education

"Excuse us, sir", said one of them, "...excuse us for talking. You're the one who should have been talking, sir. You know things, sir. We don't."

And Freire's response...

"All right," I said, in response to the peasant's intervention. "Let's say I know and you don't. Still, I'd like to try a game with you that, to work right, will require our full effort and attention. I'm going to draw a line down the middle of this chalkboard, and I'm going to write down on this side the goals I score against you, and on this other side the ones you score against me. The game will consist in asking each other questions. If the person asked doesn't know the answer, the person who asked the question scores a goal. I'll start the game by asking you a question."

At this point, precisely because I had seized the group's "moment," the climate was more lively than when we had begun, before the silence.

First question:

"What is the Socratic maieutic?"

General guffawing. Score one for me.

"Now it's your turn to ask me a question," I said.

There was some whispering, and one of them tossed out the question:

"What's a contour curve?"

I couldn't answer. I marked down one to one.

"What importance does Hegel have in Marx's thought?"

Two to one.

"What's soil liming?"

Two to two.

"What's an intransitivie verb?"

Three to two.

"What's a contour curve got to do with erosion?"

Three to three.

"What's epistemology?"

Four to three.

"What's green fertilizer?"

Four to four.

And so on, until we got to ten to ten.

A rare emperor.
From Pedagogy of Hope

John Humphrys has just made a programme, 'Unequal advantage', on social mobility and education - or so he thinks.

In his words: 'I've been making it for the best part of a year and the question it looks at is why is the social gap not narrowing.'

But the whole programme is built on the assumption that education is the key - and the only means - to narrowing that gap. No other possibilities entertained.

There's also an interview with Humphrys here. A couple of interesting quotes:

Interviewer: Is the problem just within education?

JH: No it isn't. The fact that we now have so many single-parent families, that's a predictor of social mobility. But the biggest predictor is income. If you have a low income you are less likely to get out of your social class; it's poverty of ambition and all kinds of things. Why should that be the case? I suppose it's because the social mores have broken down... if you move away from what we had after the war – a small 'c' conservative society – the consequence is that you are much less likely to have two-parent families.

Interviewer: What is the significance of fewer two-parent families?

JH: According to some estimates, 40% of children now are born out of wedlock, which is a staggering figure. And the chances are that if a child is born out of wedlock there will be less money in a household. The rest follows from that....'

Ah right. Everything follows from the social mores breaking down. Or is it that it follows from too many single parents.

I don't follow. But in any case, and despite the fact that the 'biggest predictor' of social mobility is income, the idea of acting on income inequality directly doesn't deserve a mention in the hour long programme.

Then there's this quote: