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Impressively put Bob, Such agenda driven
comments have motivated the skittish conservative Christians to come out and
support Republican policies even though those policies harm their own children
and cut their salaries. Thanks,
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 13, 2003 8:49
AM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Coming of age
in new times
Keith,
During my Ph.D. residency, in education, I was
exposed to a number of visiting scholars from Britain: Open University,
University of Bristol, and so on, so I am a little bit familiar with British
education. As well, I consume in my reading a number of British writers
who use British data, as support for their perspectives.
My response to the article you posted was: so
what? It is pretty descriptive and doesn't help me understand very
much. The historical perspective is the last 10 years, and I don't need
to cite chapter and verse on the nature of those 10 years in British
education. The greatest travesty, in my view, is the abstraction of
those kids in the 40 per cent failure cohort.
I read the article as being written in code,
justifying a further assault on public education in Britain. The target
in this case, obliquely, is another assault on the capacity of teachers to be
'objective' in setting standards in their assessment of student's progress, in
meeting the needs of the new economy, effectively putting in play a call for
the privatization of teacher assessment technologies, thus compromising that
most fundamental aspect of teacher professionalism, the assessment of their
students. There are similar pressures in the United States, and as we
have often mentioned, Blair's 'third way' is quite sympatico with King
George's royal decrees. The past 10 years, in Britain, have included
debates concerning school-based management. Local governance sounds like
a good idea, right? Well, what's the status of that reform? How
about policy talk to remove educators from managing the schools and replace
them with the textbook new professionalism of an MBA graduate. Again,
there are similar pressures in America.
On a side note. I noticed the article
indicated that test results among 11-year olds have been improving.
Blair hired a Canadian academic, Dr. Michael Fullan, Dean of the
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, to
advise his government on assessment and accountability issues. Given the
fact that the numbers [if that's what matters in education] are being
ratcheted in a direction that makes professional politicians salivate, it
sounds like Michael has had some impact. I also sense his influence in
some of the forthcoming policy initiatives mentioned in the article.
This is not the place for me to speak my critique of Michael's reformist
limitations.
Bob
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2003 5:23
PM
Subject: [Futurework] Coming of age in
new times
I feel more than a little rueful that a
recent report by the National Commission of Education in has "officially"
stated something that I've spent quite a lot of time writing about on the
Net in recent years -- the woeful inadequacy of post-puberty education for a
considerable proportion of our children. Although this particularly applies
to England I judge that a similar report could be written about America,
both countries where state education is predominant. However, although
secondary schools on the Continent don't seem to be so badly affected
(though they have other sorts of education-to-work problems which are
equally serious), the same basic problem remains.
The world of adults
appear to be in a conspiracy against the young in order to prevent them
growing up and competing for jobs.
This conspiracy against the young
is not new, of course. It goes back to the Middle Ages and seven-year
apprenticeships, journeymen and guilds. But, using the handy device of state
education and legislation in all developed countries in raising the
school-leaving age, then the practice has continued. And then on top of
that, professional protective practices have grown apace. Whenever a new
skill or pursuit is invented then there is usually only a brief windown of
opportunity for youngsters to get into them before they themselves -- now
adult -- start imposing examinations that must be passed.
The
situation affecting post-puberty boys is considerably more serious than for
girls. For one thing girls tend to marry boys who are older than themselves,
and for another, the job structure in modern times is changing away from
typically muscular and physical jobs and towards managerial-type jobs for
which females' brains are more suitable. Another factor which has not been
realised until fairly recently is that the human species is patrilocal --
that is that post-puberty boys tend to stay put in the locality in which
they are born while girls are more exploratory. In hunter-gatherer societies
this instinct is obvious, as anthropologists report. During the industrial
revolution when the community nature of society broke down completely, this
was not so obvious. But, once again in modern times, with increased
opportunities and mobility, it is the teenager girls and young women who are
much more prepared to leave their home town and get education and jobs
elsewhere. The corollary of this is a pohenomenon which is already becoming
serious is several developed countries such as Japan, Italy and England (1.5
million here), is that a large surplus of unmarried men are now staying in
the parental home -- and, in fact, exploiting their parents to a
consdierable extent.
The report referred to below talks of 40% of
young people are being failed by our schools. More accurately, schools are
probably failing 60% of the boys and 20% of the girls. But whether that's so
or not, one result of this is that, in modern times, almost all the crime is
due to 15-25 year-olds males. This has been growing so steadily over the
last century, and is so prevalent that we somehow accept this as somehow
'normal'. Well, there is no reason why this behaviour should be normal
at all. Yes, boys are more vigorously aggressive and physical in their
behaviour before puberty, and they are the natural warriors when defending
territory but I cannot see why post-puberty males rather than females should
be more intrinsically given to vandalism and crimes of violence against
their own society.
But modern girls, while they may not be given to
crimes against society in the same way as male teenagers, are now capable of
shocking their parents and adults in different ways. The recent film,
Thirteen, largely scripted and acted by teenage girls is apparently,
causing tremendous shock in America. It is shocking not only because girls
are being shown to be sexually exploratory in a much more aggressive way
than boys (who more usually become exploratory via predation by older men),
but that it is happening to middle-class girls. This is what is sending a
tremor throughout middle-class America. How far this trend will go, and how
this is related to modern trends in jobs and credentialism I don't feel
qualified to judge or to write about here and now. For the time being I
follow merely with a report (rather than a review) on the the film -- all
the more significant because it was largely written by a teenager girl
rather than the normal adult film reviewer.
Keith
Hudson
<<<<
'SECONDARY SCHOOLS FAIL 40%
OF THEIR PUPILS'
Richard Garner
Education Editor
Secondary
schools in the UK are still failing 40 per cent of their pupils, says a
study published today.
The report by the National Commission on
Education says that almost 39 per cent of youngsters in Britain leave
full-time education without a worthwhile qualification; in France and
Germany that figure is only 20 per cent.
It also says those
youngsters, who leave school without A* to C grade GCSE passes, could
benefit from top-class vocational education.
Ten years ago, the
commission produced a devastating critique of Britain's education
performance after a review of schools' performance, following an inquiry led
by the former head of the Government's statistical service Sir Claus
Moser.
The follow-up report, chaired by Sir John Cassels, the
director of the commission, says: "Time appears to have been wasted in
clinging to a singularly narrow British conception of what constitutes a
good education.
"Action is badly needed to reverse both the
disaffection of young teenagers, as evidenced by truancy, exclusion and
under-performance, and the stubbornly high incidence of young people who do
poorly in their GCSE's and drop out of education at 16 or soon
after."
But the report also says that "compared with 10 years ago ...
education and training in the UK are serving more people better". It adds
that there have been significant improvements in literacy and numeracy,
between 1996 and 2002, for 11-year-olds.
One of the recommendations
from the earlier report was that all children should receive nursery
education from the age of three and today's report says: "By January 2002,
96 per cent of three and four-year-olds were engaged in some form of early
years education." And it also shows improved GCSE passes. "Between 1996 and
2002 there was an eight per cent improvement [to 51.2 per cent] in the
number of 16-year-olds gaining five or more A* to C grade passes at GCSE."
But it adds that "the gap in achievement is widening".
The inquiry
into 14 to 19 education being carried out by the former chief schools
inspector Mike Tomlinson is also expected to order a shake-up of vocational
education to put it on an equal footing with the academic curriculum. It
will make its final report next summer.
Independent -- 12
December 2003
>>>>
<<<<
THIRTEEN -- KNOW
WHAT I MEAN?
Nothing has been glossed over; nothing toned down --
that's why adults are horrified by the new film Thirteen. But it's
also why Peaches Geldof, 14, who saw it at home ( she's too young to see it
in the cinema), admires it so much
From first-time director Catherine
Hardwicke and her teenage muse and co-writer, Nikki Reed, comes
Thirteen, a raw, revealing and honest account of adolescence in the
present day.
I.first watched this film at home, and when it was over
I felt a mixture of emotions. I was in awe that someone could capture
teenage life so perfectly on film, and I was amazed to see that what
actually happens in real life has been so honestly portrayed. Because that's
what this film is -- real and brutally honest. Nothing has been glossed
over, and nothing has been tamed or toned down.
But what is most
shocking about Thirteen? The opening scene is definitely intended to
be disturbing. It shows two pretty 13-year-old girls, high on sniffing an
aerosol, repeatedly punching each other until one is nearly unconscious, and
laughing wildly as they do it. Or is it the scene when the two young teens,
tarted up and horny, set out to seduce their 25-year-old
maleneighbour?
To me what's really shocking about Thirteen is
what happens to the heroine, Tracy {played by Evan Rachel Wood). Her mind
and emotions have been completely taken over by the media. The glossy teen
magazines show off sexy, enviably skinny young girls in tight, low-rider
jeans and tank tops which show off their sparkling belly
rings.
Meeting the need to fit into the harsh and exclusive teenage
world around her, she has become self-obsessed, a follower and an outsider
in her own home. She has become her own worst enemy.
Thirteen
won Hardwicke the director's award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier
this year, and I think it was well-deserved. It is based on the real
experiences of its star, Nikki Reed (Evie), who co-wrote it with Hardwicke
when she was 13 (she is now l5). Hardwicke formed a friendship with Reed,
and as Reed reached her teenage years, her friend noticed a dramatic
change.
"I was off the dial, angry, mean," says Reed. Hardwicke
suggested they write a screen-play together, as a form of therapy. But what
was originally supposed to start off as a teen rom-com turned into something
entirely different.
The teenage girls Thirteen features are not
working-class hooligans from the ghetto forced into a life of drugs and
petty crime. They are nice, clever girls from perectly normal LA homes. It
is the fact that the film is mainly autobiographical that disturbs me the
most. The harsh truth is that a lot of teenagers go through drugs, sex,
shop-lifting and violence.
So what does it mean to be 13 right now?
Being 13 means following the media-fuelled expectations to be cool, sexy,
beautiful and independent. Hardwicke explores this terriory with passion and
truth. In Thirteen, using a grainy, home-made, film-making quality to
capture the high angst and madness of modern adolescence, Hardwicke dives
unashamedly into a previously unexplored area of
film-making.
Thirteen's basic storyline centres around the
transformation of the innocent. Barbie-loving Tracy from Nice Girl to Bad
Girl. Tracy starts off as just another pleasant, normal girl. She loves her
teddy bears and wears her hair in bunches, but when she enters the
hyper-sexualised world of junior high school, she realises that she is not a
little girl anymore. She is in awe of the hottest chick in school, Evie, and
sets about trying to be accepted into Evie's elite clique.
She uses
shoplifting as an opportunity to do this. Like many other teens today, she
has the wrong look, friends, attitude and "lifestyle". But, through the
guidance of Evie, she discovers how to do the make-up, hair, wear the right
clothes and get the piercings that will bring about her
acceptance.
She learns how to flirt and become wanted by boys. She
reinvents herself into the ultimate modern teenager, the person she most
wants to be, Evie. The way she changes from good to bad almost overnight is
one of the more unbelievable aspects of the storyline.
Evie is a
terrible influence on the easily led and naive Tracy. Because of Evie, Tracy
loses her closeness with her loving and hard-working mother (Oscar-winner
Holly Hunter). She starts failing at school, and she becomes a drug abuser
despite her hatred for her mother's ex-cocaine addict boyfriend (Jeremy
Sisto).
She embarks on a drug-induced voyage of self-discovery and
self-destruction, with Evie as her guide. And the further Tracy dives into
the whirlwind world of premature adulthood, the worse off she
becomes.
Even though Evie is outwardly confident, inside she is
actually just a needy, emotionally insecure little girl. And in fact, Tracy,
though she seems to be a follower, is the stronger person.
A lot of
people in America, especially parents, have been horrified by the film. This
is because of the harsh reality that is teenage modem life. Today a lot of
teenagers, even if their parents (especially if their parents) don't want
them to, will try drugs. They will have underage sex. They will wear tight,
sexually provocative clothes and have piercings.
In the year 2003
these have become the outward symbols of a generation that is desperately
trying to find its place in society. Parents will be shocked at the bleak
picture this stark and honest film paints and the fact that modem teenage
life is never, ever easy.
Sunday Telegraph -- 7 December
2003
>>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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