Chris Woodhead= Cnut

[mixed_biscuits]

I agree: Woodhead has lit the blue touchpaper. As I write, thousands upon thousands of mild-mannered teachers, civil servants and actuaries are sharpening their paperknives for the final assault on the working classes' last redoubt.

Wielding only pool cues, Sky subscription booklets and copies of the Racing Post, our blue collar brothers will soon be vanquished: oh yes, much salt of the earth will be spilt tonight.

 

[DannyL]

That's why I put scare quotes around that.

All I'm saying... is that equating the historical struggle of black people with the present-day struggle of the British working class might be a bit of a 'stretch'... No?

I mean, are you saying there isn't a historical struggle that the working classes have engaged in? That'll be news to the SWP. And that present day struggles aren't continuations of this? Or that this was just unimportant, because their genetics were "wrong"? That seems to me to be the inevitable end point of your position.

 

[DannyL]

I agree: Woodhead has lit the blue touchpaper. As I write, thousands upon thousands of mild-mannered teachers, civil servants and actuaries are sharpening their paperknives for the final assault on the working classes' last redoubt.

Wielding only pool cues, Sky subscription booklets and copies of the Racing Post, our blue collar brothers will soon be vanquished: oh yes, much salt of the earth will be spilt tonight.

Surely it is exactly in statements like Woodhead's that these ideological battles are fought?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Hmmm...I appear to have planned no lessons for tomorrow...But how could that be?

Gotta go!

*hugs*

 

[john eden]

That's why I put scare quotes around that.

All I'm saying... is that equating the historical struggle of black people with the present-day struggle of the British working class might be a bit of a 'stretch'... No?

You could also argue that equating the historical struggle of black people with the present day struggle of black people in the UK might be a bit of a stretch.

 

[john eden]

Surely it is exactly in statements like Woodhead's that these ideological battles are fought?

Exactly.

 

[nomadthethird]

These are very old!

It's odd: social science has (partly) decided long ago that IQ is meaningless, whilst vast swathes of psychology and neuroscience plough on ahead with it. Go figure...

Vocab size is a reflection of intelligence. Why would it not be?

Actually, no they don't, except in cases of obvious low function, in order to diagnose severe learning disabilities or mental retardation. No one in the scientific community uses IQ tests to determine intelligence, only to determine who will have difficulty learning.

 

[don_quixote]

Assesing someone's potential as a humanities student seems to rely a lot more on intangible impressions, though, which makes the process more susceptible to favouring people who know how to talk the talk. Whereas afaik Cambridge still base a lot of their maths interview process on 'give them some hard elementary problems, see how they get on with them / give them an exam full of hard elementary problems, see how they get on with that.'

i was actually going to make this point to you when you brought up step papers.

however, step papers in themselves can be taught can't they? i mean, they require astounding cognitive ability, but you can still teach them. so those schools who can provide will stand a better chance of successful candidates.

maths is really tough to feign understanding in though, which is probably why a lot of students find it their least favourite subject.




right, on grammar schools;

differentiation; are you KIDDING?? and the idea that broad ability comprehensives only cater for those in the middle is utterly crazy. have you ever been into a school?

i admit i have never been into a grammar school or know what they do there which is so amazing, so i'm coming in as blind as you seem to be about the comprehensive system or whatever it's called nowadays. coming from leicestershire there's just schools and that's it.

but to me it just seems to be a system that perpetuates the myth that there's successful people in life and failures, and marks them down into their respective roles at the age of 11. why not ship them off to the factories then? it also seems to disregard the fact that kids can excel in one subject and not in another and further it just causes divides across families and communities.

that's not differentiation. differentiation is about success but individual success. it shouldn't put the students on a pedestal of 'intelligence'. it should be about individual effort and achievement and doing the best that you can and that ain't what grammar schools say to me.

 

[don_quixote]

Vocab size is a reflection of intelligence. Why would it not be?

monkeys and typewriters?

you have to understand what you're saying.

 

[don_quixote]

fucking hell...

Selective LEA's. First number is percentage of free school meals in the whole LEA. Second number is free school meals in their secondary moderns. Third number is percentage of free school meals in the selective grammars.

Bexley 13.2 16.5 3.5
Buckinghamshire 7.1 10.9 1.2
Kent 10.2 14.2 2.2
Lincolnshire 10.1 12.6 1.9
Medway 11.7 15.4 3.1
Slough 17.2 24.2 5.1
Southend 12.2 18.0 2.4
Sutton 7.6 11.1 1.2
Torbay 13.1 18.6 3.8
Trafford 20.3 25.7 4.0
All selective LEAs 12.3 14.3 2.4

 

[nomadthethird]

The other reason people tend to think there's a large rump of "average" pupils, is that people tend to look a lot more like each other when they're bored and not trying particularly hard. It's amazing how much more alert and interesting some teenagers turn out to be when you meet them outside the classroom.

Or when you allow for the fact that some people are shitty readers or writers but they have an aptitude for mechanical engineering, and some people who have "learning disabilities" mysteriously perk up during music class, some who can't stand history love math, etc.

The idea that students should be as "well-rounded" as possible is under fire now, with recent advances in the sciences that suggest that what American teachers are so quick to label a "learning disability" can actually be indicative of a highly focused and specialized intelligence in one area. The rise of autism and ADD also suggests that it's rather useless to try to make everyone fit into the classic "intelligence" mold, since some of the most intelligent people in the world are the farthest thing from intellectually "balanced"...it's possible that some "disabilities" are actually very high aptitudes that we simply can't fit into our little mold.

In the U.S. it's taken for granted that the public school system is only meant to force students through by passing them. This creates the problem of "lowest common denominator" teaching, where classically "intelligent" students are bored because the curriculum gets ever watered down to accommodate everyone. So the conventional wisdom is that smarter kids should go to prep schools that prepare pupils for college. And what kind of positive effect does this have? None, really. It means the common denominator keeps getting lower, and more "smart" students try like hell to get into magnet schools, while the public school system sinks farther and farther below its own standards.

Anyway, the issue is not that intelligence is one aptitude, or set of them, that everyone either has or doesn't--it's well-recognized that there are at least ten different sorts of "cognitive aptitude" and probably a lot more, so that in the future schooling will become more specialized rather than less so.

 

[nomadthethird]

monkeys and typewriters?

you have to understand what you're saying.

He should be thankful my friend who wrote her thesis on the anti-semitic origins of the SAT is not reading this thread.

 

[nomadthethird]

So rich people either do not have offspring with learning disabilities, or else cast them out, so they are forced to go and live with those working class types?

This is hilarious, since all (very literally, I can think of no exceptions) of the richest kids I knew in college had been labeled ADD thanks to their very concerned parents, who could afford to consult several shrinks till they found the script happy one, and did this happily so their child could get a legal prescription of dextroamphetamine that would give them a competitive edge over their prep schoolmates.

Only problem-- they were all on adderal so it didn't really give any of them an edge. It just made them drug addicts from a very young age.

For a while I worked at a doctor's answering service, and more than half the messages I took were from college students with ADD who had "lost" their script and needed a new one faxed to the pharmacy STAT.

 

[vimothy]

maths is really tough to feign understanding in

Au contraire....

 

[massrock]

This isn't necessarily just a reply to you nomad but I'll quote you because I pretty much agree with what you say here and it's usefully illustrative.

Or when you allow for the fact that some people are shitty readers or writers but they have an aptitude for mechanical engineering, and some people who have "learning disabilities" mysteriously perk up during music class, some who can't stand history love math, etc.

The idea that students should be as "well-rounded" as possible is under fire now, with recent advances in the sciences that suggest that what American teachers are so quick to label a "learning disability" can actually be indicative of a highly focused and specialized intelligence in one area. The rise of autism and ADD also suggests that it's rather useless to try to make everyone fit into the classic "intelligence" mold, since some of the most intelligent people in the world are the farthest thing from intellectually "balanced"...it's possible that some "disabilities" are actually very high aptitudes that we simply can't fit into our little mold.

I don't know much about the guy's (Woodhead) track record and the 'genes' bit seems pretty ill advised and also makes me wary of his motives but this above would seem to be kind of what he's getting at in that interview, though obviously he has his biases wrt what he considers the 'right' kind of intelligence. But broadly the (obvious) point is that not everyone is going to be at their best in classically 'academic' areas so it's not productive to try and fit all students into that mould or judge them by those standards. Should stress I'm not saying I agree with what might be proposed as solutions to the way schools fail to deal with these diversities or why that might be the case. Also most of what I can see in that article is the interviewer's interpretation so it's not really the best way to be informed.

Anyway, the issue is not that intelligence is one aptitude, or set of them, that everyone either has or doesn't--it's well-recognized that there are at least ten different sorts of "cognitive aptitude" and probably a lot more, so that in the future schooling will become more specialized rather than less so.

And the criticisms of one size fits all education would be much better and make more sense if stated in those terms.

Audio here btw. I listened but I didn't hear the comment about genes.

 

[josef k.]

I mean, are you saying there isn't a historical struggle that the working classes have engaged in? That'll be news to the SWP.

The SWP are definitely the authorities.

 

[massrock]

I mean obviously there are massive problems with what he says there and he does seem to be a bit of a cnut but I don't think it makes sense to hold off trying to make improvements to an education system until all of societies wider inequalities have been addressed.

I say this based in part on my own experience. I went to a badly failing and dysfunctional comprehensive school and I can say that it certainly would have been better for all concerned if there had been other options for some of the kids there than to be in those classes. Classes that were quite literally barely happening!

'Disruption' on the part of the kids and either a siege mentality or just total despair on the part of the teachers had become an endemic culture there and hardly anything in the way of 'eduction' was taking place*. It was totally out of control. Large numbers of students just weren't turning up anyway, myself among them at times. In the end exam results were terrible or non-existent and half the staff had quit or had had nervous breakdowns. Whatever the underlying reasons for all this in the end nobody was benefiting.

*Actually I now consider this to have been a fortuitous evasion of early indoctrination but still!

 

[vimothy]

This has been an interesting thread.

 

[vimothy]

Idle thoughts

I suppose that one of the ways I would read this thread is in terms of positioning relative to the issue of heritable intelligence. Positions are important, definitive, perhaps. So the positions are one thing, and the science is something else, though the two are probably not distinct. Intersecting this is the story about education, which is about institutional (organisational) incentives, and prescriptive policy, and also, of course, about positioning. A lot of stories...

 

[massrock]

Stoner.