Two Questions

[davywavy]

There's always a temptation for me to editorialise on my LJ. Often I'm the soul of discretion, presenting facts unblemished by my own opinions, with neither slant nor spin. That's not to say it's easy for me to do so.
There are certain philosophical/political ideas with which I disagree for what I consider to be perfectly good reasons and what I have to realise is that the people who agree with those idea do so for what to them appear to be good reasons also.
So, in order to try and understand the thinking of others, I'm going to ask two questions of my lefty chums. I might not agree with your answers and I'm sure that my comments section will quickly degenerate into mudslinging as usual. However, I'm asking the questions because they're points which seem to be articles of faith to many, but the arguments presented in favour to me have never made any sense. It may be that I'm just missing something, so I'll give it a go.

1) What is wrong with streaming children according to educational ability?
2) What is wrong with requiring people to work in order to receive state benefits?

Comments

[tooth-fairy.livejournal.com]

1. I find it hard to be objective on this. Wonderful as comprehensives surely are, I went to a Grammar school and it was fab.

2. Erm, humanitarian concerns? Much as I think people should work and people bumming off the state is wrong, people dying in the street because they have no where to live and no food is also bad.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

1) Well, yes, I feel that eduucating people according to their ability to learn means they will learn more efficiently.

2) I didn't say anything about starving people to death on the street. I'm asking why requiring people to work for benefits is a bad thing. When I was on the dole I worked as a volunteer 3 days a week at the Christie Hospital. Why shouldn't we make that sort of thing a preprequisite to getting benefits? Society would gain immeasurably.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the Labour 'no selection' shibboleth objects to schools selecting by ability, as opposed to them streaming by ability within the school. The first could be justified by the argument that children develop at different rates, and to write late developers off at 11 is just plain wrong. The second, that all kids should be lumped into unstreamed classes, is the sort of crap proposed by people who think we should all wear the same size shoes.

'From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs' - It's pretty clear, socialism insists that people who can work, do work.

[davedevil.livejournal.com]

1. Streaming is an issue because of when it tends to occur in a child's academic life. They may be a late developer, they may peak early. Streaming also tends to provide a stunt in the develoepr of said late developers, classes with mixed abiliites tend to generally raise the ambient level of intellegence and provides different levels of social interaction that streamed classes do not. This is provided because all to often academic streamign directly matches social status.

2. Nothing providing the work is rewarding and provides qualifications that transfer to making the person more functional in the work place.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

1) I can't agree with you here; I certainly dont' believe I've ever seen a loud, rough, stupid bullying children curb their behaviour when surrounded by quiet, studious intelligent ones. Quite the opposite. All the evidence I've ever seen leads me to believe that streamed education inhibits the development of the talented due to the dead weight of the less able.

I aint a lefty but...

[zenmeisterin.livejournal.com]

1) Having experienced both in my time I thoroughly agree with streaming. In my experience, when we were all lumped together as one the weaker students struggled and the more adept ones got bored. When we were in sets (higher, lower, whatever) then those who needed more assistance in a subject could get it without detriment to others and those who were better at it could go on ahead without leaving the others confused. Also smaller class sizes, more personal attention yadda yadda.

2) Some people cannot work for part or all of their lives for specific and good reasons. This is not the same as lazy people who go 'I can't be arsed' and expect everything on a plate, but does to an extent include those who try to get a job and don't have much luck for long periods of time. Jobseeker's Allowance is *in theory* ideal. Shame the implementation is awful.

Re: I aint a lefty but...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, as noted above, I spent a year working in a hospital as a volunteer when I was long-term-unemployed. I can't understand why requiring people to do so is so strongly disagreed with in some terms.
There is a difference between cannot work and are not working. Cannots are one thing, but people who simply are not working - why not get them doing something?

[angusabranson.livejournal.com]

My personal opinions:

1) What is wrong with streaming children according to educational ability?

Nothing, as long as the children who have been placed in the lower groups get the support and education that they need and aren't just ignored in fanour of the better students.

2) What is wrong with requiring people to work in order to receive state benefits?

I personally feel that in order to claim unemployment benefits people should be made to do a full days work once a week (minimum) doing something like road/park cleaning, helping out in day centers/soup kitchens/ or doing something either charitable or for the better good of the community. It'd certainly help cut down on benefit fraud - especially as you should make sure the days work falls on a different day from the signing on day. It'd also would either give people a chance to get out and do something or help encourage them to try and find a job (depending on viewpoints). I'd also throw on top of this that anyone on unemployment benefit should also have 'holidays'. Meaning that they may be able to have four or five days holiday over the course of the year in which they do not have to work that one day a week. If they are ill they would need eitehr a doctors note, take it as one of the holidays or rearrange to work on another day that week.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the socialist ideal of 'to each according to their needs' stipulates each child is educated at a rate appropriate to their immediate need, requiring 'appropriately sized' classes (as small as 1, as required by the children) and this actually precludes children of inappropriate ability for that class. Of course, the children should be able to move freely between classes as their abilities will naturally develop at different rates, as assessed by their expert teachers.

[raggedhalo.livejournal.com]

Streaming children by educational ability is certainly better than streaming them by parental income, but the effect of academic streaming is sink-schools, which tend to kids not gifted enough to get into grammar schools (where they exist), rich enough to get into private schools, or lucky enough to live in an area where the local comp is successful. They are effectively neglected by the education system and produce exactly the kind of people you despise. Conversely, by mixing together students of all backgrounds and levels of ability, you'll actually raise the average. The ideal, of course, is significantly smaller class sizes and greater resource per pupil and individually-tailored learning plans, but that's a ways away.

Requiring people to work in order to maintain a basic standard of living puts people like single mothers at a significant disadvantage, likely leading to a poor standard of parenting, and also is frankly a bit Stalinist.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I don't despise anyone; As I've said oftimes before, though, I do despair of a sizeable portion of humanity.
Gosh, you get so narky when I put words in your mouth as well :p

[(Anonymous)]

"Requiring people to work in order to maintain a basic standard of living puts people like single mothers at a significant disadvantage, likely leading to a poor standard of parenting, and also is frankly a bit Stalinist."

"From each according to their ability" kind of precludes forcing carers to do 'work' when they already have a full time 'caring' job.

However, single mothers are a bit of a downer from a couple of viewpoints, they consume a lot more housing per person per household than couples, with environmental disbenefits attatched, and they have difficulty teaching children certain social skills, as they cannot demonstrate skills like negotiation & sharing with a partner. I'm surprised you didn't say 'single parent families' which isn't gender discriminatory.

[susanofstohelit.livejournal.com]

My educational experience was very, very different from the way it's done in the UK, but...

my entire classes pretty much followed the same curriculum until about 14. some of us were in advanced math, and some of us did advanced extracurriculars, but for the most part the smart kids were in the same classes as the ones who found the work harder. we didn't have any choices in what we took (beyond what we were taking in our 2 optional classes - music, art, foreign language, shop) until 15, at which point we pretty much split up into college (university) track and non-college, when we'd all met the state's minimum requirements for graduation. Our teachers could usually manage to keep it interesting for the smart kids, and the presence of the smart kids helped the others a lot.

I think limited streaming is fine (if it's the student's choice), but doing too much (like putting kids in vocational school at 14) denies the student future possibilities. a good, generalist education will allow the student to make more choices as an adult.

[susanofstohelit.livejournal.com]

To clarify, I don't think there's anything wrong with kids taking auto shop instead of calculus, but they should have to take geometry regardless.

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

Nothing.

Put the stupid kids in training for jobs to sell me booze.

[zenmeisterin.livejournal.com]

Hrm. By streaming I took it to mean sets within the same class in the same year int he same school, rather than whole schools. Total separation and lumping of the less academically interested/gifted can lead to ghettoisation of the 'worst' schools...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of my own experience where we had streaming within the school itself; that's 'streaming' IMO.
That said, If some students have the acedemic gifts to benefit from seperate/grammar edcation, I see no reason to deny them.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

1. Better than some plans that have been proposed.
2. Charity work or voluntary work one day a week? Can't see a problem with that; although certain groups as raggedhalo points out should get a bye.

[borusa.livejournal.com]

1. As others have pointed out, streaming is only as good as the test you apply. It's all very easy to say "bright kids" and "stupid kids", but it's remarkably hard to tell the difference. The old Grammar school system was great for the 20% that got into grammar school, but poor for everyone else. In particular, the fact that the technical colleges never existed (the original intent was for Grammar Schools, Secondary Moderns and Technical Schools) meant that the people who were supposed to go to the tech schools ended up in the Secondary Moderns, killing any chance of people doing well academically there.

It's particularly nasty on the kids who didn't _quite_ do well enough on the 11+ to get in, but were still pretty bright. And it was horrific for dyslexics, or people who were good at one area and bad at the others.

Setting is the phrase usually used for arranging kids into different classes within a school - as a quick test, if you're good at maths and bad at french, and you're in the same class for both, then you're streamed. If you're in different classes (and the classes are divided in ability, obviously), then you've been set.

The other problem with streamed schools is that you end up with an academic elite who can't deal with non-academics in any way other than distrust and hatred - cf a thousand grammar school vs secondary modern kids stories.

Add to that the number of people who slid around the side of the 11+ due to "Daddy knows someone at the school" and you have a corrupt and ineffective system. Of course, the current one has its flaws - there are good schools and bad schools and the good schools get better, because the nice middle class kids go there, and the bad ones get worse, because they don't.

2) JSA (even with housing benefit) is an extremely small amount of money. If you're requiring someone to work without paying them a wage that's more than basic subsistance, then that's slavery. Unless you're talking about incap and disability benefit, in which case it's torture, and inhumane.
It's already a requirement that JSA people look for another job. Contrary to popular belief, most unemployed people would prefer to have a job than not have one, if they are even remotely capable of doing it.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

The problem with selecting by academic ability is that it's imcompatible with school league tables; schools with take the 'smarter' (for want of a better phrase) kids and up the league tables they go, resulting in everyone wanting thier kids to go their.
However, I cannot understand why teaching people according to their ability, which Comprehensive education fails to do, is a bad thing. My own experience was one of sitting a twiddling my thumbs whilst teacher alternately repeatedly explained things I found obvious to those that didn't and got the rowdier ones to sit down and shut up. I'm not sure I benefitted from that.
The solution to that is a streamed education system which, so long as it is responsive to shifting abilites, cannot but succeed better than the one we have now.

As regards JSA, I see nothing wrong with mobilising an otherwise moribund workforce. I'm sure your read about my own voluntary work experiences outlined above; why not everyone else? There's a substantial body of evidence demonstrating the psychological benefits of work, and charitable or voluntary work especially benefits society as a whole as well as the individual.

[medusa-nw.livejournal.com]

1) Nothing. It means you can give children attention where they need it, at the same level as their fellow classmates. It's a normal system in Holland, and everybody benefits from it.
2) Nothing. As long as it's not people who have a genuine disability who can't work (having just recovered from an 8 month dibilitating back pain I have never been so grateful that my job involves a lot of sitting down), or are perhaps receiving benefits because they are a carer for someone disabled/old/too young to take care of themselves and had to give up their own job.
If they're not working because they can't find work, I can't see a reason why they can't be put to work. Or even be put to work as an apprentice somewhere so they get retrained. Having said that, if that can be done, why can't they be hired for the job, but that's a whole different question...

[hiromasaki.livejournal.com]

1) I'm a victim of lack thereof. In my school, you had people with severe learning disabilities (Just shy of going to the handicapped school), and the Gifted & Talented Program, and everyone else was lumped in one big group.

Problem is, I'm on-par to just above with my grammar and composition, well above with my reading comprehension, and very well above with my math and anylitical skills. The G&T program in Middle School (6-8) was for Composition & Lit only, and any G&T eligible student was automatically put in it. Because I was not overly interested in a lot of that, I was booted from the G&T Reading program for low grades.

They offered to skip me a grade in Math (Taking Pre-Algebra instead of 6th Grade General Math), but with my low G&T Reading grades, my Father wouldn't sign the paperwork. This left me stuck in the slower Math classes, got bored, and my grades suffered there, too. After a while I did finally get back into the accelerated programs for Math and Physics in High School, but years were lost. (The two other people who were offered to skip a grade got 16 hours of College paid for by the school district, including Calc I & II. I finished HS Calc just in time to graduate.)

I'm not a leftie either

[vampyrefate.livejournal.com]

1) The teachers that have spoken to me on this seem to say that Mixed Ability is the 'best' way. I'm not sure I agree with this; It wouldn't help Beckham improve his game if he only played with Leyton Orient. The teachers have more experience of teaching kids than I do though, so I have to consider what they say.

On a different tack, I do wonder why the Labour Party is dead against selection by ability, but not selection by "aptitude", or selection by money.

2) As a libertarian conservative, I have a problem with people being 'required' by the government to do anything. The problem comes down to implementation. I do have a problem with people that 'choose not to work' and then cannot provide a way to sustain their existence. If someone cannot work then this is a different matter. The problem comes in when someone wants to work and cannot find a job. How do you proove that you are wanting work as regards choosing not to?

Remember as well, that people pay national insurance to pay for themselves having bad luck between jobs. Maybe there should be a system where your NI payments are on account in your name and you can draw funds back from them...

Also, i'd hate to be trying to find work and then being distracted from self markerting by having to do a shift with the canal bank restoration trust. Now if said trust paid me for my time - oh hang on, that's employment.

I also think that it takes a certain sort of person to volunteer to do anything - usually a belief in what it is that the organisation is trying to achieve. I think any person with the time on their hands will probably do some voluntary work anyway. I'd hate to run a trust and have loads of people that didn't want to be there turn up.

I think the problem with scroungers can be solved by not paying their benefits in cash.

Re: I'm not a leftie either

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

1) I think the left is still clinging to the notion that people are created equal, which they aren't.
2) I'm not saying that people should be 'required' to do anything; if people don't want to work, they shouldn't have to. But then again, why should I subsidise people who don't want to?
If society is paying for something, I don't think it unreasonable to ask for something in return. After all, said trust would be paying for your time - Minimum wage is £5.20p/h, which is about a day of work a week to match the dole. Not unfair is it?
I'd regard myself as a libertarian too, by which I feel that it is the duty of the individual to involve themselves with the machinery of the state as little as possible, and vice versa. If the individual wants the benefits of the state, however, asking something in return from the individual is not unreasonable. Rights must be balanced by responsibilities, which is something which seems to get forgotten a lot of the time.

[applez.livejournal.com]

I'm sure others have dealt with these questions ad nauseum, but here's my late-game tuppence:

1) What is wrong with streaming children according to educational ability?

Nothing wrong in principle, in my view, except for several relevant issues I've seen time after time (no singing please):

- the quality and accuracy of the testing regime to assess the best 'stream' for a given child, which should be repeated over time to capture how a person matures differently

- the larger class issues, just how Brave New World do you want, when we are increasingly in an era of such rapid changes that we need flexibility and a skillbase that can respond to them opportunistically

- the weight of social status, which in the US, at least, has devalued non-university based education and experience...wrongly in my view, but this isn't going to fix itself anytime soon.

- the frequency I have seen people in degree programs, jobs, and professions because they tested well for it, but whose passions are someplace else entirely, and this will ultimately lead to some fairly destructive schisms or devaluation at enormous cost to themselves, their families, and wider society.

2) What is wrong with requiring people to work in order to receive state benefits?

- Is it cost-effective? I think the US experience with Angola prison labour is a justified warning to this sort of thing, in extremis.

- Is it of maximum benefit to society? Whatever one's feelings about "dole-scum" ... is it maximally beneficial for society to have single mothers working in low-wage jobs and have their children unsupervised (US model), or in professional state-programs (Nordic model), or rather pay mothers to be mothers first (German model)? Perhaps yes, perhaps no ... depends on what 'values lens' you want to apply. As you might surmise, I think long-term tax-utility is a justifed basis to measure the alternatives.

[inquis.livejournal.com]

I think paying parents (or treating parenthood as "work") is a good idea if that is their sole occupation. It has been scientifically proven (saw it in a documentary about dyslexia) that children who are not given sufficient attention in terms of development are at a much higher risk of difficulties in learning. According to the programme, early play and linguistic development are interlinked, to the point that a significant number of dyslexics would not have the condition had their parents read them nursery rhymes and the like more as children. I'm probably oversimplifying, but I think a system where child-rearing was more highly valued than administration would lead to a far better future for everyone.

Late to this one...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grimtales_/]

1. Nothing.

Clarification: I do not believe people should be in seperate schools as children need decent socialisation with as many different other people as possible, but class streaming is certainly a good idea. There are problems that arise though - the stigma of being a 'Remmy' (Remedial) or the equal stigma of being a swot (High acheiver). That presents problems of its own. I don't agree with Private (Public for any Americans reading) education though, for much the same reasons I don't agree with private healthcare.

2. Lots, potentially.

The safety net is there for people unable to find work or unable to work for various reasons. Some people sponge of it, yes, but you can't damn everyone for the sake of a few. Some people will never be able to work. Some 'make work' can be offered for people to do in exchange which I think is what you were actually getting at with this one.

I spent a great deal of time unemployed (and unemployable in this part of the country) and the whole system is a bloody shambles whether your thoughts for improvement are leftist or rightist.

The paperwork is a nightmare, the staff are often worse than the chavs who are trying to get their money (And the chavs have an easier time getting cash and assistance than I did) they discourage you massively from trying to get any part time work (Well, they encourage you but the slash to your income is considerable) and the programmes to try and get people back to work are primary school level - though run by the well-intentioned - and ignored by the heroin addicts and public drunks who end up getting access to the long term courses.

Me and another long-term unemployed geek were about the only people in a 20 strong group, forced to do a course in order to keep access to our benefit (so we were told). Everyone else there was a violent nugget or a drug addict. Most skipped the course - but continued to recieve benefit regardless. The cost of attending the course cut into people's money, and getting the cost of travel back was a byzantine process - a large part of the reason half the people never showed. It did prompt me and the other geek to do ANYTHING to get out of that situation though, mostly because we didn't want to spend any more time around knife-wielding heroin addicts.

I don't think getting people to work in exchange for benefits is necessarily a bad idea, it reinforces the social contract which is a fairly lefty way of thinking.

Of course, I'm being pragmatic rather than idealistic there. Ideally nobody should have to be forced.

Experience tells me that most of these chavsters wouldn't show up for any community work and those that did would be off their tits and armed, AND pissed off and being made to do the work. And they'd likely cock it up.

Re: Late to this one...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

My major thought here is that your reason for wanting out of the dole is just as strong an argument against Comprehensive education; why is associating with violent losers something to be fled when on the dole, but at school (and it is a fact of life for many pupils) it is 'decent socialisation'?
I know you won't beleive a word I say so ask Torley, as he went to school on the same street as me. Ask him about the drug use in playgrounds, ask him about the kid who was Crucified in the woods one sunny term afternoon. Ask him about the mass brawl on the playing fields with golf clubs. That's decent socialisation?
For me, you've just made one of the strongest arguments for streamed private education that I've ever heard - to get away from those very people who made you so determined to get off the dole at your earliest opportunity.

Other than that, I agree with a lot of what you say - I clarified my 'work for dole' thought above. I'm sure I've rattled on at you in the past about how I did three days a week in a Cancer Hospital as a volunteer when I was a doley and I never found that it cut into my job-seeking time. I even did the 'back to work' courses that you did. If I can do it, why not everyone else (barring sickness, etc)? Unless people want to finally acknowledge to my face that I'm just smarter, more determined and just plain more able than most people :D

[colin-boyle.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit busy now, so I'll keep it brief.

I was talking about the original article I posted, not your one. Hence our mutual confusion! So all my responses refer only to http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1639065,00.html
And as such, still stand.

Reader's editor terms of reference include:
"To seek to ensure the maintenance of high standards of accuracy, fairness, and balance in our reporting and writing."

"The readers' editor can refer to the external ombudsman any substantial grievances, or matters whereby the Guardian's journalistic integrity has been called into question."

I think all the examples are interesting and good, but none have quite the level of editorial independence that the Guardian's Trust structure guarantees, nor do most of them seem to have independent full-time scrutineer function such as the reader's editor.

I'm not claiming the Guardian is perfect, by the way, just relatively good. And I'm not claiming either that there isn't a value structure underpinning the comment, just that the news and the use of facts is intended to be unbiased. And that the Guardian has more checks and balances than the vast majority of its peers to ensure that it remains so. Do you actually disagree with this statement? If so, are you saying that these measures are either
a) genuine but ineffective or
b) some sort of fake gloss or
c) something else?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I don't think that the Guardian has any more checks and balances than any other newspaper; I think that they have a defined editorial perspective, which they audit and adhere to, but that perspective is as judgemental, in it's own way, as the perspective of any other middle-ranking quality paper you care to name and all that the audit does is guarantee that they are sticking to that. I chose for example the Daily Mail bescause people throw that up as being a rabid paper, but it's no worse than the Guardian, IMO, just at the opposite of the political spectrum - and perhaps less well written. A standard dictum of mine is that skill of advocacy doesn't make someone right, it just makes them a skillful advocate.
My own experience of reading the Guardian is that it, like other papers, presents facts - and I've no argument with the reporting of said facts - but that it then tells you what the interpretation of those facts is, with a slant in accordance with its editorial perspective. The article you linked to was a very good case in point. You presented it as fact, but it presented statistics and then told me that those statistics demonstrated that streaming didn't work. They demonstrate no such thing, as no single set of statistics can do that. The article omits to mention that no system of streaming was ever absolute, and even in the Grammar/Secondary modern days movement between streams and schools was quite fluid in terms of demonstrated ability at any time. My mother, for example, was moved from Secondary Modern to Grammar when it was realised she was smarter than her 11-plus result indicated.
The article presented, certainly, indicates that under certain circumstances under which exam results at 11 are absolutes, that system does not work well. However, I'm not advocating absolutes, and the article doesn't suggest that alternatives may be, and might have been, tried elsewhere. Just that selection is bad. This isn't unbiased, and so leads me to question the Guardians other claims to a lack of bias.
I linked to the Daily Mail article, which cites teachers as calling for 11-plus selection - in rebuttal to the Guardian and to demonstrate that "facts", when presented in other ways, can lead to quite contrary conclusions.

I believe that Guardian intends to be unbiased. They may even have believed that that article was unbiased - but it demonstrably isn't, and nor is the Guardian. I perceive it as being a fine example of that school of thought which is tolerant, understanding, and inclusive - so long as you don't hold any contrary opinions.