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Archbishop Laud Redivivus

The Emmanuel Evangelical Church in Southgate, North London is planning a Family Conference in March this year.

The promotional blog post provides a snapshot on the state of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the UK today. The picture is not pretty.

Emmanuel Evangelical Church Family Conference
13 March 2010

Christian families are under mounting pressure from the secular world. Anti-Christian dogma is promoted in the media under the guise of ‘tolerance’. Education has become a battleground, and increasingly intrusive legislation is being proposed by our government. Recent proposals have included:

* ‘Parents will lose the right to withdraw their children from sex education classes once they reach 15.’
* ‘Home-educating parents will be forced to register annually and undergo criminal record checks.
* ‘Home-educated children will be interviewed privately by government officials; parents who refuse to allow this will find their children sent to a state school.’

Pressure is also mounting elsewhere:

* The British Humanist Association has declared that ‘there probably is no God,’ and demanded that Christian parents stop raising their children as believers in Christ.
* A BBC presenter speculated that ‘authoritarian’ evangelical parents could use home education as a cover for child abuse.

Yet there is always hope. Jesus Christ is the risen and ascended King of Kings. He has received from the Father all authority in heaven and on earth, the nations have been made his inheritance, and one day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Until then, the church has been commissioned to maintain the unity of the Spirit, to live as children of light, to speak the truth in love, to nurture our children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, and to disciple the nations.

Are you ready for the challenge?

Good question. Are we in NZ ready for the challenge? It is virtually inevitable that the same moves will be made in New Zealand in the next fifteen years.

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Liberal Arts Education is Not For Everyone

Douglas Wilson

There is not really a delicate way to get at one of the root problems with modern higher ed without confronting the emotional engine which drives those problems. And when we confront that engine we discover that the problem is caused by the atomosphere we all live in, and not by this or that nefarious educrat. The kind of colleges we have are plants that grow in the kind of soil that we as a people provide.

We have those who have given themselves over to this vice completely, believing it to be a virtue. . . . The evil can be described as a clustered bundle of problems that I will call by the general name of egalitarianism. The cluster is made up of envy, ressentiment, democracy, sentimentalism, and what Charles Murray calls educational romanticism. One obvious consequence of the problem is the notion, now prevalent in our nation, that every kid should go to college. But the reality is that far too many are going to college as it is, and if we had really good guidance counselors working in our high schools, we could cut the number in half.

But in order to make this point I have to distance myself from Aristotle first. He taught that the purpose of what we would call a liberal education was to equip a free man to be a free citizen, and what we would call vocational education was education for slaves -- mere training. But his point, some of which we must recover, had far too low a view of the honorable nature of vocational labors in the sight of God.

In another post, I will develop what the Protestant Reformers recovered in their vision of the dignity of all lawful work in the sight of God. God has made certain men for certain ends, and it is their job to find out what those ends are, and to labor joyfully in what God has equipped them to do. In short, with regard to the Puritan work ethic, we have no untouchables. All laborers, from the dairy farmer to the backhoe operator, from the backhoe operator to the librarian, from the librarian to the fish and game specialist, from the fish and game specialist to the software code guy, from the software code guy to the long haul truck driver, all of it is honorable before God. In every lawful vocation, we have the privilege of being Christ to others, and in our dependence on the vocations of others, we receive the gifts of Christ to us with gratitude. More on this later.

I say this because I am about to say that some people are more able than others. Even though God created us with aptitudes that are equally honorable, He did not create with aptitudes that are equally capable. Some people are brighter than others, as in "more intelligent," and this stone cold reality should be reflected in the education we seek to provide to them. It means, bottom line, that most people should not go to college. "College for all" is an idolatrous pipe dream, one that wants to ignore certain creational realities.

Almost thirty percent of American 25-year-olds and higher currently have a B.A. If true educational reform in higher ed takes root, over the course of a generation, we should be able to cut that number in half. If we don't cut that number in half, we will continue to "cut in half" our educational expectations. For example, if we said that our goal was to send every eighteen-year-old to basketball camp, and in the grip of a bizarre ideological frenzy, we insisted that we were going to reach the achievable goal of "every American learning how to dunk the ball," then there are only two possible outcomes. The first will be that reality will eventually set in, and we give up that fantasy, admitting that it was a fantasy. The second is what we are currently doing, especially in the humanities, and that is the achievable goal of lowering the net.

When we send kids to college who are not capable of doing the work, then two irreconcilable forces are pressing against one another, and one of them must give way. Either the historic liberal arts curriculum will give way, or the practice of herding warm bodies into college will give way. Over the last generation or so, it has been the curriculum that has given way -- through grade inflation, through cheating, through abandonment of core curriculum, and so on. When that happens, something invaluable is lost. When it doesn't happen, the unfortunate student who ought to be somewhere else learning how to do something else well is continuously exasperated by the challenge of something he cannot really do.

This means that colleges that are engaged in education reform have to be prepared to turn away customers who (in the grip of our broader culture's propaganda on this) are insisting on applying, and they have ready money in their hands. But while the Church takes all comers, the choir doesn't, if you follow my meaning.

This is an enormously practical question, and in order to address it, we have to answer the question in ways that show that we are being accountable to external realities. "For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise" (2 Cor. 10:12).

If someone gathered up (at random) a group of 100 average American high school students . . . that I could speak to them, I would regard it as my duty to try to talk half to three quarters of them out of [a college education]. But notice that I said "random." If they were a group of 100 A-students from a first rate classical Christian school, it would be more likely that I would only try to talk a quarter of them out of it -- a certain amount of self-selection has already occurred. But if they are anything like their fellow countrymen, their applications have predictive value.

Much more needs to be said on all this, but preparation for life is not a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. There are many things that a liberal arts education . . . cannot do, and there are many people for whom we cannot do what we can do for others. A liberal arts education at the higher level is not for everyone. More than that, it is not for most.

If someone rejects what we offer because they have bought into the technocratic prepare-you-for-a-job paradigm, we want to subvert that paradigm, and we want to recruit as many capable students as we can. But if someone does not apply [for a liberal arts education] because it is clear that God has equipped them and made them for something else, then God bless them all. If the majority of Christian parents are not passing by [what what a tertiary liberal arts education has] to offer, then we are not doing our job.

Posted by Douglas Wilson, 28th December 2009 Douglas Wilson is a pastor of Christ Church, in Moscow Idaho. He is the author of numerous books. He is actively involved in primary, secondary, and tertiary Christian schools. This post first appeared in his blog, Blog and Magblog.

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Holy Ghost Industrial Grade Sandpaper

Douglas Wilson

I have being writing on distance learning, and how, while it provides some important things, like information, it is utterly incapable of providing other things, like how to deal with people. In a learning community, in a school or college, your fellow students are people, your teachers are people, the administration is made up of people, and, as it turns out, so is the board. And just to make things more interesting, we have to reckon with the fact that all these people are sinful people, who have not yet attained to the perfections they will display on the day of resurrection. And, more's the pity, neither have we attained to that blessed state.

But living in believing community is one of the central instruments that a loving God has given to us to prepare us for that great day. Living among fellow sinners, learning how to deal with it properly, is the principal form of industral grade sandpaper that the Holy Spirit uses on us. But many pietists, including many educational perfectionists, withdraw from that treatment, shrinking from it, and all in the name of maintaining their smooth surfaces. But hiding the rough cut lumber in an unlit shed is not the same thing as sanding.

Allow me to come at this from another angle, and address for a moment what I consider to have been one of the top blessings that our family benefitted from as our three children wound their way through their many years at Logos School and New St. Andrews College. It was the blessing of countless micro-battles with their classmates; it was the blessing of learning how to stand up against unhelpful peer pressure, as well as the flip side of this, which is the lesson of learning how to exert godly peer pressure.

It is important to note that these are micro-battles with Christian kids in superb Christian schools, and with other kids who will grow up to be fine communicant members of orthodox Christian churches. These are micro-battles in learning leadership, not macro-battles with orcs.

One time after he graduated, my son was talking with some boys at Logos, and he asked them what the current hot movie was among their peers. They told him, and naturally it was some atrocious thing or other, I forget which one. He then asked them what this told them. The answer was that "their standards are not very good." Nate replied that what it really said was these boys who were disapproving of those standards weren't the leaders in their class. If they were leaders, some of the kids would still go off and watch Screen Gunk, but they would be ashamed to bring it up to their class -- because of all the hooting that would follow.

Over the years, I have observed class after class at Logos, and -- with regard to this issue -- you can put a bell curve on every class. Every class has a bunch of kids who "get it" and bunch of kids who "don't get it." Now remember that a bell curve is a relative thing -- the kids who "don't get it" at Logos are not in the same class with the kids who "don't get it" in some inner city school where the teacher has to teach from behind a cage.

The character of each class as a whole is determined by which half of the bell curve the leaders are in. The kids with some force of personality or charisma will fall on one side or the other. If the leaders are among the kids who don't get it, the kids who get it don't evaporate, but they do keep their heads down. If the leaders are among the kids who get it, the kids who don't get it don't evaporate either, but they do keep their heads down.

This is how classes determine their class character. The leadership may be formal, and it may not be. Sometimes the class president, the one who organizes the parties, is the spiritual thermostat for the class, but not necessarily.

Now, at Logos, there are classes where the kids don't take full opportunity to learn what it means to lead, shape, and direct in the way they ought to learn it. The lesson is available to learn, and is right there on the surface, every day. Nancy and I spent years debriefing the kids at the dinner table, talking about what to do on the playground when this happened, and what to say in the classroom when that happened. This included dealing with biblical failings in teachers sometimes, as well as among fellow students, and it meant dealing with failings in our own kids. "Next time something like this happens . . ."

In order for this to work, the parents have to have a genuinely open relationship with the kids, and in order to have that, the parents have to have the full and complete loyalty of their kids. We are in this as a family, and we deal with it as a family.

Like I said, the fact that this profoundly important lesson can be learned in a good Christian school doesn't mean that it will be learned. It sometimes isn't, and the opportunity flies past. But when a student gets his education from books and an online tutor, the opportunity is never there. This lesson is not in the curriculum at all. There is a difference between a missed opportunity and a non-existent one.

As I have mentioned before, NSA is a college that is friendly to and supportive of applicants who have not come to us from a traditional school. Many have come to us from distance learning situations, and we are the first place they have been in where the student next to them physically has a winsome face, and after class suggests that they go and do something perfectly idiotic. Now a number of these students who have come to us have been superb students, and have done quite well. But there have been more than a few who don't have any earthly idea about the biblical way to stand up to someone, about anything.

This would not have been fixed if their parents just enrolled them in a good school. It might not have been. But it would have been fixed if their parents "enrolled in the school with them," if you know what I mean, and the dinner table every night was a jolly place for roast beef, mashed potatoes, friendship, laughter, casuistry, ice cream, and all followed with Narnia readings.

Let me finish with one illustration of the kind of thing you should be looking to create. One time when our youngest daughter Rachel was in junior high, we let her go to a youth group event at another church with a friend from school. In the course of the meeting, one of the songs was "Spring Up, O Well," containing the verse about the blood of Christ, along with all the splish-splash hand motions. Our kids knew that, as far as our family was concerned, that kind of thing was, as my girls would put it, "not okay." The youth leader noticed that Rachel was not participating, and so he called her out -- Rachel needed to get into it more, and so they were all going to sing it again, with Rachel leading in all the hand motions. And so Rachel refused, the youth leader pressed it, and she said that she couldn't do it because it was disrespectful. This is the kind of thing you are after, and I can't remember the number of times our kids had the occasion to exhibit this kind of backbone.

Many would say that our kids must be full of beans anyhow, and so the whole thing must be dependent on the luck of the draw. Yes, our kids are full of beans, and that means they know how to throw down. But what we are talking about here is one of the principal glories of education, which is that learning how to throw down with biblical standards and in biblical ways. And that is found, not in the luck of the draw, but in the words, "That was good, son. Next time . . ." If you want a sample of that kind of inspired dinner table conversation, look to the book of Proverbs.

If we had been in a situation where our kids were doing distance learning (which parents who are in that kind of situation should do), a central part of their education would still have gone missing.

Posted by Douglas Wilson in Blog and Mablog 19th December 2009

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The Case Against Distance Learning

Douglas Wilson

But before anyone gets riled at the title, allow me a few caveats first.

The first is that a strong element of distance learning is essential to every form of real education. Every university library is full of distance learning packets called books. When I read Augustine or Calvin, this is because back in the day they thought certain thoughts, encoded them in squiggles on a page, after which a number of copyists, printers, translators, booksellers and librarians transported those squiggles across enormous distances of space and time. I then sit down with that book, flip on a light, decode the squiggles, and (usually) think the same thoughts in my head that they were thinking in theirs. So that's distance learning, and if you were to take it out of the process of education, all real education would cease.

So if the online revolution were simply expanding that kind of distance learning, no one who loves knowledge could be against it. But that is not the only thing the online revolution is doing, and it is there we must spend some time. But in order to spend that time profitably, I have to first focus some attention on some commonplaces that have taken root in the homeschooling world.

In making this point, I will not use the word socialization because homeschoolers have (rightly) ladled a good bit of scorn over the top of that word. Who wants kids who were socialized in the practical aspects of cocaine deals in study hall? Who wants the socialization that comes from condoms on bananas in sex ed class? Who wants the socialization of skanky wear to the prom? Who wants the socialization that trains children to be good little worker bees for the collectivist Hive? Nobody around here, right?

But those counterfeits notwithstanding, there is such a thing as life in true community, understood in a biblical and God-honoring way. And it is not possible to learn how to live in community, embodying the life of the Trinity, without actually doing it with other people (who are unfortunately not just like you) present. It is not possible to learn how to lead apart from the challenge of living, studying, and learning among others who are kind of angular. On the flip side, it is not possible to learn how to follow or imitate in the right ways unless you are following people who sometimes miss calls, make mistakes, or sin. When you are all by your lonesome self, you can think you are doing swell, but that is only because you disconnected the feedback loop.

In short, the Bible assumes education in the presence of others. It does not outlaw distance learning (after all, Paul did mail the letter to the Ephesians), but it nevertheless assumes learning in the context of three-dimensional relationships. The books are present, certainly, but they do not replace flesh and blood.

"A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher" (Luke 6:40).

Tragically, there is a fear among many conservative believers that this promise from the Lord is too easily negated by sin in the other disciples. In other words, we are afraid that our student, enrolled in the class, will more likely be conformed to the ungodly student next to him than he is likely to be conformed to the godly teacher in front of the class. But that is not what Jesus assumes. John became more like Jesus than he became like Judas.

Now there are situations when this fear makes perfect sense, but only when the godliness of the teacher or the institution is a facade. A godly teacher disciplines because love always protects the important thing, the central event. When a disruptive student tries to take the context of godly learning away from the others, that student should always be disciplined. If his misbehavior is known and he is not disciplined, then the teachers and the disrupting students are actually joined together in an unholy alliance, one that tries to make godly students recoil from the experience of learning -- or at least from the experience of learning there.

So here is another place where distance learning, even a tad too much distance learning, makes some sort of sense. Holiness alone is better than ungodly community. But a holy community is better than being holy alone, or holy apart. But another qualification is immediately necessary. A holy community is not a sinless community. A holy community is one that deals with the inevitable sin in the way the Bible says to.

I have seen many situations where homeschooling parents of high school students, and now college students, keep their kids away from evil and corrupting influences, and they are doing right to do so. Dark Satanic Mills University is not the place you want your virginal young daughter attending. And because the parents ought not to give up on the importance of learning when they have to make this kind of hard choice, they should opt for the godly materials that are increasingly available -- online tutorials, textbooks, etc. I am doing my level best to make such options, such materials, ubiquitous. Let's flood the zone, and not apologize for it.

But I cannot in good conscience do this without pointing out that when such materials are used instead of godly communities of learning that are present and available, the principled stand has morphed from righteous to perfectionistic. The problem with perfectionistic pietism is that it is generally the royal road to impiety.

The latest thing, the dernier cri, is all about distance learning that takes you away from the messy and glorious task of learning how to live with fellow sinners. When we give way to this temptation to retreat from life together, about the only thing we will succeed in establishing is the geek quotient. And by the time it is fully grown, and we start to suspect the mistake, we discover the concrete has already set.

Posted by Douglas Wilson in Blog and Mablog 15th December 2009

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Why Bother?

Douglas Wilson

On this subject of higher education in the liberal arts, there is much to develop in every direction. And by "develop," I mean "shoot at." It is what our military calls a target rich environment.

What is a liberal arts education for? Why go to college? Why pay big bucks to go to college? What is the point?

There are two main reasons for going to college, one pragmatic and the other teleological, and one of the things we have to work through is the tendency of Christian parents (who share the sinful tendency of pragmatism with their fellow Americans who are unbelievers) to make their decisions in terms of the pragmatic considerations only.

Now the issue is the "ism" here in pragmatism, and not the functionality. Nobody thinks you ought to spend multiple years and dollars to do something that gets you nowhere.

First, the pragmatic consideration. A college education gets you a college degree, which is a door opener for many of the choicer jobs. Never mind that many people are not working in the same field their major was in, the mere fact of a college degree allowed them to clear the first hurdle in applying for the job. This is, pure and simple, a pragmatic consideration that everyone who wants to make a living should take into account. It is a real factor.

The second reason for going to college is teleological -- the point here being to get a real education in the midst of a faithful community. A liberal arts education is not vocational training for English teachers -- it is preparation for life and leadership.

There are all sorts of reasons why Christian parents would want their kids to be able to do an end run around the corrupting influences that stand between them and their pragmatic degree. I get that, and I applaud it. But for the life of me, I don't understand the idea of trying to get around the point of getting a real education.

This dynamic is currently at play both at the high school level, and the college level. We have to work through it. Distance learning online for homeschoolers is a wonderful development . . . depending. The classes offered by Veritas are meeting a real need . . . depending. The Omnibus textbooks, of which I am an editor, are a Godsend . . . depending. For college credit, the new College Plus program is about time . . . depending.

Depending on what? If Christian parents are avoiding the corruptions of unbelieving institutions in order to get their student a piece of paper that will be a very practical help in the years to come, then God bless them all. But if they have come to think that that piece of paper is "just as good as" what they might get from "sitting in some classroom," then far from presenting an alternative to the world's way of modernist education, they are simply demonstrating an advanced case of the same disease. Educational repentance in higher education means turning around. It does not mean running on ahead.

More on this to come.

Posted by Douglas Wilson in Blog and Mablog 15th December, 2009

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The Educational Common Sense of E.D. Hirsch

The most recent edition of City Journal as an extensive article on educational reformer, E. D. Hirsch. This gentleman's prescriptions have been adopted over a number of years by the education system in the state of Massachusetts, resulting in a salutary rise in educational standards throughout that state.

We have posted several times on how educational theorists and government education systems have become deeply influenced by post-modern philosophical theory, coupled with a relentless drive to subvert and pervert God's established order in creation. Demand rights theories have been applied to children, resulting in a consensus amongst avant-guard educational theorists and bureaucrats to the effect that children are mini-adults, and must be treated as adults from the time they take their first breath (they are entitledto it, don't you know).

The Scriptures, however, reveal that God has created the world with hierarchical structures of superiors and inferiors.

The Fifth Commandment makes clear that children are inferiors, in the sense of being commanded to obey and honour their parents. Modern post-Enlightenment man believes he knows better, insisting that children are the sociological and legal equal of adults and are to be treated as such. This has meant an excessive emphasis has been placed on the child learning and discovering for himself, rather than being taught by a superior. As a consequence, government education systems have increasingly tended towards contentless education. The upshot: more and more illiterate graduates coming out of government schools.

E. D. Hirsch is not, to our knowledge, a Christian. He is just a common-sense academic who has managed to avoid or evade being swept up with the avant-guard establishment. Hirsch's specialist academic field was literature. Eventually he ended up as Chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia.

Hirsch was at the pinnacle of the academic world, in his mid-fifties, when he was struck by an insight into how reading is taught that, he says, “changed my life.” He was “feeling guilty” about the department’s inadequate freshman writing course, he recalls. Though UVA’s [University of Virginia] admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students.

Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

In other words, Hirsch realised that the dominant cause of poor English skills was a lack of background knowledge in related humanities. This led him to create a knowledge based curriculum for primary and intermediate schools, called the Core Knowledge Curriculum.

For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects.

Hirsch was quickly reviled by the educational establishment. His book Cultural Literacy

came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist.

The idea that there might be an authoritative corpus of knowledge which had to be transmitted to children was an anathema to the avant-guard. By the mid 1980's, the avant-guard had become the educational establishment. Their triumph was virtually complete.

Most public schools, for instance, taught reading through the “whole language” method, which encourages children to guess the meaning of words through context clues rather than to master the English phonetic code. In many schools, a teacher could no longer line up children’s desks in rows facing him; indeed, he found himself banished entirely from the front of the classroom, becoming a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage.” In my children’s elementary school, students in the early grades had no desks at all but instead sat in circles on a rug, hoping to re-create the “natural” environment that education progressives believed would facilitate learning. In the 1970s and 1980s, progressive education also absorbed the trendy new doctrines of multiculturalism, postmodernism (with its dogma that objective facts don’t exist), and social-justice teaching.

Hirsch began systematically to skewer these stupid ideas (which still dominate the New Zealand government education system to this day).

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

In 1993 the State of Massachusetts quixotically decided that it would follow Hirsch's advice and set knowledge based standards in its curricula for each school year. The result? Rapidly rising educational achievements by students in the Massachusetts school system.

In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—“the nation’s report card,” as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year—let alone for two consecutive test cycles. On another reliable test, the Trends in International Math and Science Studies, the state’s fourth-graders last year ranked second globally in science and third in math, while the eighth-graders tied for first in science and placed sixth in math. (States can volunteer, as Massachusetts did, to have their students compared with national averages.) The United States as a whole finished tenth.

It is a salutary achievement. But not unexpected. Strange things happen when you cast of the shackles of a spurious ideology and deal with the world as God has created and established it. Part of that establishment is accepting the superiority of adults (and their delegates, the teachers) over children and their consequent responsibility to teach and impart truth and knowledge to the next generation.

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Condemned to Perpetual Ignorance

A recent newspaper article profiled the latest fandango in early child education. It calls for a more thoroughgoing and radical commitment to treating children as adults from the very outset.

In what way, you ask?

Parents should be treating babies and toddlers with more respect, a visiting academic says, and that means talking to infants as if they are adults, never putting them in high chairs or leaving them in car seats, and steering clear of many popular toys.

From day one, early childhood expert Polly Elam says, parents should also consult their baby before picking them up, changing their nappy or taking them on outings. That means talking the baby through what you are about to do, before you do it – and waiting for their response.

If parents skip this consultation, they should later apologise to the baby and explain why they acted hastily.

The absurdity of such extremism is easily dismissed. But things get more sinister when we are told that this new "movement", Resources for Infant Educarers, are being used as the guiding light for over twenty-four new early childhood education centres in New Zealand. The approach is radically paedo-centric, which fits right in with the philosophic cant currently dominating the Ministry of Education. Here is a sample of this radical approach in action:

If the infant learns a new skill, such as picking up a toy they have dropped by themselves, the philosophy says parents should not praise them. Elam says: "We try not to praise the child for things that they would do naturally ... a little bit of struggle is what a child enjoys doing. When they have accomplished something, we want them to have the intrinsic feeling of, `I did it!', rather than looking for the external praise." Likewise, if an infant falls and hurts themselves, parents should not just shush them and tell them they are fine. "They're not fine – they're frightened, and so we'd rather say what happened: `You fell down the steps, and that was frightening for you'... We don't deny the child the feeling. We often want the child to stop crying because it makes us feel more secure, but we've got to allow them to go through the crying and come out the other side knowing `I can get hurt, I can cry but I can also come out'. That's a life-long lesson that we want them to learn."

Teachers as glorified pseudo-life-coaches. Stand back and let the child learn for itself, at its own pace, being the wonderful self-discovering, auto-creative being that it is. But the Education Review Office, which now conducts audits on pre-schools, is a running cheerleader for paedo-centric education.

Predictably, it gives this approach top marks. Education Review Office reports on centres using RIE or Pikler strategies emphasise how happy, independent and confident the children are.

Too true. And by the time the children get to be six or seven they will be so self-confident and uber-independent that they will be uneducable. Having become wise in their own eyes through the incessant encouragement of their parents and early childhood education "teachers" (or, as they prefer to be known, life coaches), they forever will be consigned to live in a state of perpetual foolishness. Such is the enlightened wisdom of our apostate age.

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"Government Education" has Become an Oxymoron

We believe that government education in New Zealand will continue to run down and standards will continue to slip, unless radical changes can be made. It is difficult to see those changes taking place. For the government system has been captured by teachers, teaching unions, and educational bureaucrats who do not believe in the objectivity of truth--which is to say they do not believe in a body of authoritative truth which is to be preserved and passed down from one generation to the next.

There is no authorised body of knowledge to be transmitted to the next generation. Education, amongst the experts, has morphed into a trivial exercise of facilitation. Any information the child or student might "discover" as a result of being "facilitated" is implicitly valid. As Christian educators we know this to be false. We know that certain truth exists because God has created the world, and governs all of it according to His will and power. Therefore, we, who have been created in God's image, can learn and discover truth about this wonderful world, its past, its present and its future. We can unlock many of the created world's secrets using the tools of learning God has given us. We can pass on this information and truth to our children, so they too can function well in the wonderful world God has created.

Now we do not wish to demean all teachers in the government education system. We believe, however, that a great deal of those at the chalkface, dedicated though they may be, lack the philosophical sophistication to understand why the government education system continues to undercut, undermine, and ultimately work against their endeavours. They don't understand why the government education system is constantly and ceaseless and restlessly changing. They just know that the system is not working and that there is no one silver bullet to put it right.

Sociologist Frank Furedi wrote recently criticising contentless education as it is now pervasively practised in government education systems. He also explains why it is so destructive to the government education system itself.

Let’s give children the ‘store of human knowledge’

In flattering kids as ‘digital natives’ for whom the past is irrelevant, we degrade a vital adult mission: transmitting knowledge.

Frank Furedi

In virtually every Western society, education is in trouble. Unfortunately, however, policymakers tend to obsess only about the symptoms of the problem – unsatisfactory standards in core subjects, growth of a cohort of poorly schooled underachievers or erosion of classroom discipline – and not the cause.

Yet the main reason education often is not educating is because it finds it difficult to give meaning to human experience. Time and again, curriculum specialists inform us that because we live in a world of rapid change, the conventions and practices of the past have become outmoded, outdated or irrelevant. Present educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children.

The implicit assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit. But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than those of their elders because they are more tuned in to the present. So children are often represented as digital natives who are way ahead of their text-bound and backward-looking parents.

Although education is celebrated as one of the most important institutions of society, there is a casual disrespect for the content of what children are taught. Curriculum engineers often display indifference, if not contempt, for abstract thought and the knowledge developed in the past. Both are criticised for being irrelevant or outdated; only new information that can be applied and acted on is seen as suitable for the training – and it is training and not teaching – of digital natives.

In policy deliberations about education, the acquisition of subject-based knowledge is often dismissed as old-fashioned. Typically, an emphasis on the intellectual content of classroom subjects is labelled an outdated form of scholasticism that has little significance in our era. Policymakers often represent change as an omnipotent force that renders prevailing forms of knowledge and schooling redundant. In such circumstances, education must transform itself to keep up with the times. From this perspective, educational policies can be justified only if they can adapt to change.

Since they are likely to be overtaken by events, classroom innovations by definition have a short-term and provisional status. The instability that afflicts the education system is turned into the normal state of an institution that needs to be responsive to the uncertain flow of events. Although fads come and go, the constant feature of today’s throwaway pedagogy is a deep-seated hostility to teaching academic subjects to young people, especially to those who come from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. So-called modernisers regard the subject-based curriculum as far too rigid for a school system that must adapt to a constantly changing world. The dramatisation of change in Anglo-American education-speak renders the past irrelevant. If indeed we continually move from one new age to another, then the practices of the past have little relevance for today.

Sadly, the ceaseless repetition of the idea that the past is irrelevant desensitises people from understanding the influence of the legacy of human development on their lives. The constant talk of ceaseless change tends to naturalise it and turn it into an omnipotent autonomous force that subjects human beings to its will. This is a force that annihilates the past and demands that people learn to adapt and readapt to new experiences. From this standpoint, humans do not so much determine their future as adapt to forces beyond their control.

In the worldview of the educational establishment change has acquired a sacred character that determines what is taught. It creates new requirements and introduces new ideas about learning. And it encourages the mass production of a disposable pedagogy. Educationalists adopt the rhetoric of ‘breaks’ and ‘ruptures’ and maintain that nothing is as it was and that the present has been decoupled from the past. Their outlook is shaped by an imagination that is so overwhelmed by the displacement of the old by the new that it often overlooks historical experience that may continue to be relevant.

The discussion of the relationship between education and change is frequently overwhelmed by the fad of the moment and with the relatively superficial symptoms of new developments. It is often distracted from acknowledging the fact the fundamental educational needs of students do not alter every time a new technology influences people’s lives. And certainly the questions raised by Greek philosophy, Renaissance poetry, Enlightenment science or the novels of George Eliot continue to be relevant for students in our time and not just to the period that preceded the digital age.

Often change and social transformation are represented as if they are unique to our time. Innovation guru Bill Law makes this pronouncement: ‘We may not know precisely what shape the future will take but we do know that the futures of our current students will not much resemble those of our past ones.’ But when did we last think the future of our children would resemble our own? Not in 1969, or in 1939 or even 1909.

The idea that we live in a qualitatively different world serves as a premise for the claim that the knowledge and insights of the past have only minor historical significance. In education it is claimed that old ways of teaching are outdated precisely because they are old. Knowledge itself is called into question because in a world of constant flux it must be continually overtaken by events. Policy has become so focused on keeping up with change that it has become distracted from the task of giving meaning to education.

The fetishisation of change is symptomatic of a mood of intellectual malaise, where notions of truth, knowledge and meaning have acquired a provisional character. Perversely, the transformation of change into a metaphysical force haunting humanity actually desensitises society from distinguishing between a passing novelty and qualitative change. That is why lessons learned through the experience of the past are so important for helping society face the future. When change is objectified, it turns into spectacle that distracts society from valuing the truths and insights it has acquired throughout the best moments of human history. Yet these are truths that have emerged through attempts to find answers to the deepest and most durable questions facing us, and the more the world changes the more we need to draw on our cultural and intellectual inheritance.

If the legacy of past achievements has ceased to have relevance for the schooling of young people, what can education mean? Thinkers from across the left-right divide have always realised that education represents a transaction between the generations. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker, wrote ‘in reality each generation educates the new generation’. Writing from a conservative perspective, English philosopher Michael Oakeshott concluded ‘education in its most general significance may be recognised as a specific transaction which may go on between the generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world they inhabit’. Liberal political philosopher Hannah Arendt said education provided an opportunity for society to preserve and to renew its intellectual inheritance through an intergenerational conversation.

One of the key tasks of education is to teach children about the world as it is. Although society is subject to the forces of change, education needs to acquaint young people with the legacy of its past. The term ‘learning from the past’ is often used as a platitude. Yet it is impossible to engage with the future unless people do draw on the centuries of human experience. Individuals gain an understanding of themselves through familiarity with the unfolding of the human world.

The transition from one generation to another requires education to transmit an understanding of the lessons learned by humanity through the ages. Consequently, the main mission of education is to preserve the past so young people have the cultural and intellectual resources to deal with the challenges they face. This understanding of education as renewal stands in direct contrast to the present predilection to focus the curriculum on the future.

In Anglo-American societies, curriculum-planning is devoted to cultivating an ethos of flexibility towards the future. Of course, the capacity to adapt is a valuable asset. But the exercise of this capacity requires a grounding in an understanding of the world in which we live. The question of the balance that education should strike between orienting towards the past and towards a changing world should be a source of debate. However, today, when policymakers tend to be so fixated on the present that they attempt to distance education from the past, it is essential to reaffirm the importance of a traditional humanist education.

The impulse to free education from the past is influenced by a prejudice that regards ideas that are not of the moment as old-fashioned and irrelevant. Yet the project of preserving the past through education does not mean an uncritical acceptance of the world as it; it means the assumption of adult responsibility for the world into which the young are integrated. The aim of this act is to acquaint the young with the world as it is so that they have the intellectual resources necessary for renewing it. Through education, all the important old questions are re-raised with the young, leading to a dialogue that moves humanity’s conversation forward.

Education needs to conserve the past. As Arendt argued, conservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of education. Her objective was not to conserve for the sake of nostalgia, but because she recognised that the conservation of the old provided the foundation for renewal and innovation. The characterisation of conservation as the essence of education can be easily misunderstood as a call inspired by a backward or reactionary political agenda. However, the argument for conservation is based on the understanding that, in a generational transaction, adults must assume responsibility for the world as it is and pass on its cultural and intellectual legacy to young people.

An attitude of conservation is called for specifically in the context of intergenerational transmission of this legacy. Until recently, leading thinkers from across the ideological divide understood the significance of transmitting the knowledge of the past to young people. Conservative thinker Matthew Arnold’s formulation of passing on ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ is virtually identical to Lenin’s insistence that education needs to transmit the ‘store of human knowledge’.

A liberal humanist education is underpinned by the assumption that children are rightful heirs to the legacy of the past. It takes responsibility for ensuring this inheritance is handed over to the young. It is because education gives meaning to human experience that it needs to be valued in its own right. One of the key characteristics of education is its lack of interest in an ulterior purpose. That does not mean it is uninterested in developments affecting children and society; it means that it regards the transmission of cultural and intellectual achievements of humanity to children as its defining mission.

Once society is able to affirm an education system that values itself and the acquisition of knowledge, policymakers and the public can begin to envisage the steps required to deal with the practical challenges facing the classroom.

Frank Furedi’s latest book, Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating, is published by Continuum Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).) This article was first published in the Australian and is an abridged version of his opening lecture at the Battle of Ideas conference, which took place at the Royal College of Art in London on 31 October/1 November.

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An Old Family Staple

Risotto is one of those dishes which can be deployed in many different ways. You can make lots of it, very inexpensively, and freeze the left overs or eat over the next few days. With perpetually hungry teenagers in the house, it lines the stomach walls between coming in from school and the evening meal! A quick reheat in the microwave is all that is needed.

You can serve it with chicken, lamb, beef, venison, fish--lots of possibilities.

There are several tricks to a good vegetable risotto. The key is flavour, so the more intense the vegetable flavour the better. You cannot go past using vegetable stock to absorb into the rice--it helps achieve that wonderful vegetable flavour that complements so many meat dishes, and prevents the rice being bland.

Firstly, you need to get a good base of vegetables in which you will cook the risotto. Onions and garlic are always a good beginning; then add chopped celery and/or chopped capsicum. You can use other veges if you wish. These should be sweated down in olive oil in your risotto saucepan first. Meanwhile--and here is a trick--don't discard all the vegetable peelings and choppings (onion and garlic skins, celery leaves, whatever) but put them in a separate saucepan, cover with water, and bring to the boil. Salt and simmer for about ten to twenty minutes. Strain out the liquid. All the flavour of that liquid can then be used to add to the risotto rice, which will intensify the vegetable flavour.

The best rice to use is arborio rice because it cooks into a lovely waxy white creamy texture. But, if not, then basmati rice will be fine.

Ingredients

1 medium red onion, chopped finely
1 medium white onion chopped finely
4-5 cloves garlic, crushed
cup of celery, chopped
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
1 cup of white wine
vegetable stock
1 cup frozen peas
1 tablespoon butter
salt and pepper to taste

Method

Stage I: Prepare the risotto vegetable base.

-Heat risotto saucepan with a dash of olive oil. Add in chopped onions and begin to sweat down.
-Add celery and finally garlic, stirring until all the crispness of the onion and celery has completely gone and they look like they have just been on a ten k run. If they are browned, that's fine too.
-Add balsamic vinegar and stir until it has thickened down.
-Add salt and pepper to taste.


Stage II: Prepare the vegetable stock.

While you are preparing the risotto vegetable base, put the vegetable tailings into a separate saucepan, cover with water, and simmer for about ten minutes. Strain the liquid, and set aside.

Stage III: Risotto

-Put a cup of rice (or however much you wish) into the saucepan, and stir into the vegetable base. This will let the intense flavours coat the rice which will then start to toast in the hot pan. Stir frequently, mixing thoroughly.
-Add white wine and stir. From now on you will need to keep stirring the vegetables rice pretty much all the time, so this is where you could use a good kitchen assistant. (Because there's lots of simple, repeated action, it's a great dish to start training the next generation of super chefs. Or, if hubby wants to come into the kitchen to talk to you, distracting you while you are working, at least you can put him to work.)
-As the liquid is absorbed and the dish begins to dry out, add about half a cup of the vegetable water (combined with vegetable stock, if you have any.
-As the liquid is absorbed by the rice, add more liquid, stirring all the time.
-Keep this process going until the rice is soft and cooked. (If you run out of vegetable stock, just keep adding water.)
-As the rice is getting completely soft, add in a cup of frozen peas at the end, and stir for about two to three minutes. They will cook quickly in the hot rice.
-Finally, throw in a table spoon of butter and stir it into the risotto. This will cause the whole dish to glisten and complete the creamy texture.
-Salt and pepper to taste.

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Willingly Enslaved Parents

The Press recently reported on a "survey" conducted amongst 115 parents or caregivers by a Unitec Master's graduate. The sensationalised "result" was that 52 percent of those surveyed believed there should be a minimum age for cell-phone use.

Laying aside the robustness of the survey (sample size, question framing, whether leading questions were employed, for example--about which no information was provided) let us accept for the moment that 52 percent is a significant percentage.

Assuming it is reasonably representative, it represents an indictment of parents and family life in New Zealand. Even assuming that no more than a third of the "parental" population think this way, it implies that a large number of parents are now so insipid, incompetent, and ineffectual that they need a law to back them up, or provide some authoritative warrant to them so that they can regulate and supervise the behaviour of their teenage children.

From one perspective this should not surprise us. Since the Government has arrogantly determined, in a quantum power-grab, to direct and control parents in their child rearing and disciplinary responsibilities, it follows that more and more parents over time will view themselves as "children" needing the support of "Big Daddy" government. It is natural that, since the State has asserted illegitimate power over families, that parents will play the game and want the State to carry more and more of the can for their children. So, since control of cell phone use is a matter of discipline, and since the State has presumed to legislate to control and direct how we discipline our children, it is reasonable, is it not, to require the state to go further and use its legislative power to provides rules and regulations for our children as well. "If you are going to tell us what to do in our homes, you also need to tell our children what they can and cannot do. Fair's fair." The train of thought seems inevitable. Hence, apparently a large proportion of parents now believe that the government needs to legislate to direct teenage children's cellphone use.

But there is a deeper malaise at work here. Our culture of Unbelief has sought to tear down every authority higher than the autonomy of the human heart. "For in the day you eat of it, you will be like gods, knowing good and evil for yourself," hissed the Serpent. With respect to its ideology of the family, Unbelief postulates that parental authority is intrinsically misguided, if not downright evil. Children are to be raised with a profound respect for their autonomy, lest the honour and dignity of their personhood be undermined. Thus, parents may make suggestions, entertain, divert, reason, channel, guide, facilitate--but above all, parents must not command and control. This, we are told, is damaging to a child and a blasphemous contradiction of their human autonomy.

When children become teenagers they start to have tastes and ideas of their own. Raised within the orbit of individual autonomy they quite reasonably start reflecting and asserting in their teenage years the equal validity of their opinions, tastes, predilections, and preferences as over against their parents, or anyone else, for that matter. After all, since birth, by a thousand subtle techniques and methods their own parents have been indoctrinating them into just this very notion. And so they got the point, the state-run schools they attended sang daily from the same hymn sheet. The poor kids never had a chance. They were conditioned from birth to believe in their own autonomy and self-authority.

A point in time inevitably comes when parents completely lose control of their children; or, to put it another way, children become uncontrollable. The structures of authority have eroded away. Having denied God, and made themselves gods, modern Unbelieving man is suddenly confronted with the slavery of atomistic autonomy. Instead of raising their children to be in respectful subjection to their parents, the parents are now subject to their children, whose views, wishes, and opinions are to be accepted as equally authoritative and valid.

Of course the world and human culture cannot continue to function without the skeleton of authority structures. So the newly enslaved and subjected parents appeal to a higher court--the State. Whilst they have lost authority they hope that the State might re-assert it on their behalf to "prove" to their teenage children that cell-phones, for example, are bad until they reach a certain age. The "proof" consists of the naked dictat of the State. Autonomy is believable only to the point where someone bigger, meaner, stronger, and more bullying cuts you down by force. As the old saw has it: everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.

If over half the parents in Athens believe that the State needs to pass a law to ban their teenagers from using cell-phones we can see where the culture of human autonomy has led. It has resulted in a state of powerlessness, and a spirit of enslavement. An insatiable appetite for laws upon regulations, rules upon statutes emerges. And so the soft-despotic, velvet power of the State grows and grows, with each passing decade and administration. We become a race of Sharkey's little helpers, always looking to the bosses on the hill.

The Devil is the world's first, greatest, and leading slaver. The progressive enslavement of the human race has always been his goal. His preferred modus operandi has always been subtle insinuation. The emergence of soft-despotism in the West is his most subtle work thus far. Society is progressively being enslaved to a beneficent government and all the people love it. His handiwork is becoming more and more evident as Unbelief takes hold in our culture.

Thanks be to God that our Lord Jesus Christ has come forth to destroy the works of the Devil. The Serpent has been cast down, the Ring which binds in the dark has been destroyed. As we call men to the Saviour, they will once again breath free air.

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Endowment Trust Increases Support to MCS

The Auckland Christian Schools Endowment Trust had its Annual General Meeting early in October.

In 2009, the Endowment Trust was able to contribute $4,000 towards MCS operating costs. Next year, the Trust plans to increase this distribution. Due to additional donations made to the Trust over the past year, the Trustees agreed to increase the annual support for MCS in 2010 to $4,500 pa, which will represent a 12.5% increase on the amount paid to the School in 2009.

The Trustees are keen to encourage donations and gifts to the Endowment Trust. Donations and gifts are fully tax deductible. The Trust is registered with the Charities Commission and with the IRD as a donee organization.

All donations (unless otherwise specified by the donor) are invested in high security income earning investments. All the income of the Trust is distributed to MCS to help with operating costs and expenses, thereby keeping tuition fees as low as possible. The Trust is required to keep the capital intact so that it will be able to generate a perpetual gift to MCS.

If you know of anyone, or of a business, which may like to donate to the Trust, please contact Geraldine at MCS (ddi: +64.9.269.1050)

Donations can be sent electronically to ACS Endowment Trust (ASB account: 12-3231-0647032-00). Please inform Geraldine of details so that a tax receipt can be issued, or drop a note to the Trustees, at ACS Endowment Trust, PO Box 100-937, North Shore Mail Centre, North Shore City 0745. Many thanks.

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School Newsletter: Term 4, Week 2, 2009

This newsletter contains an initial draft design for a proposed adventure playground for our younger children by FrieMCS member, Bryan Williams. Many thanks, Bryan.

Also, there is an interesting piece by James Chapman (Massey University College of Education) who at a recent conference expressed disappointment on weak literacy levels amongst school leavers. We are thankful that literacy is a great strength of our School. We are thankful to our Lord, and to the dedicated and professional teaching staff He has raised up for the School.

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Writing Helps Children Be More Creative.

Manukau Christian School emphasizes the importance of handwriting and written composition. Some recent US research by the University of Washington is showing just how important for our children the MCS emphasis is.

The Pen May be Mightier than the Keyboard

Source: University of Washington

When it comes to writing the pen apparently is mightier than the computer keyboard.

Second, fourth and sixth grade children with and without handwriting disabilities were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays, according to new research.

The study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology who studies normal writing development and writing disabilities, looked at children’s ability to write the alphabet, sentences and essays using a pen and a keyboard.

“Children consistently did better writing with a pen when they wrote essays. They wrote more and they wrote faster.” said Berninger.

Only for writing the alphabet was the keyboard better than the pen. For sentences results were mixed. But when using a pen, the children in all three grade levels produced longer essays and composed them at a faster pace. In addition, fourth and sixth graders wrote more complete sentences when they used a pen. The ability to write complete sentences was not affected by the children’s spelling skills.

The research also showed that many children don’t have a reliable idea of what a sentence is until the third or fourth grade.

“Children first have to understand what a sentence or a complete thought is before they can write one,” Berninger said. “Talking is very different from writing. We don’t talk in complete sentence. In conversation we produce units smaller and larger than sentences.”

The study was designed to compare methods of transcription, a basic cognitive process involved in writing that enables a writer to translate thoughts or ideas into written language. Both handwriting and spelling are transcription processes. Previous research by Berninger’s group showed that transcription predicts composition length and quality in developing writers. Transcription by both pen and keyboard involves the hands. Researchers, she said, are trying to understand why units of language are affected differently when hands write by pen and by keyboard.

“People think language is a single thing. But it’s not,” said Berninger. “It has multiple levels like a tall building with a different floor plan for each story. In written language there are letters, words, sentences and paragraphs, which are different levels of language. It turns out that they are related, but not in a simple way. Spelling is at the word level, but sentences are at the syntax level. Words and syntax (patterns for organizing the order of words) are semi-independent. Organizing sentences to create text is yet another level. That’s why some children need spelling help while others need help in constructing sentences and others in composing text with many sentences.”

Berninger and her colleagues recruited more than 200 normally developing children for the study. When the children were in the second, fourth and sixth grades they were given three tasks. For one task they were told to print all lower case letters in alphabetic order with a pen. They were also asked to select each letter of the alphabet in order on a keyboard. In both cases they were told to work as quickly and accurately as possible. In the second task they were asked to write one sentence that began with the word “writing” while using a pen and to write one sentence that began with “reading” while using the keyboard. Finally, the children were asked to write essays on provided topics for 10 minutes both by pen and by keyboard.

Although most children in the study developed transcriptions skills in an age-appropriate way, a small number showed signs of a specific learning disability – transcription disability. Both the normally developing and those with the disability wrote extended text better by pen than keyboard.

“Federal accommodations for disabilities now mean that schools often allow children to use laptops to bypass handwriting or spelling problems. Just giving them a laptop may not be enough,” Berninger said. “Children with this disability also need appropriate education in the form of explicit transcription and composition instruction.

“We need to learn more about the process of writing with a computer, and even though schools have computers they haven’t integrated them in teaching at the early grades. We need to help children become bilingual writers so they can write by both the pen and the computer. So don’t throw away your pen or your keyboard. We need them both.

“But we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that it is important for developing writers and children with transcription disability to be able to form letters by hand. A keyboard doesn’t allow a child to have the same opportunity to engage the hand while forming letters – on a keyboard a letter is selected by pressing a key and is not formed. Brain imaging studies with adults have shown an advantage for forming letters over selecting or viewing letters. A brain imaging study at the University of Washington with children showed that sequencing fingers may engage thinking. We need more research to figure out how forming letters by a pen and selecting them by pressing a key may engage our thinking brains differently,” she said.

Co-authors of the paper, published in the current issue of the journal Learning Disability Quarterly, were Robert Abbott, UW professor and chair of educational psychology and UW research assistants Amy Augsburger and Noelia Garcia. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development funded the research.

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Handwriting Encourages Patient Thinking

Umberto Eco is a prominent philosopher and historian of ideas in Italy. He is well known in English speaking countries for his books such as The Name of the Rose (a historical detective story, set in a remote monastery in Italy. It was later made into a movie, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater).

Recently, two Italian journalists wrote a three-page newspaper article (in print, alas) about the decline of handwriting. By now it's well-known: most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters. . . .

The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone.

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It's obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be.


My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other. Well, not always – because the inkwells, with which we soiled our desks, notebooks, fingers and clothing, would often produce a foul sludge that stuck to the pen and took 10 minutes of mucky contortions to clean.

The crisis began with the advent of the ballpoint pen. Early ballpoints were also very messy and if, immediately after writing, you ran your finger over the last few words, a smudge inevitably appeared. And people no longer felt much interest in writing well, since handwriting, when produced with a ballpoint, even a clean one, no longer had soul, style or personality.

Why should we regret the passing of good handwriting? The capacity to write well and quickly on a keyboard encourages rapid thought, and often (not always) the spell-checker will underline a misspelling.

Although the cellphone has taught the younger generation to write "Where R U?" instead of "Where are you?", let us not forget that our forefathers would have been shocked to see that we write "show" instead of "shew" or "enough" instead of "enow". Medieval theologians wrote "respondeo dicendum quod", which would have made Cicero recoil in horror.

The art of handwriting teaches us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination.

The three-page article pointed out that writing by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think. Many writers, though accustomed to writing on the computer, would sometimes prefer even to impress letters on a clay tablet, just so they could think with greater calm.

It's true that kids will write more and more on computers and cellphones. Nonetheless, humanity has learned to rediscover as sports and aesthetic pleasures many things that civilisation had eliminated as unnecessary.

People no longer travel on horseback but some go to a riding school; motor yachts exist but many people are as devoted to true sailing as the Phoenicians of 3,000 years ago; there are tunnels and railroads but many still enjoy walking or climbing Alpine passes; people collect stamps even in the age of email; and armies go to war with Kalashnikovs but we also hold peaceful fencing tournaments.

It would be a good thing if parents sent kids off to handwriting schools so they could take part in competitions and tournaments – not only to acquire grounding in what is beautiful, but also for psychomotor wellbeing. Such schools already exist; just search for "calligraphy school" on the internet. And perhaps for those with a steady hand but without a steady job, teaching this art could become a good business.

• Umberto Eco's latest book is On Ugliness. He is also author of the international bestsellers Baudolino, The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, among others.

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The Mermaids Have Stopped Singing

The latest edition of The American Scholar contains an article by William M Chace on how English Departments have declined significantly in US universities and colleges.

While there are many causes, he identifies the main reason straight off:

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

He goes on to describe how studying English used to be in its halcyon days, when he was in college:

What was the appeal of English during those now long-ago days? For me, English as a way of understanding the world began at Haverford College, where I was an undergraduate in the late 1950s. The place was small, the classrooms plain, the students all intimidated boys, and the curriculum both straightforward and challenging. What we read forced us to think about the words on the page, their meaning, their ethical and psychological implications, and what we could contrive (in 500-word essays each week) to write about them. With the books in front of us, we were taught the skills of interpretation. Our tasks were difficult, the books (Emerson’s essays, David Copperfield, Shaw’s Major Barbara, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and a dozen other works) were masterly, and our teacher possessed an authority it would have been “bootless” (his word) to question.

Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Chace goes on to point the finger of fundamental blame at the "academy" of professional English teachers itself. It has propagated a post-modern fragmentation of its discipline which has left is rootless and without mooring. He cites Harvard as a leading example:

Consider the English department at Harvard University. It has now agreed to remove its survey of English literature for undergraduates, replacing it and much else with four new “affinity groups”—“Arrivals,” “Poets,” “Diffusions,” and “Shakespeares.” The first would examine outside influences on English literature; the second would look at whatever poets the given instructor would select; the third would study various writings (again, picked by the given instructor) resulting from the spread of English around the globe; and the final grouping would direct attention to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Daniel Donoghue, the department’s director of undergraduate studies, told The Harvard Crimson last December that “our approach was to start with a completely clean slate.” And Harvard’s well-known Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt also told the Crimson that the substance of the old survey will “trickle down to students through the professors themselves who, after all, specialize in each of these areas of English literature.” But under the proposal, there would be no one book, or family of books, that every English major at Harvard would have read by the time he or she graduates. The direction to which Harvard would lead its students in this “clean slate” or “trickle down” experiment is to suspend literary history, thrusting into the hands of undergraduates the job of cobbling together intellectual coherence for themselves. Greenblatt puts it this way: students should craft their own literary “journeys.” The professors might have little idea of where those journeys might lead, or how their paths might become errant. There will be no common destination.

As Harvard goes, so often go the nation’s other colleges and universities. Those who once strove to give order to the curriculum will have learned, from Harvard, that terms like core knowledge and foundational experience only trigger acrimony, turf protection, and faculty mutinies. No one has the stomach anymore to refight the Western culture wars. Let the students find their own way to knowledge.

As the US has moved progressively to be dominated by an anti-Christian culture, the unity and coherence of knowledge, particularly historical knowledge has inevitably started decomposing. As it dismembers, ignorance rises. People, even professional educators, become imprisoned to the whim and fancy of the moment. Rootless and ignorant of their heritage, they become swept about by every changing wind of fashion and opinion. Because they no longer know where they stand, they fall for anything.

Chace, however, places more emphasis upon the deleterious effect of commercial agendas, rather than the culture wars themselves. In the end, students want to get jobs and earn and income. English (and the liberal arts generally) do not appear to offer a ready career path. A vicious circle develops: colleges get less students in such faculties and courses, so they fund them less. Teachers find it harder to get tenure because they do not attract funding and research grants (as do the hard and soft sciences). Teaching quality declines, which in turn leads to another downward cycle. He puts forward several suggestions to help arrest the declension. One of these involves focusing upon mastery of the English language (and therefore cognition) itself:

They can also convert what many of them now consider a liability and a second-rate activity into a sizable asset. They can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

But in the end, the author remains dispirited. We believe that everything which he described is paralleled in the NZ state education system. There is nothing strange or foreign here. But the study of the humanities, the classical liberal arts, is essentially a phenomenon of the Christian faith: when that faith goes, so goes the central importance of english, history, philosophy, art history and so forth to the culture and to society. It is only the Christian faith which has a fountain of belief in the brightness of the future and of inevitable progress because the future of this world has become inextricably bound to the coming of the Kingdom of Christ into human history. World history has now become redemptive history, and the Redeemer is the King of all kings, and everything is being and will be placed under His feet.

As a culture becomes progressively Christianised, once again the study of the past become important and deeply pregnant with meaning and significance. For in studying the past, we are studying Christ's redemptive work. We discover our place in that divine work in the brief time we have upon the earth--and therefore what we must do now. It was the men of Issachar of old who understood the times, and therefore knew what Israel had to do in their day. The Christian faith makes the humanities central to all learning and human action, for the humanities enable us to discover where we have come from, helping us to discover what we, then, must do in our day and generation.

Cross posted in Contra Celsum

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Increased Funding for Independent Private Schools

The former Labour government was ideologically opposed to independent schools, believing that independent schools were "elitist" and the preserve of the wealthy. For over six years the government capped support for private schools--which, with the increasing rolls--meant that every year the support per child went down.

This meant that families choosing to send their children to an independent school such as Manukau Christian were paying a double burden for education. They were paying for the support of state schools (through their tax dollars) and paying again for the education of their own children. It is a most unjust system.

The present government has taken the first step towards rectifying this injustice. Below is a press-release from Heather Roy, Associate Minister of Education.

New Scholarships Increase Choice In Education
Posted on 05 Aug 2009

Today, in my capacity as Associate Minister of Education, I announced a new scholarship initiative that will enable students from low-income families to attend independent secondary schools that they and their families would previously not have been able to afford.

ACT and National pledged to increase families' education choices, with scholarships for every child being a key part of ACT's manifesto. This announcement is an important step toward honouring that pledge.

In Budget 2009, the Government increased private school funding by $10 million - the first increase since 2000 - to make independent schools more affordable to parents. Of this, $7.4 million will be allocated directly to independent schools and $2.6 million used to provide 250 scholarships to students from low socio-economic backgrounds from 2010.

The additional funding and new scholarships will increase choice by making independent schools more affordable for New Zealand families.

Next year 150 students from low-income families will be able to go to an independent secondary school, increasing to 200 students in 2011 and 250 in 2012. Students' fees will be covered, and they will receive an allowance for uniforms and other school-related costs, to ensure no student is disadvantaged.

Over four percent of school-age students - 30,000 children - currently attend independent schools, saving the State around $200 million annually and relieving some of the pressure on State schools. I am delighted to announce the introduction of this scholarship initiative - which will provide more choice and opportunity for young people from low-income families.

This Government knows it is parents who are best placed to make the decisions about the education that best suits their children's needs. This funding will support parents in their choices and improve access for many families to a greater range of educational opportunities for their children.

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Traditional Butter Chicken

This recipe represents a family tradition, passed down through generations. It is a Pakistani version of a favorite--therefore, northern Indian. It is very easy to make, and if the ingredients are prepped and to hand, it can be made without stress, in a relaxed manner--which is not unimportant as "arsenic hour" (evening mealtime) approaches!

As always with eastern cooking, the order in which ingredients are added to the dish is very important. We have broken down the key steps.

Ingredients

1 kg chicken (chopped 2cm pieces; although any chicken portions will do)
2 teaspoons garam masala
2 teaspoons ground coriander
3/4 teaspoon chilli powder
2 teasppons grated fresh ginger
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons of white vinegar
1/4 cup (60ml) tomato paste
1/2 cup yoghurt (plain, unsweetened)

*********
80gm butter
1 large onion chopped
1 cinamon stick
4 cardomom pods, bruised
1 teaspoon of salt
3 teaspoons of sweet paprika
425 gm can tomato puree
3/4 cup chicken stock
1 cup of cream

Method

1. Combine spices, ginger, garlic, vinegar, paste and yoghurt in a large bowl. Add chicken. Coat with marinade. Cover and refrigerate for a few hours. Relax--most of your work is done. The rest is easy peasy.

2. Heat butter in a large pan, add onion, cinamon and cardomom. Cook stirring until onion is lightly browned.

3. Add chicken and marinade. Cook, stirring about five minutes.

4. Add salt, paprika, tomato puree, chicken stock. Simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

5. Add cream. Simmer about ten minutes or until chicken is cooked.

Serve with rice, and/or roti bread or equivalent.
Serves five to six adults. So you will likely have plenty left over for the next day or for the freezer. Have fun.

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Hey, parents, leave those kids alone!
Amy Douthett , July 17, 2009


Parents, at least in the West, have never had it so good when it comes to raising children: childbirth is safer and the life of an infant has never been less nasty, brutish or short. So what went wrong - why can't parents enjoy having kids?

Review
Free Range Kids : Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry
by Lenore Skenazy, “America’s Worst Mom”
Jossey-Bass, 256 pages, $24.95

“It is a curious fact that the young woman of to-day, faced with the arrival of her first baby, has little simple literature to which she can turn for help and guidance in bringing up her child.” So begins The Care of Young Babies by Dr. John Gibbens, published in Britain in 1940, and passed down to me by my grandmother. It’s a problem that sounds both quaint and enviable. Of the books that that do exist, “few stress the fact that bringing up a baby is, or should be, a grand job,” says Dr. Gibbens. “And most babies can be brought up easily and straight-forwardly.”

Easy? Straight-forward? Grand? Maybe in the olden days, when all they had to worry about was an escalating war, rationing, carpet bombing, and the prospect of shipping their children off to live with strangers in the countryside as part of Britain’s wartime urban evacuation effort. Some 70 years after Dr. Gibbens published his gentle guide, the market has been flooded with so much literature on the subject, that there is now a small but steadily growing crop of parenting books about how to raise your child without, er, parenting books. Thankfully, the irony of this is not lost on Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free Range Kids” a fun, fact-filled refutation of much of today’s parenting ‘wisdom.’

Skenazy shot to startled stardom when she allowed her nine-year old son to ride the subway alone, then wrote about it in her column in the New York Sun. Cue lights, camera, daytime talk shows. Skenazy was branded “America’s Worst Mom,” a title she now sports proudly, and one that has inspired her efforts to persuade other parents to give their children a taste of the freedom they had growing up “without going nuts with worry.”

Her central thesis is this: life is good, people are mostly good, and kids are both hardy and more capable than we think. In fact, she explains, we’re living in what is “factually, statistically, and luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.” The problem is that everywhere we look, we’re told otherwise. Which is why, perversely, in the safest of times, we’ve become the most neurotic parenting generation in history. We’re afraid of everything, with no filters, no sense of scale, and in no particular order: food allergies, strangers, poisonous plants, bumped heads, open toilets, rogue toys, Halloween candy, abduction, germs. We’re afraid we might not be perfect. We’re afraid our kids might fail. Skenazy gets it. Then she breaks it down. Her goal is twofold: take away the fear, then let the kids outside again, without the helicoptering parents hovering in the background.

It’s not an easy task. Have you seen the 11 o’clock news lately? Heard about the latest toy recall? Read about nitrates in carrots? Seen the warning labels on baby snacks? Googled, well, anything? No wonder we’re terrified. To illustrate the real odds of much-hyped dangers, Skenazy takes on the most popular stand-bys of parenting paranoia from abduction to poisoned Halloween candy, and gives you the real odds. Then she instructs parents to stop watching Law and Order, and get on with their lives.

“Free Range Kids” is in essence a self-help book, but one that is suffused with humor and backed up with a lot of striking statistical evidence. Skenazy has come up with 14 commandments for today’s beleaguered parents—“Turn off the News” and “Boycott Baby Knee Pads” being two excellent examples—with practical suggestions at the end of each chapter, and insightful posts from her website sent in by real parents and kids. Whether she’s examining the history of childhood, parenting in other cultures, the perceived dangers of the great outdoors, or the nonsensical promises of educational toys, Skenazy’s incredulous tone and engaging writing helps the reader to see the funny side of the fear.

Of course, there is an underlying seriousness and real sadness of the changes she describes. Like the fact that “from 1997 to 2002, the amount of time the average six- to eight-year-old spends on creative play has declined by about a third.” Or her story about a group of kids in Chicago sitting through a lecture on the dangers of hula hoops. Or that fact that schools across the country are cutting shop class, sports and, in some cases, recess, rather than face the risk of lawsuits from zealous parents. (“An elementary school in Attleboro, Massachusetts, has gone so far as to outlaw the game of tag because, as the principal said, ‘accidents can happen.’”)

While “Free Range Kids” is aimed primarily at parents of school-age kids, it’s accessible to all ages and stages. I have a 10-month old son, so Skenazy’s lampooning of the 1.7 billion dollar baby proofing industry was a particular delight to read. Skenazy can hardly contain her glee when examining today’s latest gadgets, from kneepads and gloves for crawling babies and helmets for toddlers, to easy grip baby soap, which she suggests might be “good in baby prison.” Her tip at the end of this chapter is “Walk through the baby safety department of a store with your oldest living relative asking, “Which of these things did you need?” I threw out my toilet lid locks after reading Skenazy’s breakdown of the statistical dangers of the open bowl, and then calculating the odds of a visitor to my home being forced to pee in the sink. Also, I couldn’t open them.

If anything, the book could have used one last ruthless edit. The “A-to-Z Review of Everything You Might Be Worried About,” while entertaining in parts, is neither comprehensive nor necessary. It feels like an editor’s suggested repository for all the little gems of worry that wouldn’t easily fit into the previous chapters. And there’s some repetition too as Skenazy hammers home her key messages. However, since the average parent of today’s over-scheduled child is unlikely to have time read this in one sitting, this may be a positive point.

“Children just used to be a part of life,” observes like-minded parenting blogger, Nancy McDermott mournfully. Maybe—if Skenazy and others manage to wrest control back from the fear mongering parenting experts—they might just be that again. Maybe one day we will even recapture the essence of Dr. Gibbens’ view of parenthood—that “all this can be the greatest of fun.”

Amy Douthett is a mom and freelance write. This review is republished from Stats Review from George Mason University.

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