Slugger O'Toole

Latest comments from Malcolm Redfellow (see all)

Malcolm Redfellow has commented 1,582 times (73 in the last month).

1. Comment on Grammar schools and social mobility: a Northern Ireland contribution to the debate
   on 23 May 2012 at 8:52 pm

   articles @ 7:07 pm:

   As far as I am aware there are no other independent benchmarks before GCSEs

   I assume “independent” translates as “don’t-trust-the-professionals”.

   Well, there are baseline assessments at each phase.

   As far back as 1999 John Gardner of QUB was explaining to the BERA what was happening in NI. Oh, look! It’s here on line!.

   I’ll leave you to update how devastatingly successful our political lords and masters have been since then. Or you can check here.

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2. Comment on Grammar schools and social mobility: a Northern Ireland contribution to the debate
   on 23 May 2012 at 6:38 pm

   Reader @ 6:31 pm:

   Last minute advice to desperate examinees: RTFQ.

   “What’s that mean?”

   “Read the question.”

   “But what does the F stand for?”

   “Read the full question.”

   So, to you, sir: RTFP (P for posting, of course).

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3. Comment on Grammar schools and social mobility: a Northern Ireland contribution to the debate
   on 23 May 2012 at 5:15 pm

   The best put-down, when a student goes into a rant, and entirely misses the point, is along the lines of “I think you’ve said enough”.

   Similarly, Reader @ 8:08 am sees the process of education as another example of economic nature red in tooth and claw [Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.]. In that world, education would be designating the masters of the universe from the hewers of wood and drawers of water. It’s not: it’s the process of extracting the best out of each and every student. It even involves co-operation and tolerance, even a bit of human feeling.

   Let’s have a bit of Chomsky to fill out an otherwise mediocre and unconvincing post:
   

   Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
   There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase, “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.” A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it’s designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of it is designed to prevent people from being independent and creative. If you’re independent-minded in school, you’re probably going to get into trouble very early on. That’s not the trait that’s being preferred or cultivated. When people live through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that from another point of view are completely reasonable….

   Humboldt, the founder of classical liberalism, his view was that education is a matter of laying out a string along which the child will develop, but in its own way. You may do some guiding. That’s what serious education would be from kindergarten up through graduate school. You do get it in advanced science, because there’s no other way to do it.

   But most of the educational system is quite different. Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate them, what we call “education,” they’re going to take control — “they” being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

   So, let’s be radical.

   Sadly (and following to some extent the logic of Reader @ 8:08 am‘s second paragraph), the best way to “rescue an underachieving sector – e.g. working class boys” might well be to teach them how to make Molotov Cocktails, because the present entrenched social system doesn’t give a damn. However, every revolution has been developed by the lawyers (England, 1640s; America, 1770s; France, 1789; Russia, 1917) — and now the English Criminal Bar Association are threatened to go on strike.

   Perhaps I’ve said enough.

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4. Comment on Grammar schools and social mobility: a Northern Ireland contribution to the debate
   on 22 May 2012 at 11:08 pm

   I had a longer, more boring response, showing the inequalities in the selective model. My favourite was the remarkable finding that almost equal numbers of each gender are “selected” for NI grammar schools. However, there must be something badly wrong with that selection: 3As at A-level comes out severely skewed: around a 57/43% split.

   That post disappeared into the cyber-aether, never to be sniffed again.

   Which leaves one thought. Is education something that must be rationed, that we can no longer afford? Why is it essential to build “competitiveness”, “at the expense of” others, into the system? We’ve given up on such norm-basing (only a pre-determined fraction can “pass”) as a mark of “success” in examinations in schools and universities, preferring “criterion-basing” (demonstrate the ability or skill, get the grade). Except at 11+.

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5. Comment on Grammar schools and social mobility: a Northern Ireland contribution to the debate
   on 22 May 2012 at 2:32 pm

   Actually, I do know of at least one instance of “selection be[ing] done on affair basis”. I’d blame it on the predictive spelling in MacOs: the intention was “a fair basis”.

   Apologies.

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6. Comment on Grammar schools and social mobility: a Northern Ireland contribution to the debate
   on 22 May 2012 at 2:30 pm

   “As a grateful benificiary of a grammer school education” — says it all, really.

   Well, perhaps not quite.

   The main pressure to remove 11+ segregation in England came from … the aspiring middle-classes. Yes, indeed. And, doubtless, would again.

   That’s the problem with selection: more are excluded than are included. On top of that it is essential to build unfairness into the system: this used to be defended on the ground that “girls mature earlier than boys”.

   So there’s the next complication: how can selection be done on affair basis, especially since no testing regime can work (refer back to the previous sentence for why).

   Ah, let’s have an IQ test! IQ tests notoriously test the ability to do IQ tests. So, we don’t use IQ tests, we have tests in “verbal reasoning”. Well, that’s class-based: bourgeois kids from practice have language skills denied the lower orders. Well, we’ll blame that on parenting, and give away vouchers in Boots (the lower orders get their stuff, not from Boots, but from the Poundsavers and 99p stores — cunning, what?)

   Now, how many do we select? There’s only room for — what? — 20-25%. We can’t have heaven crammed! Of course, with the class thing, it’d be 50% in the Cheltenhams, but only 15% in the Barnsleys. Another little bit of class-gerrymandering.

   OK, what about the next decile, next quartile among the rejected, or those parents who fear their wee darling may not make the cut? They vote, you know. They lobby, and they get good at it. Those are the types who would want selection changed.

   Now, does anyone wish a guided tour around Mary Ann Bighead’s Greatest Hits (see Private Eye over many years) and the dedicated élitist views she regularly inflicts upon consumers of newsprint?

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7. Comment on Euro crisis: When “earth’s proud empires pass away”…
   on 21 May 2012 at 3:41 pm

   Surely the failure re (b) wasn’t public, but private debt-escalation.

   Sticking to the aul’ sod — and saving myself trouble by quoting Larry Elliott (at The Guardian, today):
   

   Take Ireland, one of the three countries subject to harsh bailout terms. Does it have a competitiveness problem? As Dhaval Joshi of BCA Research notes, Ireland accounts for 0.3% of global GDP yet accounts for 3% of world trade in services and 6% of trade in pharmaceuticals. Ireland ranks third in the world for foreign direct investment, on which the return is 17%, compared with 6% in Germany. “As a trading economy in key sectors, Ireland is punching 10 or 20 times above its weight. This is hardly a sign of an economy that needs to become more competitive,” Joshi says.

   Nor would the proposed fiscal pact, on which Ireland votes in a referendum later this month, have prevented the crisis that has reduced GDP by 15% and prompted a fresh exodus of the young and talented. Ireland, like Spain, had healthy public finances in the years before the crisis broke. The problem in both countries was not too much public debt but too much private debt. The reason there was too much private debt was that borrowing was too cheap in economies that were growing fast and at risk of overheating. And the reason borrowing was too cheap was that Ireland and Spain had given up the right to set their own interest rates and were subject to the one-size-fits-all dictates of monetary union.

   Of course, the Ahern mafia could have done something about all that, by devices such as compulsory savings/imposing charges/raising taxes, diverting funds into a sovereign wealth fund (as the Norwegians have done with oil revenues) and so restraining excess disposable income (and the inflation that stems therefrom).

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8. Comment on Euro crisis: When “earth’s proud empires pass away”…
   on 21 May 2012 at 2:06 pm

   tuatha @ 12:03 pm:

   Well (a) there is the easy one. Because the Brits, partly out of self-interest, partly because the US wanted the ex-Warsaw Pact countries inside the tent [complete this clause as feel fit], rounded up another thirteen of the fifteen who were convinced of the wisdom to hamstring re-united Germany. The Germans, of course, saw the accessions as new markets, having bought (e.g.) Škoda in advance.

   As it says here, “Flag as offensive”.

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9. Comment on Euro crisis: When “earth’s proud empires pass away”…
   on 20 May 2012 at 10:54 pm

   Alias @ 10:12 pm:

   History is a wonderful instructor, so apply similar logic to Article XVI of the Act of Union, 1707.

   Do you reach similar conclusions?

   [2 doyts = 1 bodle; 2 bodles = 1 plack; 3 placks = 1 bawbee. Not many people know that.]

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10. Comment on Scottish independence: Can Alistair Darling at the head of the pro-Union campaign match Alex Salmond?
    on 20 May 2012 at 2:15 pm

    Brian Walker‘s addition to the above doesn’t make sense. One sentence in particular needs clarification:

    The Observer says Ed Miliband is coming under party pressure to back a referendum call by the time of the Euro-elections of 2014.

    A casual scan might suggest Miliband would be urging a vote before 2014. On the contrary: were it to happen, it would be a 2015 Manifesto item.

    The push for an in/out EU referendum has been growing in Labour circles for years — and not out of bare-faced opportunism. The issue has to be confronted, sooner or later.

    I’d suggest that Jon Cruddas has it sensibly in supporting The People’s Pledge:
    

    This is about democracy. At certain stages, the political classes should invite the people into the discussion that affects their everyday lives; none more important than Europe.
    I think we should use every opportunity to push the case for a referendum, simply on the basis of the democratic principles involved.
    Irrespective of where you stand on the issue, it is a question of your rights as a citizen of this country to be able to participate in discussions that affect your material everyday life and our culture.

    If nothing else comes out of the Great €-crisis, one lesson to be learned is that the (long ignored) “democratic-deficit” cannot be forgotten.

    Similarly with the lesser-spotted Scottish referendum. Did anyone not suppose that there are “noises off”? Or that Alistair Darling wasn’t a “big beast”, especially so in Scottish Labour? Or that he would not be involved? Have a look at Watt and Carrell’s piece in The Guardian, 11th January 2012, and you’ll see there’s not much revelatory in today’s interview.

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