a significant amount of CO₂ to the atmosphere.  CO₂ is, of course, the best known of the greenhouse gases and therefore, the argument runs, we risk significant heating of the planet if we persist in eating meat.  The initiated, the self-appointed guardians of society against global warming, see this with crystal clarity.  The rest of us tend to think that there are more important things to worry about and that the effort would be better spent elsewhere.  I’ll not even begin on the “to preserve the planet you must…” tactic as I’ve ranted about this type of misuse of language in other blogs.

Those with a scientific background know that there are far more damaging gases than CO₂ and that any one of molecule of the CFCs that we were so worried about almost twenty years ago has the same greenhouse effect as 17,000 molecules of CO₂ and that all we did was stop putting them up into the atmosphere.  The ones that were there are still there and it will be at least 50 years until they are gone.  Worse, campaigns of the vegetarian type, just tell the unconvinced that environmentalists are, as I overheard in the pub one night, “just bean-munching nutters with no understanding of the real world.”

That’s as may be and while I could discuss at length the various problems with how environmentalism is presented and misrepresented, I will confine myself to commenting on local matters.  One rant blog, like this, is hardly going to shift the way that environmentalism is going, satisfying as it might be to get things off my chest.  I am, after all a grumpy little hobbit and I want to vent (much as the cows vent CO₂ and methane to the atmosphere).

Earlier this week, I went to a meeting of my workplace’s environmental action committee.  We were told of the Local Authority’s “green pledge” which was handed out to each of us on a glossy colour flier.  The irony that the paper for such fliers is almost never recycled (the colour inks tend to run dreadfully due to the much shorter fibres in recycled paper) did not escape me.  Here are the words of the pledge:

Each school/organisation should:

1. set up an Environment committee or appoint Eco-Champion(s) (The committee/champions would become part of a county-wide scheme with a meeting/ training once or twice a year);
2. recycle paper / plastics / cans/ food waste;
3. wherever possible re-use items such as waste paper, refilling ink cartridges etc;
4. make use of natural daylight rather than always using lights;
5. use energy saving light bulbs wherever possible;
6. use central heating and air conditioners only when necessary;
7. turn off electrical equipment over night; do not leave on standby;
8. offer parents and others the option of receiving communications via email rather than letter;
9. provide encouragement for people to walk / cycle and provide safe storage for bikes;
10. make use of alternative energy sources.

All of these are very laudable and I am not going to argue against any of them.  However, I do have issue with the priorities and feasibility of some of them.  For example, should schools themselves, be in the business of generating their own electricity?  That’s what point 10 seems to sugest.  I would have thought that the key thing schools should do is educate children.  While having a school wind turbine might be a useful symbol, it might be better to set up a combined project with geography, science and mathematics to evaluate how best schools can make energy savings and how much this will save of fuel and electricity bills.  Such learning would then go out and inform the homes in which those children live and have a far bigger effect.  But the committee’s leadership has set her heart on a wind turbine.

Schools use, almost exclusively nowadays, fluorescent tubes for lighting.  The reason for this is simple: it costs less money than using light bulbs.  The average efficiency of a filament lightbulb is about 20% while that of a fluorescent tube is typically 80%.  At the meating, we were told that we should have to shift to using energy saving bulbs to meet point 5.  This would mean that a large number of fluorescent tubes would have to be disposed of and new lighting fittings put in. The replacement low energy light bulbs would have an energy efficiency of 80%.  Hence a great deal of cost and expense would result in no change in our energy usage.  When I pointed this out, I was greeted with blank stares.

That’s the trouble.  Too often, those given leadership of such projects lack the knowledge to be effective in achieving their aims.  A far cheaper, and much more effective method of lowering our carbon footprint (and saving about £400 per month as well as dealing with a problem that has made several staff ill) would be to mend the central heaing system.  Currently, it is set so high that even in the current weather and with all of the windows open it is unhealthily hot in my laboratories.  Not only have several of my staff complained about headaches as a result of the heat but huge amounts of energy are being wasted heating air which goes outside. I’ve been complaining about this for a quarter of a year now but it is, seemingly, to difficult a job, to manage.

And there’s the real reason why efforts to deal with “carbon footprints” are ineffective measures that are easy to accomplish rather than actions that can have a real effect. When you consider the efforts being put into getting us all to stop leaving items on stand-by with that spent on getting us to make our heating more efficient, you have to wonder. According to statistics, in the average British home, about 60% of that home’s total energy usage is in heating the rooms.while 1% is used leaving items on stand-by rather than turning them off.  It is possible to make a cut of about a fifth in the use of energy for heating, which would save twelve times the energy used by stand-by items.  It should be obvious what the most effective set of actions would be.

And they don’t include wind turbines.

Putting their oars in

Education is an important business.  Of that there can be no doubt, for societies that neglect the education of each successive generation are doomed.  Sometimes, inevitably, other matters take precedence and education fades into the background.  Yet it is always there and never a week goes by without one educational issue or another hitting the headlines.

Consequently, the world and his wife (as my father used to say) hold opinions about what is happening in our schools and in our society.  Like it or not, whatever we thinkabout the ideal of lifelong learning, education is inextricably entangled in most people’s minds with schooling.  It’s only natural, I suppose, given the experience that most of us have.  If you think of it, however, education need not, should not and, indeed, is not solely the preserve of the school, college or university.  From the moment we first open our eyes and bawl our lungs out right after our birth till our last gasping breath before the grave we are learning.  It is an inescapable part of the human condition; our brains are hard-wired to learn

Learning, however, is not, necessarily the same as education.  Learning is an innate process that happens whether we want it to or not. Education is the pursposeful direction of learning often- but not necessarily- from a source external to the learner.  The word is derived from the Latin educare meaning to lead out from or to dig a ditch away from.  This latter meaning might seem irrelevant but it is, to me, vital in understanding the whole process of education.  A ditch channels water usefully and this is a great metaphor for education.  If education is successful, it channels the interests and drives of the learner.  While to some extent, it can be forced into a given direction, the nature of the individual learner must be taken into account, much as the landscape through which a ditch is dug affects its course.  Much as you can’t force water to flow uphill, any attempt to force the learner to learn something that they are passionately committed to not learning is doomed to failure and any such attempts that succeed owe their success less to education than indoctrination.

Still in any case, it is fair to say that if education is important, the result is that everyone will have opinions.  The trouble is that often those opinions are based more in ideology than in reality.  The process began- in the UK at least- in 1976 with a speech by the then Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan.   He stated that education was in crisis and that government intervention was necessary to put this right.  Whether or not Callaghan’s statement was accurate is debatable.  Education was by no means perfect in the mid-seventies but when one looks at the fruits of all the changes since then, one has to wonder.  What is not debatable is that Callaghan’s motives in making this claim were ideological.  The labour party, of which he was leader, was firm in its opposition to elitism in education.  Their first act, in improving education, was to stamp out as far as they could what they saw as the symbol of elitism: the grammar schools.

Prior to the Callaghan speech the debate on education had always been on the issue of elitism and not on the issue of whether education was fit for purpose.  By changing the debate, from one of whether segregating pupils on the basis of their academic ability was moral or not, to whether educational standards were good enough, Callaghan was able to silence any opposition to his plans.  When the changes were questioned, the reply was the hard to answer question, “Are you against raising standards?”  Instead of questioning whether the premise, “education is not fit for purpose,” was correct, the questions were directed against the changes made.

Since then, anyone who wishes to make a point about education and who wishes changes to be made begins by stating that the education system is in a state of melt down.  An example is this blog which sparked my writing here.  The author means well, but the opening paragraph makes the basis of his views perfectly clear.  Sentences like, “Sadly education is everywhere a total failure,” and, “Education does not consist of sending children to schools,” show that the author believes that there is nothing of merit whatsoever in any field of education in any country and that schools have no place in the educational process.  If she did- I’m using a convention I saw recently: to assign a pronooun gender at random, when in doubt which to use and then stick to it- as I believe, mean something else, intend something else, she should say what she means clearly.

What she argues for in her rather lengthy post is a return to something similar to the system common in the nineteen-forties.  Single sex education stressing knowledge above understanding and working around a system of rote learning, learning spoken language before learning reading and using teachers as figures of authority.  In many ways, I have sympathy with some of her views.   For example, I believe that we do teach children to read too early here and that a later start would yield more rapid and effective progress, cementing reading as an important part of life much more than the system at the moment.  However, many of her views, such as the need for single-sex schooling, are not things I can agree with.  The evidence base quoted- papers from the National Association for Single Sex Public Education- is biased and any conclusions drawn from such evidence are of suspect validity at best.  I won’t even begin here to discuss her views on higher and further education; that would be worthy of a whole new post and I have neither the time nor the inclination to try to clamber over the chip on her shoulder to deal with her specifics.

And that is the trouble with the debate on education.  Too many single-issue or limited-issue groups produce a ton of credible seeming material with which they lobby those in power.  The ministers who decide policy draw the evidence they need from sources that just confirm their prejudices.  I could be doing our political class a great disservice by saying this, but the evidence of the last few decades certainly suggests that such is the case.  Always before a change in policy, the press are given details of research carried out by a party funded think-tank or a lobby group that is in sympathy with the change they wish to bring about.  Likewise the opposition counter with research from their own think tanks.  Never do they think to use research fom an independent apolitical source.

So, as a result, those with the biggest stake in education, the students and- to a lesser extent- the teachers are left out of the decision process.  At best any form of consultation pays lip-service to the thoughts of those in the thick of the education process.  Instead, the views of everyone else are indulged.  The one thing they all agree with is that the ship of eductaion is sinking.  It is, perhaps, more likely that the ship is going nowhere.  The reason is simple to understand.  When everyone is paddling for all they are worth in different directions, progress is impossible.  If they are so certain the ship is sinking, they should not put their oars in and, instead, start bailing.  The fact that they still paddle suggests that the good ship Education is not ready to sink beneath the waves just yet.