Subtle Sexism

A paradox of Education is that if it's the key to professional success, why are women, who do better at school, paid less than men and less likely to attain senior positions?

The optimistic view is that the legacy of sexism is being swept away by well qualified young women...it just hasn't happened quite yet. I am not convinced. It seems rather that while appearing to privilege girls over boys our education system actually continues to skew society in favour of men.

The thing our education system rewards is doing what you've been told, the way you've been told to do it. Submitting to authority in this way is an easier choice for girls because they face less cultural pressure to be rebellious. Boys have to walk more of a tightrope where they need a certain level of academic achievement, without which you're a loser with no job prospects, but they also need to rebel against authority to assert their masculinity.

In this way boys get worse grades but a better education. School is the last workplace any of us have where recompense is based solely on the quality of the work that's been done. Doing what you're told and waiting paitiently for a just reward is a great recipe for success at school and a terrible one thereafter. Those who've learned to follow the rules only so far as it's advantageous to do so are far better primed to get promotions and pay rises.

Of course sexism is a broader and deeper problem than can be tackled by schools alone. But until we teach young women to ask questions as well as answering them, schools are part of the problem not the solution.

School is why we have Inequality

People are primates. Though we are capable of reason and compassion far beyond that of our brother apes, our instincts come from the jungle. It’s natural for us to make our society a hierarchy and our response to finding ourselves at the top, or bottom, of that pile are natural too. The tools we use to accomplish this are far more sophisticated than raw physical challenge, but the urge they satisfy is not.

Imagine two children on their first day of school. They don’t know it yet but they are about to start competing for a place in society. If they do well in this competition then they will grow up believing themselves to be successful and worthy of respect, after all, is that not how the adults in charge of school have always treated them? If they do poorly then they will grow up learning that they are worth less than other children. When they leave school their grades will merely confirm what they already know: whether they are a high status individual, deserving of further academic accolades and secure, well-paid employment or one of low status, deserving only what someone powerful deigns to give them.

Telling a person that they are better than those around them elicits a powerful response. People like that and will work hard to maintain that position and earn more praise. Telling someone that they are inferior to their peers produces an equally powerful, negative response. People, especially children, respond to that treatment with anger and defiance. They refuse to do work if the outcome of that work will be confirmation by grade that they are where they deserve to be: the bottom. In this way school does not only decide who will be high status individuals and who low, it modifies the behaviour of those groups in a way that makes the division seem natural and beyond the power of school to change.

This video shows a primate reacting to unequal treatment.

A D is a piece of cucumber.

How can it be with so many teachers so passionately committed to equality, working so hard to break the connection between familial wealth and educational success, that school is the instrument by which inequality persists? The answer is that teachers have no control over what it is that determines if an individual is to be praised or humiliated. Politicians have decided that the determinate is academic ability. The way a child uses language dictates whether they will be at the top or the bottom of school and because we all learn language from our parents, the children of the educated will always have the edge in this competition. Improve teaching and you improve it for rich and poor alike, rich children would still have the additional resources to ensure their pre-eminence. The goal of our education system is to break the link between background and achievement, but if we did so then large numbers of rich children would be failures at school, unable to secure university places. The lack of resistance to this outcome shows how far it is to ever being reality.

People are primates but uniquely among primates we have devised a means of modifying our destructive primate behaviours: institutions. Our instinct is to sleep with people we find attractive, the institution of marriage aims to keep us faithful. Our instinct is to favour the strong and beautiful over the weak and ugly, the institution of law aims to secure equal treatment for all. Education is the odd one out for, rather than countering our instinctive formation of hierarchy, it doubles down on it, ensuring all children grow up acutely aware of their place in the social order.

We think of destructive behaviour and poverty at the bottom of society as indelible features of our society. Yet the only inevitability is this is how people behave when systematically humiliated and poverty wages are what we offer to people we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe are inferior.

On Teaching Science and Raising Scientists

Today I jumped into a twitter debate about the merits of science practicals which centred around two propositions. First, that teachers, not scientists, are the most qualified arbiters of science education and second, that conducting experiments is an inefficient use of time that would be better spent teaching the facts. This Guardian article by Alom Shaha was referenced which puts forward those views. I’m neither a scientist nor a teacher so I could be considered a neutral in this debate, or just an ignoramus. You decide.

To me it seemed like two groups arguing past each other. The scientists were arguing about the best way to educate scientists, while the teachers were arguing about the best way to teach Science GCSEs and A Levels. Shaha says of practicals:

Teachers are under huge pressure to carry out practical lessons for the sole purpose of ensuring students meet the assessment criteria, thus ending up using practical lessons to teach students how to jump through hoops more than anything else.

This is undoubtedly a valid criticism of the role of practicals in science education though the conclusion I draw from it is not that we should stop doing practicals but that we should change the way we determine the success of our science teaching.

Science is not a body of knowledge, it’s a method. A Neanderthal capable of devising a test to see if cow gut or horse gut makes a better bowstring has a more convincing claim to be a scientist than someone who has read reams of scientific research and accepts that research as true because it was published in a journal.

The method we use to assess science education, the exam, tests a student’s ability to uncritically absorb knowledge from an authority figure and to reproduce it. It’s a method well suited to assessing the humanities, imposed on science by the humanities graduates who decide what the school curriculum should look like. The result is that in science lessons students are far likelier to be told ‘these are the effects of climate change’ than they are to ask ‘how do we know climate change is happening and that it is caused by human activity?’

A response to my defence of practicals on twitter were that students must learn knowledge first and that enquiry into that knowledge, testing it, comes later. The problem with that is for the majority of students there is no later, GCSE science is the last they will learn. I’m not saying they should derive all their scientific knowledge from first principles, rather that the ability to design experiments to prove hypotheses for themselves is an essential part of science education. It’s worth doing, even though the time required to do it well means covering a smaller body of knowledge in the curriculum.

As teachers are regularly assaulted by pseudoscience like learning styles and Brain Gym I think they should welcome a science education geared to producing a reflex action on being presented with a claim by a supposed expert of ‘Stop. Where is the evidence that what you’re saying is true?’

The Trouble with Grammars for All

There’s a school of thought that says that the transition from selective to comprehensive secondary education failed because of progressive teaching ideologies and that, had traditional approaches been retained, comprehensives would have been grammars for all. They point to successful comprehensives serving deprived communities like King Solomon Academy (KSA) and Mossbourne Academy to say there’s nothing wrong with the education system, if only those running other schools improved their execution then all schools would enjoy comparable success and the relationship between social class and academic attainment that bedevils our current system would disappear. We would have grammars for all.

I take nothing away from the hard work and good practice behind our most successful secondaries, nor deny that other schools could learn from them, but their success is only possible because other schools fail. Imagine every school achieved the same GCSE pass rate or better than KSA, so the national 5A*-C rate was between 93 and 100%. If that was the case than 5A*-C including English and Maths would no longer be a benchmark of good performance.

This change is already happening as the new GCSE grade 4 is equivalent to a C but the new good pass is grade 5 (C 2/3). As the results of whole cohorts move up the cut off for what is considered a pass moves up too. In other words, our system is designed so that a certain proportion of children fail.

The thorny question is do those failures inevitably have to be made up of the poorest children? The evidence of KSA and Mossbourne seems to suggest not, but there’s a difference between one or two outliers and system wide change (in the form of all comprehensives achieving at KSA levels). To believe in grammars for all as a path to social justice you have to believe that middle class families will react passively to the university places they currently regard as their children’s birthright becoming 50/50 toss-ups. I think that’s incredibly unlikely. If such a challenge was mounted to middle class occupation of the highest grades then they would respond by doing everything they could to ensure their children remain at the top. Being middle class means having the knowledge and the resources to give your children the edge in this competition for place. 

The progressives of the 1970s didn’t have the right prescription for schools, but they did correctly identify a problem common to grammars and comprehensives alike: a system that ranks children on their academic performance requires that some children fail and the failures are likely to be those from the poorest homes. The phrase ‘grammars for all’ implies every child can succeed like children who go to grammars do, but that’s simply not possible in our present system.

School is Peeple

Isn't it nice when we all agree? Twitter had a moment like that this week, unanimously condemning Peeple, an app which apparently let's you rate others. I agree that it's cruel to reduce a person to a score of what you think they're worth. I depart from the mainstream when I say that it's wrong when school does it too.

Ah, but doesn't school judge a person's work and isn't that totally different from judging who they are? It might be if how well we did at school was separate from who we are, but it's not. Our parents determine how well we take to academic study, so do our genes, and that's why school gives praise and status to rich children, humiliation and stigma to poor ones.

Advantage of birth is compounded by the way school is organised. Children with educated parents arrive aged four and quickly realise they excel at all the important tasks, so they like it, try hard, get more praise and a virtuous circle begins. Children who arrive and see others are better than them recoil and withdraw. They enter a circle too, only theirs is vicious.

As they grow older and the humiliation of being the bottom festers into defiance and hatred, what does school offer them? It says you try your hardest and we will give you a grade that signifies stupity and failure. Every teacher knows a child in that position. When they collect their GCSE results is what they're getting what they deserve?

Children have varying levels of academic ability, it is not within our power to change that. Where we have a choice is whether or not we stamp them with a judgment of that ability, telling them that this is what determines their value to society.

The story of the internet is one of people claiming rights to speak and act in ways that were previously reserved for institutions. Peeple is the latest example of that.

Mr Classy's Basement

Mr Classy locked thirty children in his basement with a book, telling them that anyone who read it could come and live upstairs. Every day he opened the hatch and called down to ask if any of them could tell him what the book said, but the children only ever told him to go fuck himself.

At dinner parties Mr Classy sighed and said 'I'm doing everything I can to elevate the poor children, but their community doesn't value education so it's very difficult.'

The Dream of Equality

As a presidential contrast 2015 seems like a stark choice between blow-up statesman David Cameron and his nerdy nemesis Ed Miliband. Yet the differences of personality and presentation hide a core both men share. Both are cowards, afraid to step outside the lines drawn by their parties and their idea of public opinion. Both men will promise to tackle inequality, but they'll be using 'tackle' in its modern political sense, to talk big while acting small. Both will try and shake the legs of the top table so a few more crumbs fall down, but neither will invite us to share the feast.

They need crumbs to fall to keep us from the radical alternatives. UKIP's  fantasy of all-powerful Albion, where the pure bred answer to no one. And the Disco Stu economics of the Greens, which says other people can pay to make the world right. Neither of these are a path to greater equality, only to greater disharmony between unequal groups. That's as radical as it gets.

Where is the party that says we can create a truly equal society? A community which puts no one in poverty with low wages; from which no one divorces themselves by an embarrassment of riches. Because mutual esteem is the bedrock of good relationships and they, unlike our titles and possessions, bring lasting joy to our lives. An equality freely chosen because it's the gateway to a happy society.

It's an achievable dream. We have engines that can not only show us the future they are building it before our very eyes. We don't recognise the awesome power of these time machines only because we're building a future that's just like the present. A social hierarchy with the people who write the best essays at the top. We can change this and with a curriculum for equality raise a generation that don't use the gifts they have as markers on a social ladder. A generation free, happy and equal. We only need to believe we can.