Over on the motorblog

Mrs Bishop has relates the latest installment of the sorry saga of our Mitsubishi Grandis over at the motor blog.  Does Mitsubishi UK have the worst customer service of any organisation, anywhere? How many times can they fail to phone us back before one of us has a nervous breakdown? Details here.

Blogs for granny

My mother keeps asking me how I know so much more about what's going on than she does. "Blogs", I say. "Which ones?", she asks.

So I thought I might set up a Netvibes account for her. But who should I put on it? Suggestions please. (Sorry DK, you're too sweary). 

Twenty-first century education

I've been thinking a lot about education recently and so, it would appear, have lots of other bloggers. I'm sure there are millions of other people trying to work out precisely what the information revolution means for the way their kids are taught at school, or if, in fact, they should actually go to school at all. Or, indeed, if they should actually be taught, when it comes to it.

I mean, if Google can point you to the answer to pretty much everything in a matter of seconds, why would you want to go and sit in a dingy room and listen to a series of slightly crusty and completely unreformed socialists for six hours a day? What they tell you will be largely rubbish, and most of what isn't rubbish will be out of date. What is the point?

As I said, people much more erudite than me have been giving this some thought. Brian Micklethwait posted something the other day. The internet has changed things, he agrees, but he's not positing a thesis about what actually it means for us education consumers in practical terms, apart from the fact that home-ed becomes easier. This of course, is one possible answer to the question. Maybe children shouldn't go to school any more - they should learn at home. I don't think there's any doubt they'll learn more. They will probably become better at learning autonomously which has to be a key skill for the 21st century. But will they develop the people skills that are probably going to be key in the future. Yes, I know that home-ed children have lots of opportunities for socialising, and I know the arguments for socialising outwith their age group. But what about mixing with people you don't actually like? Isn't this important too?

Someone else who has been thinking about education is Sir Ken Robinson, who I'd never heard of before, but I'll certainly be looking out for him again after watching this presentation of his on the subject of education. What a wonderful speaker! Quite why he's not a household name is a mystery to me. He's far funnier than most stand-up comedians I've come across and is inspiring at the same time. He can also say "Al Gore" without spitting, which may be a remarkable skill on his part or may on the other hand be a major character flaw.  Either way, watch the video (not the audio) - I promise you won't regret it. His thesis is that we need to be stop destroying creativity in children, and he may well be right. I'm not completely convinced by all of his arguments though - this kind of creativity will be important in the future but it will not be for everyone. We are still going to need accountants and managers and people who do the boring stuff. His ideas do seem to suggest though  that school, as currently configured, is not the right ambience for developing the talents the creative sector will need.

Clive Davis points us to someone else who has been chewing over the meaning of education - the author Susan Hill. She has a blog here, and on it has posted a piece about whether children should be studying the 19th century greats, questioning whether it might be better to get them to read things they, you know, enjoy. She tells the story of a boy who was fascinated by fishing and was lead to reading by means of fishing magazines. Would he have got anywhere with "The Mill on the Floss"? I'm sure she's right when she implies that he would not. Again, I have to draw the conclusion that the one-size-fits-all approach of schools is failing many children, although in this case it's a failing that has been around for decades.

What does it all mean? What is the optimum way of learning in the new century? I don't know. I need to think about it some more. But it's good to know that better minds than mine are trying to answer the questions too.

Lib Dems forget the Liberal bit

The Scottish Liberal Democrats have outlined what they will do if they win power after the May elections to the Scottish Parliament. This was a wonderful opportunity for Nicol Stephen to show us that the party could stand apart from the others as the voice of economic and social liberalism.

The BBC reports the considered thoughts of the cream of Scottish LibDemmery here. The main policy positions are:

• Recruit 1,000 new community police officers
• Scrap the graduate endowment
• 100% of electricity to be generated from renewables by 2050.
• 100 new and refurbished community health centres.
• Smaller class sizes as well as new teachers and sports coaches.
• An entitlement for all two-year-olds to have up to 15 hours a week in a supervised playgroup.

So to sum it all up in a sentence, the "Liberal" Democrats actually plan to make the state quite a lot bigger. Well, when you look at the renewable energy position, the "Liberal" Democrat position might be characterised more precisely as "meaning to make the state absolutely colossal". To acheive this they are going to have to raise taxes to pip-squeaking levels - this is going to need massive subsidies. I'm not sure the 3% leeway the Treasury allows the Scottish executive over tax rates will actually be sufficient to cover the funding gap. Certainly the sop that Stephen offers to business of a cut in business rates is going to be a drop in the ocean when it comes to trying to stop an exodus of talent and business south of the border.

Brian Micklethwait, in a discussion on 18 Doughty Street the other day, said that he thought the Liberal Democrats had become slightly more Liberal recently. From this sorry, sorry announcement from the Scottish party, it's very hard to see this.

Quote of the day

The internet, still in its infancy, is the wonder-child of education. It knows everything that is to be known. It forgets nothing. It is the intellectual equivalent of Aladdin’s lamp. It will do anything within reason that you ask it to do and without question. It therefore absolves human beings from spending their lives accumulating knowledge as information. It therefore denies the hitherto accepted purpose of education.

Graham Hill, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde, quoted in this report on home education in Scotland.

ROFLMAO

From the Times: 

Having spent £13,000 on installing a wind turbine at his home, John Large is disappointed at the return on his investment, which amounts to 9p a week.

At this rate, it is calculated, it will take 2,768 years for the electricity generated by the turbine to pay for itself, by which time he will be past caring about global warming.

Don't you love it when environmentalists put their money where their mouths are? 

Posts on libertarianism

It's the same everywhere.

Amit Varma, top Indian libertarian blogger,  has a post up on his swanky new site about libertarianism in India.

[D]espite having gained political freedom 60 years ago, personal and economic freedoms are routinely denied in India. Even worse, there is no political party in the country that speaks up for freedom in all its forms.

One to subscribe to.

Nice to see...

...a big businessman arguing for no public subsidy. And telling the government to their faces too. Well done Richard Charkin.

Go and read this

Outside Story has an intruiging proposal on how to deal with NHS reform. I don't know quite what to make of it at the moment, but I shall sleep on it and see how it grabs me in the morning.

Tranzis really are socialists

Croydonian has beaten me to a posting on the fatal flaw in today's UNICEF report on child welfare, which ranked British children near the bottom of the scale. The report uses a relative measure of poverty - which as any fule no is essentially building a socialist bias into the report's results before the surveys are even performed. If you are a socialist country you will go straight to GO and collect £200. Anyone else can go straight to jail.

There's lot more wrong with the report, and I strongly urge you to read Croydonian's piece.

This inbuilt bias reminded me of another piece I was going to write; this time one which I actually failed to write at all, on the grounds that fisking Neil Harding was like taking sweeties from a toddler, and was a bit unsporting. But since it's relevant, I'll relay the story here. Neil had a post on public and private sector waste, in which he cited a World Health Organisation report which ranked Britain's healthcare system 18th in the world, and the US one in 37th. Neil invited us to conclude that the NHS gave better outcomes than the US.

However, a cursory look at the report shows exactly the same inbuilt bias as the today's report from UNICEF - it used "fairness of funding" as a measure in the ranking system, and so acheived an artificial boost for socialist systems. If you have a socialist system, it is apparently, by definition, better than the alternatives. We need to remember this next time we are told that the UN is the conscience of the world. It isn't. It's a PR agency for socialism.

NHS spending makes no difference....again.

From the Government News Network:

Statistical press notice: Diagnostic test waiting times December 2006

The following statistics were released today by the Department of Health:

* Diagnostic test waiting times data: month ending December 2006

This data shows the NHS' progress in tackling the waiting times for diagnostic tests like scans. The monthly data published today gives the waiting times for 15 key diagnostic tests carried out in the NHS. This data will help the NHS in delivering the new 18 week maximum wait from GP to treatment, including all diagnostic tests, by 2008. More information, including a diagnostic data Q&A, is available via the 18 week website.

The figures from October 2006 now include a wider range of audiology tests, with one of the 15 tests now covering all audiology assessments, rather than Pure Tone Audiometry previously. This means that the monthly publication now covers a larger proportion of longer waiters, which should be noted when comparing with previous months.

Well, I thought, no crowing over the improved performance there. I wonder what the actual figures show. It actually takes a bit of digging, because the figures they release don't actually have comparative data on them. I wonder why. But if you put the current set of data (Dec 06) against the earliest available (Jan 06) you find that waiting lists for diagnostic tests are up by 1% from 804,000 to 814,000.

This is because the extra spending on health is being spent on staff benefits rather than improvements to the service. The sooner people realise that this is all that is happening, and all that is ever going to happen, the sooner we can get on with scrapping the whole disfunctional shambles.

More EU protectionism

Via India Uncut, this amazing story from the Cato Institute.

In a move that is both remarkable and disturbing, the European Commission plans to file a complaint - and threaten protectionist trade barriers - because attractive Swiss tax policies are supposedly a violation of a free-trade accord. The bureaucrats in Brussels are not arguing that Switzerland is imposing barriers against EU products. Instead, the Commission actually is taking the position that low taxes are attracting businesses that might otherwise operate in high-tax nations.

People in this country need to wake up and understand that the EU is deeply, profoundly, and implacably illiberal. We are not going to "persuade it to change". They are not going to wake up and embrace free trade.

We really are better off out. 

What would a private sector library look like?

Tim Coates, of the Good Library Blog, has posted a manifesto for the reform of library services in the UK. From what he describes (and from my own bitter experience) libraries exhibit all the classic symptoms of state-run industries.  They are not responsive to their users, they are overly complex, they are not available when people want them, etcetera, etcetera. Replace library with passport office, police service or health service and pretty much any of Tim's criticisms remain valid.

I posted a comment along these lines, and was actually rather surprised to get a response that was largely in agreement with me. Where we differ is on whether it is actually possible to get the library service to function properly within the public sector. Tim thinks (or rather hopes) that it is:

Honestly it has hard to argue with what you say. I am just wishing and hoping we can find a way to make it untrue.

This set me to pondering what would happen if an entrepreneur got his grubby capitalist hands on a library, or a chain of libraries. What could be changed to make them more attractive? My own local library consists of a portacabin with irregular opening hours and a startlingly small stock of books. There's only two or three desks for people to sit at, and these are reserved for computer users. The staff are excellent but are hampered from providing the service they want because of pettifogging rules forced on them by "head office" in Perth.

What could be done with it?

For a start you'd need a proper home. Lots of room for reading, lots of books. Armchairs, a coffee shop, a children's play area, all soundproofed so that readers weren't distracted. You would pay for each book you borrowed. If you found you were enjoying it you could phone up and buy it. The library would replace it within 48 hours.  I'm imagining the bookshop and the library almost merging here. Think of all the things innovative bookshops do, like public readings and the like. No reason that libraries can't do this too, and make money doing it.

Book groups would have access to a central list of titles (I'm assuming a chain of libraries here) rather than a restricted list of approved titles like the one we have where I live. They could meet on the library premises at lunchtimes or in the evening. And yes, the library would be open in the evenings too. Every evening, if that's what people wanted. God knows, it might even be somewhere for people to go of an evening to socialise without getting drunk. That would be a turn-up for UK culture wouldn't it?

I've barely even started to think about this. I'm sure if a few people put their heads together they could come up with lots of wonderful and exciting services that a private library could offer. And it's worth remembering that libraries started as private institutions, set up by unions and self-improvement societies and the like.

And then remind yourself that it can never happen because any initiative along these lines would be crowded out by the local council long before it got off the ground. The state is not your friend, as someone once said.  

EU crime survey

This map is from an official study comparing crime and safety across the EU (warning 1.3Mb pdf file). The darker the colour, the higher the probability of being a victim of crime.

A few highlights:

• Only the Irish are more likely to be victims of crime than the British
• We are twice as likely to be victims of crime than the Spanish
• Britain has the worst burglary rate in the EU
• Our rates for assault and theft are at the top end
• Our rates for fraud and theft are good

It's also worth noting that crime rates are falling across the continent. So next time a NuLab clone parrots the party line that they are winning the fight against crime, you can point out to them that the EU reckons its more to do with demographics and security rather than policy.

More brainwashing

Every so often (monthly? quarterly?) my children are sent home from school with a free magazine with the jaunty title "Whatever!". I've just done an analysis of the contents:

Environmentalism (11 articles)

Saving seagulls from pollution
Tesco opens Britain's greenest supermarket
2007 will be the hottest year on record
Girl wins competition to create cartoon on subject of energy conservation
Rainforest sponsorship
Planting fruit trees
Edinburgh Woodcraft Folk's renewable energy trailer
The green school awards
What does it mean to be carbon neutral
Erich Hoyt - author, conservationist and whale researcher
Beluga whales in Vladivostok 

 Health (5 articles)

Worried about your weight?
Drink lots of water
Healthy pack lunches
Kitchen hygiene 
Take more exercise

Multiculturalism (5 articles)

Chinese New Year
Rickshaws
Multiculturalism
Highland dress
Chinese New Year (again)

Other (1 article)

Thermopylae

In other words half of the magazine is about environmentalism and a large chunk of the rest is about health and multiculturalism. There is virtually nothing on, you know, educational stuff.

The magazine is produced by a company called Whatever News from Aberdeen. It's pretty hard to find out anything about them. Bizarrely for a publishing company, they don't even have a website. As far as I can tell the magazine is funded by the Scottish Executive and advertising - many of the articles are more like "infomercials" than proper writing. 

Either way, the similarity to the primary curriculum is quite clear. Greenery, health eating, multiculturalism. Greenery, healthy eating, multiculturalism. It's no wonder that children leave school unable to read and write. I really, really have to take mine out of school before it's too late.

Greenery, health eating, multiculturalism. Greenery, healthy eating, multiculturalism. Repeat to fade.