Is economic growth necessarily the same as "real" growth?

[teamsaint]

MrGG: The key word in my last post is 'large', as in ".. large reductions ..". The research I'm think of is Hattie's, as reported here and elsewhere, but I do recognise that you will be able to find some that backs up your own point of view.

teamsaint: Who is to pay for that extra £12k to £25k per child, for the 93% of children whose parents only pay through their taxes at the moment? Or the extra 20% of salary? If only you could pluck money out of the air as well as you pluck your figures. And as for "weeding out", I well remember my tutor telling me that I wasn't good enough to continue to postgraduate work. I'm sure he was right, at the time. "Weeding out", as you call it, happens at all levels, and so it should.

you see what you want to see. I see far too many kids discarded because the system is designed to discard them rather than develop them.

As for paying for the extra and better paid teachers.....didn't you see the bit about wars? or scrapping private schools charitable status, or cut MPs pensions,
or scrap tax relief on pension contributions for those on over £150k Pa, or scrap HS2 ( a vanity project).Not so difficult.

You seem in favour of a system that pampers the few while 20% leave school illiterate and innumerate after 11 years of school. I am not.

[Lateralthinking1]

People pay for the name. That is all. When I went for job interviews, the eyes lit up as soon as they saw the school I'd attended. "How was it?" they would ask. "Alright" I would say and fail the interview for not performing a hymn of praise. "Oh dear, he won't play our game". No, I won't. I used to feel sorry for the young teacher who never got a lunch break because he was always being locked by the pupils in his classroom. Additionally chairs were piled up against the door in case he found a key. I didn't share the amusement of others in having a maths teacher who would disappear as soon as people were seated and return two minutes from the end with his flies open. He never had any thought of teaching anything on the syllabus and that happened day after day.

Then a Reverend who reckoned he could teach history as well as divinity but was so obsessed with Wesley he spoke of nothing else. The whole lesson would involve him firing questions about that irrelevance and people answering "don't know sir" while staring out of the window. Ultimately a pupils only meeting was called to put a stop to it so that we had a slight chance of passing our A levels. He actually had the gall to tell me when I passed that he was very surprised so "well done". Cheers. No thanks to you mate! Various board rubbers and chalk being flung across the room in other classes, frequently nearly putting peoples' eyes out, a woodwork teacher who would smash razor sharp metal rulers onto peoples' knuckles and a deputy head teacher who had two duties - smoking a pipe from start to finish and caning. Plus several airy aloof sorts in gowns who used to see my Mum and Dad on Parents Day and speak about someone else thinking it was me. They hadn't the heart to say that they were wrong - and dim too.

On the whole, the teaching was so lousy I taught myself. As I say, people spend all that money for the name. I am only thankful my parents didn't have to pay and that the Council picked up the bill. If that was "the best" the country could provide, I should have caught on earlier than I did. Somehow for a couple of decades I kept the faith. God knows why. I must have been mad.

Footnote - There is something about a grand building. Even today if I were to sit outside Parliament, which I ended up doing on many lunchtimes until 2010, I feel a peculiar sense of pride. Being associated with something like that, even if it is essentially just being there, has an almost spiritual dimension. That feeling is exactly how at 11 I thought it would be at an independent school. Naively I expected people to be dignified. But it turned out to be the kind of let down that most of us felt when Parliament was first televised. The difference between the architecture and the proceedings is immense. Sometime in the 1980s, things did feel different. There was some sense that there had been progress. Now it seems exactly like the 1970s and not just in regard to a sadistic Conservative Government following on from three years of a rubbish Labour Prime Minister.

[greenilex]

Lat, when you say "I taught myself" you are being every successful pupil in every school.....teachers are there to help as a last resort and only when necessary. What pupils see as laziness on the teacher's part is probably the best method of weeding out the ones who can and will from the ones who can't and probably won't without remedial intervention...

Lecturing on and on about Wesley simply provided the space for you to hone your own reseach skills on other topics, while witnessing an enthusiasm.

Alas, the National Curriculum puts paid to that kind of teaching...

[MrGongGong]

more idle musings ........... I see

[greenilex]

There's a lot to be said for musing idly

and then listening hard to the results

[Lateralthinking1]

Well, I suppose that is an angle (no. 48). The results would suggest you were right. There were far worse than him - he enjoyed being a caricature - a fearsome old style Northern preacher. But there was that idea about people with a supposed level of IQ having similar ways and to be frank I would have felt more at home in the Far East or South America. It was just so alien to me.

I suppose my main points are (i) To anyone contemplating private education for their children, don't believe that the advantage will be a better education - it is its status that you are paying for and (ii) History shows us that many have a tough time in that kind of environment but it helps to know the culture from generation to generation. I wasn't looking for a feeling of class difference (as in family background) - at 11 I wouldn't have understood what it meant - but I certainly felt it.

[MrGongGong]

indeed
but there are many myths about education that are often presented as "facts" ............
such as

"there is no classical music on the A level syllabus" or
"class sizes have no effect on the ability of students to learn"


that one needs to be very careful

[teamsaint]

going back to economic growth...don't look at the news today.
The world is being held to ransom by the rating agencies and bond dealers.
Austerity is being self imposed by shoppers on the high st.
and Iran is next in line to be attacked.

with friends like our governments and the financial sector, who needs enemies ?

[ahinton]

going back to economic growth...don't look at the news today.
The world is being held to ransom by the rating agencies and bond dealers.
Austerity is being self imposed by shoppers on the high st.
and Iran is next in line to be attacked.

with friends like our governments and the financial sector, who needs enemies ?

Iran, probably - but then I think that it's already got its fair share of those...

[PhilipT]

.. or cut MPs pensions, or scrap tax relief on pension contributions for those on over £150k Pa. .. You seem in favour of a system that pampers the few while 20% leave school illiterate..

Wow! Cut the pensions of 650 MPs! Cor!

From this tax year the maximum tax-free pension contribution is £50k, from all sources. Scrapping the remaining relief for high earners won't raise much.

If 20% leave school illiterate and innumerate after 11 years, what percentage left literate and numerate as a result of, say, the last two of those years? And what is the teachers' excuse for those figures, bearing in mind that they've been spending taxpayers' money?

[aeolium]

If 20% leave school illiterate and innumerate after 11 years, what percentage left literate and numerate as a result of, say, the last two of those years? And what is the teachers' excuse for those figures, bearing in mind that they've been spending taxpayers' money?

I presume you refer to the study mentioned in this article as the basis for those figues - although the study refers to functional illiteracy and innumeracy rather than in a literal sense, i.e. being completely unable to read or use numbers.

That study suggests that this has been a problem for a long time (the figures have remained the same for "at least 20 years") and there is no suggestion that there was a sudden drop from a higher level before that. This might suggest that there are deep intractable problems with that 20% of children, possibly linked to social deprivation, the lack of help with reading at home and other factors. Or you could take the view that teachers have simply been failing to do their job properly for the last 60 years. Without more extensive research it is hard to come to a definite conclusion.

If it comes to seeking answers for the waste of taxpayers' money, there are other questions that could be asked. For instance, why was so much money wasted in long-term PFI contracts which give extremely poor value for money to the taxpayer? Or, why did bankers take decisions which resulted in huge sums of money having to be spent by the taxpayer in rescuing financial institutions? Some people might think that some of those decisions revealed a degree of functional innumeracy far more damaging (at least to society) than that referred to in the study.

[PhilipT]

I presume you refer to the study mentioned in this article ...

No - I was only replying to teamsaint.

There may indeed be deep intractable problems with those 20% - it's not for me to say. As a taxpayer it is for me to question the value of keeping them in school.

There are indeed other questions that could be asked, but "He did it too sir!" is a playground excuse.

[Serial_Apologist]

If it comes to seeking answers for the waste of taxpayers' money, there are other questions that could be asked. For instance, why was so much money wasted in long-term PFI contracts which give extremely poor value for money to the taxpayer? Or, why did bankers take decisions which resulted in huge sums of money having to be spent by the taxpayer in rescuing financial institutions? Some people might think that some of those decisions revealed a degree of functional innumeracy far more damaging (at least to society) than that referred to in the study.

[Serial_Apologist]

No - I was only replying to teamsaint.

There may indeed be deep intractable problems with those 20% - it's not for me to say. As a taxpayer it is for me to question the value of keeping them in school.

There are indeed other questions that could be asked, but "He did it too sir!" is a playground excuse.

That last sentance is the last word in disingenuousness, given that those who "did it too" were the ones we were misguidedly persuaded to be the "experts" we were all to depend on, with all their theoretical jargon and supposed expertise.

[MrGongGong]

Since I started working in schools about 25 or so years ago I became acutely aware of the need to not base my impressions on my own experience of education as a pupil. As a parent I have seen this happen so much , I left school in 1979, much has changed, if I based my ideas of education on my experience in the 1970's I would be making a huge mistake.
The oft repeated mantra of rising illituracy (sic) needs to be seen in context, when I left school I doubt it was much different but the needs of employment were different. In many ways I wish employers would get their noses out of education and maybe do what they used to do i.e TRAIN people for their jobs rather than expecting schools, colleges and Universities to do it for them