Leave school at 14... if only it were that simple

This morning I came across a BBC report of an interview with, Sir Chris Woodhead.  Now Chris is known for his forthright opinions but in this latest interview he seemed at first glance to have gone off the deep end.  He appears to be suggesting that it is just not worth the effort keeping certain types of kids in school beyond the age of 14.

This got my hackles up a bit and I was all prepared for a little bit of blogging righteous indignation on behalf of all those less fortunate who appear to be being written off...

But a little voice of doubt in the back of my mind suggested that rather than go off half-cocked I should at least read the interview in its original form in the Times rather than its digested second hand version on the BBC.

Interestingly the sub editors at the Time have gone for the same sensationalist headline of "leave school at 14" on the front page but when you get to the article itself you find the context:

"If a child at 14 has mastered basic literacy and numeracy, I would be very happy for that child to leave school and go into a combination of apprenticeship and further education training and a practical, hands-on, craft-based training that takes them through into a job."

So he's not saying leave school.  He is recommending a different type of 'school' which is better suited to each child's individual needs and more oriented to obtaining the skills required for the world of work. Lots of similarities here with the well established German three-tiered approach of Gymnasium (for those destined for university), Realschule (for those more technically inclined towards a craft or trade) and Hauptschule (for the rest).

I'm not sure if Chris is alluding to the growing Studio Schools concept but he could well be and their CREATE skills framework seems solid (finally someone putting critical thinking at the heart of a curriculum) and evidence based.  In any case he starts to sound much more reasoned and balanced than the sub editors at both the BBC and The Times would have you believe...

Until he goes on to suggest that it is wrong for the government to encourage independent schools to support state schools as it is unfair on those who have paid for their education.   But then again, he is chairman of a group of private equity backed independent schools with debt amounting to twice its turnover so you can understand if not necessarily agree with his reluctance.

Further proof if it were needed that, the headline is there to make you read the story; things are rarely as simple as they first appear and we don't need to agree on everything.

Very fast cars

You may not have heard of Richard Noble and Andy Green, which is a shame because you really should have.  Richard is a former land speed record holder with Thrust2 (1983-1997) and Andy Green is the current land speed record holder with Thrust SSC (1997-present). Both projects represent the best of British innovation, technical expertise and sheer bloody-minded determination.

They are now engaged in the Bloodhound SSC project which aims to propel Andy in their new car to a speed in excess of 1,000 mph on the Hakskeen Pan in South Africa in 2013.  But this time speed is not their only aim.  Bloodhound's full mission statement is here but in short they are aiming to inspire a new generation of scientists, engineers and mathematicians and to reverse the decline in the study of STEM subjects in schools and universities.  

They already have 4,500 schools signed up to the project but have yet to exploit the full potential of the internet.  My involvement with the project will be to help pull together the informal and social learning aspects and to create a virtual learning community for STEM subjects under the Bloodhound banner.

Whilst I won't be the one strapped into a metal tube with a Eurofighter jet engine and Falcon rocket, I have a feeling this is going to be an exciting ride.

What I learnt on my holidays

It's been a while.

As a friend pointed out to me with a certain degree of relish only yesterday, I am not likely to have a holiday this long again until I retire and given the parlous state of the nation's finances I may never be allowed to retire...

Nonetheless, I have had the most wonderful summer!

I took my daughter and Becci across Europe for the best part of two months and came back tanned and engaged (neither of which tends to happen to middle-aged redheads too easily).

But this is supposed to be a blog about learning, so what have I learnt in my extended vacation?

If you want to learn, you must accept responsibility.  If you blame other people for setbacks, which is often all too easy, you are unlikely to change yourself for the better.  The difficult bit is accepting your part without getting stuck and dwelling on it.  Learning is hard work and the alternatives are often significantly more attractive but perhaps without the long term rewards.

Happiness is as much an attitude as an emotion.  What I mean is, it is as much about what you do as it is what is done to you.  If you simply sit around waiting for a winning emotional lottery ticket you are more likely to go without.

I also learnt never to leave a cool-box plugged into your car battery overnight if you want to catch the boat home.

Curiosity killed the cat...

...were a band in the 1980s that are among the many crimes of Simon Cowell. In fact, just checking this and looking him up on Wikepedia I notice that his crimes against music are legion as well as a few other interesting points about how he first became successful (go look it up)

...equally the proverb dates back to the time of Ben Jonson although is generally attributed to Eugene O'Neil.

I haven't blogged for a while having been doing jury service. And one thing that a random cross section of society (for that is what a jury is supposed to be) gives you is a chance to reflect on the differences between people. I have also been gently percolating on some models of personality together with a few business books I've read recently (Drive, The Laws of Simplicity, Naked, Different) which seek to identify the quintessence of success.

With a brief nod to one of the best books I read last year, "The Black Swan" acknowledging the the very nature of this reflection may just be an urge on my part to make sense of randomness, the thing that makes people stand out in my eyes is curiosity.

People who are interested become interesting.

It almost doesn't matter what you are interested in, in fact the more diverse the better in my eyes. Curious people are more often on the front foot looking for things. They may make more mistakes because they stick their noses into things that they don't understand. But on the whole they are more fun, more challenging, more diverting, just "more" really.

So, be curious. I doubt it will kill you and you might learn something on the way

Public service announcement: who's the sucker?

Well it was nearly me. And I always thought I was safely skeptical. Earlier today I got an email from an old friend with the subject line,

"VACATION MESS !!! HELP NEEDED !!!!!!"

What followed was a fairly plausible tale of being on holiday in the West Midlands (should have been my first clue as my friend lives in Kansas city... with apologies to the Black Country why would she holiday there?) and having been mugged. She had a flight to catch having fortunately left the passports at the hotel but the hotel wouldn't let her leave without paying the bill. There were a number of grammatical errors in the email but my friend is not a native English speaker and I made allowances for stress.

I replied immediately asking for a phone number. She said the muggers had taken the mobile phones and could I wire transfer $2,150 to a Western Union Branch. I asked for the number of the hotel.

Finally my suspicious nature woke up to the fact she was asking for dollars whilst being on holiday in the UK and the fact that the number given for the hotel demanding the money was a mobile. But not before I had checked the balance on my current account.

So I sent another email in which I said, "Forgive my cynicism but this looks like a scam. Can you tell me where and how you and I first met? Then I will ring the hotel."

True to classic con form the scammer raised the ante with this reply,

"Omg, What a million questions!!! why you asking me this as at moment ?? Is

this just because i asked you of help.. why have you decided to treat me
like this, i want you to know that we're meant to help each other. I knew
this is unusual but are the only person i could reach at this point and
i'm doing everything i can so we can work our way out of here peacefully
but there is nothing really working out, most important is that my flight
leaves in hours from now and I really need your help to sort out the hotel
bills. Kindly let me know if you're willing to help us out of this mess ok
tired of your cunning...

I'll be hanging on here to read from you soon."

Well they'll be hanging on for some time. Unfortunately the Met Police doesn't seem to have a cyber crime division any more and as I didn't actually become a victim of crime, according to the nice chap on the police switchboard, there wasn't much point pursuing it.

I thought I'd share..

Convincing but unfounded conclusion seeks hypothesis with GSOH

First up, I never said I wasn't a hypocrite. But Google Ngrams have shown me how much of a hypocrite I can be at times.

I found Ngrams from Dan Pink's marvellous blog. In short, they are a lovely and distracting tool which enable you to search a significant proportion of all the publications in English and some other languages since 1800 and produce scientific looking charts. You type in a word or a couple of words you wish to compare and NGram delivers you a graph mapping their incidence as a percentage of all the words published over time.

One of my first experiments was to compare the incidence of the words 'Training vs Learning' since1800. Looking at this graph it is almost impossible not to to speculate on the non existence of the word 'training' before the industrial revolution, its steady rise with the advent of Taylorian workflow management at the beginning of the 20th century and then its comparative decline with the advent of the knowledge economy approaching the turn of the 21st century.

But there is next to no real science supporting these sweeping assertions. The trouble is I start off with an idea I think will throw something up and then match my story to what I think I see in the data.

Let's try another one, the incidence of "faith, hope and charity" (or the three theological virtues) could be argued to clearly show the constant decline of religiosity in the English speaking world over the last two centuries barring a slight rally after each world war. Again this sounds plausible and might be readily accepted.

But I have done no real work to interrogate this claim or to test anything substantive. The ease with which anyone can now create superficially compelling data groupings to support their claims can only be a bad thing for self directed learners. It is now even easier to create passable nonsense. And it is not as if we weren't gullible enough already...

But I still really like them...

So Google Ngrams, a marvellous but dangerous toy.

Un-resolutions

January is properly underway now. Sometime in the next couple of days if it hasn't happened already there will be a rash of discussions about the most depressing day of the year. This will be today, tomorrow or the day after depending on which PR driven piece of non-research is driving it. I'm not going to bother to look for it or link to it because it is the same story every year.

As are resolutions. Every year we promise ourselves to be thinner, happier, richer, less single, healthier. Then a year goes by and we do it again.

But I am not mocking new year's resolutions. Although many of them fail to survive until February, it is not the failures that matter. It is the starts. The beginnings. Whether purposeful or accidental.

You must at least do something...

Don't wait for another big milestone, new year or another birthday to begin something. Find small milestones.

So today, which is the day after my daughter's birthday (she is six now if you're interested) I am going to start a few more things:

1. I shall be more positive - 2011 has been pretty good thus far

2. I am going to look into Sharepoint (I am hearing more and more about it and I am completely ignorant of it's capability)

3. I shall unplug myself a little more often and read a few more books (you know the things with pages)

4. I shall finish the decorating in my house by the February half term

5. I shall start Lent early (not in the religious sense but in the eating and drinking slightly less sense)

That's enough for one day. I think.