Self Correcting?

The educational world is all a-flutter about the poor performance of students on a recent battery of Math tests that were administered to fifteen-year-olds in various locations around the world. In my daily ingestion of “content”, I heard pretty much the same refrain from officials here in Canada, in the United States, and there was a feature report on the matter on the Journal Télévisé from France 2 in their daily 19-20 slot. There was a great deal of hand-wringing from official circles whose answer to poor test scores seems to be more testing, test prep, accountability, and choice, all mantras of a segment of the educational institutions dominated by market-driven precepts and the desire to standardize everything. The best of the reports of yesterday’s lot was some documentation in the France 2 segment wherein they compared student life in France to that of young people in South Korea, whose students scored excellent marks on the PISA. The first distinction mentioned was that Korean students spend, typically, sixty hours a week in school, whereas their French counterparts spend half that total. The Korean girl followed by the reporters started her day at six in the morning, went to school at eight and stayed there until ten in the evening, after which she attended private tutoring until midnight. She seemed quite comfortable with the situation, as did her parents, but I know I wouldn’t have done this to my own children, nor to students in general, given a sense that much learning takes place outside of school, particularly in terms of interpersonal relationships, life experience, and general cultural development. If the point is to become a drone in the commercial and industrial apparatus, the Korean/Singaporean/Japanese/Hong Kong model will serve well, I suppose, but in terms of building a sustainable and humane society, it’s likely that the hive mentality will leave serious shortfalls. PISA, the brainchild of the OECD, is aimed squarely at reinforcing the current economic paradigm, and it bending the drive of the education system worldwide to that effect, this being the paradigm in which growth in a finite living space has no limits and where we can create wealth out of thin air and distribute said wealth unequally to the point of ridicule. It favours a lock-stepped standardized, modular and cellular education that gives pride of place to narrowly focused knowledge of the quantifiable, and where progress is measured only on the basis of single-event high stakes testing, much of it framed as multiple-choice questions in the interest of statistical purity.

There has been substantial and well-documented push back against the tide of stats-driven education and the drive to turn education into a profit source, but it doesn’t often spill into the arena of public discussion, not surprising given the vested interest of the organs of the press in support of their own corporate model. Diane Ravich recently published an article on the Huffington post which I saw republished on Common Dreams, entitled “What You Need To Know About International Test Scores”, in which she cites an article from Phi Beta Kappan by Keith Baker (2007), saying the following:

Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be “a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success.” What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain “spirit,” which he defines as “ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores.”

Baker’s conclusion was that “standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless.”

Ms. Ravich draws some lessons from the test scores, mostly relating to the silliness of accepting that such a measurement would have any meaning other than all the programs aimed at improving test scores have been a dismal failure. My personal favourite, of course, is where she points out that having so many people living in conditions of deprivation does nothing to help test scores, or general education, to which I would add that the impetus to get educated seems increasingly tattered where an education seems more like a path to significant debt loads than to gainful and meaningful employment. Finally, it should come as no surprise that Democrats, both New and U.S., as well as Socialists-In-Name-Only all over the world have done little to nothing to lay the groundwork for a society where an education would be simply part of what the society does and where both work and rewards would be shared on a somewhat more equitable basis.

Please also take a minute to check out Henry Giroux’s writings in this vein.

ShipSpotting.com

© Andrew Lester

Driving past Nanoose Bay in the late Seventies was an adventure that must have twisted more than a few necks and people did double-takes at the sight of what appeared to be a World War II.-vintage submarine painted a bright yellow sitting across the bay and the marine ordinance testing station. Given that we were only ten years out from the original penning of Yellow Submarine and that the Canadian Navy didn’t seem to be that much of a threat to anyone, it was easy to think of this phenomenon as being fairly innocuous and more than a little amusing. The business at hand, it turns out, was fairly serious, and involved much more than just the Canadian Navy, with nasty real subs coming and going from the Winchelsea test range to see what they could potentially blow up with their non-doomsday ordinance.

I also recall having a rather visceral recoil at the announcement in the late 1990s when it was announced that Canada was buying four mothballed British subs to renew our aging and ineffective fleet. Having had experiences with Triumph, Norton and BSA motorcycles and with Triumph, MG, Morris and Jaguar automobiles, I was horrified to think that we were going to spend $750m for equipment from the land that produced Lucas electrics, commonly known in motoring circles, was Lucas, as the Prince of Darkness, a tart little appellation relating to the failure of all systems and the consequent lack of light or spark. In particular, on had to sake oneself why it was that the Royal Navy (the real one, as depicted on the box of Players cigarettes and a Procol Harum record) had mothballed these modern marvels. We were assured that they would be put ship shape and fighting fit prior to delivery, but such has not turned out to be the case, with these ships (actually, don’t real seamen call subs “boats”?) spending more time in refit than working to defend out coastlines from the marauding hordes of….the drug interdicted? The Russians? I’ve seen with my own eyes a couple of American aircraft carriers that have managed to slip through the protective ring, disgorging a multitude of swabs onto lighters and Government Street to admire the hanging baskets.

True to form, it seems to have taken years to refit  the ships prior to taking delivery, and then the poop came off the poop deck, with a series of onboard fires, groundings, leaks, both internal and external, and who knows what else. So the big news seems to be that the Athabaskan made an appearance being towed in dry dock to Ogden Point to be placed gently in the water to see if she would float, prior to shallow diving and eventual full sea trials. This refit apparently took five years, following the original refit. I suspect that the cost of getting this lot ready for service is more than the original purchase price, and we still don’t have a serviceable submarine fleet.

I would be happy to do without the sub fleet altogether. These are at least as useful as F-35 fighters, which is to say, they are good for the defines industry and no one else. My proposal is that they be converted into low-cost housing, or at least disarmed and set to tasks like monitoring ocean temperature, acidity, radiation levels and other potentially useful information, but I have a difficult time rationalizing even that usage when these things have to be manned by real personnel whose hair must stand up on learning of deployment, or who clearly already suffer from PTSD, and should be ashore getting treatment. Part of the romance of anything in British Racing Green was that it was a ready excuse to retire to the garage, but I don’t think we want to be doing that when the garage turns out to be Davie Jones’s Locker.

I have pretty strong recollections of arriving in these parts in March of 1968 and feeling that BC was a couple or three decades behind my former California digs, behind in crime, behind in grime, behind in overconsumption and bluster. OK, no more Fillmore/Avalon Ballroom/Straight Theater dance-concerts and no more free wheeling social life in the way it was practiced in marvellous Marin and in the Marina district. I also recall that, not long after, I thought it might be an idea to actually walk the five miles to school one lovely morning, and that said walk took longer than it might otherwise have because Saltspringers at the time didn’t see that walking was a viable mode of transportation and would pull over to offer a ride (“Hey, aren’t you one of the new kids? Lemme give you a lift…”), and where there were several versions of shaking heads that a teen would actually walk rather than get a ride right to the front door of the school. The community ran the gamut from the hip and out there to the real estate developing movers and shakers, but there did seem to be a very sense of community and a willingness to help others where the need arose. Saltspring Island, along with most of the East Coast of Vancouver Island, the Sunshine Coast and the Salish Sea generally have gone the way of Marvellous Marin, becoming a mecca for money from elsewhere, a locus of gentrification, and, in a way, a mirror of a society that has seriously lost its way. In the same way, our Canadian society has caught up with much of the mean-spirited social Darwinism of our friends to the South, and much of this is reflected in the state of our cherished community institutions, health care being a prime example.

We love you, especially your wallet.

A recent look at some time-shifted television from Detroit gave rise to some reflection on what health care will look like in a short time if we continue along our current path to reinserting greed into the equation. Every break for ads contained at least one, and often several, spots for health-related items. Some of these were prescription medications (“Talk to your doctor about adding Rigormortis.”) but many were for actual hospitals and their associated health management companies. I don’t even want to know what it costs to advertise on network television, even in a depressed market like Detroit, but it must be substantial, and some of the outfits aren’t even located in Detroit–In one instance, it is suggested that you make the trek to Chicago to treat your cancer. In one half-hour, there must have been at least a dozen of these slick presentations. It’s plain that a good portion of the health dollars spent in the U.S. (read private medical care systems) goes to promotion. There is also all the paper shuffling, apparently a much steeper cost in the U.S. than in more social jurisdictions, and, finally, beyond the salaries for highly trained professionals, there is the cost of hiring the best and brightest administrators of corporate health management organizations and a dime or two for shareholders. The Affordable Health Care Act is but a timid step is a vague approximation of the right direction, and, oh! my, what a fuss it has caused among the fans of Tea and the Fraser Institute, excuse me, Heritage Institute zombies loose on the streets of Laredo. And here in the land of Canuckistan, where socialism runs rampant, there are signs that we’re headed very much the way of the good ole boys who shoot ducks. That same Fraser Institute published a report yesterday bemoaning the increase in the interval between diagnosis by a generalist and treatment by a specialist, noting that said interval had pretty much doubled since 1993, and that Canadians should get accustomed to a more innovative system (code for a privatized, for-profit system). Ironic that they should cite 1993 as a baseline. Oh, yeah, it’s a nice, round 20 years, but it also marks the coming to office of one Paul Martin as finance minister, whose desire to slay the deficit outweighed such promises as scrapping NAFTA, reversing the GST and killing the helicopter contract. Martin did in the deficit, but mostly at the cost of services to the general citizenry, returning less money to provinces for health and education, for housing and social programs, a canon right out of the FI playbook. And now, behold, we have a proliferation of advertising on Canadian media about insurance to cover items not paid for by general health care, where Blue Cross will, for a monthly premium, pick at least part of the tab for any comely young woman who happens to get bitten in the butt by some stuffed toy in unlikely circumstances. It gives me this sinking feeling that we are looking at another of those altered baselines, where we get Mike Duffy’s and Pamela Wallin’s expenses, expensive military hardware of dubious usefulness, a surveillance state only slightly less imposing than the NSofA, but poverty and illness on reserves and in city cores, closed public hospitals, schools of increasing irrelevance, and a parliamentary system that is crumbling under Con attack.

If you don’t see this blossoming right before your eyes, save up some coin and see your nearest political ophthalmologist.

This little video is pretty enlightening:

https://www.upworthy.com/his-first-4-sentences-are-interesting-the-5th-blew-my-mind-and-made-me-a-little-sick-2?c=upw8

Step On the Assembly Line, Pay First At The Door